Total Papercrafts kit 1 for February

We start February with a touch of pretty shabby chic in soft shades of cream, peach and sage green. In keeping with the vintage feel of the kit we'll be creating hat pins from scratch together with gorgeous hand made flowers and a lacy paper frame to embellish the page.

The kit contains; cardstock, patterned papers, silver hat pins, pearl beads, paper doilies, faux suede leaves annd ribbon.

You'll need a 5" circular photo - the sample photo was edited in Photoshop to create a soft vignette edge but you could also sand and/or ink your photo for a similar effect. You will also need a brown inkpad (the sample uses Distress Ink in Brushed Corduroy), a single hole punch, 3d foam pads, strong liquid adhesive (such as Diamond Glaze or Glossy Accents), white dimensional paint (sample uses white Tulip paint from January kit 2), large and medium retro flower punches, water spray and letters plus gold glitter for the title.

Masterclasses

Have you noticed we have a new page link for our Masterclasses up at the top of the page? Everything you need to know about this new set of classes is available by clicking on 'iScrap Masterclasses' - get in touch if you are interested!!

The final pages from my December Daily album

Yesterday I posted my thoughts about the process of completing my December Daily album on Ali Edwards' blog and she was sweet enough to reply asking to see the remainder of my pages as she thought that my album was beautiful. I was tickled pink!! So for Ali and anyone else who is interested, here are the final batch of pages in my album.....
In the countdown to Christmas, the BBC screened The Nativity at a prime evening slot each night and I absolutely loved watching it. It reminded me of what this month was building towards and was beautifully filmed - I had to include it in my album.

I remembered to document my absolute hatred of the process of wrapping presents! I used one of the gift tags as a journaling spot and just popped it onto one of the D-rings.

A feeling that things were getting on top of me led to this pair of pages giving myself permission to buy ready made rather than have to make everything from scratch!! I journaled my feelings on the tags in the pocket page.

Christmas Eve is frantically busy and I only managed to remember to snap a photo of the mince pies and drink left out for Santa so I included a letter to Santa together with the service book from Midnight Mass and the pages were full before I knew it.

We have a tradition of giving prank gifts each year, some of them are very long-running jokes so I wanted to make sure these were included in my album - no-one else will have a clue what they mean but trust me, its funny!

The traditional shot of the table was a must but I also saved the joke from inside my cracker as I got the same one more than once - how weird was that?

Its a family tradition to spend Boxing Day with my husband's parents and I wanted to capture the feeling of what this day is all about - food, warmth, relaxation, laughter and family.

A last minute surprise gift from my parents meant that my sister and brother-in-law flew in from Canada to spend the rest of the holidays with us. We spent most of the day on tenterhooks waiting for them to arrive and so these pages are heavy on journaling, both visible and hidden.

It was such fun to have a family day trip together for the first time in years and we made the most of it. I had promised my sister an ice cream when she came over to us as we have an amazing local ice cream parlour - little did I know that we would be eating it in the middle of Winter!!

One of my gifts from Canada was a carton of Egg Nog, we just don't get that here in the UK and boy, was it goooooood!! Fortunately my sister also gave me a recipe so I can make my own and what better place to record it than in my album?!

One of the highlights of having my sister to stay was the opportunity to craft together. She gave me the Tim Holtz Tattered Florals Sizzix die as one of my Christmas gifts and so we spent a whole afternoon creating lots of different flowers.

Our days of rock and roll New Years Eve parties are few and far between now and so we opted to have an amazing meal together at home to see in 2011. The highlight of the night was releasing Chinese lanterns into the cold, still night sky and watching as quite literally dozens of them silently floated over the fields from the direction of the town, it was magical.

I ended my album with an entry on 1st January where rather than a resolution I decided upon a word as my mantra for the coming year. I added a cute 'Top Ten' card with a list of my highlights of the month which was a cool way to round things off.

I hope that you like what you see and that it inspires you to consider creating something similar. I highly reccommend visiting Ali's website at www.aliedwards.com - she was my initial inspiration and her site is sure to get your creative juices flowing!

I loved putting this album together and I managed to pretty much stay on top of it each day (with the exception of Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day!). The sense of achievement from having stuck it out is incredible and I absolutely love the finished project. In fact I have decided to continue with a scaled down version to record the events of each month throughout this coming year. I have a D-ring 8.5" x 11" album ready to go and plan to complete 4-5 double pages each month documenting the highs and lows. I reckon that way I should end up with a pretty meaty album but not quite as full as this one turned out to be!! Anyway, whatever you decide to create - I hope that you have as much fun as I did with this!!

Kit 2 for January

Our second layout for this month uses the fabulous Tim Holtz timepiece masks, perfect for the New Year! We have fun making the dimensional flowers again and mess around with water making the paper wrinkled and curled. We also use the dimensional paint from kit 1 to make the dotty swirls on this page.
The sample design features a single 6" x 4" landscape photo and the soft green shades of the kit make it perfect for outdoor shots.
You will also need a couple of ink pads to use with the masks (the sample uses Distress Ink in Bundled Sage and Tattered Rose. The kit includes a template for the flower shapes but if you have the retro flower punches in large and medium then you'll find this goes a whole lot faster! The sample uses a couple of border punches but if you have just one then thats fine, if you want to get some use out of your punches then grab a whole bunch. Add a few alphabet stickers for your title, six decorative brads and a distress tool (or scissors) and you are set to go!

Welcome to 2011!!

Happy New Year everyone! We hope you had an amazing Christmas celebration and that the New Year has started well for you. Its been loads of fun here as we had family from Canada come over at the last minute which was a fab surprise and just the best present ever!

Its time to reveal the first of our kits for 2011 and we start the year with a gorgeous kit using not one but two new paper lines combined in this double page design which has a fresh vintage feel to it - ice cream colours of lemon, raspberry and cream with a dash of chocolate and pistachio for good measure, you could almost lick the page (I wouldn't recommend it though!!). We are playing with resist paper from Parisien Anthology, creating a corset on the page and we also have a lovely paper flower technique with dimensional paint so we are really starting off with a bang - three techniques in one go!

The sample design uses three 6" x 4" photos, one landscape and two portrait. This design would look gorgeous with heritage photos if you are lucky enough to have them but would also be great with modern pics. The great thing about this kit is that you can make it as feminine or as masculine as you prefer by how you choose to colour your sheet of resist paper (its the paper under the 'Tea for 2' title with softly blended colours on it), so you can actually make that paper match your photos!

You'll need a water spritzer, sponge applicators for inks (the Ranger one is fab!), ink pads in brown, pink, yellow, green and blue (sample uses Distress Inks in Brushed Corderoy, Tattered Rose, Peeled Paint, Scattered Straw and Bundled Sage - not all of these are needed, just the colours you would like to highlight from the patterned papers and to match your photos), a scalloped edge punch (sample uses the Fiskars Threading Water punch but a plain scallop and a single hole punch seperately would also work), 2 sizes of flower punch (sample uses EK Success Retro Flower punches in large and medium), 2 decorative brads for envelope closures - buttons would also be ok, decorative border punch, a few adhesive crystals (optional) and a strong quick drying glue - if you have a glue gun this might be worth digging out!! I know this might seem like a lot but there is a lot in this kit to play with and its worth it!!

The kit contains: cardstock, three double sided patterned papers, one double sided Parisien Anthology resist paper, sheets of vintage book paper, 2 coin envelopes, length of ribbon, paper templates and a bottle of dimensional paint.

We are loving this kit so much and hope that you are excited as we are to play with it!!