Autumnal Scrapbooking

With the change in seasons all the colours of the world around us seem to change, the blue of the sky gets a bit hazier and the leaves turn into yellows, oranges and reds, I literally see this change in front of my eyes as my desk looks out over the forest so every day it looks a little bit different, I love the changes through Autumn and Winter - they're my favourite seasons!

The Autumn colours are some of my most favourite colours and inspired this layout that I finished last night of my little sister Xena...

 The leaves were die-cut from my Cricut Expression (using the 'Preserves' Cartridge) on white paper and then coloured using Promarkers. I then embossed some of them in my Cricut to give them some texture.

 The little envelope contains a hidden journaling card made from a scrap of October Afternoon cardstock...

  

The papers are Cosmo Cricket from quite a while ago, I've been saving them! I've also used a scrap of the Cosmo Cricket Coredinations which I LOVE - some of my favourite cardstock ever! and the embellishments are Cosmo Cricket and October Afternoon.

Thank you for all the lovely feedback on my Christmas Cards yesterday, for those of you who emailed me about buying different sized packs, I will be getting back to all of you later tonight! I've been spending today revising the packaging designs for my the big launch of my new craft ranges, as well as actually working on the designs for them (I can't wait to share everything thats coming!!) and getting things ready for my little blog and website makeover - such exciting but very busy times! :o)


Sarah x

Catching Up!

Wow, what a crazy week and Friday already! I've barely had time to breathe, let alone blog so here I am catching you all up on my crazy goings-on!

Wednesday I met Emma at Selfridges in London for coffee and catching up (and maybe a teensy bit of shopping!) before coming home to about 3 million emails (as I was also out Tuesday afternoon) I'd had no Blackberry for 2 days (not only was the service down but my actual phone broke as well - not a good week for technology in the Hurley household, let me tell you!) but luckily Wednesday I came home to my replacement, bless Vodafone and their 24 hour replacement! So now I have a new and functioning Blackberry I feel like a normal person again (and I can tweet all my random stuff from wherever I am, yay!)

Thursday I had to tidy and organise my studio which look like a tornado at the very least had been through it, I also found a bunch of samples I hadn't yet photographed (more of that further down!) as well as sorting through the last few days deliveries of things to test / review / use / that I had bought on a whim at 3am while sleep deprived *sigh* then I got my schedule and emails up to date and organised.

Today I photographed the samples I found, here is one quick and simple card to share, using my cloud stamp (available from my website) then embossed with my Cuttlebug swiss dots embossing folder...

I love clouds (as you may have noticed) I always remember someone telling me that if you feel a bit blue just to step outside and look up at the sky, the clouds, the rooftops, it literally lifts your mood! (seriously, try it!)

After taking all the pics (not great unfortunately as the light is completely blocked out by the scaffolding all round my house!) I then made myself a giant mug of coffee and sat down with my sketchbook for a day of product planning, design and development, I also made lots of plans for upcoming projects and today has actually turned out to be a super productive day and I've got tons done - love it when that happens! and I've done all this through constant hammering and banging from 7.30 am right through to 4.30 pm every day (mostly on just 3 hours sleep) as I've had my roof redone (hence the scaffolding) my head is banging, I have the biggest set of eye luggage know to humankind BUT I'm pleased with my progress - yay!

Over the next few weeks you may notice a few little changes here on my blog as I introduce some features that I get asked for time and time again (I try to bring you what you ask for!) so I hope you will like the new and improved blog and I look forward to your feedback as ever :o) Next week I have some great features lined up including some Halloween projects with my Cricut Expression, some Christmassy things and my own solution to the almost impossible to find in the UK, Smash Book.

Have a fabulous weekend, and if you haven't already then pop over to the Challenge Blog where you may be able to win yourself some Derwent Coloursoft Pencils in a fabbo wooden box!

Sarah x

Cardmaking with Crate Paper

Todays card is made with Crate Paper goodies, Emma's Shoppe paper and chipboard stickers...

The lovely seam binding ribbon is from Crafty Ribbons and the Bakers Twine is from The Twinery.

I actually made this to try out my new Woodgrain Cuttlebug Embossing folder - I'm obsessed with it already, this is like when I got my corner rounder punch (notice most of my cards have rounded corners!) well, now you will be seeing a lot of embossed backgrounds! LOL

Tomorrow I'm off for a meeting with the Kuretake girls in London, I've been pulling samples together to take with me for the shows on Thursday so look out for them and see if you can spot any of mine, I'll post them on my blog after the shows too so you can have a proper look.

Sarah x

Watercolouring for Creativity International

Recently I was sent some Strathmore Paper sketchbooks by Creativity International to try out, one for drawing and one for watercolouring. As you probably know, watercolouring is not one of my strongest areas so always being up for a challenge, thats the one I started with!!

The first thing I was struck by was the quality of the paper, I have tried out a number of different papers before, usually I get frustrated at the buckling and decide to give up watercolours forever (or until I come across my Inktense pencils and fall in love all over again!) the only thing I have achieved a result I was proud of on is board. The paper in this pad was very thick (for crafters, think of the thickness of Bazzill cardstock) and had a lovely texture to it. It took me a long time to stop gazing at the snowy white perfection and start experimenting! To make things even more difficult for myself I decided not to start with my Inktense pencils but instead to dig out the tiny set of watercolour paints I have had for a million years and used a grand total of twice on my interior design coursework!

I wanted to just get used to the paper, try a few things and see if I could master it (and get as much paint on as possible to see if I could break it, ha!) You can see here the lovely texture of the paper

 

  I managed to get around 3 layers of paint on before the paper started to buckle ever so slightly (pretty good!) as you can see here...

 I managed 4 layers of Inktense colouring (for which you use less water) and still no buckling, it was also thick enough to be cut and layered onto a card using foam pads and look as good as a chipboard embellishment or cardstock sticker would - I will definitely be using it for my Inktense colouring with my crafts again.

Here is my image coloured with Inktense pencils which I made into a card (using the Papermania Kraft basics pad, Cuttlebug Swiss dots embossing folder and a scrap of paper from the TPC Christmas Village kit)

I will be trying out the drawing pad later this week and will post my thoughts on that one too (for now I'm still at the 'gazing at the snowy whiteness of the paper' stage before I start messing with it!)

Sarah x