Challenge #28 week of 27th February 2012

Want to know what I'm longing for right now?

Pinterest find here

Pinterest find here

Pinterest find here

Pinterest find here

Pinterest find here

Just a little insight into the way my mind is working right now during these dark, grey, wet days of February.

What are you longing for at the moment? Do share! :-)

Don't forget to upload your creations to our Flickr gallery with the tag WM#28.

#27 Inspired by "green"

Well this was a very fun week for me. I challenged myself to try and see everything that came across my hands with new eyes in the hopes of bringing you some really fresh inspiration. As a result, I made 4 layouts I love.

I found inspiration on a tag that came in the mail...

I found inspiration in everyday objects...

I was happy with what I was able to accomplish with things that were not intended for scrapbook pages. And then I saw what Lisa accomplished and my inspiration was renewed. I decided to rumage through my stash, my wastebasket and my house for any other items I could use. And I am glad I did!

Look at all the fun items I found -

One thing I really dislike is the amount of junk mail that I receive every day. On any given week my household gets up to 15 catalogs (most of them in duplicate for each member of my family). The wastefulness really annoys me. 

The one good thing is that these companies spend thousand of dollars on hiring marketing companies to design their catalogs - and as such they are usually up to the trends. Look at that fossil catalog and all that wood grain paper. I just paid some serious money to purchase some of that same pattern.

 I used those scraps to make flowers...

 to create stamped embellishments.

or just punched shaped out of the backgrounds to use as patterned paper.

I was able to create an additional 2 pages (with some items leftover for more).

So there you have it. A week inspired by reusing what others might classify as garbage and finding ways to make it match our style. We hope we were able to inspire you to see things a new way. If you played along, we would love to see what you recycled, reused or re-purposed - just add it to our Flick'r gallery with the tag WM#27. 

Lisa's challenge should be up in a few hours. Woot!

xo,

Pamage

#27 - inspired by going green

This week Pam challenged us to go green and I did wonder if I'd get extra brownie points if I actually used the colour green, but what a surprise, I didn't use a single item of green I think :-) But the idea was there.

So, the real idea was to recycle or upcycle items (would love someone to explain the difference!), repurpose or reuse.

Now I may not be a natural at this but I do try and keep my eyes open for products that can be used for my scrapping and even recycle products from time to time.

This layout uses regular cooking doilies (my current fave) and string from a set of exchange presents:

And my favourite layout of this LOAD uses a small strip of Prima packaging behind the film strip. Again the doilies and of course, my non-scrapbooking specific twine that I just pick up in my local haberdashery department - I think it's designed for crochet.

So I had a few ideas about what I could do for this challenge and ended up using some old pyjama trousers that I'd had to throw away but couldn't resist keeping some of the fabric because of the gorgeous layered hearts printed on it. I added some stiffener to the back of the fabric and cut out the hearts, deciding to sew them onto my layout as a banner. The obligatory twine and doily and this came together so nicely. Really another one of my faves of the month :-) Look at that scrumptious little bottom! (My sister will most likely kill me for publishing this one!)

And then today, I decided to really challenge myself to create something using as little real scrapbooking product as possible. Grabbing a sheet of cardstock I then rummaged through my supplies and came up with the pile below. I have Prima, K&Co and BasicGrey packaging, kitchen string, cake doilies, another of the cut out fabric hearts, a floristry pin that came one of my floral arrangements, some flags made for my by my sister using regular cocktail sticks and tiny scraps of paper and some pink leaf skeletons that came as a garland round another floral arrangement. I did some fussy cutting on the BG packaging and trimmed the rest so that it would be ready to use.

Then I made up my base, layering as much as I could, leaving out one or two items and adding in another few non scrapbooking items - a parcel label, some coloured ribbon type twine from a present and a bit of gathered t-shirt fabric from, yes you guessed it, a t-shirt that I was going to throw out! Once I reached this stage, I then went off to find a photo and a story to tell!

And here's the final result. The only other product I added in was my title alpha but even here I repurposed a "j" into an "i"!

How far will go you go in your repurposing, recycling or reusing? We can't wait to see. Don't forget to link up over in our Flickr gallery with the tag WM#27.

I'm looking forward to seeing what Pam creates for us and tune in tomorrow for the next challenge.

Wishing you a great week! Oh, and happy Leap Year Day on Wednesday! (ok so I just made that up!)

Challenge #27 Week of 20 February, 2012

We are going green. If you follow me at all, you probably know that I love green. Most shades of green just make me happy. But I am not asking you to make a Green page (although, you get extra points in my book if you do!)

I am talking about the concept of "green" - Repurposing, Recycling, Re-using.

I am always on the hunt for little items to use on my layouts. Often times these items are not scrap related.

Here are a few examples:

Aerie jewelry purchase pouch turned into journaling pocket

Popsicle stick turned into ribbon holder element

dimes turned into embellishment

chipboard tag from a brad set - I covered the holes with the journaling

fabric scraps turned into leaves

magazine page scraps turned into background

chipboard sticker discard turned into patterned paper

prima packaging turned into tag

As you can see, there are many ways of adding every day things to our layouts with a little creativity.

Challenge: Whatever you are busy creating this week, keep your eye out for any items you can re-purpose in your layouts.

Remember to add your creation to our flick'r gallery.

Happy creating!
Pamage

#26 Inspired by Sketches and Hearts

I absolutely adored the sketch that Lisa chose for us this week. 

http://pagemaps.com/feb12maps.htm

I originally wanted to do a double page layout, but as I looked through my photos, I settled on these three and the right side of the layout made more sense.

I stayed pretty true to the sketch, with the heart/twine combo and the dotted line circle. Like Lisa, I used a handdrawn heart.  I went to town with the hearts too with 2 patterned papers with hearts on them and the little heart on the pouch.

Taking a cue from Whimsical Musings Challenge # 24, I used a handwritten note (the only one I have) in a little envelope.

I also hand-stitched part of the title, which makes me pretty happy.

Overall, it feels a little too girlie for my taste, but it is a love story, so it seems fitting. I had a lot of fun with this sketch. I hope you were able to draw some inspiration this week. If you did, we'd love to see your work in our gallery (tag WM#26).


I will be back soon with a new challenge.


hearts & hugs,
Pamage

#26 Inspired by sketches

I slowed things down a bit this week knowing that a lot of us are pretty busy with LOAD right now and offered a Page Maps sketch to use.

It's a two-pager but I thought it was very flexible on how it could be used.

I decided to use the left hand side and rotate it 90° to fit a landscape 5x7 photo. I shifted all the elements on the page to the left to take it off-centre but kept the three heart element as I thought this was so pretty. I decided to see how free hand I could go and drew, cut and outlined my own hearts which may seem a small step for you but was quite a big one for me :-) I love how Pam influences me to try new things. I love the effect and even though I won't be doing this on every page I do, I can imagine trying this out again sometime.

I kept it simple because I wanted the focus to be on the photo as imperfect as it is! I don't know if there's all that many photos of me and my best friend from school and I can almost remember sitting there and having this taken by another of our friends on this evening at our school.

Another Counterfeit Kit Challenge layout using my February, Record, kit

Simple. But another moment captured.

I hope you enjoyed the sketch and I look forward to seeing your takes in the Flickr gallery (tag: WM#26).

Check in again soon to see what delights Pam has for us with this week's prompt as well as the new challenge tomorrow :-)

Challenge #26 week of 13th February 2012

Another Monday, another week, another prompt. I know that many of you reading this are participating in LOAD right now and this seems to make the month race by even faster than usual (which is already lightening speed!).

For those of you who are creating daily, I hope that you are still enjoying the process and are having fun in the time you give yourself each day for this creative hobby of ours. For those of you who think we are crazy making a layout every day for a month, give it a try! It's more fun than you can imagine and such a wonderful feeling at the end of the month.

However, I know that all this creating can be quite hard on our commitments whether personal, business or crafty so I thought I'd give us a bit of a break this week and help our process along at the same time.

So this week, I'm offering you a Page Maps sketch for our prompt.

I chose a two-page sketch that I think can easily be adjusted to a single page. It has a combination of photos and sizes which I always think is always helpful and because it's Valentine's Day week, I picked out one with hearts :-)

Page Maps February 2012 sketch 

Plenty of layers, space for journalling and embellishments and even some white space. I like it and hope you do too.

If you join in on this week's prompt, don't forget to share with us over in our Flickr gallery with the tag WM#26!

We will check in again at the end of the week with our creations and in the meantime, we'll be seeing many of you in the LOAD gallery!

#25 Inspired by time

Pam asked us to think about the phrase "I spend most of my time..." which was inspired by a long, unscheduled day at work.

I considered doing something about how I talk ALL day long. Talking English to non-native speakers, making small-talk, talking business English, discussing news or current affairs, going over about grammar rules or common mistakes. That would have made an interesting layout I think but I couldn't think of a photo off the top of my head.

So instead I went with a direction relating to the past which ties in with LOAD that we are both doing right now concentrating on our past stories.

I'd seen this cute little photo once or twice this week while trying to decide which to scan and use but hadn't really come up with a reason to scrap it. But today I looked at it again and realised that it reminded me of long, summer holidays where we went out on our bikes all day, just hanging out and having fun. We lived in a different time without any sort of communication (our mums had no idea where we were all day!) and no sense of real danger. We lived in a quiet, village-type part of town and the roads were quiet and all my school friends were just a bike ride away. A few years later we moved to another part of town which was nowhere near my friends and bike unfriendly. I think I stopped going out on my bike on the day we moved :-(

Anyway, just a mix of products for this great prompt.

I have high hopes of coming back to many of our prompts again in the future so that I can do them again, taking them in different directions and this is certainly one for the list.

Which way will you take this prompt? Can't wait to see :-)

# 25 Layout about Time

Hello lovely ladies!

I am back with another completed layout. As you may remember, I was a little late posting last week's challenge due to a very hectic schedule {and/or poor time management}, which inspired me to tell the story of how much time I spend at work.

And so I challenged us to explore past or present times where most of our time has been taken up by a certain activity and our feelings about it.

I wasn't sure where this would take me. All week my heart was set on making a page about a time when I used to be able to sleep all day. Perhaps I will visit that inspiration again. But the page that resulted was a combination of some of the prompts from Lain's LOAD which Lisa and I are both participating in right now.

I was inpired by 1. things I miss, 2. school days and 3. a time when I used to spend most of my time doing ______. And this was the result.

I am particularly happy with this layout. These are some of my favorite pictures with the people that for a long time where my everything. {isn't it funny how you fall out of touch with your high school friends}.

I have an entire scrapbook about my high school days, but I made it fairly recent after highschool, so the perspective of having time pass is a welcome addition to my collection.

I hope you were inspired to create as well. Can't wait to see what Lisa made. {please remember to tag your layout WM#25 in the gallery}.

Until next week,
Pamage

Challenge #25 week of 6 February, 2012

Hello again! So a little late is better than never. Real life has once again gotten in the way of Whimsical Musings. {and that is ok}. In all honesty, I really love that about our blog. Lisa and I are both a testament to how scrapbooking really can play an important part in your life if you make time for it.
True, neither of us have small children {heaven bless those of you who do and still find the time}, but we each have busy, busy lives, families, jobs, hobbies, etc. The list of excuses is endless.

But we still make time.

I love that! Sure, sometimes it can feel a little overwhelming, but it is such a relief and delight when a page is completed. We hope that is why you are playing along too. So this week I have a story prompt that was inspired by the fact that I am posting this prompt late!

I thought to myself - "Man, I spend too much time at work". And it's true.

 This little cubicle is where I spend most of my week. Not my bed, as I would love. Not in the family room sharing with my family. Not even my creative space where I create layouts for this blog.

And that's a story I've never told.

If you created a layout based on the story "I spend most of my time ______". What would you fill that blank with? How would your tone sound? Would you sound happy that you spend most of your day at home with your toddlers? Would you sound a little bitter that you spend most of the week doing laundry? Would you sound frustrated at all the hours you spend on the treadmill? Would you romanticize about all the cuddly time you spend with your significant other?

Challenge: Take the line "I spend most of my time _____" and make it yours. Tell the story about a time, present or past, where one activity took up all of your time. 



I know I have several ideas floating around - (in fact I am working on a layout about work right now). Consider a compare and contrast between what you used to do and what you do now. Or a pie chart representing the breakup of your day. The possibilities are endless. I hope you are inspired to create and play along.


You will be glad you told this story. Be honest with yourself and examine your life. Write down those feelings. Don't feel bad thinking someone else will read your journaling and judge you. You are/were already spending all of your time doing XYZ. Why not scrap about it? (As a side note, I am little jealous of any of you that gets to make a page that says you spend most of your time scrapbooking).

Can't wait to see where this prompt takes you. We will be back sometime this week with our layout. Remember to peruse our flick'r gallery for additional inspiration.

Sorry again about the delay. I spend most of my time at work.

xo,
pamage

ps: thank you for understanding and supporting us. we appreciate every single one of our readers!