Challenge #59 week of October 1st, 2012

My wonderful Whimsical Muses - hello there!

This week starts another month. Can you all believe it is already October? It also starts LOAD for those of you who participate in that realm of creativity (I know many of you do). 

For that reason (and simply because I love this) the challenge for this week is a rather simple one. Well, maybe.

The challenge this week is to alter something before adding it to your page- personalize it, add to it, subtract from it, cut it up, re-arrange it... 

I will share with you some examples from past layouts where I have done this.

I misted this background to add leaves for my fall layout. 

i sanded the letters to make them feel more vintaged.

I painted the plain canvas flowers to match the colors of my layout.

with ink and markers I personalized the hexagons and alphas to create matching embellishments

I couldn't find enough chipboard letters in one style for my title so I painted several letter types in white for a more cohesive look.

I colored in some of the designs of the b&w paper to add other punches of pink.

I used different colored alphas as a mask for this title, not to mention - created my own background paper to match using stencils and mists

Altering your stash can definitely stretch it and give new life to forgotten stash. The ideas I shared above are just a few of the things you can try. There are plenty of techniques out there that can help you change something you no longer like into something you can use. There are even products that are meant for altering, such as plain chipboard, mistables, the resist products from Heidi Swapp and more. You can fix coloring issues, missing letters, layered stickers, die-cuts with (the wrong) words and much more by simply applying a little creativity.

So, as you find yourself busy creating this week, won't you find a way to give some embellishment (or paper) a new life and share it with us?

We hope so.

Hopefully the gallery will fill with pretty ideas of how to fall in love with our stash again and look at it with new eyes. The tag for this is WM#59. See you on the message boards!

xo,

Pamage