Publication Call

I'm working on my March column for Scrapstreet Magazine and since I am new, I have missed the opportunity to place an official call along with the other Pit Crew members. So I thought I might put a shout out to my favorite peeps to see if any of you can help me out.

I am writing a brand new fixture at Scrapstreet called Backstreet Beat. Backstreets tend to wind through neighborhoods where it's important to be creative and thrifty to thrive. The column is all about creating amazing projects with practicality and frugality in mind.

I am looking for items that use real world print somewhere on the project, whether it be a newspaper clipping, dictionary page, advertisement, packaging, cereal boxes, brochure, basically anything that utilizes real world print that you found somewhere unexpected or for "free". I'd like to see a variety of pages, cards and altered items.

Please email any submissions to lizqualman@gmail.com by January 5th. Hope to hear from some of you soon.

Thank you so much for stopping by -

Naughty or Nice

I am just smitten with the Little Yellow Bicycle Christmas Delight collection and have a few projects to share this week. I really appreciate how versatile the collection is and can represent both the Christmas Holidays as well as the season of winter. I trying to get the perfect holiday photo when I took these pictures of my daughter. Ironically, my favorite photo is the one where she looks totally bored of the whole plan. Serves me right doesn't it?

Little Yellow Bicycle includes so many fun embellishments with all of their collections. I can easily make a page with 100% of their stuff - never anything needed to add to a beautiful page. I particularly love the chipboard swirls and bling that came with Christmas Delight. They were such a great accent. Not to mention the wonderful journal cards that always have the perfect sentiment.

The decorative edge papers were a great way to vary the look of my layers and I love how the soft blue color of the chipboard words contrast with the deep rich colors of the specialty paper with the ornaments. This collection will not disappoint.

Thank you so much for stopping by -

November Challenge Winner

Congratulations to Melissa D. for being the randomly drawn winner of the November Challenge. Your layout is absolutely beautiful and I love the Little Yellow Bicycle papers you chose for the layout and photo. Please email me your information and I will get a RAK out to you soon. Melissa's layout is based on this November sketch.

Thank you so much to all who played along this month. I know things get crazy around the holidays, so I am going to take a hiatus for December since we are already most of the way through. However, I promise to be back with more sketches and challenges in 2011.

Thank you so much for stopping by -

Wintertime with Echo Park

 

Sorry the sketch is just a tad late.  I had submitted this layout and sketch to the Echo Park Guest Blogger challenge and was waiting to see if it was selected.  This morning I found out that it is the first project selected for the 12 Days of Guest Designers on their blog.  Now that it is live, I can share the sketch with you all.  I'll be posting the winner of the November Challenge this week and putting up the December Challenge soon - although I am feeling like most people are too busy to scrap...

This is what the holidays look like in Colorado - pure Rocky Mountain fun, filled with fresh air and powdery snow. The "Wintertime" collection is a perfect palette of frost to make these photos of my son look even a bit chillier. I have been working on ways to add more photos to my layouts and since I am addicted to wallet-sized ones, I am always searching for more ideas on how to include them on my pages.  For this project, I decided to make a filmstrip of my son playing in the snow to compliment the larger 5x7 close up photo. I also tried to keep my embellishments fairly simple, but had to add this super cute sticker of the snowman. I also used some pop dots.

To increase the frosty feel of the page and to give it some sparkle, I added a bit of bling to this cardstock border sticker. I also varied the colors of the sticker alphabet to create a bit more interest to the title. The little circle snowflake sticker finished off the look.

Aren't these trees adorable? It is the little details like this that make Echo Park papers so fun. I cut up some of the paper strips to include this as a layer in my design and then added some of the sentiments from the cardstock stickers.