Loot

I can't believe I haven't blogged for 5 weeks! Talk about real life getting in the way :-( Mind you that slice of real life did include a great holiday week in York and the fabulous Cardinal Colours retreat in Eastbourne last weekend. Great classes and wonderful to see old and new faces. Many thanks go to Jill and her team for organising such an amazing event! I completed 10 LO's - including Anita's wonderful canvas class.

This is the LO I completed for this month's Scrapology challenge - the theme is embossing, so the night before (and the morning of) the retreat I was stamping and embossing like mad so I could take enough motifs for this page with me! The photo is of everything I bought at Ally Pally in September last year and I was determined to use one of the bought items in the LO, so decided on the spirograph stamps (Maya Road).

The strip down the left side is punched using an EK Success punch, which was then stamped and embossed with a 12" border stamp. Then I stamped/embossed loads of the spirograph circles in gold, nutmeg and pearl gold on different cardstocks - ivory, black and bronze. Lastly I stamped/embossed a journalling block. Then I stuffed them all into my bag and set off hoping I had made enough!

I had the black embossed strip (Morrocan screen embossing folder - cuttlebug?) left over from another project - actually it had been a practice piece, but had come out too well to throw away! I also had some metal left over from one of my Ikea mirror projects, which had been embossed using a tiny mesh embossing folder and then alcohol inked - there was just enough to make a mat for the title. The spirograph images were punched out using scalloped and plain circles and layered up in twos and threes - well the original sketch had flowers on it .... and you *know* I don't do flowers LOL. Oh and I inked the ivory cardstock images with some chalk ink to match the background better, they were a bit bright.

The background paper is from Black Market Paper, the plain yellowy torn-edged paper is *I think* Basic Grey and the Harlequin paper was bought on my very first trip to the US in 2004, so I have no idea what it is! I am not really into tearing paper, in fact I cringed as I did it and Karen swore she heard the paper scream! But actually..... I rather like the way it has come out. The title is done with American Crafts Thickers.

It took a while to get everything positioned how I wanted it, then of course I had to disassemble to stick it all down! This is my favourite Scrapology page so far, I love it :-)