Jen Schow & Hip Kit Club Scraplifts!

Welcome back,

Today is a quick share of some new layouts based on scraplifts. Often, when I’m scrapping for fun, and not always working on monthly challenges and other peoples criteria, I just want to relax. When I scrap I am always watching something, either a movie or art/craft YouTube videos. My mind is just enjoying the creative process of scrapping and the crafting videos give me a little company, of others who are also passionate about creating.

Now, those who have been following me know that I am working on using up my April CKC kit, which I have broken down into smaller kits (and photos). A couple of days ago I pulled a kit to work on a new layout and I decided to watch some Hip Kit Club videos. I came across a Jen Schow video of her scrapping a layout with their March kit. This March HipKit Club kit was the inspiration kit for this months CKC. I was impressed with her layout and decide to have some fun trying to recreate it using my supplies. Jen was making the layout for the HipKit Club Friday Challenge, part of the challenge was to use the following design.

It is a cute design which entails using some of your photos as banner flags. Jen uses only one photo in her layout and I only had one photo to work with as well.

I had lots of embellishments and 3×4 cards to play around with and turn into banner flags.

I could watch Jen Schow all day, she is a very talented scrapper and I love how she shares her little tricks and is honest about the process. As we all know, not everything always goes to plan all the time. Jen is one of those scrappers who share everything, the good and the bad. It’s great to see how others make changes to their designs along the way to achieve a pleasing outcome.

Making my banner flags took a little time, but was great fun. I just worked with what I had and made enough to fit across the page. *Sorry about my manky cutting board! Guess what’s on my birthday list?

It was a fun layout to complete, though a little fiddly threading on the tags and getting them to sit right. My layout scraplift turned out quite striking, using the black & white stripe background made everything pop! I include Jen Schow’s little signature tear section at the bottom of the page.

Then, I also watched a Niki Rowland video for the Hip Kit Club, March kit. This layout uses one of their free cut files which you can download. I decided it would be fun to scraplift her design using my homemade kit. I don’t use cut files and decided to substitute the text cut file with some Jillibean letter die cuts. I wanted to use some of my patterned papers for some of the letters and so traced and fussy cut out some of the letters.

The photos I used are not that great, a little like prison shots! I had gone away for the weekend (for work) and came home to my husband with his new haircut, let’s just say that I wasn’t impressed. His nephew had come to stay for a boys weekend and offered to cut hubbies hair, this was what he ended up with! Hubby had needed a hair cut and was looking like a crazy scientist with Einstien hair, but………………………………………………this?

and…

He kept it like this for several weeks! Sometimes wearing it in a ponytail! Secretly he thinks he’s a Viking, in reality, he comes from Scottish stock. He thought it was funny and it made his friends laugh, while I avoided going out with him anywhere.

I live with a crazy person, lucky for him and me the craziness is sporadic, and he often gives me things to scrap about. 🙂

Happy scrapping everyone

April 2019 CKC Layout #2

Hello again,

Today’s share is my second CKC layout for this month. Once again, I started off with creating some more forgery items, this time it is some embellishments. The original inspiration kit for the April, Counterfeit Kit Challenge, was based on the March, Hipkit Club kit and had butterflies in sticker and die cut form. They were coloured either pink & green or in shades of blue. I attempted to copy these by colouring my black & white Kaisercraft butterfly paper with Copic markers and fussy cutting them out to use for embellishments on my layout.

Next, I tried my hand at forging another patterned paper. There is a lovely floral print with pink flowers and foliage and a blue background in the Hipkit inspiration kit. I couldn’t find anything similar in my stash to use as part of my kit, so decided to spend some time colouring in this brown and white Kaisercraft paper. I used a pink Copic marker for the flowers/foliage and a navy pencil for the background. It was a more difficult paper to colour and it was hard to get good coverage for the background.

I selected a range of papers to use for the layout based on colours I could see in my photo. I wasn’t sure it was going to work, some of the papers had strong designs and colours.

Forgeries finished, I got busy using some sprays on white cardstock to create the background of the layout.

After drying and ironing my background, I began to think about building up further layers in green tones. I remembered that there was a patterned paper with large green polka dots amongst the Hipkit Club kit. I decided to borrow this idea and use one of the green papers I had in my kit to make polka dots which I fixed onto my background.

Then, I focused on mounting my photo with layers of patterned papers, including the coloured in patterned paper that I had worked on earlier.

I then trimmed down the background cardstock and mounted it onto the navy and white spot paper, this created a nice frame around the edge of the layout.

After building up the layers under my photo I fixed it onto the background using double-sided tape.

Then, I began to plan out where I would place my embellishment clusters and titles. I added some cameras along the edge which I had fussy cut from some patterned paper. I fussy cut out some flowers to use as embellishments and added my hand coloured butterflies.

After adding the titles, my layout was finished, another one for the family album.

April 2019 CKC Layout #1.

Hello,

My first layout with my April Counterfeit kit is based around the Forgery on the Fourth challenge where you make some of the kit supplies. As I mentioned earlier, I had included a few black and white papers which had some similar patterns and motifs to the original March, Hipkit Club kit. This Maggie Holmes paper with a yellow background and flowers is really striking in the Hipkit Club kit and makes a bold statement of springtime. I wanted to try and turn my black & white floral into this vibrant mood by simply colouring it in. I decided to use coloured pencils and markers.

First I coloured the leaves in using a navy marker and then worked on the background, first using an ochre pencil and then working over this with a deep yellow pencil. It gave it good coverage and created a mustardy, warm yellow.

Next, I coloured the flowers using a pale pink Copic marker and added the darker pink to the flowers by blending in some rose pink coloured pencil.

I really liked the result, I felt that I had created the same mood and feel which the original had and got busy selecting the other papers for my layout. As usual, I looked for the colours in my photos to help select the papers from my kit.

This layout features photos of my daughter’s navel piercing, an odd thing to scrapbook, you might think? She certainly did! Let me say, that she sent me the photo of her new addition and was very proud to have finally gone through with the piercing. She had worked hard to get into shape, having lost over 24kg, through joining a gym and healthy eating. It was one of her goals to have a navel piercing on a belly good enough to show off!

Back to scrapping…

I wanted to use some of the sprays included in my kit and selected the distress ink. It proved too strong for the look I was after, so after wiping away most of it, I used some white acrylic paint to soften it into dreamy pink clouds and swishes. Then, added some blue splatters of ink.

I had just watched Janet Madison’s latest layout sharing video and was reminded about her using up scraps to create a border frame. I liked the idea of including all the patterned paper I had selected to form the outside border of my layout and quickly put it together.

I liked how the frame looked but when I added my pink mixed media cardstock everything just screamed…NO! I really didn’t like it, I needed something to stop the two clashing. I rummaged through my kit to find something to fix it and pulled out some gold washi tape. The gold tape did improve the clash slightly but I didn’t like the result, it reminded me of old ladies who go cruising in leopard print shirts and gold lycra hot pants!

Things were not going well. I moved onto mounting my photos using the patterned papers, roughing up the edge of each layer. These I liked and I spent quite a bit of time trying to create layers on my background to place them on without creating more clash. It wasn’t quite working with my forged yellow flower paper being so bright. I decided to stamp some foliage onto the background to draw the viewers eye away from all the brightness.

After lots of fiddling around and indecisiveness, I thought I should snip off a piece of the forged paper and use it to fussy cut some flower embellishments. This layout was taking a long time.

At last, things began to work for me and I managed to complete the layout using a selection of embellishments from my kit. It did not turn out like the layout I had envisioned, the use of the gold washi tape forced me to include some gold die cut embellishments. Surprisingly, this didn’t work out so bad, as the navel belly bar is made of gold.

A lot of messing around and not super happy with it, but it is finished.

Time for number two layout…with no gold in sight!

April 2019, Counterfeit Kit Challenge

Happy days, the new Counterfeit Kit Challenge has been released for April.

This month I was super excited for the release, as when they released the hint post on their Facebook page I knew straight away which kit would be the inspiration. I had already been stalking the selected inspiration website and coveting their amazing kit which they developed and sold in March. I had even contemplated ordering it, but it is an expensive venture with postage to Australia. Then, I looked at sourcing the products included from Australian online scrapbook stores, not all the products were available from one store alone or at all! I did find quite a few products at my favourite store but reminded myself about my self imposed goal to use up what I already had and not buy more product (something which has not been going well for me with the sales)! Phew, thank goodness for the Counterfeit Kit Challenge.

So, let’s check out what the inspiration kit is and what is in it. The kit chosen for this months inspiration is the HipKit Clubs, March 2019 kit. You can find out about it on their website or check out the Counterfeit Kit Challenge website which has all the relevant links, including an unboxing video.

Can I pull the kit together with the product I already own? Well, the simple answer is no…and I still want to buy the kit. What’s a girl to do, improvise and forge, make some of the papers and embellishments from scratch, use what I have?

Where did I start? I always go through my paper pads first and then through my patterned papers which are sorted by colour. I discovered that I had very little of the papers with blues and florals and that green large polka dot had me stumped. What did I select? I went through the process of colour and pattern selection and then thought about what I could modify or make. Here is what I found…

I managed to get together some pinks and greens in assorted patterns, a gold foil special floral paper, a painted Kaisercraft black and white stripe and a floral which I plan to colour in with blue and pink pencils, markers or watercolours. I had no umbrellas and no blue hearts or butterflies.

So, I substituted several papers with similar colours, motifs or patterns. A two-tone Kaisercraft blue floral instead of hearts. Some 6×6 Kaisercraft black and white butterflies which I will colour blue and green. A Kaisercraft mustard and pink floral in a smaller print size than the Maggie Holmes paper. The only polka dot I could find that had navy and white. A beautiful Kaisercraft navy and white floral (b side, P2499}which I love so much that I don’t want to cut it. Then, having no dark green polka dots, I selected this amazing Kaisercraft Hello (b side, P2514) paper which looks like an agate stone.

Next, I set aside a few maybe papers just in case…paint smooshes, dots, butterflies and a floral which could be coloured or fussy cut.

I also came across a few papers for fussy cutting to make embellishments, pink flowers and cameras.

The HipKit Club kit embellishments are bright and cheery with many spring/summer holiday motifs.

I had recently done a big sorting and organising of random die cuts from leftover kits, etc. and sorted them all by colour/theme into ziplock bags. I pulled out my neatly organised die-cuts and sorted through the bags of similar colours to the kit. Wozer, I found a tonne of similar motifs and quotes/ text to include in my kit.

Then, I grabbed a few black Thicker alphas to use for titles, some washi tape in plain gold and circles with mint/pink/gold, some Cocoa Vanilla Studio title die cuts and some foliage and butterfly stamps.

Woah, an exhausting process in all, but what a kit! This is going to be fun. I plan to scrap some fairly recent photos with my kit, my daughters birthday lunch, an unfortunate accident, a new big purchase and some summer fun.

Oops, I nearly forgot to include a bit of mixed media, some pink, green and blue spray ink/shimmer/shine. One homemade, one from Tim Holtz and one Heidi Swapp.

Make sure you check out all the April CKC designer’s kits and upcoming creations on the CKC website. Please, do join in with the challenge, it is a lot of fun? I will be sharing what I create here and on the CKC Monthly Link up page.

Happy scrapping everyone 🙂