And the winner is...

"Anonymous said...

Hi Sarah,

All the best for your degree studies - it must be hard work! I've loved your recent LOs in SI magazine. Oh, and I'd love stash pretty please!

Lana

August 26, 2009 12:24 PM"

Thanks so much Lana, please send me your name and address to rattuspackus at hotmail dot com, if you know what I mean!

And thanks to everyone else who joined in. I'm not far off my 100th post (well, another 25 or so anyway) so follow if you don't already, and keep an eye out. And keep an eye out in the December issue of SI, I'll be in there too!

Giveaway update

Here's the picture of the stash for my giveaway post. Bundle includes the following: 3 sheets white cardstock; 6 double-sided patterned paper; 2 single-sided patterned paper; 1 embossed cardstock; 1 pack gel stickers; 1 pack cardstock alphabet stickers; 2 spools ribbon (probably 3 feet on each); one tree-shaped minibook.

If you fancy being in with a chance, go leave a message on the post reached by following this link here, remember to state "stash please" or "digi please", and keep your fingers crossed!

Now, about that giveaway...

I'm sorry it's taken so long for me to get round to this post. I've been manically working for my degree, only 7 weeks to go of my placement, and then it's all mad mad mad 'til December 12th, when I'm supposed to hand in around 15000 words split between two highly intellectual pieces of work. And with a 2 year old daughter, that's pretty blooming difficult!

So I'm hoping you'll forgive me when I say I haven't had a chance to look through my stash for prizes. My blog, however, has had its 2000th visitor and then some. Therefore, this little giveaway is long overdue. If you'd like to be in with a chance of winning some Christmas-themed stash, then leave your comment below, also adding the phrase "stash please". To get an idea of the amount and variety of stuff you might get, look here and here, my previous stash prizes. I've been known to dabble in digiscrap and hybrid too, so if you'd prefer to win a $10 voucher for either the Shabby Shoppe or Two Peas, please leave a comment and say "digi please" at the end.

I will try to have a look through some time this next week, the comments will be open until 29th August 2009, at 12 midnight GMT.

And just to pretty up the post with a layout, here's one I made earlier (this year, that is!)

Another couple of pages and an imminent giveaway!

Who would've believed it, but my little old blog is nearing its 2000th visitor. I'm so pleased that so many people have passed through that I feel the urge to host a little giveaway. Again. Soooo... watch this space, next weekend I shall do just that, giving me a few more days to cobble together something tasty to pass on.

Meanwhile, I have scraped another couple of hours together today, and have managed to finish another two pages for the Simple Pleasures album:



Not the best pics, they look all flat, and there's definitely a bit more dimension to them. I'll try to take some more photos tomorrow if I get a chance. I'm liking this simplistic approach at the moment, glue and run seems to be the order of the day.

Remember, watch this space for my giveaway next weekend, and in the meantime, tell me what else YOU do for fun (keep it clean ;) )

"Go To Press" has started!

So now that I've recovered from the challenges that Shimelle sent last week, I've given a small parcel of time to my cover for the album for Go To Press (go here if you don't know what the heck I'm blathering about, and you want to know).


As per usual it took me a good while to decide what paper and layout to use, but once I'd chosen an embellishment or two, the whole thing came nicely together!

I'm quite pleased with it, and can only hope that the other pages come together as well. What do you find the hardest part of crafting? Do tell ;)

Blog challenge

So, first thing's first, I've been challenged by Jo to do the following:

1 Open the 4th file where you store your photos

2 Pick out the 4th photo and publish it to your blog

3 Explain a bit about it

4 Pass this challenge to 4 other blogs

Now, luckily, it's a good photo, and even more fortunate is that it's not of me!


It's of my darling daughter, a.k.a. Tink, when she was 9 months old. She's still got the same grin, though now with teeth, and also with more hair! Gotta love her. No, I have to, it's down in writing ;)

I challenge Trees, Janice, Lisa and Debs to do the same.

A secret mission from the no-stress scrapper

So, there I was, browsing my email the other day when I got a request from Shimelle Laine. She was wanting to host an inspiration party on her blog this weekend, and was looking for some contributions. I was very honoured to be asked to contribute, and I was sent an assignment forthwith. Be warned if you've come here from Shimelle.com: my photos are in no way as arty and beautiful as all the other party-ers, though I am working on it :)

I tried printing out the cupcakes and one of the quotes on shrink plastic, but the only stuff I had was clear - the ink on the cupcakes was taking AGES to dry, and I'm really not that patient!

Shrinking them resulted in a bit of a messy mini-cupcake fob, which, though still useable (only just - see keyring) was not what I wanted. So I traced the original cupcake onto the plastic, dabbed white opaque StazOn over the back, and then coloured the front in with my alcohol markers.



These shrunk really nicely, so I threaded them onto a ball-chain and used this to hold my second project together. This project (a minibook) involved lots of copies of a journaling tag printed out onto cream card: I then cut then out and punched a hole in the top left corner. Easy peasy. I'm going to pick out a selection of my favourite indulgent recipes, and write them in the minibook, probably with a photo on the left-hand page.


The cover of the minibook has a cut-out chocolate cupcake stuck on it and a shrink-plastic "indulge" title, also found on the printables sheet.


So, onto the card. Cupcakes, and lots of them, deserve to be presented nicely, and so I cut a cake stand out of some white card, keeping it simple, drew a brown rim on the plates, chose some co-ordinating paper, glued it all down, added the "indulge" title and voila! One tasty-looking card.


Then finally to the easiest project of the lot. This photo:


I enlarged the printables file (opened in Adobe Photoshop Elements, not in Adobe Acrobat), and copied the cupcake quote that I wanted. This was then placed on a new layer of the photo, printed out to A4 and framed. Job's a good 'un!

It's been so useful to have this challenge, it's given me loads of ideas for future projects, but alas, there was only so much time to spend crafting this week. Mind you, I think that 4 projects in about 6 hours is pretty good. So, cruise on by Shimelle's blog this weekend, take a look at all the other blogs that she's linking to. Who knows what you might find? And if you can't make that, maybe I'll see you in the classroom for Go To Press!