Sarah's September Inspiration

As you probably know last month 2Crafty sponsored the CSI challenge blog.
 As I am lucky enough to be on the DT for both these teams I got to play 'secret agent'
 and design pages with the CSI criteria and 2Crafty chipboard.
 How cool is that?

Anyway today I would like to share with you two pages that I created for these
 challenges as well as another page that I recently made featuring some of my
 favourite 2crafty chipboard pieces. 
 

Here is my first page:

I took this photo last year when we were overseas in the UK. I wanted to share the
 fond memories that I have of  English sweeties from my childhood  with my own kids so
 we visited a traditional village sweet shop. Sherbet 'Dibdabs' and 'Bon-bons' were the
 hands down favourites.

I stamped the background of this LO with an October Afternoon stamp of the centre
 of Paris. I love this stamp and thought that it was perfect for the travel theme of this page.
 My other papers are from a variety of Teresa Collins collections. 

Check out the 2Crafty elements that I used. My title 'Fun Times' is a 2Crafty phrase. I love
 these chipboard titles as there is a huge variety of phrases to chose from so there will be
 something suitable for almost every layout! The result is similar to a die-cut  title but with more
 dimension and detail. I painted my title with black distress paint and coated with dimensional magic.

The cute arrows and the leaf stems are also 2Crafty products. I painted both with distress paint
 before inking the edges for a little more definition and detail. I cut up the leaf stems so that I
 could spread them out over my page.

My second page is also a travel themed page. This time the photo was taken in San Fransisco.

It is one of my favourite pictures that I took of my 3 older boys together on that trip. They
 had just enjoyed an afternoon shopping in Union Square and were about to get on a bus
 to explore the Golden Gate Bridge. I made my background by spraying a sunburst design
on white cardstock with aqua ink then overlaying a cloud patterned sheet of vellum.
 I machine stitched it in place then randomly splattered some pink and white ink over
 the whole layout. 

Again I have used a 2Crafty chipboard word 'favourite' as part of my title. The film strips
 and casino chip are 2Crafty embellishments.  I painted the title and filmstrip with black
 distress paint and left the casino chip raw so that the detail could still easily be seen.

The last project that I would like to share with you is 'Take Three'. This is a page that I
 did for a recent colour challenge at 'Scrapfriends'. 

  My daughter was setting up a photo studio in our garage to photograph her brother for
 her NCEA photography examination board. I couldn't resist snapping a photo of her as
 she was bossing everyone around to get the photo 'just right'. 
 

I embellished my page with a variety 'photography' themed items and the 2Crafty chipboard items
 that I used on this page really made it 'pop'. The 2crafty chipboard film strips were, of course
 the perfect choice and I arranged a single strip cut in half lengthwise above and below my photo
 to give a kind of 'director's clipboard' feel. I really love these filmstrips and I think that could
 happily use them on almost every page I make! 

 The 2Crafty gear and light bulb added a real 'grungy' feeling to the layout - in keeping with
the garage in which the photoshoot was taking place. I used metallic paste to cover
both these elements to give them the appearance of 'real metal'.

Thanks for taking the time to read my post today. I hope that I have inspired you
 to try out some new techniques using our gorgeous chippies.
 Have a great month.

Sarah xx