Alex here with the next installment of my Lost Mojo (or Finding Inspiration) series! If you missed the first five installments, you can find them here:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Today I’m bringing you the final installment of the Finding Inspiration or “lost mojo” series. This one will be about using challenges to find inspiration.
There are many sites (usually in the form of a blog) which host weekly or monthly challenges. Sometimes they’re specific like a different colour challenge each week or the type of challenge might vary.
Facebook Groups relating to scrapbooking or cardmaking or more general crafts sometimes have special challenges. Some commonly found activities include some of the things we’ve already looked at like scraplifting and commonly sketches. Others frequently found are things Tic TAC Toe (also referred to as bingo) (like noughts and crosses where each box contains a prompt or item to use and you can choose a line in any direction and must include those items), mood boards and many others.
In April, such a Facebook group for the store Anna’s Craft Cupboard were celebrating their 13th anniversary with a cyber crop. There were plenty of games and challenges and I’m going to go back and complete one that I wanted to do at the time but didn’t get around to it.
There were two "Blind Crops” and for me, your pink, self confessed control freak. these are the most difficult of all! A blind crop usually is most successful when completed “live” to eliminate the temptation to peek ahead. The leader has everyone making a layout step by step according to their instructions! Eg “cut paper B into a 6x8 rectangle and stick to top left of paper A”. Supplies to have on hand are usually available for some time beforehand, although the level of detail often varies.
The designer of the blind crop I’m going to make is none other than Melinda Sweetman who is probably well known to many of you.
I’m pleased to say I didn’t cheat on terms of peeking at the finished layouts, but I had a tiny cheat which I’ll confess in due process! The list of supplies was more or less straightforward - except I had 5 papers picked instead of 4. One was from a paper pad and single sided, so more like 4.5! 🤦🏼♀️
Since I rarely pull ink, mist or paint when making up kits, I felt I could justify the “wait and see” approach” when it came to this step.
Not knowing when and how much of each paper would be used was driving me crazy! After following the cutting and sticking for the pink and woodgrain papers, I pretty much was sure my remaining paper would be the blue/lilac striped one (in the photo cluster) and not the green one.
Once I figured out we were cutting photo mats came my cheat - not only did I use the two specified papers (would have been the woodgrain and the purple) but I decided to also cut a mat from my pink paper and my green floral “spare” paper and do messy offset mats. I use a lot of paper layers and doing this was like a security blanket!
At the point when texture paste was required, I went with a "frankenpaste" as I sometimes do. I mixed Colour Blast in Snow White with Vicki Boutin’s iridescent glitter texture paste (which has a clear base). I wasn’t super happy when it was drying a bit more translucent than I hoped after 2 steps. Then I saw paste was required for a third step so I dried off what I had already done enough to put the stencil back exactly as it was. I mixed a bit of Dreamweaver pearlescent embossing paste into my frankenpaste and after doing the third area I went back over the first two lightly. This made for some thick paste and in hindsight I should have probably used a denser patterned stencil.
Here are the three pastes swatches separately. The fine glitter in the Colour Blast is hard to see, but it's gorgeous!
I also wasn’t thrilled with any of my mist choices, but didn’t want the fuss of mixing anything so I knew the shimmer pigment in Heidi Swapp Color Shine should show up even on darker paper.
I had to leave the layout to sit overnight so the thick paste could dry all the way through. The waiting time and scant adhesive causing the pink and paper to lift a lot at the edges. I decided to machine stitch for some extra interest. It's subtle, but adds some texture.
I also had to stitch down the yellow Thickers (not my first choice, but I simply couldn't make the ascending letters of a scripty font work no matter what I tried. 😒
I fussy cut virtually the entire sheet of that gorgeous floral paper from Shimelle's Little by Little collection and eliminated the red flowers and kept the others. While yellow doesn't appear in the background pattern, it definitely worked as an accent and gave me the option of yellow in the title since both pink and white alphas seemed to blend in too much. I added the lion die cut from the same collection and some critters from Box of Crayons also by Shimelle hidden among the flowers since the photo was taken at the zoo even though the journaling isn't about the outing itself,
I left the choice of flair until later since I wasn't sure where the blind crop was going to take me. I opted for the Captured set which was black on white. The white was going to stand out and co-ordinate with the paste and I wanted to include some camera motifs in the embellishment clusters anyway.
I used the silver, holographic circles from the Thickers phrase set from Shimelle's Sparkle City and some sequins from Spiegelmom Scraps to finish
Embellish with Flair product used: Captured
I'll see you again soon with something new!
Love, and embellish with flair!
Alex xx
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