Challenges all around

Howdy there -- hope you're having a lovely Sunday, wherever you may be.

February marks the start of a new year for the design team over at Scrappy Chic (you can see us all here...or in an upcoming blog post right here, if you're patient). One of the lines in my kit this month was Tiny Woods from KaiserCraft (yes, that's really the name. yes, I think it's funny. sometimes I have a seventh-grade sense of humor.)

This line has really lovely colors, but they're challenging -- fall-ish (makes more sense in their home country of Australia than here, I suppose), and it's borderline theme-y, design-wise. So, I challenged myself to make at least two layouts using it, and I turned to a couple of online challenges to get it all done. Whoa. Challenging, indeed.

Here's the first take:

Analog memories, indeed. Andrew has a lot of fond memories of this old tape recorder -- high technology back in the day! I thought the vaguely 70s colors of the paper were perfect for this particular topic.

I used Studio Calico's Sunday sketch from last week to help me out:

By making the shift from 12x12 to 8.5x11, I had to squish some elements, bumping the journalling below the title instead of next to it. Otherwise, I was (surprisingly) faithful to the original.

other supplies: ranger tag, pebbles alphas, cosmo cricket tiny type word, twine, bazzill cs, amy tangerine washi tape

The tag with my title on it is misted very lightly with Mister Huey's Clover, and I typed up my journalling on the B-side leftovers of my main paper. The buttons are chipboard from Bazzil, and I misted the heck out of those with the same Clover color. Did you know that Scrappy Chic will be carrying Mister Huey's any day now? That makes me very happy.

While I was at it, I tackled the challenge from The Creative Type to scrap your celebrity crush. How fun is that? The samples on their blog are great, too. I had no trouble at all choosing my crush -- the hardest part was choosing a photo from the interwebs. Here's what I came up with:

other supplies: authentique alphas, studio calico stickers, signo pen, kaisercraft really tiny alphas, doodlebug flock (under the stickles, dang it)

Oh, Paul Rudd, how is it that such a funny dude can smolder at the camera that way? Sigh. Anyway, you can see I used the same paper as above, plus a subtle woodgrain pattern. I'm less than pleased with my splatters -- the blue were supposed to be flocked, but the flock didn't stick well enough, so I had to do a second coat with Stickles. And then, when I was setting the thing up for photographing (almost 24 hours later, by the way), I smeared the white splatters (dang you, OA Sprinklers!). So, whatever. I still like the end result, warts and all. I'll just skip the close-up, ok?

In the end, my challenge-based layouts made the challenging paper line less of a challenge. Dig? Dig.

Feel free to go watch a Paul Rudd movie now. Enjoy!