All That Glitters

Welcome to the second of January's challenges for the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog.  This one was to add glitter, bling, sparkle, pizazz to your project!  But I had nothing glittery in my January kit - so I had to improvise in the way that we counterfeiters do LOL!

I took some unloved brads, and a beautiful, but not-the-right-colour star-shaped brad from Susanne's swap packaging and got busy with VersaMark ink, some glittery embossing powder and my heat gun:

Transformation complete, I set to work on my page.  Remember how I failed on my JYC?  Well I also gave up on my 2011 Project 12 after only 2½ months!  Which was a shame as I love my Project 12 album from 2010, and I love the year in review hidden tags I did for JYC 2009 and JYC 2010.  So I decided that I'd do a double page summary for the year, based on a lovely sketch over at Scrap365 magazine's website.

The year was a bit hit and miss with photos (hence the Project 12 fail so early in the year) so I couldn't find one decent photo for every month.   Instead I made sure we were all on there with a couple of feature photos representing some of our year's activities.

I had fun decorating each of the circles at the top of the tags - with snippets of my counterfeited Pink Paislee Mistable Ribbons, some of the contents of my counterfeited October Afternoon Flower Sack, a few buttons and the glitterfied brads.  My month names are stamps from a Scenic Route set and the free font is Veggieburger.

In my January kit I had two ways for counterfeiting the mistable ribbons - fabric (strips torn from an old sheet) and paper (border punched tissue paper) - and I promised to let you know how I got on with them.
I haven't tried actually misting on them (no mists LOL), but started by colouring them with two shades of Fiberscraps Tintz: dabbers which dispense a colour-wash a bit like very watery paint.  Both took the colour well, but the tissue paper distorted and crinkled really badly as it dried.  It took a while for the fabric to dry, but I used some of it on my 2012 goals page for the first CKCB challenge.

From top to bottom: un-touched original tissue or sheet strip
2 samples with Tintz
5 samples with Promarkers

Then I tried Child No.3's Promarkers out on them with much better results: a great range of colours with plenty of decorative potential using the blending pen and contrasting shades.  Being alcohol-based, the ink dried really quickly and the tissue paper didn't crinkle at all.  It does crease though - I'll have to get the iron out before using any of it!  The fabric has taken on a starchy stiffness after colouring with the Promarkers  - very different to the untreated or colour-washed samples.
On balance the fabric has worked better and if I had a die-cutting system that could cope with fabric my counterfeiting would be complete!

P.S. I haven't joined in with a Thirsty Thursday Challenge from A Trip Down Memory Lane for a while, but I reckon I've covered P for Polka-dot, Portrait Photos and Parents (that's us!) pretty perfectly ... as well as R for Red and Review!

Saturday Sneak Peeks

I've been busy with my February Counterfeit Kit again.  Unfortunately, I can only share one of the three projects I've produced.  One project is a page for a Chinese Whisper challenge over on UKScrappers (I received a page by e-mail, I scraplifted it and passed it on to the next person in the chain) so has to be kept secret until the chain of scraplifting is complete.  The two frame stamps in the kit have been put to good use on this page.

One project is a page for Sarah's Cards Blog (I won a prize there in January and part of the payback is producing a page for the March challenge).  For some reason, despite having constructed a generous kit, I cannot get out of the habit of gutting everything.  I shall have a pizza box full of off-cuts at this rate.  For both of these pages I've used Sizzlit dies for my titles - does anyone ever have enough title alphas in a kit?

The one thing I can reveal is my January spread for this year's Project 12 album: more gutting in evidence plus the use of the reverse of the manufacturer's strip.  Parsimonious?  Moi?  I've added some inks, bare chipboard alphas/numbers from my stash and used a fancy trimmer blade; everything else is from the kit.

I decided not to follow the provided Pagemaps sketches this year and try out A4 pages for a change. I'm planning for each month to have a similar collage page and journalling page, depending on what we do. 

So that brings my tally of pages from this wonderful kit to 6 pages and there are still loads of papers and embellishments left (not to mention all the offcuts from the gutting!).  My next project is a sketch challenge from the CKCB itself here.  Watch this space!