Challenge #134 week of 26th May 2014

Here I am sitting in my room, enjoying the luxury of being home on a Monday. Next week I begin a whole jam-packed day of classes so I suppose that means I'll have to be more organised over the weekend to get posts up and ready.

But while I was sitting here, listening to the gentle tick-tock of the clock on the wall, I realised that this is what we need to have as our prompt this week.

I'd like you to be inspired by flags.

Now, I'm sure you're wondering how I got from clocks to flags?

You see, I have a bit of a "thing" for items with the Union Jack on it and looking around me, there are several flags to be seen...

And in preparation for the FIFA World Cup in Brazil in a few weeks, there are few flags hanging around outside too...

Now, you could feature a flag on your layout, you could take the colours, you could even lift the design, use a photo of a flag or what about featuring flags as embellishments? So many ways to take this.

Here are two layouts that feature Germany  and I've used tones of the colours from the German flag to reinforce the culture I'm talking about in the journalling:

Of course, there was my Diamond Jubilee layout featuring the flag in the form of paper, but also colour combination and in the photos. And my Royal Wedding layout - subtle red, white and blue alongside the strong central photo of my flags proudly flying out on my balcony:

And this is a WM layout from way back when that has touches of the colours of the Philippine flag as well as some star embroidery to match those found on the flag.

How will you incorporate inspiration from flags onto your layout this week?

We really hope you'll share your creations over at our Flickr gallery (here) using the tag WM#134.

Challenge #133 week of 19th May 2014

Sorry this post is a "little" late! As in three weeks! Where does the time go? However, I suspect that most of you are busy too as no one gave me a nudge! Anyway, life has overtaken me a little but I noticed a few new layouts in our Flickr gallery (here) which was the push I needed to get going again. If you are still creating using our prompts, then I will try to keep up with providing them!

I thought it might be good for us to have a product/technique prompt this time around and this is as much as a challenge for me as it is for you.

I'd like you to be inspired by paint. Use it on your layout in its pure form, feature a painting, use a painted element on your page, splat it, dry brush it, photograph it... whatever you like as long as it features paint :-)

And here are a few ways I've used paint over the years:

A photo of the day with the prompt - Paint

Pam was horrified when I took this photo of the day - prompt was "Red" - and admitted that it was purely staged and the paint wouldn't actually be used! Maybe this is a photo I should use on my layout ...

Here I've used white paint for stamping as part of a Nic Howard class. This was really out of the box for me

I dry brushed cream paint here behind the title to help it stand out a little more

Stamping silver paint with bubble wrap - I love this look and need to do it again!

And here was paint splatted across the layout to help support my colour scheme

Now that I see the above examples, it makes me inspired to get my paints out and have a go - I can feel some splatting coming on at the least although that bubble wrap? Oh yes, maybe!

We would LOVE you to create a project using this prompt (or indeed any prompt - see the page above for previous ideas) and share over at our Flickr gallery (here) with the tag WM#133.

Fingers crossed that I'll be back again next week ;-)