Sunday 1 March 2015

Anything Goes at Country View Crafts Challenge and Giveaway winner

If this post sounds as though I am super excited, well I am. We have booked a holiday to go back to California and I am sooo looking forward to it. We will be staying with friends in the Los Angeles area and visiting Palm Springs and San Francisco, so being in the desert for a few days means there will be lots of warm sun, oooooh I can't wait and oh yes lots of retail therapy time too and catching up with my friend Terry.

I am heavily into bookbinding at the moment so I have made myself a little travel scrapbook to take with me so I can record my visit rather like a diary with lots of photos and collected ephemera.

This is approximately 16 x 13 1/2 cms and has been made using the brand new Tim Holtz 'Correspondence' paper stash. The colours and designs are just perfect for a red, white and blue theme. (In fact I have rather craftily used the 12 x 12 papers to make two books, the other one will be up on Friday).


This a hard backed book with a soft spine and the style is one I will be teaching at my next Country View Crafts Workshop, the pages are sewn together and I have added in some tags, envelope pockets and smaller plain pages to add interest.



I tore the outside edge of the pages and had a big inking session once they were sewn together to grunge and distress them all.


I used Tim's USA blueprint stamp, his stars and stripes movers and shapers dies and his ephemera packs to create the collage on the front cover.


I also designed my own closure together using one of the Idea-Ology hitch fasteners and some elastic.


Here you can see how I held it together on the back of the book .......


.... and the ends link over the hitch fastener at the front of the book.



I've started to add some little die-cuts like the movers and shapers camera and I will stamp some journalling mats and take some mini tags and a small kit of bits and pieces so I can add everything as I go along. That's the fun of being in a home and living like an American rather than being in a hotel all the time.


Because this is nice and flat it will fit in my case perfectly.

I hope you will join us for our March challenge - don't forget anything goes and there will be a "20 voucher for the winner to buy some lovely crafting goodies from Susan's online shop.


Before I finish I would like to announce the winner of my 5 year blog anniversary and what are now over 1000 posts. I was blown away by the number of you who entered and the most amazing comments you left me, I feel really encouraged by your very positive remarks about my work, it was really wonderful feedback, thank you so much.

I ran the Random Org number generator and the lucky number is -


.... and by my counting that number belongs to Dagmar.

Congratulations Dagmar, if you would like to email me your address I will get the goodies in the post to you. My email address brenda_brown25@hotmail.com

Thanks again to each and everyone who of you who joined in.


Have a wonderful week ahead everyone and hopefully you will have some time to get inky.

Listen to your heArt

hugs Brenda xxxx