August challenges!

I love this monthly challenge at Operation Write Home sponsored by Our Daily Bread Designs because regardless of who wins the prize they offer, Operation Write Home wins shipment of one package for 25 entries, and two for 50 entries! Yay! This month's challenge is masculine cards, and here's my entry:

The first two challenges at Scraptastic Club are up. Challenge #1 is to create a layout with a "Subway Art" title, using at least 3 lines of text and 3 different types of lettering. I had so much fun with the current "Barn Door" kit (psst -- I think there's still some left). This layout actually started life as an idea for Challenge #2, when the picture reminded me that when we were little girls at about this age, my sisters and I called ourselves The Leslie Sisters Singing Society and bingo! I had my subway art title! The rest of the page just came together, pretty unusual for me. The mat behind the photo is a Cricut cut made with one of the kit papers. "Leslie" is also a Cricut cut, and I'm still trying to decide whether to add Liquid Pearls dots to the rest of the letters, or whether just the initial letter is plenty.

8/16 -- got challenge #2 done today, you know, the one that the above layout started out to be? The challenge was to use the provided sketch, plus a color palette of soft neutrals, pink and blue. I don't usually go crazy with the embellies, but once I got started, I couldn't stop. The blue cardstock, the brads and the flowers are from my stash except for the one I cut from kit paper, but I'm loving this Barn Door kit! Aren't those veneer pieces cute? I pretty much threw them on the page and glued them where they fell -- I'm no good at randomizing.

Challenge #3 was simple -- use octagons on your page. I used the mask I just bought from Scraptastic and a mist similar to the color of the pp, then stamped over it in sepia with a background stamp with tiny octagons. It's pretty subtle, but hey, masking and misting are new to me and I'm not too bold about it yet. This sweet baby of mine is now 34!

Two more challenges to go this month!

8/29/12 The 4th challenge featured a fun sketch by Heather, with two great interpretations. I saw the sketch as a card, and that's what I did:

9/2/12 Last challenge done! Michelle posted a lovely palette of teal, rose, kraft and lime to use, with a great sample she did with the current Story Begins kit.  As I chose the other kit this month, I used scraps of some Crate Paper with these exact colors instead. The other part of the challenge was to use some sprinkles on the page. My thanks to the girls on the Forum at Scraptastic Club, who recently gave me some pointers about creating sprinkles. That was fun! I used 3 different colors to match the pp.

The journaling is about my great grandmother's hand-painted china, which my sweet sister shared with me:

August done; bring on the September challenges!