Challenge #187 - Frosty the Snowman (Dec 19 - Jan 1)

Happy Monday, HMITM players! It is with deep sadness that I am about to make this announcement. Due to the dwindling participation over the last year or so, we have decided to put HMITM to bed. (I'm not yet prepared to say that we are completely retiring this long-time, inspiring challenge because I am hoping that some day in the future, we might be able to revive it.) I played in this challenge for a long time before being invited to join the design team, and it's been a part of my scrappy routine for many years. I will miss the HMITM challenges and seeing all the wonderful and diverse interpretations from my teammates and our players.

Debbi

And now, onto our last challenge...

Anna-Karin here with the last challenge. At first I wrote, 'the last challenge of the year', but then I realised I had to change it to 'the last challenge. SO sad!

Since it is December and winter in the Northern Hemisphere, I thought we would do a frosty and wintery challenge. Here it is:

- Do a winter or Christmas themed layout
- Depict snow on your layout (here are a few examples: snowflakes, torn white paper hills, dry embossing, organza, paint, vellum etc.)
- Use glitter
- At least three shades of blue (but you can use other colors too)
- Something shiny or transparent

I hope you like it and we hope you have a bit of time over in this busy time of the year to play along.


Our guest designer for this challenge is Katerina Laiopoulou.

Thank you for joining us Katerina! Here's some info about her,in her own words:

'My name is Katerina Laiopoulou, I am 35 years old and I live in Athens, Greece.
Scrapbooking is a way to express myself! I started making layouts in 2008, but guest books monopolised my interest the last 3 years.

I don't limit myself to one style, but I love colours, flowers and butterflies! I love to experiment with new techniques and I am fond of fussy cutting, it relaxes me.

I love blogging too. You can see my work here. It would be all greek to you (LOL, sorry for that), but you can use the google translator. I have a passion for the greek language :-)

I ‘ve been a guest designer for Get Creative and Scrapbookers in Greece. I am so happy to be sharing these LO’s with you and be among all these talented ladies!

Thank you all!!!'

And Katerina wrote this about her layout: Snow is everywhere on this LO and that’s because I love snow! I tried to create a landscape, a small village lost in the mountains on a winter snowy day. I torn white and shades of blue paper to create the mountain hills, cut those little houses, add glitter on the roofs and snowflakes everywhere! I used a photo of me, which was taken on the way to Kalvryta ski center, where you can find lots of fresh snow, enjoy yourself and see the fabulous mountain view!



Anna-Karin: I am so sad that this is the last HMITM challenge (at least for now). I am going to miss it so much, both doing the challenges and seeing what everyone else comes up with. I knew I wanted to use these winter photos of the two cousins. Quite many shades of blue were used on the layout. I love clear elements and cut off a third of the patterned paper and replaced it with a transparency (I placed the layout on white cardstock when I photographed it, the right hand part is transparent IRL). The transparency was stamped and ghost letters were used for the title. Rub-ons were also used. Snowflakes were white embossed all over the patterned paper, then it was misted with Perfect Pearls and water and finally a flourish was stamped with Chipped Sapphire. Snowflakes were die cut from watercolour paper, canvas, vellum and aluminium tape. They were coloured with Distress Stains and misted with Perfect Pearls. Some were coated with Stickles for glitter. Extra snow was added in the form of dry embossed torn strips of vellum, Stickles was added to the top. The journaling is on a tag behind the top photo and is about how much fun they had together on this cold day.

Elizabeth:   I am so sad that this is our last challenge. I have had so much fun designing with this fun team of ladies. Will definitely miss it. This was a fun challenge to end on, Anna-Karin. Love working with blues, and shimmer and glitter just add to the fun. I must admit, I am not a 'dirty' scrapbooker, so the thought of actually sprinkling glitter onto the layout in some form or fashion just about gives me hives, so I stuck with the great letter stickers and embellishments to make it shine. (I did do glitter on a layout once, and the whole scrapbook has been sprinkled with the pixie dust over the years. :P)

 

Debbi T: This was such a fun and inspiring challenge, Anna-Karin! I love all the elements of the challenge--they all worked so beautifully together. I combined this challenge with the current challenge over at The Color Room (the blues in their palette worked perfectly with the HMITM challenge). I was being a bit lazy and used glittery letters and stickers and paper, but at the last minute, I felt like that was cheating, so I broke out the Stickles and added some glitter to my punched border. For my transparent element, I was delighted to use some old vellum that's been in my stash for about a decade!

Janet M - Loved this challenge and it was a perfect one to get another page done for a book I'm working on for pictures of our old house for my husband. These were a couple of our horses which always posed for pictures much better than the kids or the dog would.

For my snow I embossed a piece of velum that I tore and I punched out a piece of mulberry paper from a really old stash. For the something shiny or transparent - I used one over the picture and then stitched it with the sewing machine and the letters for the word day. Adding glitter, sparkles and etc is pretty easy when you have a snow picture.

I'm very sad that this is the last layout for HMITM- it's been the most inspiring place I've designed for, it's made me reach outside my normal ideas, giving me some fantastic challenges and inspired me when I have seen what everyone else creates with the same challenge. Moving on to other things will keep us all busy and I may just have to go back and re inspire and challenge myself with doing some of the old challenges again.




To play, just share your layout through Mr. Linky below! We can't wait to see what you create!

Challenge 186 - Celebrate Wacky December

I have a source for wacky holidays that I share with my students, and I consulted my wacky holiday calendar for December and found out:

December is Bingo's Birthday Month.
It's also Rising Star Month.
And it's National Tie Month.
The first week of December is Cookie Cutter Week.
December 5 is Bathtub Party Day!

So...I challenge you to use:
* A bingo card (if you don't have these in your stash, just google "bingo card" under Google Images, and you'll find a gazillion).
* Use something that you can tie--ribbons, twine, raffia, etc.
* Use at least 5 stars.
* Use punches or cutters or a shape templates.
* Use your imagination and whatever product you want to create "bubbles" on your page.

Aren't you glad I didn't choose National Gazpacho Day? :)

Debbi Tehrani:

I haven't been around for a while because we sold our house and moved to a new one. It's good to be back and scrapping again! I just recently started playing over at The Color Room, and I thought it would be fun to use this week's palette and sketch for my HMITM page. My husband loves the cheesy touristy photo ops, and I'm doing a whole album about that called Poser. This page is going into that book.

(Unfortunately I'd had my camera battery charger packed and my battery died just in time to take a picture of my layout. I therefore had to use my iPad to take a photo--not the best picture, but you'll get the idea of my layout):

Anna-Karin: Such a fun combination of items to use for this challenge!! Instead of using a bingo card, I stamped a bingo card repeatedly on the background. I tied twine to the tags and used a whole bunch of stars die cut from the same paper as the tags. For the tags I pulled out my very old Accu-Cut EZ2Cut templates and I used a punch for the reinforcer circles. Finally, I used bubble wrap and red paint to stamp bubbles on the page. Thank you so much for this fun challenge Debbi!

Janet M- What a fun and creative challenge this one is- I finally got my sewing machine unpacked and got to use it on my layout.
My five stars are on the bingo card and the ornaments, the bubbles are the clear buttons and they are tied into the layout. I also added a few snowflake stars with my stamp and embossing powder. I used a border punch for that part of the challenge.
Cute combination of stash to use this time and it really did have me searching for the elements - I loved it.

To play, and have a shot at being chosen for our How Awesome Is Too Awesome Hall of Fame and creating as a HMITM Guest Designer, just share your layout through Mr. Linky below! We can't wait to see what you create!

Challenge #184 winner

A big thank you to those who played in our Mix It Up challenge! We hope you had fun using all those different patterned papers.

The winner is Kelly with her layout Happy Holidays with the Storeys. Kelly used the different papers in such a great way and the black and white plus red colour combo brought all the papers together so nicely. Fabulous Christmas tree. Here's her layout:



Congrats Kelly!!

Our current challenge is just below this post. It is a great challenge, hope you can play along.

#185 Thankful (November 21 - December 4)

Canadian Thanksgiving has come and gone, but American Thanksgiving is celebrated this week.

I would like you to do a layout about thankfulness. (any aspect)

plus...
3 foam embellishments
4 colors of cardstock
5 buttons
6 stickers (non-alphabet)

I hope you will take some time over the next two weeks and reflect on the things you are thankful for and make a layout about it :) We would love to see what you create. There is a link at the end of the post. Thanks for stopping by the blog!


First, here's the layout from our guest designer this month, Shaunery Wharton:

Shaunery: This was a fun challenge!! As with all of my HMITM attempts/entries, I always challenge my self to dive into my scrap box first. So here's the breakdown for everyone!

3 foam embellishments ~ oh did I even OWN foam?? After much digging and rooting around my stash, my cupboards and garage, I found a stack of foam "mats" meant for some kids craft project. I took two and ran them thru my die machine and created the flourishes. Those I embellished with Liquid Pearls. The third piece I painted over in white gesso (nothing STICKS to foam!) Then I stamped a favorite image once the paint was dry with my Chalk Ink in Lime Pastel. I then fussy cut and adhered.

4 colours of cardstock ~ into the scrapbox and found these four scraps of Bazzil. I took three strips in each colour and ran thru three different border punches. Then I layered and built up a faux "embossed" background paper with them.

5 buttons ~ actually forgot them in my original layout and caught just before uploading. Went thru the stash and found 'em! Re-photographed and uploaded properly!

6 stickers ~ (non alpha's) so my non-alpha submissive stickers are two border stickers, layered on each other. Two mini hot-air balloons, and two altered vellum sticker hearts. My "Thankful For" are made from labeling tape. I wasn't sure so...

I tucked a little tag in and listed a few things I'm thankful for.. my husband, my children, my fabulous circle of crafty scrappy friends (who won't say a single word about me spelling "Thankful" completely WRONG, TWICE) and for the "release" scrapping and crafting provides me. It was very nice working on this layout after a total crap evening after some volunteer time. Focusing on WHAT I am thankful for, setting the ickiness aside and forgetting about those who made me feel rotten that evening. I'm very thankful for the opportunity to do this challenge and for a place to set "life" aside and focus on what's important.

Janet M - What a great challenge and what a hard one to tell about being thankful for, I have too many choices , which is a good thing. I choose a picture of my four youngest grandchildren to scrap which I realized I had scrapped before but since I do books for the families, I often use the same picture.

My foam pieces are the & signs, brackets and the ice cream cone. The stickers are the banners, critters and the cupcake.

Thanks for the great challenge - I always like to write down the things that I am thankful for.



Anna-Karin: I always enjoy doing layouts about things to be thankful about. I used photos of the little one and me and a bunch of stickers about gratitude. At first I didn’t know what stickers to use, since I hardly have any stickers. I love the 7Gypsies word and quote stickers, so I decided to use those. The big title sticker was adhered to cardstock, die cut with an On the Edge die and inked a bit with Distress Inks. The remaining 5 stickers came from the same and another set of stickers. For the cardstock, I used four colours Kraft core. The four pieces were die cut into 8 hearts and I used different embossing folders for each one. The only foam embellishments I have did not at all fit with the colours of the layout, so instead I die cut three birds from brown craft foam. Buttons are always an easy thing to add (and I have a whole drawer full). Thank you for this wonderful challenge Elizabeth!

Elizabeth: So I did kindof cheat on my own challenge. :P When I was making the challenge I think I was thinking of felt instead of foam, so my butterflies are sortof felt-like but they are stuffed a little so I think there must be some foam inside. :) I had fun using cardstock instead of my usual patterned papers. I never tire of using browns and blues together, and yellow rounded it out nicely. I used a bunch of random stickers from my stash, which is always a good thing.



Fi - Again a little late with this one, things have been hectic this year as school wraps up not too mention as weekend away for me. I miss read foam embellishments for felt and for some reason I left my buttons at home so I had to make do with what I did have on hand.

3 foam embellishments - I didn't have any of these with me so I used foam dots and covered them with glitter
4 colors of cardstock - pink, orange, raspberry and white
5 buttons - I only had one of these in my stash so I used stickers and stitched them so that they resembled buttons.
6 stickers (non-alphabet)- at least I did have these with me.

To play, and have a shot at being chosen for our How Awesome Is Too Awesome Hall of Fame and creating as a HMITM Guest Designer, just share your layout through Mr. Linky below! We can't wait to see what you create!

Challenge #183 winner

A big thank you for playing along with us in our guest Amy's 'Gifts' challenge!

The winner is Tory with her layout Kitten Love. We love the kitten paw prints, the glitter doodling and the sweet bouquet of flowers tied with baker's twine. Here's her layout:

Congrats Tory!

(Kelly, I tried to comment on your layout, but Blogger wouldn't allow me. Your layout is stunning! I looked for your email, because I always feel bad about not being able to comment, but couldn't find it.)

Our current challenge is below this post. We hope you will join us!

Challenge #184 - Mix it Up (Nov 7 - Nov 20)

Janet here with challenge #184. Remember the rule in fashion - don't wear stripes and plaids together. Well we're breaking that rule in this challenge. Stripes , plaids, dots and flowers. Squares, circles, stars and prints. Mix it up anyway you want to but you need to use at least eight different patterns in this layout and because we want to keep it even more fun, a holiday photo from any holiday. Because this is going to be a happy mixture, the word 'happy' should feature someplace in the layout or title.
We don't want the papers to match the holiday though, that's a no-no!

So here's the challenge:
- Eight different patterns, none to match the holiday
- The word 'happy'
- Any holiday picture and embellishments. ( Embellishments can match the holiday)

We are so happy to have Shaunery Wharton join us as guest designer this month! She does such fabulous work, always with lots of wonderful details. The layout she created for this challenge is absolutely gorgeous. Have a look at her blog to see more of her work. Thank you so much Shaunery!

Here she is:

Bio: I am a stay at home mom to three crazy children. When my oldest was born, I discovered scrap booking only a month later. It was like, this craft was created just for me! I save and keep everything. I've evolved quite a bit since 1994 (yep, nearly 18 years of scrapping) and love the constant change and growth of the industry. I especially enjoy incorporating challenges in my layouts. Sketch's, color, recipes...you name it. These sites continually help me stretch and grow. They have also provided a source of friendships, I've met so many wonderful people via the net over the last two years.

Shaunery: I was so honored to be asked to play at HMITM as a guest designer. I rearranged my whole schedule to get the layout challenge finished but I still was a tad late. But I HAD to play! I do not normally scrap a lot of holiday pages, with the exception of Halloween. So this was intriguing and inspirational. I chose my eight patterns from my scrap box. Orange and brown seemed to be the predominate colors..taking my cue I starting building and layering. The "garland" at the top of my page is inspired by the bead garland my MIL hangs on her mantel each year, I knew I wanted to recreate it. The "matting" of pattern on white, was inspired by my df Jenny who likes to mat w/ black. To bring attention to the Christmas Holiday theme, I used metal Christmas embellishments and my favorite Tim Holtz Santa stamp. If you'd like to see close ups and see my product list, please visit my blog, http://www.shaunerysblog.blogspot.com/.

Many thanks to the crew at HMITM, I'm so tickled that you invited me to play along! Thanks so much!

Janet - I'll probably look at this layout years from now and wonder why I have sailboats and Halloween eyes on a Christmas layout and I can't imagine what someone else may wonder. I had fun creating my own challenge and even though this isn't the best picture it sure captures the search of looking for Santa after he leaves our house Christmas morning.

I based my layout of a Page Maps sketch, I didn't want the different patterned papers to take over the layout so I did keep the areas on them smaller. Talk about using up some old stash I think the Jolee's stickers on this were about the first time they made the embellished ones - and true to the challenges here to use things up the whole package went on the layout.



I had a little fun with this challenge and got two more done, one is of my granddaughter and her first snowman, I used all summer and spring papers on it. The second one is my other daughter's dog Stella dressed up for Halloween using different patterned papers with flowers, plaids and birds.




Anna-Karin: I enjoyed mixing different patterns and used lots of different ones on my layout. I used grey, black, blue and red papers and cut them into tags of two sizes. The tags were distressed a bit and then stitched to the page to form borders at the top and the bottom. They were also embellished with a bit of subtle stamping (so subtle, it is hard to see on the photo). I used a fun photo of me and my sister and the tip of the tail of the dog fleeing the scene of a Christmas photo shoot which didn't go as planned. The title translates ‘Happy?’ Thank you for this awesome challenge Janet!




 Fi - I decided to Challenge myself by doing a card.  I used eight prints from Basic Grey and Webster Scraps and included a the following prints:  music notes, woodgrain, spots, stripes, flowers, swirls, geometric and a general print.  I used the title happy for my card and although the papers are quite Chrismasy I have used it as Birthday card.  Anyway I hope you like my card, its not easy using 8 prints on one card.  Check out my blog for more details.  Great challenge Janet!!!

To play, and have a shot at being chosen for our How Awesome Is Too Awesome Hall of Fame and creating as a HMITM Guest Designer, just share your layout through Mr. Linky below! We can't wait to see what you create!

Challenge #180, #181 and #182 winners

We are so very sorry that we totally missed to post the winner for challenge #180 (Home Sweet Home) and challenge #181 (Johnny Appleseed).

The winner for challenge #180 is Amy, with her fabulous layout 'Priceless':



Congrats Amy!! The little house is so cute and your French doors being covered in the kids' art.


The winner for challenge #181 is Shaunery with this fabulous layout:



Congrats Shaunery! So many fun details and the chalkboard background is so cool.

The winner for challenge #182 (Beautiful Autumn) is Katerina with her wonderful autumn layout:



Congrats Katerina! The dry embossed cardstock looks wonderful and so do all those leaves.

Thanks for playing everyone! The currect challenge is just below this post, we hope you will join us.

(A little note on comments, at the moment Blogger is not allowing me (not sure about everyone else) to comment on blogs where the comment section is not a pop-up. As a result, I haven't been able to comment on several layouts. I am sorry about that. Hopefully it will be sorted out soon.)