get out the old black pen

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Today's 'Friday scrapping' layout was brought to you by my black pen, who has, sadly, lay dormant in my toolbox for way too long. Sometimes I get really sick of the cardstock border, and this week I brought out the pen, and drew some borders on. It is quick and easy and givse a soft edge feel to an otherwise 'hard' blocky layout.

The trick to it is to be confident. You can't attempt this with a timid, slow, perfectionist attitude. You just got to confidently go for it. Not fast, just not too slow, or your line will look wobbly and shaky. I just cruise along with the pen, turning the page so that my hand is at a good angle where I'm comfortable, and I draw from corner to corner, in a single line (ie no stopping), and I watch the edge of the page, trying to keep my line approximately a consistent distance from that edge, all the way along. I usually aim for about 5mm from the edge, but whatever your preference is fine.

So this layout below is about Amelia starting some Martial arts lessons. You can see the name of it as my title, I don't know how to spell or pronouce it! I had to look it up on the net to get the spelling for the title. These photos were actually taken at 6pm when it was mostly dark outside, but I managed to turn them to mostly 'day time' shots by using the enhance and lightening tools. There is a lot of what's known as 'noise' on the pics, and the quality is by no means fab, but I'm okay with that. I guess. One day I'll take some better ones of her during the real daylight hours. Still totally stuck on white cardstock...*sigh* (note: the black is the background table, not cardstock - the layout stops with the white).

Amelia is off, as we speak to a birthday party, so I just whipped up this quick card using my new butterfly punch!

Even though I made a solemn vow all year to buy nothing of the scrap variety (other than cardstock) , I just had to make a teeny exception for this. It is very cute, and I know my kids will love to punch a million butterflies. Yeah, that's right, I bought it for the kids! (ahem). I had to ORDER it from my LSS as they didn't have one in stock. Avoiding all other things in the shop, I walked straight up to the counter from the front door and said "I need a small 1" wide butterfly punch by EK success - do you have one?". It was all very definite and the sales lady knew better than to try to sell me anything else. So she just took my order and said 'it'll be here Monday". Nice.

This card took all of 7 minutes, including me asking Amelia to look in my scraps and punch out 6 butterflies for me. I decided to add the hand drawn line around the edge, as I am in a hand drawn line type of mood. Easiest card EVER! If you payed more attention to the papers and the colour scheme, rather than ask your 7 year old to punch out whatever she wants, this card has the potential to look really quite spectacular.

In a simple kinda way.

Of course. :)