Books

This week on Frosted Designs I am host another challenge.  When coming up with this challenge I wanted to really challenge our followers and step just a little outside the box.  So I turned to my favorite pastime and that is reading books.  I love to read and I have been an avid reader since I was a little kid.  The books I read are very much interwoven into the fabric and story of my life.  So this week everyone is supposed to use a book to inspire their project.  Head on over and see all the great projects and learn about some great books.  Plus check out the new prize for the month of October!

Anyway...On to my project.  This week I chose the Dark Tower Series by Stephen King as my inspiration.  This series of 7 books is are some of my favorites.  I am currently re-reading them and will probably do so again countless times over my (hopefully long) life.  They are full of suspense, excitement, love, determination, sadness, intrigue, etc.  I just honestly can't say enough good things about these books.  I will admit that they get off to a bit of a slow start with book 1 (gotta cut Mr. King a break as he was only 19 when he wrote it), but if you make it past that you won't regret it.  So, my project...

First I will start with the title.  "The world has moved on " is a phrase that is used repeatedly in the books.  In the story the world has changed rapidly and time has gone a little funny.  Things just aren't quite as they seem.  I have used the title (and the hidden journaling) to express how much my "world" has moved on since the time of this picture.  I was only 20 or so at that time and things sure have changed.

For the overall style of the page I used Steampunk.  I felt it really fit well with the story as the story has a curious mix of old and new.  It isn't Victorian, but rather more Western so I shifted the focus of the Steampunk a little to be more western.  I once again used the new Graphic 45 paper, Steampunk Debutante, to make this page.

Next are the roses and the 1 3D red rose.  Roses were a big part of the story, but there is a single, special rose in the book.  It is almost a character in and of itself at times.  It holds the world and it has a huge draw over many of the characters.

The train is also in the 3rd and 4th books.  He is called "Charlie the Choo Choo" or "Blaine".  He is a train with superior knowledge who likes riddles and is a serious obstacle of the 5 main characters.

The bear is to represent the character, Shardik.  He is an guardian from the old ones and is a giant cyborg of sorts.  He is part machine and part flesh.  That is why I put the gears and cogs over the bear to show that.

Finally the number 19 is in the story a lot.  It holds a special significance that I believe comes from the fact that Stephen King was only 19 when he started writing this story. 

All in all I hope you enjoy the page and are inspired by the challenge.  I have a great time working on this layout.  Get busy crafting and reading!

Steampunk

Steampunk has become a new fascination for me.  It is a sub-genre of sci-fi (which I am a huge fan) and has recently made its way into the scrapping world.  It frequently has lots of Victorian and old futuristic elements.  It is very visually gritty at times and I tend to find it fairly appealing.  Recently I got the new Graphic 45 line Steampunk Debutante.   I have been having a lot of fun with this line and wanted to share a card I made for friend's 30th birthday.  I will more than likely be sharing a few more Steampunk inspired projects in the future.

Cut a Rug

OK so maybe don't cut a rug, but this week at Frosted Designs we are cutting up photos and pictures.  I love the look of creating mosaics and blocks with photos but it often a technique I forget to use.  I was excited to create a layout for this week's challenge and really had fun with this.  Head on over to Frosted Designs to see the other projects created by the design team this week.  Seriously the ladies outdid themselves this week and there is some great inspiration over there.

I cut my photo to look like a window pane so it emphasized the main portion of the photo.  Other than cutting up the photo I did a lot of wet distressing.  This may be one of my new favorite techniques!  It is so fun and I love the dimensional effect that it gives.  A lot of inspiration for this layout came from the Swirlydoos blog post demonstrating wet distressing.

So much work so little time

Once again things here have been pretty crazy.  I haven't had much time to update my blog.  Heck I have barely had enough time to even get any crafting done in the first place.  So that means that I have quite a few projects that I need to post.  We'll start with the most recent and work our way backwards.  That is because this most recent one is a challenge that is still going on over at Frosted Designs.  This week you are challenged to make a back to school project.  For my project I created an altered lunch box for my niece.  Her birthday is right around the beginning of the school year so I thought it would make a great birthday present.

The next project was for our celebrate life challenge at Frosted Designs a few weeks ago.  You were basically supposed to somehow celebrate life in your project.  I interpreted this challenge by scrapping a layout about one of my passions in life.  I LOVE to food.  I love to cook, eat and learn about food.  It is something that I spend a lot of time reading about, thinking about and dreaming about.

And Finally This layout isn't for a challenge at Frosted Designs.  It is just something that I thought was WAY too cute to not share.  This is a layout about my sister's dog (the big one) and my dog (the little one).  They are different in almost every way.  Mine is old, hers is young.  Mine is high strung, hers is mellow.  Besides all their differences they have the best time playing together.  My sister took this photo of the two of them after a long day of playing together.  We like to call them the "twins"

This Way!

This week at Frosted Designs the challenge is to use and arrow somewhere on your layout.  Head over and check out all the great work by the design team.  I didn't get mine done this week in time to have it up on Frosted Designs, but I did make sure to get it done so I can still participate in the fun challenge.  Arrows are a great way to give direction to a project or highlight a certain aspect of the page or a photo.  For my I used a photo of my nephew leading us down a path at the Fort Worth Botanic Gardens.  He was our guide when we went off on a wooded path and it was just too cute.  I thought the arrows would be a great addition to this page because he was pointing the way for us.