Pocket Life Challenge with Jennie

Hey Everyone! This is Jennie with today's Pocket Life Challenge. It's the first one of the year! This challenge has nothing to do with paper, sketches, techniques or anything like that. This challenge is to catch up with 2017 and/or get you ready to document this year successfully. 

You can write this in a piece of paper and put it in your work area or your planner. Put it in a place where you can see it. 

First, make an inventory of spreads you need to do or count the weeks you need to finish.

Second, create a plan to print your photos. This is very important, is one of the reasons most pocket scrappers "fall behind". I have a printer and it has helped a lot with my process. If you have a go to company to print photos try to print every 2 weeks or at least once a month. Set the last day of the month to make your order. If you need suggestions come by the Citrus Twist Kits Fan Page, this tribe is super helpful. 

Third, look back at what you done. What do you want to document? Which techniques would you like to keep doing. Are you sticking with the size you used for 2017? Are you switching? Are you doing it monthly, one week per page or double spread for a week?

THIS IS THE REAL CHALLENGE: Create a game plan!  Do you printed all the photos? Do you have enough supplies? You know what you need to finish. As soon as you figure out what you need to do come up with a plan to do it. Make 2 or 3 spreads this week. The DT will be around to help you and inspire you! 

Post you lists and game plan on the Fan Group! Accountability helps a lot! 

Now to the layout! Of course I used the January Sugarland Pocket Life Kit. Every month I make 3 double spreads with the kits and I have enough left overs for one or two more. Use your Pocket Life Kit to reach your catch goals. It's a lot easier when you use a kit. Limiting your supplies makes the process faster. 

Decide which photo sizes you like using. Most of the time I use 3x4 for my vertical photos and 6x4 for my horizontal photos. I edit my photos once a week. For the 3x4 photos I make collages with PicStitch.

Kristen's last challenge got me hooked on stitching.

On 2018, I will keep adding pieces of ephemera and packaging.

This challenge won't take more than 30 minutes! Reflecting can help your process. Don't forget to share it with us! 

Kit Love with Adele

Hello lovelies!

Hope you all have had a fab start to 2018! 🙌 💕 I was so excited to open the new "Sugarland" kits this month. The colours are so sweet and very up my alley, and the cute little cork hearts are the perfect "sprinkly" addition to my pages.

This month, I have recorded an Inkie unboxing for you as well as two real time Project Life pages. I found it so quick and easy to put together the pages with everything in the kit coordinating so very well.

I love using pops of colour to brighten up photo heavy pages or dark photos like the ones in the page below. With the abundance of tags in the kit, it's so easy to add some quick journaling to a page with a little embellishment to prettify it up. 

I also love layering several pieces from the ephemera pack and 6x6" paper cut apart sheets to create clusters on my PL pages.

So make yourself a cuppa, grab a tasty snack and enjoy this little unboxing and double page real time Project Life video! 

Documenting the Good & the Bad with Kathleen

Hey there, it's Kathleen here again and first of all I want to wish you all a Happy New Year!!

When I unpacked my Citrus Twist Kits January "Sugarland" kits right after Christmas, I absolutely loved the bright, fresh colour scheme. I loved working on my December Daily album, which is filled with lots of greens, reds, but also blush, black and white, but I felt SO ready for a non-Christmassy colour palette!

All I knew when I started this layout was that I wanted to use one of those gorgeous pompom frames from the Crate Paper "Good Vibes" collection that were included in the Main kit, as well as lots of the patterned papers.

Now when I see pompom, mint/teal, pink and yellow, I immediately think of my scrapbooking heroine Suse Fish (who happens to be a guest designer this month - so keep your eyes peeled for the visual feast that awaits you!). If you've seen her work on IG or her blog (and I really can't believe you haven't), then you know that these are the typical Suse-colours. And she also happens to be the queen of layering which allows for lots of different patterns and papers on your layout.

So I quickly searched my Pinterest board where I keep my favourite layouts of all the talented ladies out there and found one by Suse that she had actually made with a Citrus Twist Kits kit in the past - how perfect is that? I absolutely love all the layers on the right side of the layouts with lots of little bits peeking out from below:

Now a lot of times when I have another layout as inspiration or starting point for mine, it starts off looking quite similar (in terms of placement and structure) but then often ends up taking a different turn. Sometimes you can still see the similarities, and sometimes it completely changes up to a point where there is (almost) no resemblance between the two.

This time, however, you can definitely see a lot of similarities and that is because it just worked and felt "right". I didn't feel the need to change a lot of things because the way Suse had laid out her page and what she chose to put on hers, actually worked really well for me!

I didn't plan on keeping almost everything like it was in Suse's layout, it just kind of happened - haha. I only looked at her layout a few times when I started mine and then closed it, but it seems it was really stuck in my head ;)

So as you can see, I also used some torn strips of some of the patterned papers from the kit and layered them on the right side of my layout. I also tucked in pieces of the vintage book page that is included (how cool is that?!) and some other bits and pieces like tags and labels.

I also used one of the cute exclusive phrase stickers (how fun are the phrases on them??) that reads "It's complicated" and stuck it in there. When you look at the photo of me in the pool with the blue sky and sunshine, you would think that this is a really happy, perfect memory - which in reality it isn't. I was actually sick a lot while we were on vacation and spent a lot of the time in bed, but one day decided I wanted to get into that pool at least once to have some nice photos to take away from this trip..

So to hint at the fact that there is more to this story than what you can see in the photo, I used this sticker. I included more journaling on one of those cards that was included in the Crate Paper "Good Vibes" ephemera pack which fitted perfectly behind my photo. I also used the "The Story" stamp from the exclusive stamp set to give another hint that there is this card tucked away behind the photo that you can pull out.

On the left side of my page I added another small(ish) cluster of embellishments. I used that cute die cut tag from the ephemera package, layered a piece of patterned paper behind it and sprinkled some more bits and pieces on/around it. I cut off the part of the tag that ran off the page, turned it around (the backside is white) and used it in the right corner of my layout as another layering piece.

The little "good vibes" phrase was part of one of the branding strips of the patterned papers and it fit perfectly onto that small tag. Now I said that the memory isn't just all good, so the "good vibes" and "chill out" phrases might seem a bit wrong - but the fact of the matter is that we ended up having a lot of fun taking these photos.

So even though the circumstances weren't perfect, it wasn't all bad and I wanted my layout to reflect that.

To finish off my page I added my title with the phrase thickers, splattered some yellow colour shine across my page and added some more embellishments like the wood veneer arrow* in the bottom left corner, and some stars in different shapes and textures*.

* I got the wood veneer arrow and the yellow acrylic stars in one of the "NSD 2016 Bits & Pieces Grab Bags" that you can get in the CTK shop for only $3!!

I am very pleased with how this page turned out (and I have Suse to thank for that because her layout was so inspiring!) and I am also very happy about how I documented the "not so great" part about this memory. I don't only want to scrap about the happy memories and I also don't want to just leave out the negative sides of certain events or memories, so finding a way to incorporate these as well (in a way that I still like the project) is important, I think.

I hope you like today's inspiration - whether it's the sketch, the colour scheme or the part about documenting the good and the bad!

Happy crafting, friends!
Kathleen

Tuesday Tutorial with Kira

Hello friends!  It's Kira and I am back with a fun tutorial for you today.  First, I wanted to talk a little about inspiration.  I love Instagram for most of my inspiration; there are just so many talented people on there.  But when I first joined about a year ago, I was only following paper crafters for the longest time.  I love to get inspiration from everywhere though!  And one of my favorite sources of inspiration is quilters.  And the initial source of my tutorial is from one such quilter, Janice Bailor (You can find her on Instagram @laruedefleurs and she also has a link to her killer Etsy shop there).  I loved how her fabric "feathers" looked so much, I modified them to suit my paper crafting needs.  So with her permission, I am sharing that tutorial with you!

To start, you'll want to choose some paper.  I am working with the 6x6 Crate Paper Good Vibes paper that came in the Pocket Life kit, but any paper will work, even pulling from your stash would be a great option.  I cut my paper down to varying widths, between 1/4" to 1/2", but again, any width will do!

After you've cut down your strips, you will adhere them on some paper.  I used plain, white printer paper so my sewing machine wouldn't have too much thickness to sew through.  And just a dab of glue will do right in the center of your strips.


(If you don't have a sewing machine, you can still make these!  Just glue the strips completely down on your paper and omit the stitching part of this tutorial!)

After you have your strips glued down (I glued them down about 6"-8" up my page), you will stitch down each strip, forward once and reverse once, until all the strips have been stitched.
 

 Now it's time to cut your feathers!  You can  create your own template for your feather half, or just print off mine to use.

You will place your half feather template at a slight angle on top of your paper strip block.

Trace around your template and then cut.  Then flip your template over and repeat.

You should have two feather halves now.

Now to make your quill.  I free handed mine and you can make yours however you'd like.  But I started with a 1/4" strip of paper (I used the Wild Child 5 paper from the main kit). I adhered my feather halves on a piece of printer paper with a slight gap between the two.

Then I put a small amount of glue on my Wild Child paper and adhered that in the middle of my feather.  I trimmed down the edges to make it look more "quill-like".

And to finish it off, I stitched down the center of the quill.

What do you think?!  Aren't these just the coolest embellishments?!

I used mine on a 12x12 layout.  We have a duck pond just blocks from our new home and my kids love going down to feed the ducks.  A picture of my son with the ducks seemed like the perfect photo to use these feathers on.

 

I made three for the layout and clustered them to the left of my photo.  I created even more texture behind them but tangling up a bit of the thread.  Below the feathers I added a piece of chipboard from the embellishment kit, ephemera from the main kit and PL kit and a cork heart from the PL kit.  I made a bow out of some ribbon from my stash and threaded the tag with some bakers twine from an old Citrus Twist kit.

I used the High Five thickers for my title, and layered some ephemera, chipboard and cork hearts below it.  I added some more thread underneath the chipboard too, so that element is repeated throughout the page.

After adding more embellishments throughout the page, I finished it off by adding some black splatters, which mimicked the black splatter print on the 6x6 paper from the Good Vibes collection.

 

Thank you so much for stopping by!  I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and try it out for yourself!

Until next time,

Kira

Guest Design Suse Fish: January Sugarland PL Kit

When Trina mentioned she had a Pocket Life kit that I might enjoy playing with, I was so excited to see it; then when it arrived, I was grinning like the cat who’d got the cream! Gosh, this Sugarland kit is beautiful, isn’t it? All those gorgeous fresh shades - pinks, yellows, cornflower blue, jade green - so uplifting and just perfect for documenting a page about new starts and hopeful plans.

The danger with this spread was that I wanted to use every single item in the kit! Not being able to choose which pieces to use because you love them all is a very a nice problem to have, isn’t it? So a large part of my process was spent picking up die-cuts and thinking, “Ooh, yes that one,” only to swap it straight back out for an equally gorgeous one!

I wanted this page to reflect my hopes for the coming year - not only in my journalling, but also in the positive, fun tone of the photos. 

Because this is the year I’d like to lighten up a little and try to really relish the simple joys of each day. Life can sometimes feel a bit like a never-ending ‘to do’ list and that’s such a shame, as it’s a gift, isn’t it? I look at my daughter’s sunshine-y determination to find joy in each day and feel inspired to try to do the same.

So what are your plans for the coming year, I wonder? Do you have dreams in your heart or a vision of how you’d like your days to look in 2018? Why not make a project that reflects those goals, using colours that you love and words that reflect your heart?

Here is a Youtube video with a little rambling from me. Enjoy!



Wishing you a beautiful year friends, filled with colour, joy and of course, *lots* of deliciously sugary scrapbooking.

Sunday Sketch with Kathleen

Hey there, it's Kathleen here and first of all, I hope you all had a wonderful, relaxed Christmas with all your loved ones! Today it's my turn to share a Sunday Sketch with you, so let's have a look at it first:

And here is my take on it:

As you can see, I stuck almost 100% to the sketch. The only thing I really changed is the placement of the journaling (I added mine as hidden journaling and I will show you in a second how and where) and the alignment of the two photos.

For my photos I printed the same one twice (of my husband and our dog - who loves to sleep on my side of the bed as soon as I leave); once in colour and once in black and white. Because I didn't want to cover up too much of our dog in the right photo, I decided to add my photos kind of offset.

For my title I used this gorgeous "story" die cut from the ephemera pack in the Scrapbook kit and also added one of the little tags from the exclusive cutouts page. "Down & Out" seemed quite appropriate for this page :D

As I said before, I added my journaling as hidden journaling. On the one hand because I didn't feel it would fit below my photos and on the other because I wanted it to be handwritten. Since I'm not too fond of my handwriting, though, I went for this solution.

I cut out one of the tags from the Crate Paper "Good Vibes" cut aparts paper, slid it into the glassine bag that the little cork pieces came in, and layered this behind my photo on the right.

For the paint splatters in the sketch I used some Color Shine sprays from my stash, some star puffy stickers from the Maggie Holmes "Carousel" collection, some of the exclusive epoxy sticker dots and these really cute little starburst stamps from the exclusive stamp set.

I am absolutely in love with those little starbursts, so I had to add quite a few of them! I think they add such an interesting touch to this cluster and I'm quite sure they will make an appearance on many more of my projects :D

I also added some more details like the red and blue stitching on the left and right side, the stickers in the lower left corner and the little tag in the upper right corner peeking out from behind the paper strips.


Now it's your turn!  To play along with this week's sketch and to be eligible to win a $5 gift certificate to the CTK Store,  create a layout based off of this week's sketch and upload it to the CTK Gallery with today's date (12/31) in the title. Can't wait to see what you all come up with!!

Thanks for stopping by and I wish you all a safe and Happy New Year!!

3 to Inspire | Gina

Hi everyone, welcome to another edition of the 3 to Inspire challenge. I hope that you can play along and all you need to do is follow along with the prompts below. My layout was created with the Sonoma main kit and the embellishment kit

My 3 prompts this week are:

1. write your journaling on a tag

2. add least 2 hearts (they can be embellishments, stamping or hand drawn)

3. use a single photo

I've framed the photo here with layers of paper, a sticker, die-cut and journal tab

The tag is a great way to add colour and small amount of journaling

Now it's your turn! Share your creation with us in the CTK gallery and/or the Facebook fan page by Saturday January 3rd for your chance to win. You can also upload to Instagram and tag us @citrustwistkits. Have fun!

As this is my final design team project and blog post for Citrus Twist, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Trina, it's been an absolute blast being on this team, I think for what must be getting close to 3.5 years over 2 stints and I couldn't think of a better team than this, creating with these gorgeous kits each month has been so much fun, thanks for everything Trina! xox

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