Projects Galore – Make Upcycled Cards

As y’all know I have been working on a book and video series based on making cards from paint chips. I have made all the videos and also have the book ready to be released, hopefully this week. If you would like to know more about the book and its release please sign up at http://www.alteredupcycling.com or follow us on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/AlteredUpcycling

Here are some pictures that will give you an idea of the sort of cards we’ll be making 🙂

There are also lots and lots of videos on YouTube that y’all might be interested in checking out. Here is one of them:

How to make a Smash Book the Upcycled way Part 3

Here I am again and I finally found some time to work on my Smash Book! The upcycled version looks pretty cool and I started work on the first page yesterday. I am going to talk about some upcycled embellishments over the weekend but I thought it would be cool to share what I did for my first upcycled smash book page with y’all!

Yesterday was an amazing day. I had lunch with a team at our company and also found the time to shop and get an awesome pair of shoes while waiting for our order to arrive 🙂 I had a lovely evening with friends and followed up on some very interesting projects at work. Got a few

My Book of Inspiration

We all have lists of projects that we want to do. Some we find in magazines, others come to us in dreams, many more flood from blogs that we follow or blogs that we love 🙂 I have an ever growing list of projects I want to make but I find that most of the times I forget about the ideas because they are in many different places, in word files, on sticky notes, in sketchbooks, all over the place and when creativity strikes I don’t want to dig for ideas, I just want to create, altered books, artist trading cards, smash books, upcycled treasures…

Therefore I have resolved to make a book of inspiration. Have you noticed that since the new year has started I have been all about making scrapbooks, organizing memories and generally getting my crafting life in order? 🙂 I love the new me, hope it lasts… My book of inspiration will have clippings from magazines, sketches of ideas that I dream up and printed pictures of anything that is found on the WWW. Finally I will have all my ideas in one place complete with notes and doodles so that I can start on a project whenever the mood strikes.

You can choose to have a physical book or sketch book or you can also take pictures of anything and everything that catches your fancy, and that you would like to try your hand

The Smash Books craze and how to start a smashing upcycling adventure! Journey’s End Part 6

I am finally done with my 2011 Smash Book. I just have to add a little bit of journaling but I will do that as and when the mood strikes me. I have a pen and the book ready for whenever little things pop into my head. I also still have a bit of place for extra odds and ends

The Smash Books craze and how to start a smashing upcycling adventure! Part 5

So the book is finally coming together 🙂 The pictures, journalling etc are all on the pages now, all smashed in my folio. That makes me happy for I feel like I have the base of the book all done. Now I am building on the base, adding layers and layers, of journalling, embellishments, memorabilia and stickers.

Most of this work was done last night and early this morning but the day has been spent meeting friends and family and writing all my little short stories 🙂 I picked 7-8 themes and wrote little stories that revolved around these themes. I printed the stories out on vellum and have stuck them in my book with some glue. The titles were also printed on vellum and some of them I just smashed in, others received a little more love 🙂

Here are some pages that have been worked on. This book will never be a perfect work of art. I am

The Smash Books craze and how to start a smashing upcycling adventure! – Back on Track Part 4

Yes! I am back on track. After coming back to my Pretty Pink Smash Folio armed with an action plan, I did much better. I still feel bad about some of the pictures that are smudged, but I have decided that once the book is done I will go back and reprint and replace the ones that are really bothering me. That way I will be happy with the finished result 🙂

I did make some progress today. First like I said I would, I made a rough plan on paper and wrote down all the different things that I

The Smash Books craze and how to start a smashing upcycling adventure! – A bit of a detour Part 3

Ok. So yesterday didn’t go according to plan at all. I had all my pictures printed and ready and like I shared with y’all I was going to make piles according to the month and then stick all the memorabilia and all the pictures and then build on that base. Well…like I said the plan didn’t quite work out…at ALL! 😦

First I figured it would be good to go with themes instead of months. And so I started making a list of all the major themes, all the major events that took place in 2011. Here is my list so far: Weddings, Birthdays, Dinners, Out to Lunch, Picnics, Life at Work, Travel and

The Smash Books craze and how to start a smashing upcycling adventure! Part 2

So finally all my pictures have been printed. I had made a folder for all the pictures I wanted printed for the year 2011 and was astounded to see that I had over 120 pictures that HAD to be included in my Smash folio. This is after I went through the folder again and again and deleted anything extra. Geez! Talk about a busy year! 🙂

2011 has been a year of decisions, mixed feeling and health, ups and downs and some major happenings. I am really looking forward to going over the year through this craft project and to enter the new year, hopefully wiser for all my experiences.

Scrapbooking…the altered way

I love scrapbooking and have done it in one form or another for the past 12 years. I started off with a scrapbook that was made out of a few colored sheets of construction paper stapled together when I was 12. Each page had a collage made out of all the memorabilia that I had collected on a family trip to Austin, TX. Everything from newspaper clippings to restaurant napkins to tickets and photographs came together and told a story in those pages. Each page had a theme and represented one fun thing that we did on the trip.

As I started getting more serious about crafting and learnt more, I moved to ring binders and patterned paper. The layouts were now embellished with a few stickers and there were pockets and fold out pages to add some visual interest.

Then, on another vacation, when I was taking some time out to indulge myself and

My Steampunk Room – Part 2

Here it is, as promised, Part 2 of my steampunk room.

Steampunk!