She calls me Pegs

The Kreatorville Krafts May Kit has been revealed, just click on this link to see it's beauty!

My second LO with the kit is a little tribute to the kit's owner, Kean, who I've come to consider my friend. Isn't it wonderful how friendships can grow right here, online? And a friendship it is ... I find myself wishing her success in her business, worrying about her if I haven't heard from her in a few days, thinking about her family when I know one of them is feeling sick, and yes, even feeling proud - though it obviously has nothing to do with me - when I hear the boys are doing great at school. Strange ... just like in real life, sometimes you feel an immediate connection with some, and none whatsoever with others ... like I said, strange...

Anyway, here's my LO, created only with May kit products:


If you'd like to know more about the title, see the difference in this LO before and after the black outlining (one of my favorite "finishing touches techniques), and find out just how easy and quick it was to personalize the buttons, please visit my blog post over at Keatorville Krafts! Hope to see you there!

Love xxx Peggy

Finally...

... I have some projects to show you! After not having been able to scrap for so long, it felt soooooo good to be scrapping again. It's funny how much I missed it. Because I spent all of my free time scrapping lately, I haven't been able to read any of your blogs yet, and I've missed you all so much. I'll visit you all real soon, I promise!

Kreatorville Krafts December Kit

The first projects I want to show you are the ones I made with the Kreatorville Krafts December kit. I loved the kit as soon as I laid my eyes on it, and I have to tell you, that felling just grew stronger and stronger when I got to work with it! I challenged myself to work only with kit products, both because I love challenges AND to show you just how much you can do with it. And this kit made it easy for me to live up to the challenge! Apart from inks, paints and stitching materials, I used nothing but kit products on my kreations! Here's what I made:


Don't you just love Kean's reindeer on this page??? I find her embellies to be the PERFECT embellies to make a plain LO into a WOW-page!!

For my next project, I wanted to kreate a mini album, again using nothing but the kit. Now this was a double challenge for me, as I'm not used to making mini's. I've only ever started one before (it's still not finished LOL), so I really was out of my comfort zone ... However, again, the pages just seemed to build themselves. Kean's choice in papers coordinate perfectly, the embellishments are just gorgeous and perfect for any kind of project, and what's more, it's just FUN to work with!!!

That bird was just too pretty to be buried inside of an album, it screamed to be used on a cover!!


Journaling left page: 12/6/2009: Sinterklaas just visited this morning, but that didn't stop us from putting up our christmas tree in the afternoon :)

Journaling right page: Just like last year I couldn't get Yannis to come and help us, just like his dad ... However, the girls were super enthousiastic. They hung up all of the ornaments all by themselves.

In addition to the Cosmo Cricket Ornament Fashions papers, filled with gorgeous embellishments, Keandra always includes papers in her kit that are perfect to cut out, like the swirls you can see on the left page!

Journaling right page: 21/17/2009: Enjoying the first snow by taking a beautiful evening walk straight after school. Daddy's always up for a good snowball fight :)

Aren't those colours beautiful together? And I had never worked with rubons before, but I so love the look of it!

Journaling left page: 12/21/2009: the girls had fun for hours making christmas decorations.

Again I found the perfect shapes in the paterned papers to cut out to use as embellies!



These have to be my favorite pages of the mini. I just love the blue, brown and red together and when I first cut out that blue paper I had no idea it would turn out so pretty in the end!

Journaling right page: 12/20/2009: it continues to snow, and of course the fun isn't complete without a proper snowball fight



Journaling: Poor Chloë ... Yannis really let Chloë have it! There even was snow trapped between her eyes and her glasses! But the pictures turned out great, didn't they LOL?

Again I was thrilled to be able to cut out the pp and get some perfect embellies coordinating with the rest of the page. I added that present because of the "gift" my son gave his sister in this pictures... And of course I just had to add the "to/from" gift tag here LOL.

This is the last page of my mini so far, but I still have to add some pages. I'm hopeful they will be finished soon.

Be sure to visit the Kreatorville Krafts blog to see what the other members of our team made with the december kit ... so much loveliness!!!

A little reminder ... most of us in Europe know how hard it is to buy American kits because of the huge shipping costs. We at Kreatorville Krafts are trying to find a way to get them here cheaper for potential European customers. However, to do that, we have to find some interested European parties, we need a certain number to be able to distribute them cheaply. So, if any of you living in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, anywhere in Europe, are interested, please let me know. You can either leave me a comment or contact me at peggy.schenkels@telenet.be. I'll keep you updated on our progress.


December guest designer for The Next Step

Another project I want to share with you is something I made as the december guest designer over at The Next Step. I am sorry to say the lovely ladies over at The Next Step have decided to discontinue their blog. Although I understand it takes a lot of time running a blog, I have to admit I'm sorry to see the end of it. I for one loved reading it. I learned so much from them, and I would like to thank Lucy, Bethany and Gayle for the time they spent putting the blog together all these months. Good luck in your future projects ladies!

For my guest spot, they asked me to do a tutorial on painting techniques. I decided to make the cover of my "book of me" album:

You can find my tutorial with step-by-step instructions here. I hope you'll go and take the time to visit the tutorial, you'll see just how easy it is to create a painted background, even if you (like me) no nothing about painting or painting materials LOL.



I'll leave you on a happy note ... I was published again in scrapstreet with my "Lucky" LO. If you'd like to see the article, click here.

I'll talk to you later my friends, I'm looking forward to visiting all of your blogs again, it has been wayyyyyy too long!

Love xxx Peggy

I am me - FP Challenge Prompt 12

This month's challenge over at Forward Progress is about letting go and free ourselves from the expectations of others.

This was a difficult challenge for me. It kept lingering in my mind, and the more I thought about it, the more I knew I'm not there yet ... I'm not free from the expectations of others. My life is filled with expectations ... I expect a lot from my family, my friends, myself, and I know they have certain expectations from me. I really don't know how to go through life without expectations, so why would I expect others to expect nothing from me? The only sense I could make out of this, the only thing I've learned through the years, is to not let it bother me all that much if I don't live up to someone's expectations. With me, what you see is what you get. Expect all from me that you want, but if I can't live up to your expectations, that's your problem, not mine...

So here's my take on the challenge. It's a 9x9 page, the first page for my BOM album.

I had problems putting this into words for a LO, but when I found this "Ralph Waldo Emerson" quote, it knew instantly it said all I wanted to say:

"All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I looked someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I and only I could answer. It took me a while and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: that I am nobody but myself."

This album will be all about me (as the name says duh LOL), about my random thoughts and feelings. I'm thinking most of them will be inspired by song lyrics or quotes, as I've never been any good in just putting my thoughts on paper. I've tried started a journal several times, but I've failed miserably each time. I need to be inspired first LOL.

Obviously this is a very plain LO, but I love it, the pic just doesn't do it justice. In future, I'm hoping this album will have the look of an art journal, but for this particular assignment, I wanted the LO to reflect me ... plain and simple, no frills, true to my "what you see is what you get" theme.

I'm hoping some of you will find the time to play along with us this month, you still have two more weeks to submit your entry. Even if you haven't "progressed" in a certain area, you might, like me, find that that's okay too. Life is about evolving, we can't expect to have everything sorted out right now, right? If ever...

Love xxx Peggy