Hello there, and Happy New Year to each and every one reading this post! December is a busy month for many in the craft blogging world, but I seem to have done the complete opposite, having had an unintentional blog break for all of last month.
The darkest time of winter has been a bit tough on my family this time, and I hope the new year brings more energy for new projects. January will bring more daylight, that's for sure, and that already helps! Ideas and plans I already have plenty of. More about that soon!
Meanwhile, it' s sketch challenge time again at
Scrap Africa!
Here's the sketch by
Denise van Deventer.
I didn't do a lot of Christmas themed crafts this year, but now with this sketch I was inspired to. (I think it goes really well with both wintery and summery themes!)
So I chose a selfie with my little one from previous year's Christmas Eve.
I made my layout while we were at our country cottage for the holidays, so I took the extra challenge of having less supplies to choose from. For instance, I didn't use any store bought scrapbook papers, but combined my gelli prints with some re-used packaging material.
The alphabet stickers, the metallic purple flourish washi tape and the date stickers are all I took from my stash at home. The snowflake and the glittery star stickers were bought for the kids at Lidl (supermarket) and Flying Tiger (dollar store, kind of). The tag with a pocket is also from Flying Tiger, and the snowflake paper is from the stickers' package.
I started the background with a gelli print, made the stars with a texture paste through a stencil, and added some splashes with water and my new Gelatos. I got the Bright Colors set for myself for Christmas, and the colors are indeed deliciously bright! The pale blue I used here is just one of the lighter shades included in the pack.
Some red and turquoise Stickles dots give the finishing touch.
I was also inspired by the challenges at
Challenge YOUrself (Happy Holidays) and
Mixed Media Place (Mood Board).
At Challenge YOUrself, the continuous theme is that there must always be a photo of YOU in your layout! I take a lot of selfies and enjoy scrapping them, so that suits me well. And for those of you who don't already scrap self portraits so much, this challenge is a reason to!
In the mood board at Mixed Media Place, I was particularly inspired by the combination of sparkle and earth tones, different letter types and of course the stars!
Speaking of how dark we have it here in Finland, I looked up today's time of sunset in Espoo and it has already been at 3.28 pm. Here's a photo I took at 4.12 pm. while writing this. Note that it is considerably less dark now that it has snowed! We didn't have a white Christmas so that week it was already pitch black at 4 pm.
The upside of the northern location is that the amount of additional light is really notable each day that the spring gets closer! And of course with snow, blue moments like the one in the photo can be quite special and beautiful.
I've never been to the northernmost part of my country in the winter, during the phenomenon called the polar nights. It means simply that the sun does not rise at all during the midwinter days. In Utsjoki, the next time of sunrise will be at noon of January the 16th, can you imagine that.
Thank you for for your visit! I'm particularly thankful for all the comments, as always.
