Welcome to our September guest ...

Please welcome our wonderful guest designer this month,  Michelle Van Oudtshoorn from New Zealand with her delightful take on our challenge this month.

The colours in Peter Graham's "Monaco Coast" are quite vibrant - so I decided to use the bright colours as my inspiration in my layout. I used red, yellow and dark blue water paint, using a toothbrush to spray and make droplets for the background. Then sprayed a little bit of gold over the paint. I then used a combination of papers, flowers and embellishments to compliment the yellow, blues and reds.

I am very honoured to be asked to be guest designer for ARTastic. And here is a little about me……

I started scrapbooking in 2001.My neighbour started her own business from home and invited a few of us to come over and give it a try – I was hooked. I scrapped at every opportunity – even in the wee hours of the morning when I couldn’t sleep. I used to wake up with these ideas running around in my head – and then had to go and scrap them (perhaps having a note book and writing these down and scrapping them in the more sane hours of the day would have been more advantageous in the sleep department). It was really handy having a scrapbooking business three houses away from my house (not handy on the budget though) …. I was fortunate enough to have my own craft room, so when I was not able to sleep I would go down to my craft room and scrap – and didn’t disturb the rest of the sleeping members of the house. Ideal to close the door whenever I was in the middle of a project – so the organised chaos on my desk was out of eye sight ;)

My husband, two kids (son, who is now 24 and my daughter, now 21) immigrated to NZ in September 2010. The 7 years have gone very quickly – and we love our new life here in NZ. It’s been the best blessing for our whole family. And we have met some amazing people, and some of my closest friends I have met through scrapbooking.

My style of scrapping has changed over the years. And these days, my pages wouldn’t be without flowers – I have a container with 12 levels and have sorted my flowers into colours. My friends call it my flower tower! I am very much a girly scrapper – besides flowers, I love bling too. I am also a great chippie fan.

I take great inspiration from the talents like Di Garling, Gabrielle Pollaco and Frank Garcia. And I would love to put mixed media projects together like Anna Dabrowska (aka Finnabair) and Natalie May.

I am a great Prima Marketing fan and love the graphics and detail of Graphic 45 – great for fussy cutting. I sometimes amaze myself that I have enough patience to sit and cut out minute pieces of paper – yet have no patience sitting in traffic or waiting for things to happen. And now I am loving the 49 Market range – their papers and flowers are just beautiful.

I mostly create layouts, and have done a few cards and have also created a few mini albums. Here are a few examples of my work.

My Blog: http://queenm1809.blogspot.com.au

Remember ....

You still have plenty of time until the end of the month to upload your own take on this challenge.  All details are on the blog sidebar. We'd love to see what you can do with our inspiration this month.