Trendy in 2012

So, like any good scrapbooker I've been following all the CHA 2012 sneak peeks ... and well I must say overall I'm not really impressed.  There are a few little things hear and there that are cute, some things that I will probably pick up, but nothing that is screaming "Lorena you must buy me" 

Click on this link to see the Sneek Peaks (here)

I'm tying to figure out what the anticipated trends are going to be for the upcoming year ... I would like to say that Vintage has yet another round in the ring, and that Kraft paper will stick around again for another season... these are two of my favorite things in scrapbooking.

What I have seen this year so far has been the following:

TWINE - it's showing up everywhere, and everyone is putting out their version of it too.  Personally I love bakers twine, and even more over I love the "natural" twine.

HONEYCOMB - it seems as though every company has either honeycomb or chicken wire on something weather it be a stamp, a resist, a patterned paper, or digi.

WOODGRAIN - again, not something I don't care for, I like it.  Many different takes on it out there, from painted shabby chic to, white on Kraft, to stamps to natural wooden pieces.

FRENCH INSPIRED - from the Eiffel tower, to fleur de lis, to damask - it's everywhere  - it's vintage, it's c'est bon!

BUTTERFLIES (again) - not sure if it's still or again.  These little papillon are showing wherever you look - they seem to be tastefully done, not childish or cartoonish, but realistic and wholesome.

Well there you go folks, there is my take on the upcoming Scrapbook Trends of 2012 (so far) lets see how far off I am going forward.

What have you seen in trends this season?

Two new Copic techniques

I was inspired to make a Vintage card by a very creative talent; Lacey Stephens - see her blog HERE.  I used her tip of stamping the image in brown ink instead of black.  It made a world of difference.  I would love to have made my card with the new Bo Bunny "Snowfall" collection, but I haven't got my hands on it yet... so I settled for their 2008 collection "Winter Whisper"   I'll tell you something, Bo Bunny has come a L-O-N-G way in three years ... from single sided very thin paper, to double sided cardstock and all the 'fixins'!  I love the brown and blue together, so it worked well to give the vintage feel I was going for on this card/image. 

I stamped a Magnolia image, Fairy Dust Tilda, and coloured her in all blues and browns.  I double mounted it with Spellbinders and a bit of Webster's Pages trim.  I used a Bo Bunny trinket which was originally a dark tarnished copper colour, and heat embossed it white.  A little bit of glitter and twine and finished.

My second card encompasses a totally different technique, it is called "no lines" colouring.  How you achieve this is by stamping the image in a very pale colour, usually blue.  However I don't have any light blue ink, but I do have a Stampin' Up ink called Pink Pirouette.  It worked very well for my needs.  Everything I was reading online suggested that this technique is very difficult.  I didn't find it as difficult as I feared ... but I will say that this first image is NOT my best work, and practice will make perfect (or at the very least, better)  I decorated this card with some various Prima flowers and a pebble.  Some very old paper from my stash, from one of those large packages the your non-scrapbooker friends give to you for Christmas thinking that this is an awesome gift because it is 100 sheets of scrapbook paper.  What they don't know is that you will be using the backs of the same paper for white backgrounds as the fronts of the paper are such a Dog's Breakfast of colours and shapes that you will never use more than 3 or 4 sheets.  Well I think this was sheet 5 out of that package.

Let me know what you think of these techniques, please leave a comment; they are free, just like smiles at McDonalds!

~Lorena~