Month: February 2019

Cheeky Studio: Stay Wild

Posted on by Natalie

Hello, lovely friends! It’s me, Natalie, back with my last Cheeky Studio design team project for February. I had an absolute blast creating this layout! I started by using my Silhouette Cameo to cut out a tonne of the leaves from the Cheeky Studio ‘Florals’ cut file, and then I painted them with watercolour while they were still stuck to the cutting mat.

While the leaves were drying, I splodged Worn Lipstick Distress Ink on a piece of white cardstock to give the background lots of energy and to give the leaves something to sit on.

Once the leaves were dry, I took them off the cutting mat and glued them down to the background in a wreath shape. I made sure to only glue the base of the leaves so that the tips would stick up a bit and give the layout some dimension.

The photos I scrapped on this layout, are of my children playing in the back garden of the house in which we used to live, and the ephemera pack provided lots of lovely pieces reminiscent of that garden – flowers, birds, an owl and the resident fox who used to steal my tea-towels!

If you’d like to see this layout come together. You can watch the video below. And don’t forget: if you’d like to order anything from the Norwegian Wood collection (or any of the other Cheeky Studio products), you can use my discount code natalie10 for 10% off your order. Thanks for stopping by! Until next time … happy scrapping! x

Weekly Round-Up: 11 – 17 February 2019

Posted on by Natalie

Hello, lovely friends! Thanks for stopping by my blog today. It’s been rather quiet here lately, and for good reason – I’ve realised that I need to slow down a bit, especially when I feel like going faster. Over the course of my recovery from mental illness, I’ve found that my energy can ebbs and flow quite significantly. Sometimes I have no energy at all – it takes all I’ve got to get out of bed in the morning – and sometimes I have so much energy I feel as if I am ricocheting off the walls! During these more energetic phases, I tend to make the most of it and end up overdoing it, which usually leads to longer, more pronounced energy-less phases. I know I need to better pace myself so that I don’t have such exaggerated ups and downs, so I’ve taken a bit of a break this last week or so and have been gathering my thoughts about how to move forward.

It’s not just my energy level that suffers when I’m bouncing around and spinning all the plates; it’s my attention. I miss things. I stop noticing things. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from this latest bout of mental illness, it’s that being mindful, being aware, stopping to smell the roses, is fundamental to my wellness and to my creativity. If I try to move too fast, I end up on autopilot and miss out on all the good things in my life. But if I go slow, if I live mindfully and intentionally, I experience the fullness and richness of life which in turn pours out of me into the things I create. That’s the kind of life I want to live.

I’ll write more about all this in a separate post, so for now, I’ll leave you with links to three videos that I’ve shared recently. I hope you enjoy them! Bye for now. xxx