Christmas Traditions, CKC Blog Hop

Happy New Year Everyone. We still have another week of the school holidays before life gets back to some form of "normal" and the digital cameras have been extra busy filling up my photos waiting to be scrapbooked folders. Following on from my friend Cilenia's challenge to scrapbook December Traditions, I have decided to take Traditions as my theme for my Christmas Scrapbooking pages this year.

Today is a special day for my blog. It's my first blog hop as a member of the Counterfeit Kit Challenge  (CKC) Blog Team. If you are following the hop you will have arrived from Andrea's Blog - welcome.

This month's inspiration kit is A Merry Winter December from Paper Issues. Paper Issues are sponsoring the CKC blog this month. The kit includes some wintry elements and some Christmas themed ones with a mid pink, blue and green colour scheme. Using this as inspiration I mix and matched together items from my extensive digital scrapbooking kit collection to create a "new kit" to work with for my Christmas Traditions pages.

I quiet like the burgandy-pink colours in the December SASsy kit that came free with purchases last month called Be Merry, I've been told it will be the free kit again this month, and as it would be rude not to use a free kit I took that as my starting point. I looked for other kits with a similar red/pink included in my Christmas kits stash. Magic Moments by Becca has a splash of that colour along with a gorgeous green, actually I think that's why I bought that kit, I fell in love with that green. Unfortunately the kit is no-longer available as By Becca has retired, but as my kit is digital I'll never run out - phew. I pulled out the colour wheel and my blue based winter themed kits to pick one that will blend in well with the others and chose Cilenia Curtis's Blue Winter kit from last year.

I pulled items from these three kits to build my "Christmas Traditions" mix and match kit to scrapbook with this month.

For the papers I took patterned prints, snowflakes, ornaments and musical scores as per the inspiration kit.

Next I looked for elements from all three kits and then added the missing items from my stash of buttons and stick pins. There are lots of stars in the inspiration kit. I made some star shape cutters/stencils for a previous project so I added those to use with the papers.

The inspiration kit contains lots of nice flares. Cilenia's Blue Winter Kit has some incredibly creative transparent "Snow Bubbles". I thought they would make some awesome original custom flairs by placing them over cropped papers and images. Here's an example.

In a few days I'm going to get scrapping those photos that represent some of our English Christmas Traditions.

If you are blog hopping then the next stop is Jemma's Blog, and I know she'll have something super fantastic and inspiring to share with us.