Bella Blvd Studio Blog: October Guest Designer: Melinda Spinks

We are so excited to introduce you to our talented October Guest Designer, Melinda Spinks! Let's get to know a little more about Melinda and check out the projects she created to share with us!

Hi everyone, my name is Melinda Spinks and I'm thrilled to be with you as October's guest designer here at Bella Blvd. I must say I have been very spoilt to work with the gorgeous Halloween Magic, Scattered Sprinkles and Tiny Tots collections and look forward to sharing my projects.

Firstly, a snippet about me... I've been scrapbooking since 2009 as I needed something crafty to fill the late evening hours when I had some rare time to myself. Who knew I would end up with my own craft area in the spare room and gorgeous friends all over the globe. I hail from Australia on a broad acre cropping farm with my husband 'the farmer' and three hayseeds aged 15, 8 and 2. The farm and kids keep us incredibly busy so there's not much time for hobbies other than my paper crafting. However I love to cook and spend a great deal of time in my kitchen baking up a storm. I'm also passionate about my garden, piano, reading, being silly, practical jokes of the harmless variety and I'm terrified of clowns. I share my crafty life on my blog and add a few of life's personal moments on Instagram.

"I Solemnly Swear", by Melinda Spinks.

I have always loved fussy-cutting pictures from paper and in my early 20's I had an entire wall in the house completely covered in pictures from magazines. It certainly was a talking point. These days I keep things on a much smaller scale as our farm homestead is over 100 years old and a mosaic wall... well let's just say it wouldn't be nearly as cool. I couldn't resist all the gorgeous animals on the Tiny Tots collection and I loved that each of them had their very own speech bubble name tag.

"Me and Bee", by Melinda Spinks.

My little hayseed has always loved bees, especially is ride-on bee which has probably rolled to the moon and back. I must admit, they make a cute pair. As soon as I spied the gorgeous paper with little bees I knew I had to use it for this photo, I just didn't plan on spending so much time hand cutting all the hexagons to resemble a bee-hive but it worked in the end. Hand stitching is my relaxation therapy ... I decided to give this little bee an extra long stitched flight path to balance the layout.

"Seriously?", By Melinda Spinks.

Halloween is not something that we celebrate here in Australia and especially not on the farm... it's a bit far from out neighbours to go door knocking. However, I really wanted to use the Halloween Magic collection for a non-Halloween specific layout. My daughter and one of her friends just happened to find a can of silly string ... need I say anymore. I decided to add some splatters to the layout just to give it a whimsical feeling to tie in with the crazy photos.