Green City

 

It already seems like an age ago, especially now that the autumnal wintry weather has kicked in, so it was lovely to spend last weekend scrapping with my Scandinavian summer holiday photos.

I managed six pages which is seriously fast scrapping for me!  Some ladies managed 15+ in the same amount of time.  Perhaps they spent less time chatting/eating/drinking/ogling other people's supplies?  Perhaps they were better prepared beforehand?

For my retreat preparation I had printed out a selection of holiday snaps in various sizes and jotted down some page ideas for some of them.  I had also put together a couple of Counterfeit/page kits but somehow once I'd selected these two photos of contrasting verdigris sculptures, it was more appropriate to grab my scraps bag to make my layout:

The journalling reminds me that, despite being the capital of Denmark,  Copenhagen's self-contained centre was easy to walk around as  it was full of parks and cyclists, keeping the motorised traffic sparse and calm!

An added benefit of scrapping with friends (apart from the shared chocolate) is that if you need a certain something, someone will surely lend/give it to you.  While I was cutting my title with my Sizzix Go Go Boots dies, left out to share on the "tools" table at the weekend retreat, I had a chance to browse through a friend's copious die collection and found the perfect flower to add to my page!  Thanks Jayne :-)

The page is based on this month's sketch over at Sarah's Cards and coincidentally conforms to a monochromatic challenge over at The Studio - haven't played along there for a while!

Scapbook Page Titles

Do you struggle with scrapbook page titles?  Does a title come to mind as soon as you choose your photo or do you decide on a title once the page is complete?  Does every page need a title?

I think I could answer both "Yes" and "No" to each and every one of those questions, though I have very, very few title-less pages myself.

Frequently my 95% complete page will sit on my desk for a day or two while the "perfect" title is trapped in the recesses of my brain; I know it's there - maybe I dreamed it - but I want to wait for it to surface.  Sometimes it does, other times I settle for something else and move on to the next page.

Occasionally I pick a photo and the future page title is glaringly obvious - maybe it's a play on words, or a phrase we were using at the time, or a lyric from a current song that just fits somehow.  My first April Counterfeit Kit page certainly fits this category (even though the statue is of a mammoth rather than an elephant): the title was set in stone!

I've used a sketch from Creative Craft World
as part of the weekly challenge on UKS.

I seem to find it relatively easy to come up with alliterative titles (like Secret Surprise or Bognor Beach) but these start to look a bit cheesy if overdone. Occasionally Often my "perfect" title contains too many vowels for the alphabet I had in mind and I end up mixing fonts or get inventive with a backwards "3", a trimmed "Q" or an upside down "w"!

When I really struggle to find the right title, and my family and scrapping friends can't help either, I resort to the internet! My first port of call is usually Denny's Quotes (they have a decent search facility and a mix of page toppers, quotes, poems and lyrics).  Other places I go include The Perfect Title (organised into categories), The Quote Garden and Song Lyrics (you can search albums, artists, songs and within the lyrics).
I could do with some reliable alternative places to visit, so do please share where you go for page title inspiration in the comments.

P.S. I'm multi-tasking as ever and, while my page fits a UKScrappers/CCW challenge this week, it also ties in nicely with this month's challenge over at The Studio: to include at least three items from their supply list - Kraft, twine, die cuts, ink, a star and washi tape - I managed all but one! Pop over here if you fancy having a go yourself!

Real Life Confessions of a Christmas Misspent

This is where I come clean ... remember the post on December 10th where I admitted to being 5 days behind with journalling my Christmas ... well that was it ... I didn't manage another page!  Not a single one.
My JYC album just didn't suit - neither the time available, the photos I had, nor the things that happened!  I barely had time to read the prompts, let alone mull over what to scrap for the day.  At a certain point I realised it would be too draining to have the project hanging over me all through January, so I chose to let go, move on, call it a day!

Instead I decided to take inspiration from Siân's December month in numbers & Alexa's Christmas numbers journalling and capture some of our festive memories in a single page. 

The page is based on the monthly challenge sketch from UKScrappers and uses my January Counterfeit Kit, an X-cut border punch, some of the packaging from Susanne's Christmas packages as well as the most perfect embellishment from inside the packaging!
This is indeed REAL life - not everything works out the way you plan it:

• sometimes you can't find the power lead for the tree lights and have to buy new ones (only to have the missing lead magically reappear)
• sometimes teenagers simply will not cooperate for a photo (or even get out of bed on Christmas morning to open their presents)
• sometimes you get so carried away with the food shopping that you don't need to return to the shops for nearly a week, even though they are only closed for one day!

But there's still a whole load to be thankful for including:

• a son who wants to help with the cooking (if not the washing up)
• a daughter who loves to help decorate the tree (and would be happy for it to be up all year round)

Oh and for the record, a 14lb turkey is about 3 days too big for our family of six (plus the dog)!!

No Direction?

At the end of last year I was checking up on my boys at university browsing randomly on Facebook when I spotted that No.2 Son had a new profile picture. For a mad moment I thought he'd photoshopped his face onto a publicity shot of the latest boy band sensation on the X-factor, before recognising the other lads in the group! I messaged him:

"You look a bit like you've been on the X-Factor ... "No Direction" perhaps?"

And so this page was born - the first from my March Counterfeit Kit adding only a few brads.

I used the Sunday sketch from The Studio (loosely) and tied it in with the weekly challenge on UKS too - so sketch and paper ruffle for The Studio, bling, 1 photo and "white" space for UKS!!!

Just in case you're not an X-factor viewer ... and I count myself among that number, but I am blessed with No.3 Child who likes that sort of thing, so cannot avoid it ... here is a photo of the boy band in question (the curly-haired lad is from a local school)!

One Direction, photo courtesy of the UK Fan Club

Egyptian Art

I did a page a few days ago about the wonderful layered sand art that I saw on my recent holiday in Egypt.  This week's page for The Studio Sketch Challenge is also about art that I saw there ... the art of towel folding.  It is many, many years since I holidayed in a hotel (self-catering is easier with a family of fussy eaters) and so I was quite enchanted by the towel sculptures that greeted me each afternoon.  Wonderful.

I've used two sheets of cardstock (the red one was gutted of course, which allowed me to mat the photos), a strip of Daisy D's Cherry Tomato paper, some buttons, Candy Cane Stickles, and some lovely red velvet "paper" to cut flowers and Sizzlit Broadway Melody alphas from.  I've actually reversed the letter "A" as it fitted better with the rest of the letters that way around.  The large flower is based on a tutorial I saw over at Scrap a Little. So simple to do: just five punched circles.  I can see a lot more of these appearing on a page near you soon.

Advent Origami

I have been folding paper over at The Studio as part of their Advent Projects.  I took a simple little Origami folding technique and after making hanging decorations and a garland I worked out that these shapes would be perfect to construct a Christmas tree

If you fancy having a go, pop over there to download a step by step guide.
ETA 28/11/11 - I've also shared the method directly in a blog post over at It's A Creative World here.

Learning to scrap quickly!

I thought I'd squeeze in a quick final class for The Studio cybercrop before the midnight deadline!

The class from Ania was very inspiring and I have used up a LOT of scraps from last year's Journal Your Christmas and made a little gift for my daughter to boot!

The only trouble with speed scrapping (with me at least) is the mess!

"Quote Unquote"

I was inspired by a brilliant little project from Audrey Yeager on the recent Studio cybercrop to make a "little" tag book of my own.  I say "little" but I got rather carried away ~ as usual my brain had bigger plans than is quite sensible in terms of available scrap time.

First off, I decided rather than do a 10 page booklet with just 10 aspects of something ... I'd do an A-Z of interesting quotes: several hours of surfing later I had a range of quotes that included words for each of the letters of the alphabet.

Then, rather than do a nice small format (the example project was just 4"x3") I decided to make each page 6"x4" ... and sew the quotes in strips on each page and ink and stamp and .... you get the idea!  Take a molehill and make a mountain every time, that's me.

The chipboard shape on the front cover was twice as big - I cut it in half before stamping and embossing and the back cover is graced with the other half as well as the word "Unquote".

The pages are made from double sided Scraperdashery Shakespeare quote papers (although I haven't actually included any Shakespeare quotes in my A-Z), with small cardstock squares to contain the quotes. I had fun with the machine, sewing the quotes on securely and then I went a bit mad with various blooms and buttons, all stuck on with Diamond Glaze in the hope that they'll stand up to some handling.

The next little project on my blogging adventures is to try and make a slideshow to show each individual page ... but not tonight!

Another Studio effort

Continuing with the classes from The Studio's recent cybercrop I was inspired by Ifa Zainon's class to have a go with acetate image transfers.  Ifa had provided travelling words to do this with, but they didn't fit the photos I wanted to scrap from a day out at Hawkstone Historic Park & Follies, so I typed some appropriate words into Wordle and hey presto!  I chose a colour scheme that fitted in with a day in the open air and saved a couple of wordles with slightly different word frequencies to get a variety of word sizes; these were printed out (in reverse) onto transparencies and then rubbed onto my cardstock to transfer the ink.  I wiped the transparency clean and it's now ready for more of these wordles another day (will I be able to find it when that day comes though?).

Acetate printed "wordle"

Ifa's class was a single page, but I had so many photos to include that I flipped the basic design and produced a vaguely symmetrical double page.  I've used my favourite Autumn Leaves swirly stamps with some old shadow inks to echo the rather patchy wordle transfers.  The Funky Vintage chocolate alphas are brand new (to me) stash from Making Memories; I've just re-read the packaging and find that they are self-adhesive!  Oh well, they're sewn on securely now!!

Lace-covered chipboard button
and securely sewn acetate letters

Three things that I am grateful for from this day:

• our sat nav which allowed us to tell the RAC which middle-of-nowhere-layby we had pulled into once the smell from the engine had become rather worrying.
• the RAC man who spent ages in the increasing dark and cold, cobbling the broken bits of the gear box back together again.
• Child No.3's mp4 player which allowed the three smaller people to huddle together watching the whole of  "The Incredibles" while we waited!

Scrapping with scraps!

It is a good job that you cannot see the back of my LOs because I am terrible for gutting my CS and PP in order to make everything go further.  I'm not quite sure why I do this as I have enough stash to keep me scrapping for a decade without resorting to such measures ... I guess it's just part of being me!
I reached a whole new level of parsimonious behaviour last night as I had a design in my head and the PPs weren't complete sheets but I felt sure that I could manage anyway!  In the end the red "Learn" PP is 3 separate pieces from one 12x8 piece and the "Inspire" PP is two pieces from a 12x9 sheet.  Can you see the joins????

Here's what it looks like on the back:

The photos are ancient snaps from 1997; I was practising with face-paints in anticipation of a Mother & Toddler fund-raiser while we were staying with my father in Woking.  I had to ask No.1 Son what the green face and the red mask represented because I couldn't remember ~ apparently he was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, which also explains the stance: that's not a salute, it's a martial arts pose!

The LO also has another example of chipboard decorating ready for the Pink Booby Charity Crop - I'm nearly ready with the necessary photos for my instructions.

And multi-tasking (as ever) the LO earns me some points on UKS as it fits in with last week's challenge and the framing was inspired by Lisa Saunder's recent CC class over on The Studio.

More Cybercrop Inspiration!

As if I needed another excuse to avoid housework, The Studio are having a CC this weekend.  The pre-crop challenge from last night was to frame your title.  I'm still playing with chipboard in anticipation of my class at the 5th Pink Booby Crop so I took the opportunity to photograph a few step-by-step images too.  As I love to multi-task with my scrapping, the LO is also meeting the criteria for the August Week 3 challenge over on UKS (3 photos, celebration, blue and bunting - a bit cheeky with that last one I know).  I made a little dent in my BG Archaic collection pack and a big mess on my scrap desk.

No.2 Son's 18th birthday celebration at home - fairly low-key in advance of the big day as he was about to go skiing with his 6th form mates!