Saturday 31 October 2015

Walking "The Line"

Fiona at Staring at the Sea is going back to her SIPIDI meme, with SIPIDI standing for See It, Pin It, Do It! It's aimed at getting us to actually do the things that we see and pin on Pinterest. She's split it into two posts per month, with the first one about her plans, and the second her progress. The second one will be on the last Friday of the month so we can compare our projects and progress. I'm expecting sewing, baking, cards and maybe home decor projects to pop up on other blogs, but I'm bringing you a walk.

I walked the Jubilee Greenway earlier this year; it's a 60km circular walk around London which I finished in June. I'd intended to do the Capital Ring next, but I kept putting it off as other things cropped up during July and August. It's another circular walk, but twice as long, and I don't fancy starting it in the autumn as the weather gets worse. Thus I started looking for other, shorter walks to do now before tackling the Capital Ring in the New Year, or maybe in the Spring if we get the harsh winter that's being predicted.


One walk that I found online is "The Line", a new sculpture trail that loosely follows the Greenwich Meridian from Greenwich to Stratford. At the moment it's in three parts, linked by the Emirates Airway and the Docklands Light Railway, with artworks spread out along about 4.5 miles of the walking part of the trail.

I don't use Pinterest, but I bookmarked the walk and I planned to do it once my daughter went back to school in September, but the weeks started slipping by as I did other things.

When I read Fiona's SIPIDI post, I felt that I really should just get on with the walk; it had been four months since my last mini-expedition and I missed my days out. I just needed to get myself in gear and get out there. 

(That was a longer introduction than I planned - here's the actual walk.)

I decided to walk from South to North as I knew exactly where the Greenwich part of the trail runs, indeed I'd walked it in reverse as part of the Jubilee Greenway and I'd seen two of the artworks previously. Leaving North Greenwich station behind me, I headed for the river and soon spotted my first sign - they're red going north and blue going south.



Walking round the O2 I somehow went straight past the first artwork, placed on the Greenwich meridian and called Here, hidden as it was among the building work, and I had to backtrack to see it.



Distinctly underwhelmed, I moved on to A Slice of Reality, a 9m section of a sand dredger. I'd seen it before, but being low tide the whole structure was exposed this time.



Moving on, I came to Liberty Grip, a modern sculpture based on the limbs of store mannequins.



Next up was Antony Gormley's Quantum Cloud, which was a lot more interesting than the previous three. You can just see that the dense part in the middle is the outline of Gormley's body.



At this point there's a break in the walk, and you need to cross the Thames via the Emirates Airline, the cable car linking the Greenwich peninsula to the Royal Docks. I hadn't been on it before, but trusty Oyster card in hand I headed for the station. It wasn't at all busy, perhaps because it was a weekday morning, and I had a cabin to myself as I crossed the river, looking left over the O2



and right towards the Thames Barrier at Woolwich:


Arriving at the Royal Victoria Dock, there should have been three more artworks, but it appears that one hasn't been put in place yet, and one has been removed already. However Eduardo Paolozzi's Vulcan is there, incongruously plonked outside a restaurant, in a space that's too small to stand back and look at him properly.


Having explored the dock, the official 'walk' has you hopping on a train for two stops along the DLR to Star Lane, but it's only a mile or so and I'd barely got going, so I decided to walk. It was easy enough, basically following the line of the DLR, but it was certainly not a scenic part of London. Once I reached Star Lane, the signs for The Line reappeared, including this one painted on the ground:



The road took me to Cody Dock, a former derelict dock that is being transformed into a 'creative quarter with community gardens'. 



The dock opens onto the River Lea, and there I found the next artwork, Damien Hirst's Sensation, a cross-section of human skin:



Following the river now, the next sculpture was probably my favourite; called DNA DL90, it's a double helix made from shopping trolleys. And I love the fact that it's sited next to an Amazon distribution centre.



The River Lea meets both the Limehouse Cut and Bow Creek at Bow Locks, and here the walk does a spiral to place you on a narrow spit of land between the River Lea (on the left) and Bow Creek (on the right). 



It's actually surprisingly tranquil here, despite the road and rail bridges overhead, and I think that this is a waterway that I will come back to. The Lee Valley Walk runs from the Thames to Luton, and it looks to be worth exploring at least part of it.

Anyway, back to this walk, I followed the river up to Three Mills, a set of former water mills on the river, one of which is open to the public at weekends, while another houses a film studio. 


Passing between the buildings, I headed for Three Mills Green and the final sculpture, Network, a nine foot tall man looking at his mobile phone:



The walk continues from here along the river to Stratford High Street, but I decided to cut through Lee Valley Park and join the Greenway to get to West Ham for the train home. Unfortunately, both the park and this part of the Greenway are closed due to work to improve the sewer system, so I had to walk the streets instead.

I was rather disappointed with this walk, as the whole idea was to follow "The Line" - the Greenwich Meridian - and it failed to do this. Once you've left 'Here' behind you the meridian isn't even mentioned again. One reason that I wanted to get onto the Greenway is because I know that not only does the meridian cross it, but it's actually marked on the ground there:



Photo - January 2015
But the day wasn't wasted, it was a pleasant enough walk (if you ignore the extra part from Royal Victoria to Star Lane) and I saw some interesting artworks. I wouldn't do it again though, nor would I recommend the walk to anyone else as it stands. You would do much better to pick either the Thames or the Lea and follow it instead, and you could still see some of the art.

I've walked a large chunk of the Thames before (15 miles from Woolwich to Lambeth) but I will certainly be coming back to the River Lea in the future.

Thanks for sticking with me to the end, and now you can go and see what everyone else has been Seeing, Pinning and Doing!

Thursday 29 October 2015

Signal Hill & Cabot Tower

Still cruising here, and it's back to St John's (Newfoundland) for a quick three-photo page of Signal Hill. This hill stands on one side of the harbour entrance, and played a part in defending the island for more than three centuries. Cabot Tower stands on the summit, built to commemorate both the 400th anniversary of John Cabot's voyage to the New World (1497) and the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria (1897).

I stacked up three photos of the hill and the tower taken from different viewpoints for my page, and layered a few papers on the right with my title and journalling.




Supplies
Cardstock - Colorset
Paper - Heidi Swapp No Limits, Graphic 45 Artisan Style, Hot Off the Press
Letters - American Crafts, Heidi Swapp
Washi Tape - October Afternoon, Tesco
Globes - atd
Enamel Dots - Teresa Collins
Ink - Docrafts

Tuesday 27 October 2015

Right Back Where We Started From

I'm a member of a couple of scrapbooking groups on Facebook, and one of them set the first in a series of 'Friday Focus' challenges last week - to focus on layers and/or doilies. ScrapMuch? posted their latest sketch the same day, and it's a serendipitous combination of layers and doilies.

I'm still working through the photos from our cruise to Ireland and Canada this summer. I have quite a few page ideas fizzing about in my head, and one of those was for our return to Liverpool. It wasn't an idea for the layout itself, but I knew it would be a single 4x6 photo page, and I knew that the title would be the song "Right Back Where We Started From".




Supplies
Cardstock - Colorset
Paper - Heidi Swapp No Limits, Colorbok Travel
Letters - American Crafts, Heidi Swapp
Word Stickers - Tim Holtz Idea-ology
Arrow Paperclip - Freckled Fawn
Tag - Graines Creatives
Globe - atd
Enamel Dots - Trimcraft
Ink & Mist - Docrafts

Sunday 25 October 2015

Where Next?

Have you heard of ScraptoberFest? Four scrapbook challenge blogs have teamed up to offer a four-part challenge for October. You can do them individually or combine all four to have a go at the Bonus prize.


I first saw ScraptoberFest on Scrap Our Stash, and their challenge was straightforward enough - use two different washi tapes.

Challenge YOUrself asked for a layout with YOU in the photo. At this point I was thinking that my entry would be another cruise page, but ...

My Scraps and More gave us a colour combination, and this was not going to work with the aqua, orange, cream and grey of my cruise album so far.

Finally, The Memory Nest gave us a sketch, a fairly simple sketch, so open to interpretation.

I focussed on the requirement for me to be in the photo, but I didn't really have any unscrapped that would fit both the sketch and the colour combination. However, we've been talking about our holidays (vacations) recently, and planning where we'd like to go next year and the following years and I decided to get my thoughts down on an 8x8 page.

My annual family albums and my holiday albums are all 12x12, but I sometimes make 8x8 pages which are more about thoughts and feelings, rather than the 12x12s that document our activities.

I used a photo of me in one of the photo spots on the sketch and used the other for my title.


I worked on white cardstock, matted on navy, and used several of my travel stamps to make the background. I've written the names of all the countries I've already visited around the edge of the page, and also written a little about some of the places I'd still like to visit. At the moment, I think we'll be returning to Austria next year, but after that, who knows?
   
Supplies
Cardstock - DCWV, Moments
Paper - Pink Paislee Snow Day, Echo Park This & That 
Letters - Hobbycraft
Doily - Dovecraft
Chipboard - My Mind's Eye Market Street
Washi Tape - Tesco, Trimcraft
Ink - Docrafts, Ink It Up!
Mist - Cosmic Shimmer

Tools
Stampendous Travel Words Stamps
Papermania All Aboard Postmark Stamp
Amy Tangerine Camera Stamp

Friday 23 October 2015

Going Coastal

We spent the first morning of our cruise this summer following the Irish coast en route from Liverpool to Killybegs. I picked the best photo of that coast and printed it large for this page.

I've already used my default large photo layout for this album (for my title page) so I went looking for an alternative. I picked an old five-photo sketch from Shimelle and used all that photo space for just one. 


Supplies
Cardstock - Colorset
Paper - Heidi Swapp No Limits, Hot Off the Press
Letters - Papermania
Washi Tape - Unknown
Diecuts - atd
Wood Veneer - Studio Calico
Mist - Docrafts

Tools
Fiskars Postage Stamp Border Punch
Scrapberry's 'Around the World' Stamp
Dovecraft Filmstrip Stamp
Amy Tangerine Camera Stamp


Wednesday 21 October 2015

Noon Day Gun

I'm sharing another page from a ScrapMuch? sketch today, and this time it's the current sketch. It caught my attention when it was published last Friday, and I looked through my cruise pictures to find a set of four that I could print at an appropriate size.

I picked pictures from St John's (Newfoundland) where we climbed up Signal Hill, above the harbour, in time to see and hear them fire the Noon Day Gun.

There's no journalling yet because this will be one in a series of pages about Signal Hill and I'm not sure how the story will run across all the pages yet.




Supplies
Cardstock - Colorset
Paper - My Mind's Eye Chalk Studio, Graphic 45 Artisan Style, Heidi Swapp No Limits, Hot Off the Press
Letters - American Crafts
Vellum - Hot Off the Press
Labels - Heidi Swapp No Limits, Pink Paislee Memorandum
Wood Veneer - Heidi Swapp
Stars - Paperchase
Enamel Dots - Doodlebug
Pearls - Mark Richards
Ink & Mist - Docrafts

Tools
Big Shot & Stars Die

Monday 19 October 2015

Killybegs

I will need to make a lot of pages with 4x6 photos for my cruise album, so I've been bookmarking suitable sketches when I see them but don't have enough time to use them immediately. This page is based on one of the September sketches from ScrapMuch?

It also incorporates this month's Stash Challenge from Scrap Our Stash, one to create a layout using stash items for each of the letters of the word INKS. Mine are Inked edges, Notebook border and No Limits paper, the title Killybegs, Star Sticker and Stamping.

I used two photos of the town of Killybegs in the Republic of Ireland, the first stop on our cruise. The top one is the view from our ship's berth; the bottom one is a view across the bay as we walked into town.



I'm planning to make introductory pages like this for each of the towns/cities that we visited, to act as dividers in the album and to make it clear where each set of photos were taken. The stamped circle on the right isn't very clear, but it reads 'Entry Date'. I'll repeat this on each introductory page, and then I won't need to date all the intervening pages too.

Supplies
Cardstock - Colorset
Paper - Heidi Swapp No Limits, Colorbok Travel
Letters - American Crafts
Star Sticker - Studio Calico
Pearls - Mark Richards
Ink & Mist - Docrafts

Tools
Fiskars Postage Stamp Border Punch
American Crafts Notebook Border Punch
Woodware Scalloped Circle Punch
Fiskars Shape Cutter & Circles Template
Stampendous Travel Words Stamp
American Crafts Amy Tangerine Camera Stamp

Saturday 17 October 2015

Pointe aux Canons

I'm hopping about with my cruise photos, not working chronologically at all, and I'm not posting the pages in the order I made them either. These photos are from Saint-Pierre; this island lies just off the Newfoundland coast but it's French, not Canadian.

Pointe aux Canons is the site of a fort which defended Saint-Pierre against British attacks (not altogether successfully since we destroyed it in 1702). Today there's a row of cannons and a torpedo in its place.



Supplies
Cardstock - Colorset
Paper - Heidi Swapp No Limits
Letters - American Crafts, Bo Bunny
Wood Veneer - Heidi Swapp
Washi Tape - October Afternoon
Enamel Dots - Docrafts
Pearls - Doodlebug

Tools
Woodware Scalloped Circle Punch
X-Cut Corner Punch

Thursday 15 October 2015

Guest Acts

Sorry, my cruise pages aren't showing much of the beautiful and interesting places that we visited at the moment. I'm finding it easier to pick off those pages where I have a limited number of photos to choose from.

The ship has its own resident entertainment team, but also invites guest acts onboard. We had five guest acts this cruise - flautist, singer, magician, pianist and comedian.

I picked the 1 October sketch from Sketch-n-Scrap for my page; it's a six-photo sketch and I only had five, but I planned to place my title in the position of the sixth photo. Mine are portrait so I also decided to switch to two rows of three photos instead of three rows of two.

I'd already printed my photos, which are larger than those in the sketch, and once I started laying things out it was clear that I was going to have to shuffle the elements around the page, so my page is not an exact copy of the sketch by any means. I dropped the smaller background square entirely, and the 'tilt' is smaller on my page than the sketch. I also moved the large circle in onto my title square. Hopefully you can see enough similarity between my page and the original sketch.



Supplies
Cardstock - Colorset
Paper - Heidi Swapp No Limits
Letters - American Crafts
Enamel Dots - Doodlebug
Ink - Docrafts
Washi Tape - Unknown

Tools
Woodware Scalloped Circle Punch
X-Cut Corner Punch

Tuesday 13 October 2015

Quiz Champs

We took part in a lot of the quizzes on our cruise, and we won five of them, including two evening quizzes which have a bottle of fizz as their prize. The photos are of our daughter with our winnings (which she wasn't allowed to drink).

I used the October Week 1 sketch from Let's Get Sketchy for my page, but I flipped it horizontally and I replaced two of the small photos with one larger one. 

I used wood veneer question marks in my embellishments, and I inked them black because they were beginning to discolour. I do hope that won't happen to all the wood veneer pieces that I have used previously.



Supplies
Cardstock - Colorset
Paper - Heidi Swapp No Limits, Colorbok Travel, Echo Park Happy Camper
Vellum - Crate Paper
Letters - Papermania
Word Stickers - Tim Holtz Idea-Ology
Wood Veneer - Studio Calico
Pearls - Doodlebug
Ink & Mist - Docrafts
Washi Tape - Unknown

Tools
Woodware Scalloped Circle Punch

Sunday 11 October 2015

She Reads

This IS a cruise page, but it's a 'people' page rather than a 'places' page, one about our daughter and her propensity for reading wherever and whenever she could.

I started out with two 3" x 4" photos and Sketch #115 from My Scraps and More, but I soon realised that I wanted to sit my daughter and the vellum girl back-to-back in their similar positions, and my photo was too small for that. I reprinted it and cropped the other one down to a 2" square, which means that my page no longer looks exactly like the sketch.



Supplies
Cardstock - Colorset, Papermania
Paper - Heidi Swapp No Limits, Graphic 45 Artisan Style
Letters - American Crafts
Vellum Girl - Crafty Templates/Quirky Kits
Word Stickers - Tim Holtz Idea-ology
Ink & Mist - Docrafts
Enamel Dots - Simple Stories, Doodlebug
Washi Tape - Unknown
Epoxy Dome Stickers - Ebay

Tools
Woodware Scalloped Circle Punch
X-Cut Small Circle Punch

Friday 9 October 2015

What Time Is It?

I have a number of cruise pages fizzing in my head, waiting for me to get them down on paper. Some of them are ideas that I had while we were on holiday, including the intention of documenting the eleven time zone changes that we experienced in fourteen nights. The cruise terminal in Sydney (Nova Scotia, not New South Wales) had a row of clocks on the wall, and this was just what I needed illustrate the story.

When I saw the Scrappy Friends challenges this month, and in particular Rochelle's tic-tac-toe grid with 'clock' in one corner, I knew that it was time to make the page. I had a clock print paper in beige and brown to satisfy the middle box, and just needed to use some pearls to complete the diagonal line.

The second part of the challenge is Brenda's sketch, and I decided to put my photo on one of her large tags with my title on the other one. I knew that this would make them different widths and I played about with some of the paper layers and my circles for a more one-sided page.

The third part is Kelly's autumnal mood board from which I picked the overall brown colour, with a tiny touch of orange in my washi tape, and the circular arrow piece (a bracelet?) which I copied as a piece of wood veneer.

I had a large amount of writing, so I used my finest pen to minimise its visual impact. I pre-planned it and I thought I had plenty of space, but in the end it filled the whole of the lower part of my clocks paper.



Supplies
Cardstock - Colorset
Paper - Heidi Swapp No Limits, Hot Off the Press, Echo Park, Teresa Collins 
Letters - American Crafts, October Afternoon, Bo Bunny
Stickers - Anita's Glitterations, Ebay
Washi Tape - Efco
Wood Veneer - Creative Embellishments
Pearls - Mark Richards
Ink - Docrafts

Tools
Woodware Scalloped Circle Punch
X-Cut Small Circle Punch


Wednesday 7 October 2015

The Churches of St John's

St John's in Newfoundland was the first Canadian port of our cruise this summer. We planned a walking tour of the city, taking in the major sites including a number of churches. I decided to pull them all together on one page, and to use a grid to give each one its own separate space.

I used three similarly coloured patterned papers from Heidi Swapp for my squares, and pondered over another colour/pattern to layer with them. I liked the aqua map print, but I didn't have very much and it wouldn't provide a contrast. This lead me to a different map print from October Afternoon; it's a map of Paris, but you don't see enough of it to be able to work that out. 



My original plan was to have separate title, journalling and embellishment blocks in the middle row, but this evolved as I worked and I combined them across the three squares, pulling in the aqua map print here. There isn't actually much in the way of embellishment as the page was feeling quite busy to me.

Supplies
Cardstock - Colorset
Paper - Heidi Swapp No Limits, Lily Bee Double Dutch, October Afternoon Travel Girl, My Mind's Eye Just Splendid
Letters - American Crafts, Jenni Bowlin
Tag - Graines Creatives
Enamel Dots - Simple Stories
Ink - Docrafts

Tools
X-Cut Small Circle Punch
Stampendous Arrow Stamp


Monday 5 October 2015

Stick It Down - Black Watch

Today's reveal day for the single pages from this month's sketch at Stick It Down. It's a six photo sketch this time, though I'm sure you could make it work with fewer.

I'm staying with my cruise album, and I picked photos of our ship in six of our seven ports of call for my page. (The seventh was Belfast, where the port area was fairly industrial and not at all photogenic.)

My photos are wider than those in the sketch, so they take up a greater proportion of the page. I tried my title on both the left and the right, and with the letters in both directions, and ultimately chose to run the words up the left side of the page, filling the gap at the top with a repeat of my compass stamp. 



Supplies
Cardstock - Colorset, Papermania
Paper - Heidi Swapp No Limits, Glitz Design Uncharted Waters
Letters - American Crafts
Label Stickers - 7Gypsies
Enamel Dots - Studio Calico, Trimcraft, Doodlebug
Ink - Docrafts

Tools
Scrapberry's 'Around the World' Compass Stamp

Sunday 4 October 2015

Cards for World Card-Making Day

I used to be an avid follower of My Sketch World, particularly the Sketch-a-Thons each year. Lucy had to hibernate the blog a while ago, but she's slowly coming back and she published four card sketches for World Card-Making Day yesterday. I used my last male card recently so I decided to use her sketches and some old 6x6 papers to stock up again.






The deadline is quite short for these, and for once I am grateful for the time difference for helping me to link up in time.