Running Event Pages

My husband is running the Brighton Marathon in April, and he's done three other increasingly long events so far this year. January was a half-marathon in Victoria Park which I've already scrapped; February and March have been two themed 'run as far as you can' events at Cyclopark in Kent where he completed 16 miles and then 20 miles: 

(The numbers are my page count for the year.)

33. Tiaras & Tutus

This page was inspired by a YouTube live from Shimelle Laine in January, though I used an assortment of pocket page cards rather than cut-apart sheets for my version. 

Supplies: Paper - Echo Park Capture Life; Pocket Cards - Studio Calico, Project Life; Letters - Shimelle; Stickers - Shimelle, Tim Holtz, Paige Evans

34. All Stars

This one is my version of the February sketch from For the Love of Pretty Paper, though it morphed a fair bit from the original.

Supplies: Paper - Paige Evans Wonders, Paige Evans Bungalow Lane, Paige Evans Whimsical; Letters - American Crafts; Vellum - Anita's; Mistable Stars - Studio Calico; Stickers - Paige Evans #Stickerbook; Puffy Shapes - Elle's Studio; Washi Strip - Paige Evans

Play the Game

I'm diverting today as it's my turn to share a DT page for Twilight Crafts and Jenny Wren Cut-Files. I didn't have any photos for my cruise album or my 2025 album that I wanted to scrap with a cut-file so I've gone into the archives with a 40 year-old photo of my brother at a fancy dress party. If I remember correctly, it was a black-and-white themed event and so he went as a draughts board (checkers if you are reading this from the US or some other countries).

I chose a Grid Background which worked with the theme, and cut it from burnt orange paper. I backed the photo with lots of papers from my scraps box; nothing's 40 years old, but some are ten or more. 

Supplies: Paper - Studio Calico {#OOTD}, KaiserCraft Teddy Bear's Picnic, Hot Off the Press My Boy, Echo Park This & That, The Robin's Nest, Glitz Design Laced with Grace, KaiserCraft Lush, Basic Grey Recess; Letters - Rosie's Studio; Border Sticker - Fancy Pants Swagger; Enamel Dots - My Mind's Eye, Simple Stories

Disclosure - I receive digital cut-files free of charge from Twilight Crafts as part of my DT role. All other supplies are my own.

Pages from Ibiza

Continuing with my Mediterranean cruise album, I'm moving on to Ibiza today, the capital of the island of the same name. This was our third port of call, and is the sixth to be scrapped as I'm not working in order. Just Cartagena and Palma (Majorca) left now.

(The numbers are my page count for the year.)

28. Ibiza

My usual 'sub-title' page which divides the album into chapters for each port of call. This one has two photos of the old town, one from our ship across the bay, and one with the town sign from part of the fortifications.

29. Dalt Vila

Literally the 'Upper Town', Dalt Vila is Ibiza's walled old town and I have photos of two of the gates where you can enter through the walls. My page design is inspired by Shimelle Laine's YouTube Live from 3rd February. 

30. Bastions of the City

There are seven bastions around the walls of Dalt Vila and this page has photos of a few of the better ones, arranged on two blocks on the page.

31. Quiet Streets

A few photos of the streets of Dalt Vila, which became a grid on a grid. I've used squares a few times in this album in various sizes, and it seemed like a good time to repeat them.

32. Ibiza Cathedral

My 'go to' choice of photos for churches seems to be one of the outside, one of the inside and one of the alter. I'm trying to make them all different, and scraplifted an older church page for this layout.

Supplies: Cardstock - My Mind's Eye Necessities; Paper - Heidi Swapp Set Sail, Photoplay Travelogue, Cocoa Vanilla Studio Heart & Home, Heidi Swapp Sun Chaser; Letters - American Crafts, Tim Holtz, Doodlebug; Stickers - Heidi Swapp, Photoplay, 49 & Market; Washi Tape - Vicki Boutin; Enamel Shapes - Altenew, Simple Stories, 49 & Market, Hey Little Magpie, Twilight Crafts, Pink Paislee, American Crafts, My Mind's Eye

Pages from Cádiz

Back to the cruise album now, and I'm quite pleased with the progress I've made. We visited eight different ports and this is the fifth to be scrapped. I'm not doing them in order though, so it was the last one we visited. 

(The numbers are my page count for the year.)

22. Cádiz
Starting with my normal subtitle page, which split the album into sections for each port. I used two photos, one of the city gates and one of a view over the rooftops from Torre Tavira, putting them in opposite corners on L-shapes of patterned paper. 

23. Revisiting

Cádiz was the only port on this trip that we'd visited before. I didn't want to duplicate lots of pages from last time, so I made this one as a summary instead, and it refers back to our previous visit in 2018.

24. Castillo de San Sebastian

This is an old fortress, reached via a causeway, which has recently been opened to the public. I had four 4x6 photos for the page, but they all had quite a lot of sky or sea in them so I cropped them all to 3x6 and stacked them up next to a column of scraps.

25 & 26. Torre Tavira/Views

These were two separate pages in my planning, but they became more like a double once I was working on them. The left side is for a watchtower and the right side has the views from the top. Cádiz is full of these towers which merchants built on their houses so they could see their ships arriving in port. I used a ledger paper which perfectly matches that theme, being headed "Manifest of the Cargo on board the ______ whereof ______ is Master, bound from ______ to ______".

  

27. Teatro Romano  

Cádiz had a Roman amphitheatre which was lost and buried for centuries until it was rediscovered in 1980 when the site was being redeveloped. I have a couple of 4x6s of the seating area and a 3x4 of the passageway which runs behind it.

Supplies: Cardstock - My Mind's Eye Necessities; Paper - Heidi Swapp Set Sail, Photoplay Travelogue, Cocoa Vanilla Studio Heart & Home, Heidi Swapp Sun Chaser; Letters - American Crafts; Numbers - Heidi Swapp, Studio Calico; Stickers - Heidi Swapp, Photoplay, 49 & Market; Washi Tape - Vicki Boutin; Enamel Shapes - Altenew, Simple Stories, American Crafts, 49 & Market, Hey Little Magpie, Twilight Crafts, Pink Paislee

Two Birthday Cards

We have a couple of family birthdays this month, so I've been card-making for them. 

The first card is for my (adult) nephew who plays Sunday football. I used a piece of clip-art with my Silhouette to cut a ball from black card, backed it with 'Happy Birthday' printed paper for the white parts, and layered it on a green paper with a vague grassy feel.

The second card is for my mum. I've watched a few reels from Katie Pertiet recently which tie in with the release of her new collection, but applied the ideas using some of her older products.

Supplies: Cards - Make & Create; Papers - Pinkfresh Studio Escape the Ordinary; Tag - 49 & Market Curators Meadow; Rub-Ons - 49 & Market Color Swatch Peach, 49 & Market Plum Grove; Inks - Ranger Distress Oxides

Graduation

This page has been a long time coming. It's a double that will finish my 2023 album and I first saw the sketch back in July but it's taken me until now to decide on papers and actually make the page.

The sketch comes from a Facebook group called 1 Sketch: 3 Ways where each month three ladies each make and share a page with a process video, all based on the same sketch. The sketch they chose for July originally came from Page Maps and I thought it would work well for the photos of our daughter's graduation from the University of Sussex.

I've had the mortar board print paper for years, having originally bought it for my own graduation (which I haven't scrapped yet). I chose to use it in place of the spotty paper in the sketch but struggled to find other papers to go with it, until I bought some papers and a sticker sheet from Echo Park Graduation in the January sale and picked out red from our daughter's hood as an accent colour.

Supplies: Paper - Echo Park Graduation, Sandylion Graduation Caps, Shimelle Head in the Clouds, Paige Evans Whimsical; Stickers - Echo Park, Tim Holtz

(Pages 20 & 21 for the year)

Pages from Mahón

I'm going back to my cruise album now, tackling one place at a time and moving to our sixth port of call which was Mahón, the capital of Menorca.

14. Mahón

The first page is, as always, a sub-title page that divides the album into sections. I printed two 4x6 photos and separated them with my title. The strip on the left was driven by the numbering on the paper, which looked like it needed something more on that side.

15. Trepucó

The first thing we did was walk out of town to see the remains of a Talaiotic settlement from the period 1200BC to 200BC, which was characterised by stone buildings known as talaiots and T-shaped stone megaliths called taulas. 

16. Església el Carme

At this point, I had to decide whether to put my titles in English, Spanish or Catalan for the next few pages. I decided on Catalan, because that's the version on a sign on my next page, even though it meant more pesky accents. I printed three 4x6 photos of the church (built for an order of Carmelite nuns) and arranged them with a journalling card on uneven quadrants of paper, making use of offcuts from other pages.

17. Mercat Claustre del Carme

The cloisters of the last church now house a market and I printed three photos, one large and two small. The scale of the building in each one meant that I didn't want to put them in a block so I found an older page and scraplifted myself.

18. Església Santa Maria

Another church, and I had a trio of photos which were very similar to the set from Església el Carme, and very close to them in the album, so I had to find a different layout for them. I ended up with another scraplift which does use four quadrants of paper again but the photos overlap them and the page looks different enough for me.

19. Parc des Freginal

Finally, a few photos from a park that's hidden away and took some finding, with  with the entrance being a passageway through a building. This was where I saw my first hoopoe. I printed six photos, but dropped down to four for the page, arranging them in a square block with my title down the side and washi tape at the top and bottom of the page.

Supplies: Cardstock - My Mind's Eye Necessities; Paper - Heidi Swapp Set Sail, Photoplay Travelogue, Cocoa Vanilla Studio Heart & Home, Craft Sensations Dreamy Pastels, Pinkfresh Studio Simply the Best, My Mind's Eye Now and Then; Letters - American Crafts, Creative Memories, Basic Grey; Stickers - Heidi Swapp, Photoplay, Studio Calico; Filmstrips - 49 and Market; Washi Tape - Little B, Vicki Boutin, Stampin' Up!; Glitter Tape - The Works; Enamel Shapes - Simple Stories, Hey Little Magpie, Twilight Crafts, Maggie Holmes, Altenew, Cocoa Vanilla Studio