Sunday 28 February 2016

A 'Starting Point' Page

At the beginning of the month, Tracy Banks (MercyTiara on YouTube) challenged us to kill off an old kit or collection pack. I picked Basic Grey's Archaic collection because I'd already had a bash at killing it off back in January, with this page:



I returned to the collection with another page earlier this month:



And finally, I have a 'starting point' page. This is a term that Shimelle Laine coined a few years ago for a page that you start without photos in mind. I used my largest paper as a potential photo mat and ran a row of rectangular scraps below it. Then I layered up a few smaller pieces at the left of the photo area. I'll come back to this page later in the year and finish it when I have a suitable photo.



Are you wondering whether I will actually finish this page? Or will it sit around forever waiting? Never fear, I've done this sort of thing before and I promise you that they DO get finished.

EDIT: The finished page is here.

Supplies
Cardstock - Bazzill
Paper - Basic Grey Archaic

Friday 26 February 2016

Shimelle & Me

I made this page for a couple of challenges: UKScrappers are running a new series called Scrap Like You Mean It, and the first prompt was to scrap in your favourite colour; Shimelle's latest weekly challenge is a monochromatic page.

I chose blue for my page; I'm not sure that it's truly my favourite colour but I use it a lot in my scrapbooks. I picked a mottled blue paper for my background and decided to work with a background cut file and fill the various openings with different blue papers. 

I selected the Pie Chart Background from Laura Whitaker, but her original file is 12x12 for a Cameo and I have the Portrait which can only cut an 8" width. I initially just resized her file, but then I thought that an 8x8 background would be almost covered by my photo. My next step was to copy and flip the file, weld two together and resize again so my final pie chart background was roughly 6x12. 

I normally choose a photo before I start my pages, but on this occasion I did almost all my background work before picking one. I did a quick flip through my most recent photos and picked one of me with Shimelle at a mini-book workshop last September, which I printed at 4x4 and matted twice.




I used my Portrait again to cut the word 'Shimelle' in her own handwriting (sourced from the internet) and finished my title with silver glitter Thickers; I used a gem for the dot on the 'i' and more gems next to the photo. Finally I journalled around the edge of the page as a border.

Supplies
Paper - My Mind's Eye 29th Street Market, My Mind's Eye Bright 6x6 Pad, Crate Paper Neighbourhood 6x6 Pad, Scraps
Letters - American Crafts
Gems - Mark Richards
Ink - Docrafts

Tools
Silhouette Portrait
Laura Whitaker 'Pie Chart Background' Cut File
Fiskars Shape Cutter & Circles Template


Wednesday 24 February 2016

Whales

The waters between Newfoundland and Labrador are a 'hot spot' for whales (over 20 species have been seen there) and we managed to see quite a few including one that blew a waterspout as it surfaced. Unfortunately, they don't stay on the surface for long so getting a decent photograph was quite difficult. However I did manage to capture a fin and a tail, and I've scrapped them with the mid-month sketch from Sketch-n-Scrap.

I printed my photos as 3x3 squares and added a journalling card next to them, matting them all on navy paper to stop the photos disappearing into the background paper. I've been working on this album for a while now, and I have a healthy collection of scraps, so I just used some of those as they were rather than worrying about the sizes on the sketch.  



When I reviewed my album later on, I amended this page, adding an extra cluster at the top - see this post for details.

Supplies
Cardstock - Colorset
Paper - Heidi Swapp No Limits, HOTP Ivory Sarabook, Graphic 45 Artisan Style, Lily Bee Double Dutch
Letters - American Crafts
Card - Project Life Summer
Sticker - Tim Holtz Idea-ology
Washi Tape - KaiserCraft, Unknown
Ink & Mist - Docrafts

Tools
Fiskars Shape Cutter & Circle Template
Woodware Postage Stamp Punch
Woodware Scalloped Circle Punch


Monday 22 February 2016

Killer Vampire Bugs from Hell

An odd title, and an odd subject for a scrapbook page, but these bugs form one of the memories from our holiday in Canada last year.

They were the black flies that we encountered in Red Bay. The females feed on human blood, and they were determined to have us for lunch. We could feel them biting and we were able to squash them, but by then they had done their worst. The bites spoiled our day, sending us back to the ship early, and they itched for days afterwards.

I chose Sketch 98 from Sketch-n-Scrap for my page. I only had one picture of the flies, but I sourced a drawing from the internet to go with it and split my title and journalling across the other two quadrants.

I'm sticking to black titles in this album (in a variety of fonts) but I didn't have any small black letter stickers; these are actually woodgrain stickers that I coloured with a marker. 



Supplies
Cardstock - Colorset
Paper - Heidi Swapp No Limits, Lily Bee Double Dutch
Card - Project Life Summer
Letters - Elle's Studio
Ink & Mist - Docrafts
Epoxy Sticker - Ebay
Washi Tape - Unknown

Tools
Big Shot & X-Cut Ticket Stubs Die
X-Cut Small Circle Punch

Saturday 20 February 2016

Red Bay

Red Bay, on the Labrador coast, was the last of the Canadian ports on our cruise last summer, and the only one on the mainland. We moored just outside the bay and used the ship's lifeboats to go ashore. 

This is my arrival/introduction page for Red Bay; I've made one for each port of call to divide up my album. The two photos are the view of the bay and a closer shot of the village both taken from the ship. I've taken inspiration from (i.e. copied) Glitter Girl's Adventure 128, placing my photos next to each other with strips of patterned paper above and below.



I'm also linking up with Shimelle's weekly challenge - to mix old scrapbooking stash with new. I would consider most of the things on this page to be "new" in that I bought them specifically for this album (even though they are up to 10 months old now). The stripy paper is definitely "old", I'm guessing 2010 though it could be earlier, and so are the turquoise gems and the label stickers. 

Supplies
Cardstock - Colorset
Paper - Heidi Swapp No Limits, Colorbok Travel, Pink Paislee Memorandum
Card - Project Life Summer
Letters - American Crafts
Stickers - 7Gypsies, Studio Calico
Brads - My Mind's Eye
Wood Veneer - Studio Calico
Gems - Papermania
Washi Tape - Unknown
Ink & Mist - Docrafts

Tools
Fiskars Shape Cutter & Circles Template
Stampendous 'Travel Words' Stamp
7Gypsies 'Collections from the Journey' Stamp


Thursday 18 February 2016

Pink Birthday Card

It's my nan's birthday soon; she'll be 94 and her eyesight isn't what it was, so I've made her a simple card with blocks of different pink patterned papers.


Supplies
Basic Grey Mint Julep 6x6 Pad
Silver Peel-Off Lines & Hearts
Worn Lipstick Distress Ink

Tools
Happy Birthday Stamp
Dovecraft 1" Square Punch

Tuesday 16 February 2016

Stream Trails

Back to Canada now, and my final page from Corner Brook in Newfoundland. It's a double from the Stream Trails, a network of paths that follow the Corner Brook Stream.


I used a sketch from ScrapMuch? who have had a few useful double page sketches recently.

I wondered about stitching the circle on the sketch, but there's no other stitching in my Canada album, so I decided to use a cut file instead. 



My photos are a tad larger than those in the sketch, and I altered the shape of two of them from squares to landscape and portrait shots. My embellishment was strongly influenced by the sketch; the leaf sprigs and flowers just seemed right for this page.

Supplies
Cardstock - Colorset
Paper - Heidi Swapp No Limits, Crafts House Retro, Bo Bunny Double Dot
Letters - Pink Paislee
Flowers - Dovecraft
Gems - KaiserCraft Droplets
Washi Tape - Unknown
Ink - Docrafts, Ink It Up!
Mist - Docrafts

Tools
Silhouette Portrait
Big Shot & Poppy Stamps Small Leafy Sprig Die
The Works Text Stamp

Sunday 14 February 2016

One Year On

It's St Valentine's Day, and Shimelle has challenged us to scrapbook with hearts this week, so I have a page with a rare photo of my husband and me together. It's an old photo and the title reflects the fact that we'd been married for a year. However it's not an anniversary photo, but one from some friends' wedding a few weeks later.

Unusually, I picked my background first, followed by a Project Life card to go next to my photo and hold my heart embellishment, then a few papers to go with them.

I shuffled papers for a while, before I decided to adapt a sketch from Stuck?! Sketches. It's a three-photo sketch and I only have one, but the circles were just what I needed to break up the boxiness of the layouts that I'd tried and rejected.



My background paper came from a Quirky Kit last autumn, and the text print heart was an exclusive piece in the same kit. The chalkboard heart was another Quirky Kit item, but from summer 2014. I had three left from the pack and had I intended to use them all when I started the page but it didn't work out.


Supplies
Paper - Pink Paislee Cedar Lane, My Mind's Eye Now & Then, My Mind's Eye Find Your Wings & Fly, Carta Bella Baby Mine
Card - Project Life Sweet Edition
Letters - October Afternoon
Stickers - EK Success, My Mind's Eye Now & Then
Brad - My Mind's Eye Now & Then
Ink - Docrafts
Mesh - from Stash

Tools
Sewing Machine

Friday 12 February 2016

Lea Valley Walk - Tottenham Locks to Waltham Abbey

At the beginning of January I walked the first section of the Lea Valley Walk, from Limehouse to Tottenham. A busy month at work meant that it was February before I could resume my walk.

I headed back to Tottenham Lock last Tuesday morning,



and headed north past a boatyard with what I think were two Thames barges.



I soon came to Stonebridge Lock, 



where I crossed to the opposite bank, and passed a genuine shipwreck (or should that be a boatwreck?)



I followed the path and the river across Tottenham Marshes and it was all feeling rather more countryside than London, when IKEA loomed in the distance.


 This was definitely London after all, and I passed a bus depot,


an industrial estate and the retail park, before passing under the North Circular and emerging by the London Waste EcoPark, a recycling facility.


According to my walk guide, there's a sewage works nearby too, and I could smell more than I could see of it as I headed on towards Pickett's Lock.


The lock itself has been renamed Alfie's Lock in Honour of the former lock-keeper. The Canal & Riverside Trust website says that this was a temporary change, for one month last summer, but the signs are still in place now in February.



The path now runs between the River Lee Navigation and the William Girling Reservoir, but sadly the reservoir is hidden by a huge embankment. The area opens up to a golf course on the left bank


and sheep on the embankment beside me made it all feel like countryside again.


Onwards I went, following that embankment all the way to Ponders End, where a handy signpost pointed out my progress so far and still to go.


When I set out from Tottenham, I hadn't been sure whether I could make it to Waltham Abbey, or whether I'd have to stop at Enfield Lock. So far, so good, and I began to think that I'd actually get all the way.

I passed Ponders End Lock, squashed between two road bridges,


and then a rather picturesque building, not mentioned in my guide, but I later found out that it's the back of a pub.


The next stretch was rather monotonous, with an unchanging view of the embankment (now screening King George's Reservoir) and the electricity pylons.



However I made good progress, and was soon approaching the winter moorings that run up to Enfield Lock.



I crossed the river just below the lock itself, and emerged into the middle of a pretty village, 



next to what I guess used to be the lock-keeper's cottage.



The houses of Government Row were built for workers at the nearby Royal Small Arms Factory. I'm not sure I'd like to live quite so close to the water, especially as my map shows another waterway running behind them.


Leaving Enfield Lock behind me, I reached Rammey Marsh



and the lock of the same name.



The "Kimberley" was in the lock as I passed and we kept pace with one another as far as the M25 before she pulled ahead.



I passed under the motorway, and the end of my walk was finally in sight. All day, I'd been following the River Lee Navigation, a canalised river that follows a similar course to the River Lea itself. The Lea had been over to my right, often on the far side of the various reservoirs that I'd passed, but finally the two run side-be-side here, with the Lea just the other side of the 'central reservation' in this photo.



I reached the main road in Waltham Abbey, and looked back at both waterways (Lea on the left, Lee on the right).



Then I crossed over to look at the next stretch, should I choose to continue...



I've completed the London part of the Lea Valley Walk now, but it does continue, ultimately arriving at the river's source in Leagrave near Luton. I'm fairly sure I won't go that far, but another section or two through the Hertfordshire countryside is tempting. 

I've used the train up until now, but the journey from home is obviously getting longer and longer. It took three trains and a tube to get back this time but I think that I will use the car in future. The railway follows the Lea Valley for the next 15 miles or so to its terminus at Hertford, so I can park the car, walk another section and then catch the train back to my start point.


Wednesday 10 February 2016

My Boy

I've been a follower of Mercy Tiara (Tracy Banks) on YouTube for some years, and she's announced her plans for a series of 27 Day Challenges this year. Each one will be posted on the first of the month, and we have 27 days to play along. Her first challenge is to use up an older collection or kit, and this lead me back to Basic Grey Archaic, which I tried and failed to kill off a few weeks ago (with a page called Play Hard). 

I pulled out the remaining pieces once again; lots of my paper scraps were 6" wide so I started by lining them up in a column, then layered a 6x6 piece and a 4x6 piece on top, followed by a few small strips, before I decided on my photo. I picked an old one of my son, which I'd previously cropped to about 4x4, and added a couple of stickers and a circle of the dinosaur print.



And guess what? I still haven't killed off this collection, and I only used two of those pesky stickers.

Supplies
Cardstock - Bazzill
Paper - Basic Grey Archaic
Letters - American Crafts
Brads - Bazzill
Ink - Docrafts
Mist - Mister Huey's


Monday 8 February 2016

Birthday Card

I have three birthdays coming later this month, so I'm trying to make the cards in advance rather than the night before I need to post them. Sketch-n-Scrap posted a card sketch last week that picked for the first one.

I used a navy blue card blank with a piece of 'Happy Birthday' paper as my background.  Then I punched and cut a few sizes of circle from scraps of Fancy Pants' Wave Searcher papers from a few years back. When I added them to my card, I spread them out a bit more than in the sketch, and I interspersed them with punched stars and small dots, also adding epoxy stickers to the smallest size of circle.



Saturday 6 February 2016

Forget the Selfie

A new year begins in February over at shimelle.com with the announcement of weekly challenges each Monday. The first one was to scrapbook a selfie, but I didn't quite do this, although I am in the photo I scrapped.

I'm a Luddite and don't have a smartphone, so selfies are few and far between. My husband took a few on the first formal night of our cruise last year, but they are truly terrible, so bad that we had a professional photo taken on the second formal night the following week, and it's that picture that I used here. 

There isn't normally a story to this sort of posed photo which makes it difficult to think of an interesting page title. However this time Shimelle's challenge got me thinking about those failed selfies and lead directly to the title of my page.




My page design came from another challenge - this week's sketch from Let's Get Sketchy. I copied the main diagonal elements, but I added a journalling box on the left, and moved my title across above it.

I cut the word Selfie four times on my Silhouette Portrait and layered them up to give the word a little dimension, adding the rest of the title with letter stickers.

Supplies
Cardstock - Colorset
Paper - Heidi Swapp No Limits, Colorbok Travel, Graphic 45 Artisan Style, HOTP Ivory Sarabook
Vellum - Crate Paper
Doily - Dovecraft
Letters - American Crafts
Wood Veneer - Heidi Swapp
Word Stickers - Tim Holtz Idea-ology

Tools
Silhouette Portrait
Woodware Scalloped Circle Punch
X-Cut Small Circle Punch

Thursday 4 February 2016

Main Street

That's Main Street in Corner Brook, Newfoundland which was the fifth port of call on our cruise to Canada last summer. I had a few photos from the city centre that I wanted to include in our holiday album, and I was stuck for a page title so I just used the street name.

There's a mix of landscape and portrait images, and none of them is a 'main' photo so I printed them all at the same size and scraplifted a page that I made about 18 months ago (Talk to the Animals).




That big wood veneer camera from Heidi Swapp has always seemed to be too large on the page, but it fitted nicely on the label that I used on this one. The aperture is rather large too - nearly 1" across - but the @ fills it nicely, and I echoed these with a smaller camera and a star in the top cluster.

Supplies
Cardstock - Colorset
Paper - Heidi Swapp No Limits
Letters - Anita's Glitterations
Wood Veneer - Heidi Swapp, Studio Calico
Enamel Dots - Doodlebug
Ink & Mist - Docrafts

Tools
Woodware Scalloped Circle Punch
Dovecraft Filmstrip Stamp

Tuesday 2 February 2016

Captain James Cook Historic Site

Yes. it's another double page! That's two in less than a week! I don't generally enjoy them, unless I have a good sketch... and this one from ScrapMuch? was almost perfect for my photos from the Captain James Cook Historic Site in Corner Brook, Newfoundland.

I did add an extra photo on the left, and I changed the size of one of the photos on the right to give extra importance to the statue of Captain Cook. He was the first person to reliably map the coast of Newfoundland, and it was this work that led to his later voyages to the Pacific. 



The Historic Site is a small area of parkland at the top of Crow Hill. It was quite a walk, but definitely worth it for the views over the bay. I used another of the view photos on my Corner Brook title page - here.

There's no 'proper' title as it is on the left-most photo, with some journalling strips beneath it. I could have written directly on the background on the right, but I used strips again so that it would end just above the photos, and I wouldn't either run out of space or have an awkward gap.

Supplies
Cardstock - Colorset
Paper - Heidi Swapp No Limits
Arrow Clip - Freckled Fawn
Ink - Docrafts

Tools
Big Shot & Tag Die
Fiskars Postage Stamp Border Punch