Friends

Another page for a Lottie Loves Paper stash-busting challenge; this one was to use only patterned paper and no cardstock for a page. I like a patchwork for showing off a variety of patterned papers, and turned to this month's sketch from Creative Scrappers, pairing it with an old photo of my son and a friend's daughter when they were toddlers.

I chose a 6x6 paper pad from Authentique as being the easiest way to use lots of co-ordinating patterns and then joined two pieces together for the large box at the bottom of the sketch. Two of the long strips at the top of my page are washi tape and the third is a paper from my scraps box. My background is almost plain, but it's a very subtle patterned paper from Echo Park, and not cardstock.

Next I hand-stitched the three circles and added circular embellishments in the same way as the sketch has them. One of my papers had critters on it so I punched some of those to use with epoxy circles rather than all being paper. My main changes were to use more circles instead of the star indicated on the sketch and to move my title as it fitted perfectly at the bottom of the page and looked lost and 'floaty' on the left.

Supplies
Paper - Echo Park Not to Self, Authentique Nestled, Heidi Swapp No Limits
Letters - SEI
Washi Tape - Dovecraft, Little B, Unknown
Word Sticker - Crate Paper/Maggie Holmes
Epoxy Circles - Ebay
Enamel Dots - Studio Calico, Stampin'Up
Embroidery Thread - DMC
Ink - Ranger
Mist - Docrafts

Tools
Fiskars Circles Template
X-Cut Circle Punches
Big Shot & Spellbinders Circle Dies

Tarn Hows & Black Crag

This was another page driven by a challenge. Lottie Loves Paper asked us to mix Something Old with Something New for one of their stash-busting challenges. I started out from the new; my most recent scrapbook order actually came from Lottie Loves Paper and contained the 6x6 pad and stickers from OneCanoeTwo's Creekside collection. These outdoors-y papers took me back to December when my husband and I spent a weekend in the Lake District. I printed three photos from a walk we took then and looked for a sketch that would work with my photos and papers, turning up one from Shimelle's 'Sketch to Scrapbook Page' series.

I had also bought a few 12x12 sheets from Creekside, but in order to mix old and new I picked out an older alternative from Studio Calico; it's labelled 2015 but I can't have had it that long as I first ordered from them in 2016. I mixed old and new in the embellishment too - the flowers are ancient, the woodgrain paper and heart puffy stickers are middling and the enamel dots and word stickers are new.

I also worked this page to a recent weekly challenge at UKScrappers; Elaine asked us to use a non-white background, two or more photos and a doodled element, so it's her fault that I doodled around the edge of the page.

Supplies
Paper - Studio Calico Ariel, One CanoeTwo Creekside, Authentique Nestled
Letters - Elle's Studio
Word Stickers - OneCanoeTwo Creekside
Heart Stickers - American Crafts
Flowers - from Stash
Enamel Dots - Simple Stories, Stampin' Up!

Tools
Big Shot & Spellbinders Circle Die

Pretty in Pink

I'm moving away from my cruise album now, in order to take on a few challenges that don't fit to it. This page was entirely inspired by one of the stash-busting challenges from Lottie Loves Paper this month. Prompt 6 was to use cameras or hearts, and this immediately brought to mind an 8x8 camera print transparency that I have and love, but want on a page rather than in my stash. 

The transparency is mostly pink, so I looked for a photo of my daughter to go with it and turned up a baby photo that matched really well. At this point, Sketch-n-Scrap published their mid-month sketch which has a large square and a portrait photo, perfect for my transparency and the photo I'd found.

I wanted a few papers behind my photo and chose some from a 6x6 pad to layer up. There's a bit of black in those papers so I then rummaged through my embellishments (which I store by colour) for pink, aqua and black pieces, finding an acetate heart to take the place of the flowers in the sketch and enough other pieces for three clusters around the photo.

Babies and hearts also fit the criteria for one of the options from the "This Month in History" challenge at Grand Diva's Creative Corner where Brenda is celebrating the birth of Abraham Lincoln in February 1809.

I'd planned to use a plain white background for my page so that the transparency would be 'legible' but I found that it was too stark and switched it out for a pink ombre instead. I don't scrap with pink very often and I'm happy to have this pretty paper in my album now too.

Supplies
Paper - Pink Paislee/Paige Evans, We R Memory Keepers Love Notes, My Mind's Eye 
Transparency - Pretty Little Studio, Freckled Fawn
Letters - Jillibean Soup, KaiserCraft
Tag - My Mind's Eye
Labels - Pretty Little Sticker
Stickers - Pebbles, My Mind's Eye
Enamel Shapes - Freckled Fawn, Stampin' Up!
Flowers & Frames - from Stash
Ink - Hobbycraft
Mist - Mister Huey's

Tools
Big Shot & Spellbinders Circles Die

The Musical Merrymaker

Another cruise page, with photos of one of our guest entertainers. Andy Eastwood aka the Musical Merrymaker is a showman and ukulele-player who did two evening shows on board playing classics from the era of George Formby and also his own arrangements of other pieces.

I used the first of the February sketches from Stuck?! Sketches for this page, but switched the doily to a square of vellum as I haven't been using doilies or circles in this album. I wanted a much longer title and subtitle for my page than that in the sketch so I moved them to the bottom of the page where I added an extra strip of paper and some washi tape.

Supplies
Cardstock - Craft Sensations, Bazzill
Paper - Photo Play Boarding Pass, Echo Park Travel, Echo Park Note to Self
Vellum - Crate Paper
Letters - Basic Grey
Stickers - Studio Calico, Echo Park, Papermania
Washi Tape - Tesco
Enamel Dots - Studio Calico
Ink - Ranger
Mist - Mister Huey's, Docrafts

Tools
Silhouette Portrait & Filmstrip Cut File
Big Shot & Spellbinders Circles Die

Black Watch

This is the last of the 'introductory' pages for my cruise album - I always try to make a page with photos of our ship in each port. My itinerary is often on the title page of the album but this time I've combined it with the ship photos.

We were supposed to visit six ports, but one was cancelled due to bad weather so I had five photos from the ports of call and one from Rosyth where we started out. This month's sketch in the For the Love of Pretty Paper Facebook group had six photos so made the perfect starting point to my page, though I needed to rotate it and my photos were larger.

I matted each photo on two papers, mostly from a 6x6 pad which tied in with another of the stash-busting challenges from Lottie Loves Paper, to use six or more 6x6 papers on a page. 

Once the photos were double-matted, they were even larger so I dropped the extra pieces behind them. I also had to move the title as it wouldn't work in the middle.

I added the itinerary to the left of the page, with a few pieces of ephemera, but they needed to be anchored by something so I added the paper strips on the left. All-in-all my page moved a fair distance from the original sketch, but I'm happy with it.

Supplies
Cardstock - Craft Sensations
Papers - Photo Play Boarding Pass, Jillibean Soup, Basic Grey, Echo Park
Letters - Fancy Pants
Stickers - Photo Play, 7Gypsies
Cork Stars - The Works

Tools
American Crafts Notebook Border Punch
Big Shot & Little B Arrows Die

Road Trip

Having made the title page for my cruise album (Cruise 2017), I'm moving on to one of my 'introductory' pages that come between the title and the first port of call. We live in Essex and our ship left from Rosyth (near Edinburgh) so we turned the journey into a road trip, staying overnight in Durham and Edinburgh en route.

I'll cover some of the stops in more detail in my main annual album, but I did want to include the trip in the cruise album (and bust some of the road trip themed pieces that are in the Boarding Pass collection). I based my page around two main elements - a map of the UK with our stops marked by enamel dots and a column of photos from the places we stopped - Durham Market Hall, Hadrian's Wall, the English-Scottish Border, Jedburgh Abbey, the Palace of Holyroodhouse and the Forth Rail Bridge.

Supplies
Cardstock - Craft Sensations, Bazzill
Paper - Photo Play Boarding Pass, Simply Creative, Simple Stories
Vellum - American Crafts
Letters - Fancy Pants
Die-Cuts & Stickers - Photo Play Boarding Pass
Enamel Dots/Shapes - Marianne Designs, Stampin' Up!
Ink - Ranger

Tools
Silhouette Portrait & Filmstrip Cut File
Big Shot
X-Cut Ticket Stubs Die
Little B Arrows Die
X-Cut Circle Punch

Cruise 2017

Two challenges collided to make me do this page next when I'd intended to move on to Akureyri in my cruise album. We're on our third run through the alphabet in the ABC Challenges at UKScrappers and I picked up A for Adventure; also one of the stash-busting challenges from Lotties Loves Paper this month is to use as much ephemera as possible on a page. 

I have the ephemera pack and the sticker sheet from Photo Play Paper's Boarding Pass collection; some of the pieces are more travel-themed than others and I'd mentally reserved them for my title page. One of them has the wording 'It's time for a new adventure' which fits in with the UKScrappers challenge and I used an 'adventure' word sticker too.

We visited three countries on this trip (Iceland, Greenland and Norway) so I picked three scenery photos and printed them at 4x4 to fit across the page with paper strips above and below. I used a vertical strip of navy paper to ground all the die-cut pieces and arranged them in a column, trying to fit them together like a jigsaw puzzle.

I popped a couple of the stickers up on foam squares and scattered a few enamel dots and wood veneer stars into the mix. I cut the title on my Silhouette and added the three country names with letter stickers.

Supplies
Cardstock - Craft Sensations
Paper - Photo Play Boarding Pass, Pink Paislee Memorandum
Letters - Basic Grey
Die-Cuts - Photo Play Boarding Pass
Stickers - Photo Play Boarding Pass, October Afternoon Treasure Map
Wood Veneer - Studio Calico
Enamel Dots/Shapes - Doodlebug
Brad - 7Gypsies
Washi Tape - Tesco
Ink - Ranger
Mist - Docrafts

Tools
Silhouette Portrait
Kreaxions Circle Cutter 

Lovely

I'm flitting between my cruise pages and challenges that take my fancy but can't be done as part of the cruise album, and this page falls into the latter category. This month's sketch at UKScrappers with two circles of stitching and some trees in the embellishment caught my eye and made me think of scrapbooking a Christmas tree photo. (I can't copy the sketch here, but it's on the link if you are interested).

Lottie Loves Paper have a series of stash-busting challenges this month, and the fifth one was "Small is Beautiful" - use up your tiny embellishments. I was originally going to spread some Christmas brads and other small pieces out around the stitched circles, but I changed tack and decided to fill in the gap between the two circles with the smallest pieces I could find instead. My provisional title for the page was "Red, Green and Gold" and I stuck to that colour scheme, starting with gold enamel hearts and chipboard stars, then brads in all three colours and finally filling in the gaps with gems. I store most of my embellishments by colour and when I found a glittery die-cut of the word "lovely" in my red drawer that became my title instead. I layered it over an acetate circle from the gold drawer and I love that the circle looks like a Christmas bauble.

Supplies
Cardstock - Bazzill
Paper - Basic Grey Serenade, OneCanoeTwo Creekside
Chipboard Stars - Studio Calico
Enamel Hearts - Marianne Designs
Acetate - Studio Calico
Brads - 7Gypsies, Dovecraft, Papermania
Gems - TPC Studio, Papermania, ZVA Creative
Embroidery Thread - DMC

Tools
Fiskars Circle Template

Austurvöllur

Austurvöllur is the main square in Reykjavik, and it borders both the Alþingishúsið (Parliament House) and the cathedral (which I've already scrapbooked here). The Alþingishúsið was the fifth of the photos that I considered when making my Historic Houses page but I thought that it was best scrapped as part of this page with an general view of the square and a close-up of the central statue (Jón Sigurðsson, a nineteenth century campaigner for Icelandic independence from Denmark).

My page design is another one from Shimelle's A Most Magical Scrapbook class. Hers had a 4x3 photo next to the 4x6s, and I originally printed my statue photo at that size but I felt that it dominated the page so I reprinted it at 3x2. 

This is the last page for Reykjavik and I've also finished Olden. I still have a page each to make from Tasiilaq and Ålesund and I've barely touched Akureyri and the trip we took from there so maybe I should focus on that next.

Supplies
Cardstock - Craft Sensations, Bazzill
Paper - Photo Play Boarding Pass, Echo Park Note to Self, Pink Paislee Memorandum
Letters - Jillibean Soup
Puffy Stickers - Fancy Pants, Bella Boulevard
Ink - Ranger
Mist - Docrafts

Tools
Big Shot
X-Cut Bunting Mini Dies
X-Cut Tag Die
Spellbinders Circles Dies
X-Cut Circle Punch
Fiskars Postage Stamp Border Punch

Historic Houses

This page is a "twin" to one I made a couple of weeks ago. That page (Town Park) was the first one that I made for my cruise album that was a flat grid rather than being made from layers of paper, so it was a design principle that I wanted to repeat elsewhere.

We saw various historic buildings in Reykjavik and I had five that I had wanted to include in the album, but didn't want to give each one a whole page, and I was undecided as to how to combine them. While making the Town Park page (which had one large and three small portrait photos) I decided to repeat it rotated for landscape photos this time. I've used pictures of four of the buildings on this page and kept one of the Parliament for another page.

Supplies
Cardstock - Craft Sensations, Bazzill
Paper - Photo Play Boarding Pass, Echo Park Winter Park
Letters - Basic Grey, My Mind's Eye
Washi Tape - Little B, Unknown
Puffy Stickers - Fancy Pants
Ink - Ranger
Mist - Docrafts

Tools
Big Shot
Little B Arrows Die
Dovecraft Stars Die
X-Cut Circle Punch

Bounce!

With all the new collections being released shortly, Lottie Loves Paper are setting a series of stash-busting challenges this month so that we can clear out before we restock. Prompt 2 was "Go Sticker Crazy" and I decided to use up an old pack of alpha stickers. I bought these and the matching paper back in 2011 and although I've used almost all the paper the stickers have languished in my stash. I found that they're a bit big for titles, there's only one of most letters and the mix of patterns was overwhelming.

I arranged and rearranged them on the page (luckily they are cardstock and not too sticky) and came up with two basic choices, either a rigid row by row arrangement which filled the page, or fitting the letters together more closely while rotating some of them to fit which filled about two-thirds of the page. I much preferred the look of the latter, which also fitted better to the carefree nature of the photo I picked. I filled in some of the gaps with punctuation pieces and enamel shapes and outlined all the stickers.

My photo is a very old one of my son and his friend. I embellished directly over a shadowy corner, and added the title in black foam letters to contrast with the flat patterned letters in the background. 

Supplies
Paper - Pink Paislee, My Mind's Eye Wild Asparagus
Black Letters - Papermania
Letter Stickers - My Mind's Eye Wild Asparagus
Ticket - Basic Grey
Leaves - Unknown
Enamel Shapes - Marianne Designs
Ink - Ranger

Tools
Big Shot & Little B Arrows Die
X-Cut Corner Punch

Fire & Ice 2018

This was the third page that I made for Stick It Down's recent cyber-crop, and it's another double. Ashley's challenge was to combine a song title with any sketch from the SID archive. I'm not a fan of song title challenges as a rule, but my daughter had just come back from a 'Fire & Ice' scout camp (a song by Pat Benatar) so that was enough to get me started. 

Their scout leader had posted some photos to Facebook during the weekend, so I sorted through them and looked for a suitable sketch, hitting on this one from January 2015. One of the weekend's activities had been wood burning so I used the photo from that as my title. (Aquila is the Explorer Scout Unit that my daughter belongs to.)

Being a Fire and Ice camp, I wasn't sure whether to scrap these photos with warm (fire) or cool (ice) colours, so I tried them against a few colours and orange was the clear winner with even the snowy picture looking good against it.

Lotties Loves Paper have just launched a series of stash-busting challenges in their Facebook group, and the first of those was wood. I've used 24 wood veneer stars on this page but that's barely dented my stash at all. I'm on my second packet of them and have a third ready for when this pack runs low.

Supplies

Paper - Simple Stories Awesome, Recollections Awesome Boy

Stickers - Simple Stories Take a Hike, The Paper Studio

Wood Veneer Stars - Studio Calico

Enamel Dots - Stampin' Up

Ink - Ranger

Tools

Fiskars Shape Cutter & Circles Template

X-Cut Circle Punch

Big Picture 'Explore' Stamp Set

Almost Grown Up

I'm back with another page from last weekend's cyber crop organised by the ladies at Stick It Down. Laura's challenge was a 'Grab 5' where she asked us to use a stencil, stamping, alpha stickers, sequins and this sketch.

My choice of photo to use was completely driven by the sketch. My daughter attended the local scouts' dinner and dance for the first time last year. It's a formal event for over 16s only and the only photo I have of her and her friends was small and square, perfect for this sketch.

Next decision was the background paper; I wanted it to be fairly plain for the mixed media effects in the sketch, but I didn't want to use completely plain cardstock as a lot of it would be on show. The paper I chose had some paint lines and spatters already printed on it, and I used two stencils and a stamp to add to them. 

The hardest part of the sketch was that large arrow, and I played around with various options before ditching it in favour of paper strips spanning the width of the page, sitting my title above them.

The long line of spatter is mostly printed on the page, though I added stars, sequins and some silver mist to it. I also added a small cluster at the top to cap the line, though it's not part of the original sketch.

Supplies
Paper - Pinkfresh Studio Indigo Hills, OneCanoeTwo Creekside, Crate Paper Random
Letters - Fancy Pants, Anita's
Stickers - MAMBI, OneCanoeTwo
Sequins - from Stash
Ink - Hobbycraft, Papermania
Mist - Mister Huey's

Tools
That Special Touch Grid Stencil
Heidi Swapp Star Stencil
Studio Calico Star Stamp

Austria 2016

I have loads of scrapbook pages for 2016, so many that they're going to need three albums rather than my usual two, so I decided to remove the pages from our holiday in Austria and give them their own album. This means that I need a new page summarising the holiday for the 2016 album.

The January challenge at For the Love of Pretty Paper was to make a review page for 2017, using us least six photos. Since these challenges are just for fun, I had no qualms about twisting this one to make my holiday review page. I printed off a dozen photos as squares (just smaller than 4x4) with the intention of cropping some of them to be landscape or portrait as required once I had a plan for the page. Well, I shuffled them around for a bit, didn't manage to come up with a plan and then put them to one side in favour of 'easier' pages.

Last weekend, Stick It Down ran their first cybercrop, which included a couple of double pages and inspired me to pull those photos out again. Cathy's challenge combined a tic-tac-toe grid with any double sketch of our choice, so I looked for one that could be adapted for the photos I'd already printed, picking this one from May 2015.

I've used it before (Arlington Court), back when it was published, but the two pages look completely different and you wouldn't think that they started from the same place. With 12 square photos this time (I didn't crop any in the end), I laid out nine in a grid on the central square and use the other three to the sides as in the sketch.

My paper choices were relatively simple - I'd used Pink Paislee's Atlas collection for the original Austrian pages so I just pulled out the remaining papers and embellishments. I was low on full sheets but found a pair from another collection that would coordinate with them for the background.

For the tic-tac-toe part of the challenge, I chose the middle row - ink, stripes and stencil. My background paper has the stripes, I've inked all the paper edges and I also used ink through a stencil to add small circles on the background, around the paper circles on each side of the page.

Supplies
Paper - Fancy Pants Park Bench, Pink Paislee Atlas
Letters - American Crafts
Numbers - October Afternoon
Washi Tape - Ebay
Puffy Stickers - Fancy Pants, Jillibean Soup, American Crafts/Shimelle
Enamel Stars - Pink Paislee
Ink - Ranger
Mist - Docrafts

Tools
Big Shot
X-Cut Camera Die
Spellbinders Circle Dies
Fiskars Shape Cutter & Circle Templates