It's been a slow start to the Summer Photography Scavenger Hunt for me this year. A day in London would normally yield a few finds but I didn't have much spare time on my latest trip (for business) and only managed one:
5 - Pedal Power
A row of 'Boris Bikes' from London's public cycle hire scheme (named after the former mayor).
Here's the full list:
- The Rosiness Of Red
- Stripes
- A Framed View
- Wings
- Pedal Power
- Glorious Green
- An Unexpected Reflection
- A Pile Of
- Looks Smaller Than You
- A Field of Plenty
- Pretty In Pink
- Bell(s)
- Equal Portions
- A Trilogy Of Three
- Out Of The Blue
- Something That Could Be From A Favourite Book/Movie
- Re-purposed
- Currency; Coinage or Paper (the odd, the different, the beautiful)
- Picture Postcard Perfect
- Mellow Yellow
Alternate A: a shopping bag (not the store's plastic)
Alternate B: a coupon to use
I thought it was an interesting list when it was published, but now I'm finding it to be a challenging list too. So many of the prompts are open to interpretation that it's been harder than just going out to take pictures of say a church or a post box which are clearly defined.
Still, there are three months still to go as the hunt runs until 30 September this year, and I'm sure to find a few of these on holiday, especially the currency and the bell (since we will be cruising on a ship which I know has a bell).
This hunt is hosted by Mary-Lou at Patio Postcards, and she's published the list of participating bloggers today. I'm off to check them out, I'm sure most have made more progress than me. Why don't you join in too?
It's been ages since I made a page from our cruise to Iceland, Greenland and Norway last summer. First a poorly computer separated me from my organised photos, then the madness of National Scrapbooking Day (which just wasn't suited to working on this album), and finally a lack of scrapping time recently all mean that it's been three months since my last page.
I'd rather like to get this album finished before we cruise again later this year. Otherwise I know that the newer photos will demand my attention and I'll never get this one done. (Ask me how I know - I haven't finished a holiday album from 2009 yet and it's haunting me.)
So... it's back to Iceland and a tour we took from Akureyri. It was the only ship's tour we did, we normally prefer to do our own thing but this seemed to be the best way of seeing the geology of a country shaped by volcanic activity. One of the places we visited was Dimmuborgir National Park, and our guide stopped beside this crack in the ground to explain that it is the boundary between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, which are moving apart at the rate of around 1" per year.
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| Shimelle's Page |
I printed a couple of photos of the fault line, one in 4x6 and one in 3x4 as they are different in scale and I didn't think they would work as a pair if I printed them at the same size, and then went looking for a sketch or scraplift that suited them. I came up with Glitter Girl Adventure 056, where Shimelle had a deliberate space between her two photos that I found attractive.
My page isn't a carbon copy; once I had the initial placement of photos and mats I did my own thing with the positioning of my title, journalling and embellishments.
Supplies
Cardstock - Craft Sensations, Bazzill, Papermania
Paper - Photo Play Boarding Pass, Jillibean Soup Staples, Basic Grey, Pink Paislee Memorandum
Letters - American Crafts
Tag - American Crafts/Amy Tangerine
Word Stickers - Tim Holtz
Washi Tape - Ebay, Little B
Enamel Dots - Studio Calico, Simple Stories
Ink - Ranger
Mist - Mister Huey's, Docrafts
Tools
American Crafts/Shimelle Stamps
Big Shot & Spellbinders Circle Dies
We'll be celebrating our Silver Wedding Anniversary next month with a party, and I decided to make all the invitations rather than buy them. I kept the design simple, with easy to repeat shapes, but it was still quite a time-consuming process. Having made a prototype, and agreed a few tweaks with my husband, I roped him in to a production-line process rather than making each card individually.
We printed our invitations on one side of some 4x6 cards and then decorated the other side. We picked a variety of floral patterned papers (using up some older, thinner papers in the process) and I cut them to size for the backgrounds, before he rounded opposite corners and I inked the edges. I cut a pile of 25s from silver card on my Silhouette portrait and stuck those down while he punched a load of hearts from coloured cardstock; we joined forces to stick the hearts in pairs on the patterned side of each invitation and also above the wording on the printed side.
These are just two of the invitations we made. We used about six different patterns in all and varied the colours of the hearts to match. We intend to repeat the silver 25s and the punched hearts in our table decorations on the day.
More cards from me today, it's all I seem to have time for at the moment. These two are dead simple, with the numbers 18 and 21 cut on my Silhouette.
I chose a casual font for the 18, layered it over a number-print paper, and used glittery peel-offs for my sentiment and the stars. I was planning to use another number print for the background of the 21, but then I found this key print and decided to use that instead as 21 is traditionally the age when you get the key to the door. I chose a more formal font for the number on this one, and decided to cut an offset in a darker colour. I intended to add a sentiment to this one but I didn't have anything that stood out against the key print so I settled for stamping the inside of the card instead.
Happy Father's Day to those celebrating today.
This is the card that I made for my Dad, using a sketch from Sketch-n-Scrap's Summer Daze virtual crop on Facebook.
I used the Industriana paper pad from Kanban, and swapped the flowers from the sketch for stars.
We're halfway through June now, and I've finally remembered to make my parkrun page for May. When I joined parkrun at the beginning of the year I wanted to make it a habit for life, and so far I've not missed a week.
There's less to say about each individual run now so I've put all the May photos on one page and journalled about the month as a whole.
It's a very simple page, 8x8 in size with little embellishment as I want to keep the pages flat in the album. I used a couple of A4 magazine freebie papers for this page; it's a good size and a good way to use up some of those 'free' gifts.
My blog posts have been running behind my scrapbooking recently, and I made this page at the end of May from one of the sketch challenges in the Quirky Kit Subscribers Group on Facebook.
I decided to kill off a 6x6 pad for this page, an old one from My Mind's Eye that I have been trying to finish for a while but there's always more there than I think. It was mostly odd shaped scraps, perfect for punching lots of circles which I arranged in a similar way to those on the sketch, though mine are smaller so I used more.
I thought that the jumble of patterns and colours would work well with a toddler photo, so picked an old one of my son and my friend's daughter and matted it on a neutral woodgrain with a few scraps from the pad layered at the edge. The page looked unfinished to my eye so I let it sit for a while before adding a doodled outline to each circle, a few epoxy stars and some word stickers.
Supplies
Cardstock - Colorset
Paper - My Mind's Eye
Letters - American Crafts
Word Stickers - Authentique
Epoxy Stars - Funny Sticker World
Ink - Ranger
Mist - Mister Huey's, Cosmic Shimmer, Tattered Angels
Tools
X-Cut Circle Punch
June's a busy month for birthdays here; in particular we have five in five days among our friends and families just now. I made these two cards for teenage boys in the same session using the same materials with two recent card sketches.
The first one was from Stick It Down and that spotty background inspired me to use a mask for the base of the card. I picked a couple of colours of distress inks and used an ink applicator with a new mask from Creative Embellishments. I then looked for papers that would match the ink colours and chose an old 6x6 pad from My Mind's Eye for the banner. I stamped and punched my sentiment but it looked a bit lost so I added an extra circle behind it.
My second card is based on card sketch #123 from Sketch-n-Scrap. I used the same mask, stamp and paper pad and one of the papers had a triangle print that was perfectly suited to the banner strip across the card. I stamped and punched another sentiment square and used that instead of the flower on the sketch but I moved it down to connect it with the other card elements as I didn't like it 'floating' where the flower is. This way you can also clearly see what the pattern is on the speech bubble paper.
This page comes from the last of the National Scrapbooking Day challenges in the For the Love of Pretty Paper group on Facebook, though I actually made the page long after NSD had passed. The challenge was a sketch from Laura featuring a trio of tags and I have a pack of tags that I want to stash-bust so it was a must-do for me.
I need to renew my passport this year and that had set me thinking about scrapbooking some of my older passport photos. I don't have originals but I took new pictures of the photo pages of my old passports and put one on each tag of the sketch. These are me aged 15, 20 and 27.
Supplies
Paper - Basic Grey Carte Postale, KaiserCraft Secret Bird Society
Tags - American Crafts
Globe - OneCanoeTwo
Epoxy Stickers - Ebay
Enamel Dots - My Mind's Eye
Washi Tape - Stampin' Up?
Mist - Mister Huey's
I'd printed an assortment of photos before National Scrapbooking Day, different numbers and sizes including a couple of sets for double pages. One of them was a group of five 4x3 photos from Cartmel in Cumbria where we stayed for a night last December having won a night's B&B in a raffle.
I decided to scrap those photos for a simple challenge from For the Love of Pretty Paper, to use a vertical striped paper. I had a large scrap of striped paper that suited the colours of the old buildings in Cartmel rather well so I started arranging and rearranging the photos on the page for a layout that I liked. One thing that soon struck me was that the photo of Cartmel Priory was just too small. The other buildings filled their frames but I'd taken the Priory photo from a distance to include the graveyard and it looked too small and insignificant. I printed it again at 4x6 and I'm much happier now, the building is a similar size to the others and it seems more balanced. Back to rearranging the photos and I decided on a circle of photos backed by a circle of the striped paper.
Supplies
Paper - Bo Bunny Double Dot, KaiserCraft Madame Boutique
Stickers - Bo Bunny Mama-razzi, atd
Enamel Dots - Doodlebug
Tools
Kreaxions Circle Cutter
Silhouette Portrait
June is here, summer is on its way and today is the first day of the Summer Photography Scavenger Hunt run by Mary-Lou at Patio Postcards. It's a varied list this year and plenty of the items are open to interpretation so I look forward to seeing what the other participants find, especially when they are in other parts of the world.
- The Rosiness Of Red
- Stripes
- A Framed View
- Wings
- Pedal Power
- Glorious Green
- An Unexpected Reflection
- A Pile Of
- Looks Smaller Than You
- A Field of Plenty
- Pretty In Pink
- Bell(s)
- Equal Portions
- A Trilogy Of Three
- Out Of The Blue
- Something That Could Be From A Favourite Book/Movie
- Re-purposed
- Currency; Coinage or Paper (the odd, the different, the beautiful)
- Picture Postcard Perfect
- Mellow Yellow
Alternate A: a shopping bag (not the store's plastic)
Alternate B: a coupon to use
The hunt runs for four months, until the end of September, so get your camera out and join us.
