Summer Photography Scavenger Hunt - August

August's been a quiet month for me, and not much opportunity for scavenger hunting. I'm taking part in the Summer Photography Scavenger Hunt organised by Mary-Low at Patio Postcards and today is our link-up day.

I'm beginning to wonder if I will find all the items this year, so it's time to bag the alternatives just in case. 

Alt A - A Shopping Bag
I've been using this canvas bag for years, long before the plastic bag charge came into effect.

Alt B - A Coupon to Use
We were given these three as anniversary presents - two afternoon teas and a dinner with cocktails.

We are taking our main holiday (vacation) next month so hopefully I will have lots more photos to share with you at the end of September.

December 2014 / Year of the Bus

My last page was a summary of our holiday in Austria in the summer of 2014, and that filled in one of the last few gaps in my annual albums for that year. I'm so close to finishing those albums now that it would be a shame to move to other projects rather than just get them done. There were a couple of sets of photos that I had earmarked to include but now that I'm looking at them again I'm just not inspired to scrap them and they really won't be missed if they're not included in the album at all so that's two more pages crossed off the list.

Therefore I have one double and one divided page left to go. 2014 was the year that I decided to try including more 'everyday' moments in the album via 4x6 cards in divided page protectors, but this fizzled out by the middle of the year. August was the last monthly divided page that I made though September did get one for our camping holiday I've bypassed the quieter autumn months altogether and my last divided page will be for December. 

I had an almost complete 12x12 sheet of paper in my scraps box which I decided to use for all the cards. There were just a couple of shapes punched from one corner which I hid behind one of my photos. The front has my title card, a fuzzy print from my sister-in-law's birthday party and the cockerel which used to inhabit the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.

The back has its own title as all three photos are sculptures celebrating the Year of the Bus. There were sixty of them spread across London, but I only saw a handful - these three in December plus two in January in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

Austria

Earlier this year I was working on my 2014 album which was getting rather fat, so I decided to split out the pages from our summer holiday in Austria and give them their own separate album. That meant I needed to make an extra page to go in the annual album to summarise the holiday. The arrangement of the other pages from that summer meant that my Austrian page would have to be either a single or a triple. I wasn't sure that a single would have the space for enough photos to give a good round-up of the week, but I didn't really fancy making a triple so I left that page for a while and moved on to other things.

One of the prompts from Shimelle's latest class Layer on Layer on Layer has provided the solution to my conundrum, with a method for using lots of photos in a relatively small space via a Silhouette cut file. Shimelle used a commercial file with the word "Wanderlust" backed with five photos and five patterned papers but I made my own file for the word "Austria" and backed all the outlines with photos.

I also managed to tick off a couple of the challenges from the Summer Fiesta at For the Love of Pretty Paper; Week Three was travel-themed and I've combined Tuesday's prompts (florals, triangles and the word 'explore') with Wednesday's (florals, masks and geotags). If you are wondering, the challenges are set via a dice roll and florals just came up twice in a row.

Supplies
Paper - Pink Paislee Atlas, American Crafts/Dear Lizzy Star Gazer, Simple Stories I Am
Enamel Dots - Pink Paislee Atlas, Stampin' Up!
Puffy Stars - MRI
Washi Tape - Little B
Ink - Hobbycraft

Tools
Silhouette & SCT 'Outline Alpha' Free Cut File
Big Shot
Little B Arrows Die
X-Cut Camera Die
Creative Expressions Mask

Parkrun - July

I'm catching up on my parkrun scrapping, with my July page to share with you today. Needless to say, I'm still running each Saturday though the hot weather took its toll and made it really uncomfortable some weeks. 

Four Saturdays in July, so four photos, and I treated this as a double page. I found two pieces of yellow 8x8 paper, but not quite the same shade of yellow so I cut them in halves and pieced them back together to make my background. I had some old 2x12 paper in the same drawer so used some of those pieces as strips across the middle of the page behind my row of pictures. 

With all my jourmalling in place along the bottom, the top of the page looked a bit bare so I ran some washi tape across and added a few stickers to finish.

Double Christening

Some photos just won't wait to be scrapped; we attended a double christening for my husband's cousins' babies at the start of August and I finished the page three days later.

Both babies are boys so I started my paper selection with a baby blue and a much darker blue. I didn't want a monochrome page, and didn't find any good multicolour patterns that worked with my blues so I went with plain yellow instead, as blue and yellow always look good together, and then drew in some gold too.

Supplies
Paper - American Crafts/Shimelle Starshine, Pebbles New Arrival, HOTP, Craft Creations 
Letters - Docrafts, Simply Creative
Chipboard - Pebbles New Arrival
Label Stickers - Pebbles
Word Stickers - My Mind's Eye
Puffy Stickers - Belle Boulevard, MRI
Enamel Hearts - Stampin' Up!

Tools
Big Shot & The Works Scalloped Circles Dies
Hobbycraft Heart Punch

For the Love of Pretty Paper

If you're a regular reader here, you'll have seen numerous mentions of the Facebook group For the Love of Pretty Paper. It's my favourite Facebook group and the only one where I regularly contribute rather than lurking at the edges, so when someone proposed a group meet-up in real life, they didn't have to ask me twice.

I had three photos from the day and pondered whether this should be a single of double page. Normally three photos would be a single but I wanted to print them at 4x6 to see all the details and a single might not have enough space for plenty of pretty paper. On the other hand three photos on a double would leave a lot of extra space to fill. 

The double page sketch at Stick It Down this month is one for three portrait photos and it started me thinking about how I could adapt it for three landscape photos. The block on the right side would be fine rotated for landscape photos instead of portrait, but the left was harder to adapt. 

I thought of using a cut file for the large circle on the left, and then that morphed into a title piece which I backed with pieces of insta-cards from Simple Stories. Of course I couldn't then layer my photo over it so I had to rearrange the pictures, deciding on a block which includes another insta-card for my journalling. 

I love the fact that Simple Stories mostly use and re-use the same colour combinations in their collections so I was able to team the insta-cards from Good Day Sunshine with the floral paper from Homespun and ephemera from Carpe Diem. At first I tried to scatter the ephemera pieces to approximate to the circles on the sketch, but they didn't work for me like that so I ended up clustering them together. It was another step away from the original sketch, but I hope you can see how this page evolved from my initial inspiration.

Of course I couldn't make an FTLOPP page without also ticking off an FTLOPP challenge and this one fits the "E for Ephemera" prompt in our Alpha Relay (where different members set the challenge each week based around the letters of the alphabet).

Supplies

Cardstock - Papermania

Paper - OneCanoeTwo Creekside, Simple Stories Homespun, Kit'n'Kraft,

Insta-Cards - Simple Stories Good Day Sunshine

Ephemera - Simple Stories Carpe Diem, Jillibean Soup Hardy Hodgepodge, OneCanoeTwo Hazelwood

Stickers - OneCanoeTwo Stickerbook, Jillibean Soup Bowl of Dreams

Washi Tape - Quirky Kits

Enamel Dots - American CRrafts/Shimelle, Doodlebug

Tools

Silhouette Portrait

Take a Hike

I had a pile of photos from our Easter holiday in Cumbria printed at the end of April, ready for National Scrapbooking Day and the remainders have been sitting on my desk ever since. This set were originally 4x6 prints, but I trimmed them all down to scraplift a page from Shimelle Laine's current class Layer on Layer on Layer. Her prompt was about scraplifting your own page (and I've already done that) but I really liked her page design as something a bit different from my normal three photo layouts.

We're continuing the Summer Fiesta challenges at For the Love of Pretty Paper, and this was an easy one - to use red on a page. I might not have used red otherwise, but I'm very pleased with the way the page turned out and I've used some ancient stash.

Supplies
Paper - We R Memory Keepers Quoted, Crate Paper Notes & Things, Jillibean Soup, Basic Grey. Photo Play Paper, Craft Creations
Vellum - American Crafts
Letters - American Crafts
Stickers - We R Memory Keepers, One Canoe Two
Chipboard - Making Memories?
Wood Veneer - Creative Embellishments
Enamel Dots - Stampin' Up!
Ink - Ranger

Tools
American Crafts Scalloped Border Punch
Big Shot
X-Cut Ticket Stubs Die
Little B Arrows Die
Woodware Scalloped Circle Punch
Woodware Tag Punch
Scrapberry's Compass Stamp
Studio Calico Stars Stamp

Parkrun - June

I'm getting lax with the scrapping of my weekly parkruns; it's almost mid-August and I'm sharing June's page today. There were five Saturdays that month, so five runs which I put on a double page.

I found that I'd settled into a pattern of running and walking the same sections each week and my times had plateaued during May and early June. I decided to shake this up and consciously change my thinking from "I just need to get to the next corner and then I can walk" to "I know I can get to the next corner, but how much further can I go?" I pushed myself harder in the last two runs of the month and was rewarded with new PBs each time. 

I split the run photos into three in a row on the left half of the page and two in a column on the right half; there wasn't really much new to write about first three but I wrote quite detailed accounts of the last two runs including that change of thinking.

As always I tried not to cut into any new 12x12 sheets and this page was made from scraps; I had a piece in my scraps box from which I'd only cut a 4" circle and there was enough left for the right page and for the two strips above and below the photos on the left page. The stripy paper on the far left both holds the month name and covers a cut-out from the original circle. I don't embellish many of these pages as I want to keep the pages quite flat and the writing is actually the most important thing. The photos are very same-y and not at all flattering but I'm very glad to have them each week.

Theo

Something a bit different from me today - a single photo, mixed media page. I don't often scrap single photos so when I do it's nice to have the space for playing with inks.

I'm taking Shimelle's Layer on Layer on Layer class and my initial inspiration for this page came from one of hers which was made from lots of layers of white scraps. I really liked that look and thought it would work with a baby photo (my husband's cousin's new arrival). I don't actually have many white scraps but I found the chevron paper and decided to include blue-grey in my mix. Shimelle used a bold holographic print as her background, but I wanted something softer and decided to make my own.

I'd previously used the packaging technique to smoosh ink over this cardstock and then abandoned it so I pulled it back out and stencilled the diamond pattern on top before layering my scraps. I store my embellishments by colour so picked out lots of white and silver options including various die-cut pieces which I tucked in each side. For a long time I wasn't sure where to place my title or whether it should be blue or silver, but once I realised that these blue puffy stickers would fit on the vellum circle in my layers there was no other option. They're a slightly different colour from the blue-grey of my ink so I added a few plus signs to the diagonal line of embellishment so that the colour would repeat around the page.

We have a Summer Fiesta running in the For the Love of Pretty Paper Facebook group with six weeks of daily challenges. We're allowed to combine them so I kept them in mind while I worked and completed three from Week One in this page (Monday - diamonds, Tuesday - puffy stickers and Saturday - get messy, wood veneers and stamping).

Supplies
Cardstock - American Crafts
Paper - We R Memory Keepers, My Mind's Eye, American Crafts, Studio Calico
Letters - Fancy Pants
Labels - Pretty Little Studio
Wood Veneer, Gems, Ribbon - from Stash
Ink - Ranger, Memento
Mist - Mister Huey's

Tools
Tando Creative Harlequin Mask
Big Shot
The Works Scalloped Circle Dies
X-Cut Ticket Stubs Die
Studio Calico Stars Stamp

Snow and Xmas Trees

We have a weekly Alpha Relay challenge running in the For the Love of Pretty Paper group on Facebook, with different members setting each challenge based on the letters of the alphabet (in no particular order).

Having entered a page into A for Acrylic, I was picked (by random number generator) to set the next one, and chose D for Double page. I knew it wouldn't be a popular choice, but challenges are supposed to be challenges, aren't they? No point picking something too easy.

I had this set of photos in mind when I set the challenge. They come from our Easter holiday in Cumbria and I sketched the layout and printed the photos back before National Scrapbooking Day but I didn't use them for any of the challenges then and they've been lurking on my desk ever since. This was a group holiday but we split up on this particular day with my husband and our friends tackling a few fells while I took their son on a less strenuous walk in Whinlatter Forest.

Despite being April, winter was lingering and there was snow on higher ground. As we walked through the conifers my young companion declared that snow and Christmas trees were two of his favourite things, so setting the title and subtitle of my page at that point. I knew I had a tree print in a Christmas collection from Glitz Design so that determined my colour scheme, with the yellow stripe coming from the same paper pack. I picked blue as a nice contrast to the yellow and a match with the blue skies in the photos, and added a few pops of dark green with my title and some puffy stickers to match the lone green tree on the tree print paper.

Supplies
Paper - Glitz Design Hello December, Little Yellow Bicycle Acorn Hollow, Basic Grey Capture
Letters - Papermania
Die-Cuts - Jillibean Soup, Heidi Swapp, Lakeland
Stickers - October Afternoon, Jillibean Soup, Pebbles, Simple Stories
Enamel Dots - Stampin' Up!
Ink & Mist - Docrafts

Tools
Fiskars Postage Stamp Border Punch

Party Bag Name Tags

We recently celebrated our Silver Wedding Anniversary with a party. Our guests ranged in age from just two months to over seventy years, and we all know from experience that children tend to get bored at such events. 

Some years ago, when our children were children, we went to a wedding where the mother of the bride had thoughtfully provided them with goody bags of things to keep them amused during the reception. I thought this was a great idea, and copied it for three of our younger party guests. Being a crafter, I couldn't just write on the bag tags, but decided to make them each a chipboard tag with their names on. 

I made one for Alex first, picking papers from Simple Stories. The definition paper and star tape were already printed on the paper so it had some instant interest. There was a box part way up that I didn't like, but it was easily covered with a die-cut tag stamped with his name, and I finished off with a few punched stars.

I picked a colourful striped paper from Crate Paper's The Pier collection for my second tag and copied the printed tape from my first tag by using real washi tape on this one. I stamped the name on a label, and finished with punched butterflies.

Last tag now, and I wanted a more playful print for a two year-old. This paper from Crate Paper's Neighborhood collection was perfect and I added a couple of pieces of washi again. I had to change stamp set to fit the longer name on another label, and I punched flowers to embellish this time. Those flowers needed middles, so I added a few gems and then went back to the other tags to add gems to them too.

Although I say it myself, I think the bags were a success and our young guests gave us no trouble at all. Alex's dad had promised him a puzzle book if he behaved, but there was one in his bag for him, and Martha was very happy with the tiny teddy bear in hers which she was still carrying around when we saw her next day.