Cruise Iberia 2018 - A New Project

Unless anything untoward has happened, we are currently on our way home from another cruise; this time we went south to Spain, Portugal and Morocco, two new countries to me and all new for my husband, though it's about thirty years since I was last in Spain.

Of course a new cruise means a new cruise album and I've been collecting papers for this project for a few months, mostly in the summer sales but also pulling papers from my stash. While researching our destinations I realised that many of the towns that we would be visiting have lots white buildings with terracotta roofs and I decided to build up a kit of papers starting from that terracotta colour.

I couldn't find a whole collection that I liked that I felt would work for this, but I used a few sheets from OneCanoeTwo's Twilight collection in terracotta, soft blue-grey and navy as my starting point, added a few more from Creekside and worked from there. 

I next looked at single colour prints, selecting some in terracotta/peach/coral shades. They don't all work together but they'll be spread throughout the album and mixed with other colours and patterns. 

I also looked at the other side of each paper which gave me some more colours and patterns, and enabled me to pull in coordinating papers from the same collections or similar collections from the same manufacturer.

I repeated this with navy and blue-grey papers and also added some grey or black and white prints.

Then looked at the other sides and selected matching papers from the same or similar collections.

One colour that kept recurring in these sets (that wasn't in my initial selection) was aqua, so I picked out a few more aqua papers including some from Bo Bunny's Early Bird collection which mixes coral, aqua and navy.

Throughout these choices I tried to keep two rules in mind: the papers should be white-based rather than cream-based where possible and they should be 'clean' patterns rather than distressed ones. I have a huge mish-mash here from seventeen manufacturers and they don't all mix with everything else but I should have sufficient variety to combat the monotony of sticking to one collection only for a whole album. I've also included vellum and cardstock in my kit but not photographed it here.

I made my last two cruise albums on plain backgrounds throughout (grey then kraft) and there were positives and negatives to that approach. On the upside, it was one less choice to make each time and plain cardstock is relatively cheap and easy to obtain. On the downside, it could get tedious and I felt that I had to cover a lot of that cardstock where I might have left a patterned paper on display. Therefore I'm planning to use some of these papers as backgrounds, and probably do some pages on white cardstock. I think this will also allow me to make a greater variety of pages via mixed media, stitching and cut-files, none of which appear in my previous cruise albums.

I've added six 6x6 pads to the mix, but only one of these is new. The first two pads from My Mind's Eye should work well though they are already well-used. Only some of the Moonstruck and Creekside papers will be any good, and although I've included my few remaining sheets of Hello World (because it's travel-themed) it's cream-based and I'm not sure whether I will actually use much of it. My new purchase is the Let Your Heart Decide pad from Pinkfresh which I chose for the clean designs, good colour mix and plenty of white.

I have also pulled out lots of tags, insta-cards and Project Life cards to use for journalling and layering, including travel-themed pieces from My Mind's Eye and Pink Paislee. Nothing in this pile is new, and some are pieces that I'd just like to see used up.

My stickers are a mix of old and new. I'd like to use up some of the Echo Park and Jen Hadfield stickers but they're not the best colour match, and although the Dear Lizzy stickers match colour-wise a lot of those are too random for me. However I have a better chance of using them if they are in the kit than not. The Pinkfresh puffy stars are new as are the Pink Paislee washi strips and the travel-themed Thickers from Crate Paper. On the right, I've pulled in all my OneCanoeTwo stickers as one of their collections was my initial inspiration for this kit.

More stickers now, mostly smaller ones including words and icons. Several of these were bargains in Studio Calico's sale at the start of the year including a set of clear date labels for the month of September which will enable me to date my pages consistently but unobtrusively.

I have fewer ephemera pieces than stickers, the main ones being from Pink Paislee and OneCanoeTwo. Returning to the travel theme, I have cork geotags and rub-on geotags from Studio Calico, acrylic pieces and flair that didn't make it into the pages of my last album, and globes in both chipboard and wood veneer. The placecards and confetti are more pieces that I really want to see used up.

I've bought a few new alphas, but intend to use the part packs that I already have where I can and also to cut some titles on my Big Shot or Silhouette as I go along.

I will of course be using enamel dots, gems and washi tape throughout the album. I've bought a couple of new packs of enamel dots but will mostly pull them from my stash for each page. I'll use mist too (a new coral one alongside existing colours) and I think I'll be inking my paper edges in grey this time. Finally, I'll be using my dies, punches and stamps for pieces that I can keep repeating without any fear of them running out.