It's almost Christmas and I've bought gift cards for my niece and nephews this year, but I wanted to jazz them up and make them a bit more special so I made a few of these gift card holders from Carta Bella's Hello Christmas collection. I've shared full instructions over on The Mad Scrapper blog and the collection is available in store now.
I can't believe that I forgot to share my latest blog post for The Mad Scrapper with you, one which features some of the pages I made for our long weekend in Dorset. You've seen the pages here already but that post focusses on my process for creating a series of pages from a holiday or event and shares a few hints and tips in case you are considering a similar project.
One of the reasons that we chose Dorset for our autumn mini-break was my long-held desire to visit the abandoned village of Tyneham. The village and the surrounding area were requisitioned by the War Office in 1943 to provide an area for military training; they were supposed to be given back after the war but that never happened, the buildings fell into ruin and the area is now part of Lulworth Ranges. However the village is open to the public when the ranges are not in use.
I took loads of photos so this had to be a double page (with a single to follow for the adjacent farm). I printed a map to go with the photos and used a couple of journalling cards, one on each side.
I've scrapped both of these photos previously on separate pages for my 2019 and 2020 albums (Hello Brighthelm and Goodbye Brighthelm) but now I'm putting them together for another page in my daughter's university album. Brighthelm was her first year accommodation, a house which she shared with four others.
I've used another sketch from Dotty About Flair, die-cutting my hexagons from a Pinkfresh Studio 6x6 pad. As is normal for me, using this number of different patterned papers meant that I added minimal embellishment, but I included some white puffy asterisks for a Be Colourful challenge from For the Love of Pretty Paper.
I went for a couple of extra paper layers than are in the sketch, pulling the blue and green colours from the photo and adding orange as a contrast. I used a text print for my background as hinting at education, smooshed a little blue ink over it in a diagonal line and stamped a few clusters of tiny orange stars.
The large yellow rectangle of paper comes directly from the sketch, but I added extra layers both under and over it, all from the Late Afternoon paper pad by Amy Tangerine, which I am using for my Dorset pages.
I started from a cream base card and pencilled a 3" circle on the front. I daubed green ink around that circle and then made my wreath with sprigs die-cut from an old Basic Grey paper which I chose for its subtle variation in greens. I then added my butterfly and some pink punched flowers to the wreath, finishing with tiny gems as my flower centres and extras scattered around the wreath.
As we arrive in December, I think we are all looking forward to the end of 2020, but there is an annual event that starts today and runs to the end of March when everything should be closer to normal.
I'm talking about the Winter Photography Scavenger Hunt which is hosted by Eileen at A Bracelet of Days. She's drawn up a list of 20 items, bearing in mind that so many of us are still facing restrictions on our daily life, plus three alternatives if needed. Her full list is:
This is my second page from our journey down to Dorset last month, when we stopped near Amesbury to visit The Ancestor, a sculpture which was mentioned on a documentary I watched about the A303.
I took a few photos in both landscape and portrait but cropping them to square seemed best and I ordered one at 4x4. When it arrived, the sculpture was only a couple of inches tall within the picture and you couldn't see his features so I re-printed at 8x8 which also matched a challenge from UK Scrap Addicts to use a larger photo than normal.
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| A Bit of a Do |
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| Laura's Sketch |
I'm not scrapping our Dorset break in order, and I'm jumping to the end of Saturday now and a brief excursion to the Isle of Portland. I'm starting at the north end of the island with a trio of photos from the viewpoint area there.
I'm using Amy Tangerine's Late Afternoon paper pad for my holiday pages; I love the range of colours in the stripy paper but so far I've only used small strips in among the other patterns. This time, I decided to make it my background but it's really bold so I layered a rectangle of the black and white diagonal stripe over it to give a more neutral area behind the photos. (I gutted the middle part though as it's too good to hide.)
I've also been hoarding the floral die-cuts but I'm in danger of holding on to them for so long that I don't use them at all, so I used two on this page along with two halves of a ticket die-cut which I chose in order to spread the green colour from my letter stickers around the page.
We stayed in the village of Abbotsbury for our short break last month, and I took plenty of photos of the buildings there, including the remains of the Abbey.
This time I had six 3x4 photos which were going to take up about half of a 12x12 page so I had to adjust my original design. I cut one photo down to a square and arranged them in a rough overlapping grid. My strips of patterned paper are in similar places to those on the original page but with larger photos everything got pushed down the page, including my title. I considered squeezing my journalling in at the bottom, but then I was inspired to add it to the top paper instead, writing on the lines between the scallops as I did on my castles page a couple of days ago.
I'm back up on The Mad Scrapper blog today with a page featuring an autumnal leaf wreath cut-file from Paige Taylor Evans (which was a freebie in her Facebook group) backed with papers from Amy Tangerine's Late Afternoon collection and layered over a ring of bronze modelling paste confetti circles.
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| Jenny's Page |
I spotted this sketch when someone used it on Facebook, and traced it back to a July 2013 post from Liz Chidester at The Scrappiest Blogspot. She doesn't appear to be blogging any more but there are a few other sketches that I might go back to.
I'm using the paper pad from Amy Tangerine's Late Afternoon collection for my pages. One of the sheets is a cut-apart, and I used a section of it for the 'Hello' circle which starts my title. I couldn't bring myself to use three Es from my Thickers in one go, so I cut the rest on my Silhouette.
Well, 2020 hasn't turned out how any of us would have expected; all of our planned holidays were cancelled, to be replaced by a long weekend in Dorset last month. I'll be scrapping the photos with the aid of Amy Tangerine's Late Afternoon 12x12 paper pad and ephemera, my latest DT choice from The Mad Scrapper. There are 48 papers in the pad, 2 each of 24 patterns, and I filmed a flip-through a few weeks ago.
I made my first page as an introduction to the trip, with a wide view photo of the village and a smaller one of the pub where we stayed. I used two separate area of the page for the two photos, filled the space between them with my title and journalling, and added three clusters of die-cut and punched leaves and flowers around the page. The tag at the top is from the ephemera pack, and I added puffy stars to it and my title.
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| Scraplift #41 |
