Mercado de Vegueta

This page follows on immediately from the last, and has photos from the food market in the old town of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. I scraplifted myself for this one, basing it on the Cape Wrath page that I made for my Scottish cruise album.

This time I used a photo frame to hold my page title (in three fonts), switched to two photos in the bottom half, and moved my journalling to a new spot.

Supplies

Cardstock - Bazzill

Paper - Heidi Swapp Carefree, Jen Hadfield Peaceful Heart

Letters - Simple Stories, Unknown
Stickers - Heidi Swapp

Ephemera - Rosie's Studio
Washi Tape - Little B, Ebay
Enamel Shapes - Freckled Fawn, 49 & Market
Ink - Ranger

Tools

Big Shot & Dovecraft Label Die

Studio Calico Alphabet Stamps

Vegueta

The last two posts were a brief diversion to catch up with unblogged pages that I made last year. In truth I am still scrapping our Canary Islands cruise and have a page today from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Vegueta is the old town, and my page is a double with photos of three of the old buildings. 

I laid a torn paper strip on each side of the page to hold my title (cut on my Silhouette) and journalling, using the centre part for my photos. I made the right hand side first with two photos of Columbus' House which I matted together on a stack of patterned papers with the building name up the side in Spanish. I then moved across to the left side and made two separate patterned paper stacks for individual photos of the town hall and the theatre, repeating some of the papers from one stack to another.

Looking at the page on screen now, it's obvious that the flower cluster at the bottom-left needs a small piece of the same filmstrip washi tape that's in the top-right cluster so I've gone back and added it (but not taken a new photo).

Supplies

Cardstock - UK Crafts

Paper - Heidi Swapp Carefree, Jen Hadfield Peaceful Heart

Letters - KaiserCraft, Webster's Pages

Ephemera - Heidi Swapp

Label Sticker - Heidi Swapp

Chipboard Stars - Studio Calico

Puffy Hearts - Unknown

Washi Tape - Ebay, Unknown

Gems - Love to Craft

Ink - Ranger

Tools

Silhouette Portrait

Big Shot & X-Cut 'Explore' Die

X-Cut Circle Punch

 

Grand Western

This page comes from the same long weekend in Devon as the last one, so I used the same paper collection. I made the page a couple of months ago and I'm sure I used a sketch but I can't find it now; if I track it down I'll add it here later. 

On the Sunday we joined some local friends for a walk beside the Grand Western Canal (which used to run from Taunton to Tiverton and the southern end is now a country park).

Supplies

Cardstock - UK Crafts

Paper - Cocoa Vanilla Studio Storyteller

Letters - Pinkfresh Studio

Ephemera - Pinkfresh Studio

Puffy Stickers - Elle's Studio, Crate Paper

Ink - Ranger

Weekend Getaway

I've found a couple of pages that I made in November and missed blogging, so here's the first, a late share of my November DT page for Twilight Crafts, one using Storyteller papers from the shop with the Polaroids cut-file.

It's the first of four (I think) from a long weekend camping in Devon last summer. I used a main photo of our new tent with smaller prints from the campsite in the polaroid frames.

My title is a mix of puffy stickers and stamped letters. I bought a set of tile letter stamps from Elle's Studio that remind me very much of the old Mini Market stickers from October Afternoon. I bought loads of those stickers when OA went out of business, and now I can have as many as I need in any ink colour I own. I stamped my word on white cardstock and cut the letters out individually to look like stickers.

Supplies

Cardstock - UK Crafts

Paper - Cocoa Vanilla Studio Storyteller

Letters - Pinkfresh Studio

Ephemera - Pinkfresh Studio

Puffy Stickers - Rosie's Studio, Pinkfresh Studio

Stickers - Crate Paper

Dots - Nuvo Drops

Ink - Ranger

Tools

Silhouette Portrait

Studio Light Chevrons Stamp

Disclosure - I received a discount on the Storyteller papers and the cut-file free of charge from Twilight Crafts. All other supplies are my own. 

Dining @ Vasco

Woohoo! Three pages in a row for the same album. Let's see how long I can keep that up! 

This is another from our Canary Islands cruise, but it features one of the speciality restaurants onboard rather than anywhere we visited ashore. Vasco serves dishes from Goa in India, and I scrapped a couple of photos of the food with the aid of the January sketch from For the Love of Pretty Paper. I rotated the middle part to suit the orientation of my  photos and made the central panel into a pocket to hold a copy of the menu.

I've also ticked off the second birthday challenge from the same group, a Tic-Tac-Toe where I chose dots, patterned paper and 2x photos.

Supplies

Paper - Jen Hadfield Peaceful Heart, Heidi Swapp Carefree, Doodlebug 

Letters - American Crafts, Heidi Swapp

Stickers - Heidi Swapp

Gems - Love to Craft

Dots - Nuvo Drops

Ink - Ranger

Paint - Golden

Tools

Big Shot

Quickutz Tab Die

Dovecraft Label Die

Charco de San Ginés

I have another page from Lanzarote today, one featuring a lagoon in Arrecife. It's my second DT page this month for Twilight Crafts. They've recently released a range of stencils and I was given JWS18 Circles Plain and Stripey which is A5 in size. (They do some designs in A4 too.)

I repeated the whole stencil across my 12x12 white cardstock, using Distress Oxide ink in Hickory Smoke, a colour which matches the grey in the Heidi Swapp papers that I am using for this album. 

You might spot a mistake in the stencil alignment on the right hand edge, but I hid that by trimming the cardstock down and matting it on a patterned paper. It's one that I don't like much and I don't think the design matches the rest of the collection very well, but it makes a good mat for a page.

I ran a couple of strips of paper across the page to divide it into two parts and added my title across the middle. The top part has an overview photo of the lagoon with a journalling card, while the bottom part has two detail photos.

I also made this page for one of the Birthday challenges at For the Love of Pretty Paper. We had three at the end of December to celebrate the group's 8th birthday and this was a 'This or That' challenge, for which I chose circles, mixed media, white background and camera.

Supplies

Cardstock - UK Crafts

Paper - Heidi Swapp Carefree, Jen Hadfield Peaceful Heart, Amy Tangerine

Letters - KaiserCraft

Stickers - Heidi Swapp, Rosie's Studio, Maggie Holmes, MAMBI

Washi Tape - Unknown

Gems - Love to Craft

Ink - Ranger

Tools

Big Shot

Dovecraft Label Die

Disclosure - I received the stencil free of charge from Twilight Crafts. All other supplies are my own.

Along the Prom

It's more than a year since our cruise to the Canary Islands and I really need to finish that album. I'm returning to Arrecife in Lanzarote today for a page with the  artworks and monuments that we saw along the prom.

I had four photos, which I arranged in an offset grid, using papers from the two collections that I chose for this album - Heidi Swapp's Carefree with Jen Hadfield's Peaceful Heart. I matted the two larger photos on dark cardstock and used the off-cuts to die-cut my title letters.

Supplies

Cardstock - Bazzill

Papers - Heidi Swapp Carefree, Jen Hadfield Peaceful Heart, Paige Evans Bungalow Lane

Ephemera - 49 & Market

Stickers - Heidi Swapp, Studio Calico, Tim Holtz

Cork Geotag - Studio Calico

Washi - Little B & Unknown

Dots - Novo Drops

Ink - Ranger

Tools

Big Shot

Make & Create Alphabet Dies

Hayburn Wyke

Back in the autumn I made a series of pages from our holiday in Yorkshire last Easter, and there's one more that I made then but didn't share here. This was for a walk to Hayburn Wyke, a cove near our holiday cottage with a small waterfall down onto the beach.

I took the main photo on the page when most of our group were arranged around the waterfall, but I don't think they were aware I was taking it. I originally printed it at 4x6 but the details were lost at that size so I reprinted it at 6x8 and I'm much happier with that. 

I've been using two collections for this holiday - Simple Stories Hello Today and Pebbles Seen & Noted. I'd originally intended to mix the two but it turned out that I prefer the pages when I use one collection at a time, and this page uses the Pebbles papers. 

Supplies

Cardstock - Bazzill

Paper - Pebbles Seen & Noted, Simple Stories Hello Today, My Mind's Eye Just Splendid

Washi Tape - Ebay

Star Gems - Hobbycraft

Ink - Ranger

Tools

Big Shot

Dovecraft Label Die

Dovecraft Star Die

"Ship Ahoy!" Mini-Book

My first project of the year for Twilight Crafts is a mini-book. It's something I've planned to do for a while, a record of all the cruise ships we've sailed on (before I forget where and when we went). 

My book is 3.5" x 4.5", because that was the size of some scraps of chipboard I had, and I ran washi tape around the edges before covering the middles with papers from 49 & Market. I chose the JWCF709 Compass cut-file as being the perfect motif for a travel mini-book, cut it in navy blue cardstock at just over 2" wide and backed the openings with lighter blue cardstock.

Internally, I made the pages from 6x6 papers which I cut down to 4.25" wide, scored at 2.5" to make a flap and cut away the top corners, alternating left and right.

I could then stick a photo on the outside of each flap, add the ship's name below and journal on the inside of each page.

Finally I glued each pair of pages back-to-back, poked holes through them all and threaded them with soft twine. I added a cord lock (pinched from my husband's camping supplies) to the twine so that I can take the back cover off when necessary and add more pages for future ships.

Supplies

Cardstock - Bazzill, Stampin' Up!

Paper - 49 & Market Vintage Artistry Anywhere, M&C World Map 6x6 Pad

Letters - Tim Holtz, Creative Devotion, My Mind's Eye, Pebbles, Basic Grey, October Afternoon, Crate Paper, 

Stickers - Tim Holtz, 49 & Market

Washi Tape - Unknown, Little B

Gems - Unknown

Ink - Ranger

Tools

Silhouette Portrait

Disclosure - I received the digital cut-file free of charge from Twilight Crafts. All other supplies are my own.

All the Grid Squares: Mardyke & Aveley

The first thing on my blogging agenda is to catch up with my project to walk in/through all the OS grid squares in Thurrock. This has lain fallow since September and my last outing is unblogged. The map on the right is an outline of Thurrock: my home is in the purple square; I've walked in the dark green squares since last August, and the light green squares in the past; the grey and blue squares are land and river borders.

I've walked east, south and west so far, but little north of my home square so I decided to rectify that with a jaunt along part of the Mardyke Way, which threads its way between the A13 and the southern edge of South Ockendon. It could have been an out-and-back but I sought to maximise the square-bagging by walking around part of Aveley and then back along the B1335 (see map below and yellow squares above).

I parked in Davy Down Riverside Park and revisited a heron sculpture which I remembered from my last visit in 2014; the vegetation has grown considerably since then.

This is Stifford Pumping Station, built in the 1920s to house the diesel engines which were used to extract water from a borehole.

I crossed over the Mar Dyke, very slow-moving at this point,

and passed under one of the 'fourteen arches' of the Victorian railway viaduct,

leaving Davy Down behind me and following the Mardyke Way west. The path runs between some rough land used for grazing horses and the ancient woodlands of Brannet's Wood, Millard's Wood and Low Well Wood, following the fence-line in the photos below. 

The Mar Dyke itself is all but invisible, but the whole area floods in heavy rain.

Under the A13,

past the back of Thurrock services

 and then under A282 sliproads of Mardyke Junction,

before I ended this section at Ship Lane.

The Mardyke Way does continue to Purfleet-on-Thames but it follows roads rather than the river from this point and I have no need to walk the rest in terms of grid squares.

Instead, I turned north, crossed over the A13

and entered the town of Aveley. 

We're definitely still in Thurrock, but pretty close to the border with the London Borough of Havering, and Aveley is served by TfL's 372 bus as it wends its way from Hornchurch to Lakeside Shopping Centre.

I walked an L-shape of residential streets before joining the main road, with its pubs and shops. 

To be honest, Aveley doesn't have a very good reputation but I found it to be clean and tidy with all the shops you need plus what seemed to be an active community forum.

St Michael's Church is set well back from the main road, 

with the war memorial in front.

From here, the road leads out of town, joins up with the B1335 and crosses over the M25 en route to South Ockendon. 

The B-road skirts the southern edge of that town, running along the northern edge of the woods bordering the Mardyke Way. I could see into Hangman's Wood from the road,

and there is a footpath through there, but the oft-repeated signs to keep out rather put me off. Instead, I kept going until Brannett's Wood (which was much more welcoming) 

where I headed south to rejoin the Mardyke Way near the railway viaduct and return to the car.

This walk knocked off seven new squares bringing my total to 33 out of the 204 in Thurrock (including boundary squares and potentially inaccessible squares). The project then stalled but I shall be going back to it. The river squares are calling me, but it'll be squelchy there in winter so it's probably more sensible to tramp the streets of Grays next.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year!

Things have been a bit quiet around here recently, with tumbleweed blowing across the blog. I lost my crafting mojo for a while and even when I did make anything I really couldn't be bothered with photographing it and blogging it. I even considered giving up entirely. However, new year and new focus. I have been scrapbooking and I feel  that if I stop blogging I might regret it later, but I am unlikely to regret carrying on, at least for the time being. 

I'm not promising regular posts again, but I do have a few ready and lined up from what I have made and not shared in the last month or so. I am also still creating for Twilight Crafts so you will see projects for them too.

Away from crafting, I want to continue with my local project of walking in all the grid squares in Thurrock (I have a walk blog post coming up) and further afield I need to complete the Capital Ring. I'd reached Wembley in March 2020, just before the world closed down, and I'm ready to go back. To be honest, I just want that walk over and done with as it's been underwhelming and I have another long distance walk planned for afterwards.