Pages from Olbia

I'm starting my cruise album in the middle, with the pages from Olbia on the Italian island of Sardinia. It's just a small town which only needed four pages, and less daunting than starting with the title page for the whole album with so many choices in front of me.

(The numbers are my page count for the year.)

94. Olbia

This is my sub-title page; I always make one of these for each port we visit to break the album into distinct sections for each place. We were in Olbia for 12 hours so I have two photos of the town taken from the ship, one in the morning and one close to sunset.

95. San Simplicio Basilica

This is one of two significant churches in Olbia, built in the 11th century in honour of the town's patron saint. I have large photos of the inside and outside, plus two smaller ones of St Simplicio and the Virgin Mary. My page is loosely based on one in a November YouTube video from Shimelle.

96. Chiesa di San Paolo

The second church is St Paul's; again I have photos of the inside and the outside, but this time close-ups of the multi-coloured dome and one of the frescoes. I arranged the photos on a wide band across the page, wanting to get away from stacking the larger ones on top of each other as I did on the last two pages.

97. Parco Fausto Noce

The 'Park of Auspicious Walnuts' (according to Google translate) was a lovely green space in the city. I have two 4x6 photos again which I deliberately split up on the page with the title across a central band. I used natural embellishments with my outdoor photos for the December challenge from Hey Little Magpie.

Supplies: Paper - Heidi Swapp Set Sail, Cocoa Vanilla Studio Heart & Home, Photoplay Travelogue, Craft Sensations Dreamy Pastels; Letters - American Crafts, Cocoa Vanilla Studio, October Afternoon, Jillibean Soup; Die-Cuts - Heidi Swapp; Stickers - Heidi Swapp, Studio Calico, 49 & Market, Jen Hadfield; Tickets - 49 & Market; Washi Tape - Vicki Boutin; Enamel Shapes - Maggie Holmes, Simple Stories, My Mind's Eye, Altenew, Studio Calico

A New Project - Mediterranean Cruise 2024

I generally make two types of scrapbooks - annual albums and travel albums - and it's time to start a new one for our Mediterranean cruise earlier this year. Since 2015 I have assembled a kit for each holiday album in advance and this is no exception.

Our cruise was 'Islands of the Mediterranean' from Newcastle-on-Tyne, and saw us visit five islands (Corsica, Sardinia, Majorca, Menorca and Ibiza), plus Gibraltar Cartagena and Cadiz.

I first saw and liked Heidi Swapp's Sail Away collection when it was released in 2022, but I had no need for it then. However, when I saw it half-price at the beginning of the year I decided to make it the basis of this new album. I have the 12x12 pad, a few individual sheets with different patterns, the 6x8 pad, an ephemera pack, the Thickers and three packs of stickers (motifs, words and labels). Both paper pads are single-sided so I've cut up all the cut-apart pages already to give me a pile of tags, journalling cards and layering pieces, some of which are in both sizes.

However, much as I like this collection, most of the papers are monochrome; I felt that it was really a set of backgrounds and I wanted to add in a some multi-coloured patterns. I ordered Cocoa Vanilla Studio's Heart & Home collection kit (also half-price) at the same time with no thought of using the two together, but once they arrived I was struck by the close match in the colours, although the Set Sail papers are more distressed than those from CVS. I also ordered the matching mini puffy alphabet stickers and the puffy hearts and dots.

Later on in the year, I added in a third collection, Travelogue from Photoplay, which shares the same colour palette as the first two and is more travel-themed. I'm a bit uncertain about using three collections with different styles together, but we'll see how it goes.

On to embellishments now, and I have a few packs from 49 & Market; I've rolled the washi tape stickers from Everywhere that I used for the last holiday album on to this album, I bought the filmstrips and wishing bubbles from Moonlit Garden for this album and I received the tickets from Mariner in a mystery box. I bought the puffy alphabet stickers and enamel dots from American Crafts' Cedar House collection, and I've pulled in some stickers and enamel dots from two Maggie Holmes collections plus a sheet of travel-themed paper snips from Bramble Fox. Lastly, I'll date my pages using stickers from Studio Calico; I used some of them previously for my 2018 Iberian album but luckily the remaining dates cover our port days this time.

For titles, I have a mixture of old and new alphabet stickers, I have alphabet stamps and dies which are endlessly repeatable, and I have my trusty Silhouette Portrait for either cut-files or individual letters.

The kit will form the foundations of the album, but I won't be limited by what I've chosen so far. I will be adding washi tape, more enamel dots, Nuvo drops and anything else I wish to this selection as I go along, and once I've used something I will add it to the kit to be repeated on future pages. 

Art of the Brick

Just one page today, but it's a mammoth one - a double with an insert - for our visit to Art of the Brick in March. This was a touring exhibition of artworks created from Lego bricks, and there were plenty of them. I had trouble whittling the photos down to just these twenty. I'd originally thought that I would use lots of primary colours to match the bricks, but it turned out that yellow was the best match for the photos and I just added a bit of green. Embellishment is sparse because I really wanted to focus on the photos for this one.

I'm down to three gaps in my 2024 album now: a page from the recording of a QI episode (and I'm waiting for it to be broadcast so I can perhaps take some screenshots); a double for my husband's TGO Challenge walk across Scotland in May; and a few pages from a weekend camping in the Peak District in August.

Supplies: Cardstock - Bazzill; Paper - Amy Tangerine Late Afternoon; Stickers - Tim Holtz, Studio Calico

(These are pages 91-93 of my page count for the year.)