Holding the Baby

I've found that scrapping my holiday photos has become a bit of a chore, so I'm changing my approach to scrapping for a while. 

Rather than forcing myself to scrap with a specific set of photos and papers, I'm going 'backwards'. I decided to join in with the 12 Days of Summer Scraplifts over in the Scrap Squad Facebook group, starting from the page design, then choosing papers and photos to suit.

The original layout for the first challenge appears to be by Karlla Dauer and can be found on Pinterest. I chose  pastel papers from Cocoa Vanilla Studios and then sought a photo, coming up with this pair of my husband and nephew where the paper colours match those of the baby bouncer.

Supplies
Paper - Cocoa Vanilla Studio Daydream, Cocoa Vanilla Studio These Days
Letters- Tim Holtz

Enamel Dots - Marianne Designs, Altenew, Simple Stories

Paint - Golden

Tools

Big Shot & Dovecraft Tag Die

Tummy Time

Christina's Page

I'm scraplifting today and sharing a page from the June/July Chinese Whispers game we played in the Mind the Scrap Facebook page. I played second in this chain, scraplifting Christina's page before passing my version on to Clair, who passed to Judith.

Christina's page was a very pretty one with two portrait photos, and what I think are 6x6 papers in her layers. I seem to have scrapped most of my pairs of photos, and had to go back to 1996 for some of my nephew as a baby. However these are landscape photos so I had to play with the dimensions and layering from Christina's page.

I won a 6x6 pad from the Pink Paislee Moonstruck collection for one of my National Scrapbook Day pages and the colours worked well with my photos. However I really struggled with finding a suitable background paper; in the end I chose a plainish paper and stamped my own design. I used a star stamp with denser, darker stamping at the top and lighter, more sparse stamping as I went down the page. 

I kept the position of the title from Christina's page, choosing a mixture of script Thickers and tile stickers, and kept her arrow too.

Supplies
Paper - My Mind's Eye 29th Street Market, Pink Paislee Moonstruck
Letters - American Crafts, Shimelle
Die Cut - One Canoe Two
Enamel Hearts - My Mind's Eye
Puffy Hearts - American Crafts
Word Stickers - Tim Holtz
Chalk - Readicut Crafts
Ink - Hobbycraft, Ink It Up!
Mist - Docrafts

Tools
Big Shot, X-Cut Tag Die & Little B Arrow Die
Heidi Swapp Inspire Stamp Set

Stick It Down Blog Hop: James - First Christmas

Welcome to Stick It Down's November blog hop! Several of our design team members have created Christmas projects to share with you using any of our past sketches. If you've never participated in a blog hop before, you'll "hop" from blog to blog to visit each designer's page and project and leave a comment at each stop along the hop. The hop starts and ends at the Stick It Down blog, where you can comment to let us know you've completed the hop and you'll be entered to win the grand prize. You should have come here from Hanne's blog; if not you might want to start again from Stick It Down.

I don't have any recent unscrapped Christmas photos, so I went all the way back to 1996 and my nephew's first Christmas for this page. I used last December's single page sketch and a 6x6 paper pad from KaiserCraft, turning the chevrons in the sketch into hexagons on my page.

My letter stickers were kraft, but I sprayed them gold with mist and used more gold stickers for a subtitle.

You should be heading to Terri Ann next, but here is the order of the hop, in case you get lost:

Marci

Irmeline

Lore

Hanne

>>  Amanda  <<

Terri Ann
Alison 
Evelyn

Ronna

Ali

Ashley
Katy
Stick It Down

We have several prize packages and one grand prize lined up! Paper Wings Productions is generously sponsoring our blog hop and is offering a $25 gift certificate to the online store!

Paper Wings Productions is owned by Carrie Edelmann Avery. All of the PWP stamps are produced in the USA and are made using the highest quality of materials. You can check out the PWP online store to see the red rubber cling stamps and the clear photopolymer stamps!

You have until Monday 23 November at 11:59pm (EST) to complete the hop and the winner will be announced on or before 25 November.

In addition, I am offering my own prize, a set of the papers I used for my page, plus a few Christmas embellishments and a set of gold letters. Just tell me your favourite colour combination for scrapbooking in the comments below. Entries will close on Monday at 10:00pm GMT; I'll do a random draw from all entries and announce the winner later in the week. 
(Open to UK & Europe only due to postage costs. Sorry.)

Supplies
Cardstock - DCWV
Paper - KaiserCraft Outdoor Trail, KaiserCraft Chrismas 6x6 Pad
Letters - Hobbycraft, Dear Lizzy
Washi Tape - Papermania
Enamel Dots - Trimcraft
Mist & Ink - Docrafts

Tools
Big Shot & X-Cut Hexagon Die

4 Generations

It's not the first time that I've used this title on a page, but it seems appropriate to the photo. Last time it was one of my nan, my mum, me and my daughter. This time we're on the other side of the family, with my grandad, my dad, my sister and my nephew.

I made the page for this week's challenge at UKScrappers; it was set by Alison, and she asked us to use a theme of Grandparents, stickers or ribbon, and punched or die-cut shapes.

Once I had chosen my single photo, there were no criteria for the layout of the page so I chose to work with Miniowner's September sketch. I machine-stitched her circles, which gave me a headache when my bobbin thread ran out mid-circle, but I did manage to rescue them. I double-matted the photo on torn paper, and used a second piece to ground my title on the opposite circle.


I realised towards the end of making this page, that it also fits in with Rochelle's September Challenge - a Tic Tac Toe grid where I have used the middle column - stitching, numbers and jewels.


Supplies
Paper - Crate Paper Boys Rule, Crate Paper Styleboard, MME Wild Asparagus, Basic Grey Sultry
Letters - Jillibean Soup
Number - Crate Paper Mia
Stickers - Studio Calico, Tim Holtz
Gems - from Stash
Ink - Docrafts

Tools
Sewing Machine
Woodware Scalloped Circle Punch

Live, Laugh, Love

Another page from Let's Get Sketchy's birthday blog hop today. This time it's Brenshevia's challenge and she chose both a sketch and a colour combination of pinks, peaches and aquas. 

I was going to skip this one as the colours didn't bring any paper collection to mind and I wasn't in the mood for gathering individual sheets together. However when rummaging for bits for the last page I found a set of freebie papers from Scrapbook Magazine that matched the colours perfectly - a few papers and printed embellishments from Fancy Pants' It's the Little Things. Being a love collection I chose an old photo of my husband and me at a friend's wedding. 

I was short on paper (just a few sheets, and it's smaller then A4) and short on time (the challenge deadline was fast approaching, though it has been extended now) so I kept the page pretty simple and everything came from the free paper pack except the washi at the top and bottom of the page.

I used the same sketch a few days ago (What a Handful!), but the two pages turned out quite differently.

Supplies
Cardstock - Bazzill?
Paper & Embellishments - Fancy Pants It's the Little Things
Washi Tape - October Afternoon
Ink - Ink It Up!

Tools
Woodware Scalloped Circle Punch

James at Six Weeks

The new team scraplifting game at Scrap Whispers is under way, and I'm going first this time, but you'll have to wait a few weeks to see my page. In the meantime, the first couple of weekly challenges have been published and I've made a start on those too.

First up is Challenge #139 which was to either scrap a photo where we have altered the colouring, or to make a monochrome page. My photo printer is temporarily out of order, so I opted for the monochrome page. I'm still using the kit I made last week which has a variety of aqua papers in it, so I chose those and picked out photos of my nephew as a baby. 

Additions to the kit this time were the large teal/aqua letters and the grey background paper.

There's no journalling as I have already made a page from this day and I have nothing to add to what I wrote before.

EDIT (23 May): I'm also linking this page to My Creative Endeavours where Lisa's challenge today in the Sketch-n-Scrap Birthday Bash is to use the kits we created in response to her original 'Create a Kit' challenge a couple of weeks ago.

Supplies
Paper - Echo Park Yours Truly, First Edition J'Adore (double-sided), Bo Bunny Garden Chic
Letters - American Crafts Thickers, October Afternoon Mini Market Stickers
Washi Tape - Trimcraft
Ink - Ink It Up!

Tools
EK Success Corner Punch

So Tiny & Cute

I'm still in the mood to scrap whatever photos I come across, rather than working on any of my half-finished albums. Today's photo is of my nephew when he was a baby (nearly 17 years ago). It was originally 10" x 8" but the top part of the photo had some floral bedding that was distracting attention from the baby. I had tried and failed to scrap this photo before, but I decided to crop out the top part, giving me a 10" x 6" photo.

I've seen and liked a few pages recently where everything is aligned at one side of the page. I decided to try this out, so I layered all my papers on the right hand side of the page.

I did make a mistake when cutting my papers - I originally planned to use the spotty paper as my background and the gingham as the strip below the photo, but I picked up and cut the wrong paper, so I ended up swapping them over. Oh well, no-one will ever know (except you, dear reader). And I will be more careful next time.

Supplies
Paper - Lily Bee Double Dutch, MME Lime Twist, MME Miss Caroline, Karen Foster Oh Boy Stripes
Letters - American Crafts Dear Lizzy Foam Thickers
Metal Words - Making Memories
Ink - docrafts
Paint - Mister Huey's Opaque White

Baby James

Yesterday's cybercrop challenge came from Suzysnail, and was called 50 Shades of Grey. I expected this to be a black, white and grey page and hers was, but the challenge was to use at least five shades of any one colour on the page.

I decided to use more of my blue scraps, and I made another patchwork page, but with punched squares rather than the fussy cutting of hexagons or triangles. I'm not sure how many shades of blue are on the page but there are about 15 different patterned papers. 

Supplies
Cardstock - Papermania
Paper Scraps
Letters - Sandylion/Disney
Ink - Papermania

Tools
Dovecraft 1" Square Punch
Fiskars Postage Stamp Border Punch