Build a Snowman

Today I'm sharing my first December DT page for Twilight Crafts, featuring another Jenny Wren cut-file. Sorry that all you're getting at the moment are DT posts; my crafting time is being taken by other things at the moment but I hope to be back to a more normal schedule in the new year.

I originally scrapped these photos back in 2012, but I chose a grey and green colour scheme then and I've never really liked the page. It's been ear-marked for a re-make in blue for almost a year and I've finally done it, using the Snowman cut-file for my title. 

I originally used eight small photos, but I ditched half of them for the new version, matting them in a block to follow a sketch from Lisa Sikorski at Scrap a Sketch.

I had one full sheet and one part sheet of paper left from Echo Park's Winter Magic collection; some careful gutting and the addition of a sheet of navy cardstock allowed me to get a few layers and to use the patterns from both sides of the snowflake paper. 

I was really pleased that I could layer the snowflake 'O' of my title exactly over one printed on the paper. I added a large pearl to the centre of that one and then added small ones to a selection of snowflakes across the paper. 

I am so much happier with this page than I was with the original version, and I'm one step closer to finishing my 2012 album. Two pages left to go there, and I have photos printed and papers chosen for one of them!

Supplies

Cardstock - Stampin' Up!

Paper - Echo Park Winter Magic

Glitter Tape - The Works

Pearls - Scrapberry's, Craft for Occasions

Tools

Silhouette Portrait & Jenny Wren Snowman Cut-File

Big Shot & The Works Alphabet Dies

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

At the Top

This is a companion page for Climbing Snowdon which I blogged a few weeks ago, but I couldn't share it then. And the reason that I couldn't share it was that it was made as part of the team scraplifting game at Scrap Whispers. Three teams all start from the same scrapbook page and each team member scraplifts the layout of the person before them. The three end layouts can look very alike, or very different, depending how each team member interprets the page they are given.

This time I was scraplifting Sherri and I used her page as inspiration rather than copying every element. I liked the bracket-shaped square behind her photo and I made this a bigger feature on my page. I also swapped her large journalling block for a second photo. I'm not sure whether her background paper is one piece or whether she layered up strips on the right, but I added paper strips to my plainer background. Sherri has some metal embellishments on her photo, which I mimicked using a tag sticker with a brad and I used another brad as an echo of her flower.

All three chains of pages have been revealed on the Scrap Whispers blog this week - Georgina's Team on Monday, Nilsa's Team on Tuesday and Rosey's Team on Wednesday.

Supplies

Cardstock - Bazzill Dotted Swiss

Paper - Basic Grey, Cloud 9 Designs, Glitz Design

Letters - Making Memories, Jenni Bowlin Studio

Stickers - Simple Stories

Brads - Dear Lizzy, Papermania

Ink - Ink It Up!

Tools

Fiskars Postage Stamp Border Punch

Bracket Shaped Square Template

Tryfan

I'm filling in another gap in my 2012 album today - with photos from a walk that my husband and our friend did in North Wales. With so many pictures it had to be another double. I do like the Sketch Support website for double page sketches, and this page is based on their Two-Page Sketch #12, though I did change it a bit, especially on the left half.

Supplies
Cardstock - Bazzill, DCWV Linen Stack
Paper - Crate Paper DIY Shop
Letters - American Crafts Thickers
Washi Tape - The Range
Gems - The Hobby House
Buttons - from Stash

Tools
Woodware Postage Stamp Border Punch
Woodware Scalloped Circle Punch
X-Cut Small Circle Punch

In Memoriam

A sombre title, but this is just a page about a memorial we saw in Cornwall last year. It stands at the foot of Rough Tor and was raised to the memory of Charlotte Dymond who was murdered there in 1844. It made me wonder what our towns and cities would look like if all murder sites were marked in a similar way.

This wasn't a subject for bright colours; I chose grey, cream and pink and worked from Shimelle's Sketch 26 - Scrapbooking with a Favourite Patterned Paper - though my journalling is below the photos not between them.

Supplies
Paper - First Edition J'Adore, Pebbles Fresh Goods, scraps
Letters - Anita's Glitterations
Washi Tape - Queen & Co
Stickers - Pebbles Fresh Goods
Gems - Papermania Dew Drops

Tools
American Crafts Open Scallop Border Punch
Woodware Scalloped Circle Punch
Woodware Flower Punch

A Photo for Nan

I recently signed up for a new workshop at Two Peas in a Bucket - Glitter Girl's Scrapbook Survival Guide. It's self-paced with five chapters covering different strategies for scrapping more photographs, staying inspired - not overwhelmed - by your supplies, getting more from your tools, working with your most precious photos, and developing confidence in your own scrapbooking style.

This page is a scraplift of one of Glitter Girl's sample pages, and it's another page where I have killed off a collection of paper. I had two part sheets left and I could just about cut and piece them together to create a 12x12 background. I embellished with an offcut from making that, plus stickers and pearls.

The photo is one that I took in order to have a picture of both of my children so that I could send it to my Nan last Christmas.

Supplies
Paper, Border & Stickers  - Fancy Pants Winterland
Letters - Fancy Pants Home for Christmas
Ribbon & Pearls - from Stash

Rough Tor

Back to the challenges, and this page is for Stash Challenge #8 at Scrap Our Stash. This was a Tic-Tac-Toe challenge, with the requirement to use a set of stash items that appear as three-in-a-row in the grid. I've been using a lot of brads recently and I have plenty of washi tape, so I chose the left column - washi tape, journal card and 5+ brads. This still left plenty of options in terms of subject and layout.

I have a list of pages to do in order to finish my 2012 album and I decided to do one of them - from Rough Tor in Cornwall last summer. I picked just two photos and used Sketch 11 from Shimelle - scrapbooking on the diagonal - from March this year. I swapped my layout over compared to the sketch as neither of my background papers were complete sheets and this way the photos cover the hole.

Supplies
Paper - Basic Grey Wisteria
Journal Card - Donna Salazar
Letters - Making Memories
Washi Tape - We R Memory Keepers
Brads - Papermania
Gems - Dovecraft
Ink - docrafts

Tools
Woodware Scalloped Circle Punch
Woodware Daisy Punch

Climbing Snowdon

This was another UFO that I had lying around. I'd actually done most of it, but I left the journalling for another time. It was to be one of a pair of pages, and I wasn't sure how to divide the journalling across the two. I've made the other one now, and it had more space for writing so it ended up all being on that page. The only things that I did to finish this page were to caption the photos and add a little backpacker sticker.

As the title says, these are photos from climbing Snowdon, which my husband, daughter and friend did last April. The other page has photos of them at the summit, but I can't share it yet. I'll link it up here when I can. It's here.

Supplies
Cardstock - Bazzill Swiss Dot
Paper - Basic Grey, Cloud 9 Designs
Letters - Making Memories, Jenni Bowlin Studio
Sticker - Simple Stories
Labels - 7Gypsies 
Ink - Ink It Up!

Tools
Fiskars Postage Stamp Border Punch
Bracket-Shaped Square Template

Build a Shelter

I've finally finished my page from Week Two of Shimelle Laine's Break It Down class at UKScrappers (lagging behind as the class is now at the end of Week Four). Every week there are six prompts that build to a complete page, but I went my own way with some of them for this week.

1. Scrap a conversation - Ignored this as there wasn't a particular conversation that I actually wanted to scrap. I decided to scrap the next set of Cornish holiday photos and see where the prompts lead me.
2. Choose your supplies - DIY Shop papers from Crate Paper, which I've used on several Cornish pages so far.
3. Make some stacked embellishments - I did do this, but after I had made the rest of the page.
4. Design a page using stacks of paper - Shimelle gave us a sketch but I decided to make a random stack under my photos and add extra strips at the top right and bottom left. At this point, I changed mybackground paper and also raided my scraps box for anything that would co-ordinate with the DIY Shop papers.
5. Block out the space for photos/journalling/title - I already had a clear idea where my page was going, the photos are the major element and I didn't feel that it needed any journalling.
6. Use your smallest stamps - I don't have many stamps, but I did stamp a flower on any clear space on the paper layers.

And here's the finished page:

Supplies
Paper - KaiserCraft Le Chateau, Crate Paper DIY Shop, Scraps inc. Basic Grey Periphery and K&Company Hannah
Letters - Jillibean Soup Alphabeans, American Crafts Thickers
Washi Tape - We R Memory Keepers
Gems - Papermania Dew Drops
Stickers - K&Co Hannah 
Ink - docrafts

Tools
Big Shot & X-Cut Ticket Stubs Die
Hobbycraft Star Punch
Popcorn Flower Stamp (Magazine Freebie)

Rainforest Biome

Thus is my final 'Biome' page from the Eden Project in Cornwall last summer, but the Rainforest Biome was so big that it gets a double page. So often, when I do a double page I print all my photos the same size and use quite a rigid grid to fit them all in. I wanted to get away from that a bit so I chose two sizes of photo and tried to arrange them across the page in the order that we saw them. There's still some 'gridness' to the page as I couldn't help but line some of the photos up with each other but I do like the flow of it.

I have had this rainforest printed paper for ages and this was the perfect opportunity to use it, but it's quite a bold print and could easily overwhelm the photos. I decided to use large pieces at the page edges and punched squares among the photos as embellishments, then I added lots of epoxy flowers to the corners between photos and squares. Then I went back to my Mediterranean Biome page and added the same flowers in blue to that page. I've journalled on that one too now.

Supplies
Cardstock - Bazzill (Natural)
Paper - docrafts Spring Chic, unlabelled rainforest paper, Sandylion Travel Stripes
Letters - Basic Grey, Lily Bee
Flowers - WHSmith
Ink - docrafts

Tools
Fiskars Postage Stamp Border Punch
Dovecraft 1" Square Punch

Outdoor Biome

Back to Cornwall and the Eden Project today. I used the June sketch from Sarah's Cards with three photos from the Outdoor Biome. This biome is basically everything at Eden that isn't inside their two giant greenhouses which are known as the Mediterranean Biome and the Rainforest Biome.

I stuck fairly closely to the sketch, except that I added a couple of tags above the title. This ties in with the tags on my first page from the Eden Project, and I also used the same butterflies on both pages.

Supplies
Cardstock - Papermania
Paper - Crate Paper DIY Shop
Letters - Authentique, Lily Bee
Butterflies - Prima
Eyelet Brad - Pebbles

Tools
Woodware Scalloped Circle Punch
Craft Creatives Butterfly Punch
X-Cut Small Circle Punch
Office Hole Punch

Mediterranean Biome

This is another page from the Eden Project in Cornwall last summer, with photos from inside the Mediterranean biome, one of their two huge 'greenhouses' as pictured on my 'Return to Eden' page last week.

I picked the best few photos and used another sketch from Sketch Support.

There's no journalling yet, as I've mislaid my guide book and I want to check a few things before I write it.

Supplies
Paper - Daisy D's (background), Laura Ashley, Dovecraft
Letters - Scenic Route, Lily Bee
Brads & Ribbon - from Stash

Tools
American Crafts Simple Scallop Border Punch

Return to Eden

Further to my last post, I am still scrapping our Cornish holiday, but I have managed to combine that with a challenge from Sketch-n-Scrap. Their Sketch #34 shows a grouping of 4 small photos, but I have used it for a single photo from the Eden Project.

This page will be the first of five pages (I think) from our day there, so it acts as a mini-introduction to the ones that follow. The title refers to the fact that we also visited in 2004, though that time I only had three photos for one page. 

Supplies
Cardstock - American Crafts
Paper - Crate Paper DIY Shop, Crate Paper Little Sprout, Scraps
Letters - American Crafts Remarks, October Afternoon Mini Market Stickers
Butterflies - Prima

Climbers

I'm still scrapping photos from our holiday in Cornwall last year, though there are lots of new June challenges that I want to get stuck into. I'm hoping that I can combine the two.

For now, it's a single page based on Sketch Support's Sketch #20 from April last year. I did play around with the number of photos and the layout of the paper panels, but the sketch was my starting point.

The photos are of our children climbing the cliffs above Trebarwith Strand on the north Cornwall coast.

Supplies
Cardstock - American Crafts, Papermania Kraft Basics
Paper & Pennant Stickers - Echo Park This & That
Letters - American Crafts Thickers
Border Stickers - Doodlebug
Ink - docrafts
Mist - Mister Huey's
Paint - Folk Art

Tools
Big Shot & Circles Die

Surf Seeker

Today's page is a little bit different from my normal style, and could have gone horribly wrong, but it didn't and I'm really happy with the way it turned out.

I'm still scrapping our Cornish holiday last year and I have five photos of my daughter paddling in the sea. My original thought was to put them all in a block, but the varying amounts of zoom made them look peculiar together. I wondered about spreading them around the page and remembered a page by Mercy Tiara where she did just that. She posted it back in February but I have only recently watched her process video.

I started by spattering my page with white mist, then marked out and machine-stitched a grid on my page. I arranged the photos, adding washi tape, a piece of border and a button to each picture (though I moved the buttons around later on). Title in the middle and sub-title at the bottom. Then I dug through some ancient embellishments and scattered an assortment of gems around the page. I found some sequin stars but the colour wasn't suitable, so I punched a pile of vellum stars and spread them around the page too.

The title may not appear to fit with the photos, but we had gone to this beach for my daughter to body-board, only to find that the tide was in and there was no beach left. She had a paddle here before we moved on to another beach where she was able to body-board. I don't have any photos of that (she was too far out, just one black speck in a sea of black specks) so it's mentioned in the journalling.

Supplies
Cardstock - Core'dinations Tranquil Blue
Letters - American Crafts Thickers, Craft Creations, Starform
Border - Bazzill Half the Edge
Buttons, Gems & Vellum - from Stash
Ink - docrafts

Tools
Sewing Machine
Woodware Tiny Star Punch
Amy Tangerine Date Stamp

Lanhydrock

The sketch for my last page originally came from Sketch Support; I have had a good nose around the site and it has quite a few interesting sketches even though they aren't posting any new ones.

I'm sticking with our Cornish holiday for another double page. The left side is from an old sketch at Sketch Support, which I mirrored with different proportions for the right side.

Supplies
Paper - First Edition Spring Feast, Crate Paper Random, MME Wild Asparagus
Letters - American Crafts Remarks
Ribbon - from Stash

Tools
Fiskars Bracket Border Punch

Tintagel

My photo printer has been out of action so I have been scrapping older photos for the past few weeks. It's back in working order now so I want to finish my 2012 album. In particular I have photos from our holiday in Cornwall to scrap. The Birthday Bash at Sketch-n-Scrap ended today, but some of the challenges are live for a couple more weeks. Lynette posted a double page sketch challenge at A Work in Progress earlier this week and it was perfect for my photos from Tintagel:

I do struggle with double pages sometimes, as I have a tendency to pick my photos and then print them all at the same size. I found that using the sketch meant that I fitted the photos into the prescribed sizes (though I swapped square photos for landscape/portrait photos and used one less on my page). I have a few more doubles to do from Cornwall, so I think I will seek out more sketches for those.

Supplies
Paper - American Crafts Dear Lizzy Neapolitan, K&Co Life's Journey, V&A Linen Paper Pad
Letters - American Crafts Thickers
Embellishments - K&Co Life's Journey
Gems - Making Memories
Ink - Dovecraft

Tools
Woodware Flower Punch

Drive It

I've had a bit of a scrapbooking lull between the scramble of finishing off April challenges and the madness of National Scrapbooking Day that is to come tomorrow, but I have pulled together a page for the third stash challenge at Scrap Our Stash. They called it the Pretty Paper Party challenge and asked us to use paper from at least three collections and to dig into our stash for some rub-ons.

I decided to try and fill in one of the gaps in my 2012 album with a page from Legoland. It will sit opposite this one so I tried to use a similar colour scheme and I used the same Thickers for a similar title. I don't have a lot of rub-ons but I unearthed some gold stars from a birthday themed sheet.

The turquoise and floral papers are from two different collections from My Mind's Eye but I love how well they coordinate and I was inspired by one of my own recent layouts to stitch around the edge of those papers. The yellow is an ancient piece from Daisy D's and the red is from Fancy Pants.

Supplies
Cardstock - DCWV Linen CLoset
Paper - MME Miss Caroline, MME Lime Twist, Daisy D's Butter Polka Dot, Fancy Pants Wavesearcher
Letters - American Crafts
Rub-On Stars - Royal & Langnickel
Thread - DMC

Tools
Hobbycraft Medium Star Punch
Bazzill Basics Paper Piercer

Mascot Hunting

Challenge 135 at Scrap Whispers was a colour challenge - to use red, aqua, white and kraft on a page. I picked a couple Olympic mascot photos and printed them at 4x6 and I pulled out an assortment of papers but I started the page without any clear idea of where it would end up.

My first step was to use white mist and a stencil to make a pattern on my kraft cardstock background. Then I discovered that my photos would cover most of my stencilled area if I laid them side-by-side so I ended up placing them in a vertical column with strips of paper and ribbon. I tried to counteract all the vertical lines with some horizontal washi tape and a white circle around  my title, which I stamped because I didn't have sufficient letter stickers in the the right size and a good colour. 

Supplies
Cardstock - Papermania Kraft Basics
Paper - MME Lime Twist
Washi Tape - Trimcraft
White Stickers - Anita's Glitterations
Gems & Ribbon - from Stash
Mist - Mister Huey's Opaque White
Ink - Papermania

Tools
Pebbles ABC Stamps
Dreamweaver Background Dots Stencil
Amy Tangerine Roller Date Stamp

U Heart Curry

I'm a week late in sharing my page for last week's Team Challenge at UK Scrappers, but better late than never. Wonky gave us a sketch to use, and asked us to include a stamped image, plus buttons and ribbon or trim.

I was deep into Paralympic scrapping last week and I came across two photos of my daughter in the Indian restaurant that we visited in Brick Lane after we watched the wheelchair marathons. My husband took the photos as she was scraping out the serving dish.

I wanted to use spicy colours and started from a photo mat from a stack that I am keeping on my desk in the hope that I will use them up. The rest of the papers came from my scraps box and ended up being not so spicy after all. I stamped a part frame around the top right of my photo mat and also used a date stamp near the title.

Supplies
Paper - K&Co, Glitz Design, Basic Grey Periphery, Scenic Route Belleville, DCWV Garden Party Mat Stack
Label Stickers - October Afternoon
Washi Tape - Trimcraft
Ribbon - Papermania
Buttons - Meiflower
Ink - VersaColor
Rub-on Letters - Papermania
Heart - from Stash

Tools
X-Cut Scalloped Border Punch
Woodware Scalloped Circle Punch
7 Gypsies? Stamp Set
Amy Tangerine Roller Date Stamp

4 Generations

One aim for this year is to complete as many of the House and Team Challenges at UKScrappers as possible... and not to leave them until the last minute.

The January House Challenge is a sketch, which I used as a starting point, rather than copying it exactly. My photo was taken on New Year's Eve and has four generations of my family in the female line - my daughter, myself, my mum and my nan. 

Supplies
Paper - Crate Paper Random, Echo Park This & That, Echo Park Yours Truly, 
                  Dovecraft Eastern Promise, MME Miss Caroline
Letters - American Crafts Remarks
Flower - Bo Bunny Mama Razzi
Brad - Laura Ashley
Ink - docrafts