2016 Album Cover

My 2016 albums are done now, but there was one more task left. I use postbound or snapload albums rather than three ring albums (for reasons discussed in this post) and I have two brown albums from Pioneer which will hold these pages. These have windows in the front which I have now filled with title cards. 

My supplies were very simply chosen, using the first things that would work rather then diving through everything I own in search of the perfect pieces. I started with the background papers; these were the last two left in a 6x6 pad which was sitting on my desk, and the kraft grid sits well with the brown fabric of the albums. I then sought an alphabet sheet with flat stickers and two each of the numbers 2, 0, 1 and 6 left and stopped as soon as I found a suitable sheet from Basic Grey. 

Next up I considered washi tape, but decided to look at stickers first; turning to my OneCanoeTwo #stickerbook where I chose one with some green to match the numbers. The other main colour in the sticker was pink so I pulled some small tile stickers to add 'Part One' and 'Part Two' to the title cards. 

Since the word 'Part' is shorter than 'One' and 'Two' I added a pink enamel heart to each card. This could have been another motif or colour, but again I stopped as soon as I had something suitable rather than perfect. Finally I added a trio of green rain dots to each card and popped them into their pockets.

Coast to Coast

Last page now for my 2016 album, and it's another long distance walk for my husband. This time he and a friend were walking north to south across Devon from Lynmouth to Wembury.

An eight day walk across glorious countryside yielded a plethora of photos so I made a double page by repeating the 'Half and Half' sketch from Shimelle's Start with a Sketch class. This gave me room for twelve smaller photos in the bottom half of the page plus larger photos, title and journalling in the top half. It's also a good design for when you don't have two identical papers for the background as it can be made by splitting two different papers into 6" panels for the tops and bottoms.

Supplies
Paper - Authentique, We R Memory Keepers Free Spirit, Crate Paper Random, My Mind's Eye Collectable, Simple Stories Awesome

Letters - American Crafts

Journalling Cards - Project Life

Puffy Stickers - Pinkfresh Studio, Freckled Fawn

Enamel Dots - Echo Park, Pretty My Page

Ink - Ranger

Tools

Silhouette Portrait

Big Shot

Dovecraft Label Die

X-Cut Pennant Die

Prom

I'm working through my remaining 2016 pages, but it really is a reminder that I shouldn't leave double pages until last. This is the fifth of six, so almost done.
This page is from my daughter's Prom which was held at a local hotel. I've gone with seven photos: I took the large one on the left outside the hotel when I dropped off my daughter and her friend; the rest are a mixture of professional photos and snaps taken on their phones.

I used last month's double sketch from Stick It Down for my page, adjusting it to suit my variety of photo sizes, and adding extra papers on the right so that the far column of photos wan't so isolated.

I mostly used papers from Amy Tangerine's Shine On collection, which I also used for Family Fun and Games last week. However, where that page was quite colourful and playful, I concentrated on the grey and black papers this time for a more sophisticated look with gold accents.

I built an embellishment cluster on each side of the page based around two cameras in different sizes; they are the same motif cut from a 12x12 paper and the 6x6 pad. The 'summer' and 'party' words on the left came from the same 6x6 paper. I finished off with some of the smaller chipboard pieces from the collection and some puffy dots in grey and black.

Supplies
Paper - American Crafts Amy Tangerine Shine On, American Crafts/Shimelle Head in the Clouds
Letters - American Crafts
Chipboard - Amy Tangerine Shine On
Puffy Stickers - Elle's Studio
Word Stickers - Crate Paper/Maggie Holmes
Label Sticker - 7Gypsies
Ink - Hobbycraft
Mist - Docrafts

MUSE

I'm sticking with my 2016 album for this page, filling in another gap with a double page from when we saw Muse at the O2 in April. 

I took a ton of photos and thought that this was going to be a photo-heavy page, but when I sorted through them there just a couple that were really much better than the rest and that I wanted to blow up large. I then added a third which wasn't quite as good but gave me a close-up of the band in action.

I was stumped for both page design and colour scheme so asked for ideas on Facebook. One lady shared a concert page where she used a cutfile and this got me going though neither my cutfile nor my colour scheme match hers at all.

I started with a black cardstock background and liberally spattered it with three colours of mist. I used a stars cutfile, backed some of the small stars with vellum, and filled some of the larger stars with die-cuts.

Supplies

Cardstock - Craft Sensations, Papermania

Paper - Sandylion, HOTP

Vellum - Crate Paper

Word Stickers - Tim Holtz

Mist - Docrafts, Heidi Swapp

Tools

Silhouette Portrait & Paige Taylor Evans 'Stars' Cutfile

Big Shot & Dovecraft Star Die

Woodware Tiny Star Punch

South West Coast Path Part 9

My husband and father-in-law have been walking the 630 miles of the South West Coast Path, one section per year since 2008. I'm currently working on my 2016 album which was their ninth expedition, a stretch of the north Cornwall coast.

I've made each year's pages on the same blue paper, and they are always photo-heavy which generally means a grid. This time I have three rows of 7cm high photos with stripey borders at the edges, holding clusters of die-cut and punched shapes.

Supplies
Cardstock - Bazzill, Papermania
Paper - Craft Creations, Scrap Within Reach Elliot
Letters - October Afternoon
Washi Tape - Efco
Glitter Tape - Hobbycraft
Enamel Dots - Doodlebug, Marianne Design, Echo Park

Tools
Silhouette Portrait
Fiskars Postage Stamp Border Punch
Woodware Postage Stamp Punch
Woodware Scalloped Circle Punch
Big Shot
Spellbinders Circle Die
Little B Arrow Die
Dovecraft Star Die

Chepstow Castle

I'm filling in another gap in my 2016 album today, with a page from our holiday in Wales at Easter. We visited Chepstow Castle one afternoon, and I had sufficient decent photos to need a double page.

It's a rough scraplift of my 'Lift Me Up' page from last year, mostly flipped from left to right, but with some of the page elements moved around to suit my new set of photos.

Supplies
Paper - We R Memory Keepers Free Spirit
Glitter Tape - Unknown
Pearls - Craft for Occasions, The Hobby House
Ink - Ranger
Mist - Docrafts

Tools
Silhouette Portrait
Fiskars Bracket Border Punch
Woodware Postage Stamp Punch
Hobbycraft Star Punch
Big Shot & Spellbinders Circle Die

Family Fun & Games

I finished off my 2005 album recently, so I'm now switching from older photos to newer ones as I move to my 2016 album and attempt to finish that one too. I've drawn up a list of missing pages, six of them, and they are all doubles.

I'm starting in the middle of the year with photos from a family barbecue at my brother's house. They naturally fell into four subgroups, which suited the 'Kicked Up Quadrants' sketch from Shimelle's Start with a Sketch class.

Supplies

Cardstock - UK Crafts

Paper - American Crafts/Amy Tangerine Shine On, American Crafts/Shimelle

Letters - Collage Press, American Crafts, SEI
Puffy Hearts - American Crafts/Amy Tangerine
Washi Tape - October Afternoon

Ink - Hobbycraft
Mist - Mister Huey's

Tools

Big Shot
Papercraft Essentials Tag Die
Dovecraft Label Die
Spellbinders Circle Die
X-Cut Bunting Die
Woodware Scalloped Circle Punch

Off the Grid

Old photos again today as I wanted to tackle a Grab 5 challenge over at For the Love of Pretty Paper but I couldn't fit it to a cruise page. Our five items were chipboard, journalling, Project Life style cards, ephemera or die-cuts and twine/thread.

The photos are my husband and two friends taking a break on one of Dartmoor's tors a few years back. The title card is from Simple Stories Travel Notes as is the paper across the middle, a 6x8 which I cut and stretched. I raided my scraps box for the layers to the left of the photos and embellished with die-cuts and chipboard stars. The finishing touch was a few lines of stitching to satisfy the thread part of the Grab 5 challenge.

Supplies

Paper - Simple Stories Hey Pop!, Simple Stories Travel Notes, Simple Stories Awesome, Teresa Collins
Card - Simple Stories Travel Notes
Die-Cuts - atd World Travel
Chipboard Stars - American Crafts
Enamel Dots - My Mind's Eye
Thread - DMC
Ink - Ranger
Mist - Docrafts

Tools
Big Shot & Little B Arrow Die
Fiskars Postage Stamp Border Punch
Scrapberry's Compass Stamp

Austria 2016

I have loads of scrapbook pages for 2016, so many that they're going to need three albums rather than my usual two, so I decided to remove the pages from our holiday in Austria and give them their own album. This means that I need a new page summarising the holiday for the 2016 album.

The January challenge at For the Love of Pretty Paper was to make a review page for 2017, using us least six photos. Since these challenges are just for fun, I had no qualms about twisting this one to make my holiday review page. I printed off a dozen photos as squares (just smaller than 4x4) with the intention of cropping some of them to be landscape or portrait as required once I had a plan for the page. Well, I shuffled them around for a bit, didn't manage to come up with a plan and then put them to one side in favour of 'easier' pages.

Last weekend, Stick It Down ran their first cybercrop, which included a couple of double pages and inspired me to pull those photos out again. Cathy's challenge combined a tic-tac-toe grid with any double sketch of our choice, so I looked for one that could be adapted for the photos I'd already printed, picking this one from May 2015.

I've used it before (Arlington Court), back when it was published, but the two pages look completely different and you wouldn't think that they started from the same place. With 12 square photos this time (I didn't crop any in the end), I laid out nine in a grid on the central square and use the other three to the sides as in the sketch.

My paper choices were relatively simple - I'd used Pink Paislee's Atlas collection for the original Austrian pages so I just pulled out the remaining papers and embellishments. I was low on full sheets but found a pair from another collection that would coordinate with them for the background.

For the tic-tac-toe part of the challenge, I chose the middle row - ink, stripes and stencil. My background paper has the stripes, I've inked all the paper edges and I also used ink through a stencil to add small circles on the background, around the paper circles on each side of the page.

Supplies
Paper - Fancy Pants Park Bench, Pink Paislee Atlas
Letters - American Crafts
Numbers - October Afternoon
Washi Tape - Ebay
Puffy Stickers - Fancy Pants, Jillibean Soup, American Crafts/Shimelle
Enamel Stars - Pink Paislee
Ink - Ranger
Mist - Docrafts

Tools
Big Shot
X-Cut Camera Die
Spellbinders Circle Dies
Fiskars Shape Cutter & Circle Templates

Lea Valley Walk

This page has been a long time in the making; I've pulled out the photos and papers and then put them away again more than once. It's a page-and-a-half from a walk I took along the Lea Valley almost two years ago, and which I blogged at the time (Part 1 & Part 2). Part of the problem was the sheer number of photos that I took; I had culled them down to 20 previously but this time I ditched a few more to give me a 15-photo page. I kept the photos (with captions) on the 12x12 part of the page and put a map and my journalling on the 6x12 part to the right. The walk is way-marked with swan symbols, which I photographed at the time and then used in my embellishment clusters.

Supplies
Cardstock - Dovecraft, Bazzill
Paper - Pinkfresh Studios Felicity, Echo Park Everyday Memories, Basic Grey Serenade
Ephemera - Simple Stories Carpe Diem
Washi Tape - Ebay
Puffy Stickers - American Crafts/Shimelle
Enamel Dots - Docrafts, Eyelet Outlet
Ink - Ranger

Tools
Big Shot & Provo Craft Alphabet Dies
X-Cut Circle Punch

Just Big Kids

This page is something of a filler in my 2016 scrapbook. It uses a photo that I might not have scrapbooked, but I needed another page in order to even them up and prevent a gap in the book. It was one of my daughter and her fellow explorer scouts icing biscuits as part of a Christmas craft night last year.

The design is a departure from what is 'normal' for me, but it came from the third of the Advent Calendar challenges at For the Love of Pretty Paper. Each of these challenges require us to use five stash items and a specific technique, and this time the list was gold washi tape, wood veneer, small tile alpha stickers, a date stamp, a 'cut-apart' paper and watercolour painting.

I started by marking the shape of a Christmas tree on the page, which I then roughly painted and stitched round the outline. I matted my photo on two 3x3 cut-apart cards plus another paper and overlapped it onto the tree. Gold washi on the right, tile stickers in my title, wood veneer star on the tree and a date stamp under my journalling. Looking at the page in the screen now, I feel that it needs an embellishment cluster at the bottom right so I shall see what I can add.

Supplies
Cardstock - Stampin' Up!
Paper - American Crafts Deck the Halls, Pebble/Jen Hadfield Warm & Cozy
Letters - American Crafts
Washi - Tesco/Unknown
Sequins & Wood Veneer - Advent Calendar Gifts
Watercolours - Dr Ph. Martin's
Ink - Ranger
Mist - Docrafts

Tools
Amy Tangerine Roller Date Stamp

Raven Crag

Following on from our successful game of Chinese Whispers/Scrap Whispers in May, I signed up to two games in June, one at UKScrappers and one in the Mind the Scrap Facebook group. I thought that it would be interesting to start my chain with the same page in both groups, and to see how it evolved as different people worked with it. 

I started by scraplifting an old page of my own - I had three 4x6 photos and wanted a different layout from just stacking them in a column; a quick look through my previous pages turned up this one, and it was easy to swap the 4x4 for a 4x6, though this lead to me moving the title to the top of the page.

My photos are from a trip to the Lake District last December, and the papers all came from my scraps box. The washi tape is a newish purchase, as is the travel-themed die set which I used to cut the cameras and the word explore.

Supplies
Paper - American Crafts Peppermint Express, Basic Grey Hipster, Pink Paislee/Paige Evans
Letters - Glitz Design
Washi Tape - Little B
Enamel Dots - Teresa Collins, Eyelet Outlet
Ink - Ranger

Tools
Big Shot, X-Cut Travel Mini Dies & Papercraft Essentials Tag Die
Scrapberry's Around the World Compass Stamp
Fiskars Postage Stamp Birder Punch
Woodware Scalloped Circle Punch

QUEX - Queen Extravaganza

I'm continuing with 2016 photos, working backwards through the year, and I'm now in November when we saw the Queen Extravaganza at Hammersmith Appollo. They are a very special Queen tribute band, having been put together by Roger Taylor and Brian May, and they were playing the "A Night at the Opera" album in full. Photography wasn't allowed, but I wasn't the only one taking a few pictures, and I supplemented them with some from their Facebook page. 

This needed to be a double page, and I turned to the sketch archive at Stick It Down for ideas, picking this one from 2014. I had a half-sheet of music print paper which worked perfectly for the vertical panel on the sketch and found some 6x6 papers from the same collection to go with it. I picked dark blue for the panel across the bottom of the page to work with the blue hues in my photos, and decided on black for my background.

I cut the musical notes on my Silhouette (using a cut file based on some free clip art that I had made previously) and added washi tape, stickers and clear stars for further embellishments.

Supplies
Cardstock - Craft Sensations
Paper - 7Gypsies Avignon, Echo Park Hello Winter
Letters - American Crafts, October Afternoon
Stickers - Tim Holtz
Stars - Papermania
Washi Tape - Little B, The Works

Tools
Silhouette Portrait

Time to Dine

We're nearly half way through 2017, and my 2016 album is far from complete. I've tried a couple of times to start from the beginning of the year and work through chronologically, but that's not working for me. I'm having another go at that album now, but starting at the end of the year with December pages.

One of our friends organises a Christmas Ball each year in the Lake District and I pinched two of her photos from Facebook to use with one of my husband and me. 

I picked a sketch from Rochelle Spears' part of this months Scrappy Friends challenge and used Christmas papers from Simple Stories. On this occasion I kept fairly close to the sketch, except for swapping the portrait photos for landscape ones. 

Supplies
Cardstock - Bazzill
Paper - Pebbles/Jen Hadfield Warm & Cozy, Simple Stories DIY Christmas
Letters - Hobbycraft
Brads - Simple Stories
Holly - The Works
Enamel Dots - Simple Stories, Trimcraft
Ink - Ranger
Mist - Docrafts

Tools
Bracket-Shaped-Square Template

Tea at The Ritz

This is the third page from one of my friend's birthday last year and it's a double for Afternoon Tea at the Ritz Hotel. We had a fabulous day out in London and you can see two other pages from the day earlier on my blog (Cheers and In the Sky Garden). 

I used one of my favourite double page sketches (from the now defunct Sketch Support) for my page, one that's really versatile and I have to limit its use. 

On this occasion, I swapped the positions of the title and journalling, and squeezed an extra photo onto the left page. On the right, I turned one of my paper layers into a pocket for the menu and swapped the larger and smaller landscape photos over to help with the layering over the pocket.

Somehow I have managed to run out of cream cardstock, so I used white for the background and chalked the edges to make it a beige/pink colour instead. I based my embellishment on circles and stars to contrast with all the rectangles of paper, and finally found the perfect place for a Shimelle sticker with the wording 'drink tea + eat cake'.

Supplies
Cardstock - Chartwell Studio
Paper - Studio Calico Heyday, Studio Calico Sundrifter
Letters - American Crafts
Circle Stickers - Anita's Glitterations
Doily Sticker - My Mind's Eye
Word Stickers - American Crafts/Shimelle, Crate Paper/Maggie Holmes, My Mind's Eye
Stars/Gems/Flowers - from Stash
Washi Tape - Dovecraft
Chalk - Studio G
Ink/Mist - Docrafts

Tools
Big Shot & X-Cut Ticket Stubs Die

In the Sky Garden

One of my friends celebrated a landmark birthday last year, and our day out in London runs to four scrapbook pages. I made and shared the first one last month, and this is the second, from the Sky Garden at 20 Fenchurch Street, aka the Walkie Talkie.

I picked four photos and worked with uneven quadrants on the page, using two 6x6 papers on the diagonal and filling in the other two corners with smaller pieces. Clouds seems like an appropriate embellishment, so I used all that I had along with hearts, stars and gold word stickers.

The third and fourth pages from the day are coming shortly - a double for the main event, Tea at The Ritz.

Supplies
Paper - Studio Calico Heyday
Letters - American Crafts
Die-Cut Clouds - Studio Calico
Word Stickers - Crate Paper/Maggie Holmes
Enamel Hearts - American Crafts/Shimelle
Gems - ZVA Creative
Ink/Mist - Docrafts

Tools
Fiskars Apron Lace Border Punch

Cheers!

I'm sharing another 12x12 page today; this one is from the CyberCrop that Paper Issues held in their Facebook group last weekend. They posted more than 20 challenges, but I only did a handful including this sketch. Entries close tomorrow morning (BST) so you still have time to play along.

One of my friends reached a milestone birthday last year, and we had a whole day of celebrations. These will run to four pages in my album and I've been on the lookout for a suitable collection of papers to scrap them as a set. I finally picked Heyday from Studio Calico; I have the 12x12 collection pack, the 6x6 pad and the ephemera set. It seems to be a childhood-themed collection but most of the prints are neutral and the balloon-patterned papers are good for a birthday while still being fairly subtle.

I toyed with the title for a long time. This is the first page from the day, and we're drinking Prosecco on the train to London (at 10am). I considered 'Start As You Mean to Go On' and 'Let's Get This Party Started' but both felt too long; 'Celebrate' was a possibility for a while but it would leave me short of both Es and As for the other pages. I did the rest of the page, including the journalling, before I finally settled on a title, and it was the journalling that gave it to me; the last word I wrote was Cheers! and so I duplicated that as the title, tying the two in together.

Supplies
Paper - Studio Calico Heyday, Simple Stories So Fancy
Letters - American Crafts
Stickers - My Mind's Eye, Crate Paper/Maggie Holmes, American Crafts/Shimelle, Paperchase
Die Cuts - Studio Calico Heyday, OneCanoeTwo Hazelwood
Gems - from Stash

Tools
Fiskars Apron Lace Border Punch
Big Shot & X-Cut Ticket Stubs Die

Say Yes to NCS

I posted a page recently about my daughter and her team-mates graduating from NCS (National Citizen Service) and this page comes a couple of months earlier in the album, as she started the experience with a residential trip to Norfolk where they were originally put together.

She came home from this trip and told me she had photos for me to scrapbook, having asked her friend to take some of her on the abseiling wall and taking the 'leap of faith'. I picked two pairs of photos, printed them at 4x6 and ran them across a double page; alumni of Shimelle's Design Decisions class may recognise the design of the page from a double in her final set of videos.

Supplies
Paper - Simple Stories A Charmed Life, Pink Paislee Paige Evans, Studio Calico Snippets
Letters - Trimcraft
Stickers - Studio Calico Snippets, American Crafts Shimelle, Teresa Collins
Chipboard - Studio Calico
Ink & Mist - Docrafts

Tools
X-Cut Circle Punch
Hobbycraft Star Punch

Hallowe'en Pumpkins

I'm sharing another 2016 page with you today so the album appears to be back on track, at least for now. This one's from Hallowe'en when my daughter's Explorer Scout Unit tried their hands at pumpkin-carving.

Believe it or not, this page started out from a Stick It Down sketch. I had three photos, two landscape and a smaller square, and I initially rotated the sketch to suit them. As I went on, I dropped the smaller photo, added in more paper layers and rotated the background back again while keeping the photos at 90° to the original. Hopefully you can still see the sketch in my finished page.

I used old October Afternoon papers from several collections and fussy cut most of the embellishment pieces from a Witch Hazel paper. The frame on the photo highlights my daughter's Harry Potter pumpkin.

Supplies
Cardstock - Craft Creations?
Paper - October Afternoon Witch Hazel, OA 9 to 5, OA 5 & Dime
Letters - October Afternoon Daily Flash
Die-Cut & Brad - October Afternoon Witch Hazel
Enamel Dots - Teresa Collins, Doodlebug, American Crafts/Shimelle
Ink & Mist - Docrafts

Tools
X-Cut Circle Punches

NCS Graduation

Having said last post that I am going to forget about 2016 for a while and scrap whatever photos take my fancy, I'm back to it almost straight away. 

This page is from December when my daughter and her team-mates graduated from NCS - National Citizen Service. This is a government scheme for 16-17 year-olds delivered in three parts - Adventure (outdoor activities away from home), Skills (workshops in a university or college) and Make a Difference (a community project that they choose, plan and deliver). See www.ncsyes.co.uk
for more information, especially if you are in the UK and you have a teen.

I worked with another sketch set as part of the January challenge in Facebook group For the Love of Pretty Paper, but I flipped it horizontally and swapped the two smaller photos for a larger one. I also replaced the frame with a longer strip of paper to give me a place for my journalling.

I used new Echo Park paper for my background and found an excellent match for the colours in an old My Mind's Eye 6x6 pad. I kept the rest of the papers to simple monochrome patterns to calm down the busy background.

Supplies
Paper - Echo Park Everyday Memories, My Mind's Eye Just Splendid, Photo Play Fun with Friends, American Crafts, Crate Paper
Letters - American Crafts, Pebbles
Sticker - Echo Park Everyday Memories
Enamel Dots - Fancy Pants, Doodlebug, Trimcraft
Ink - Docrafts
Mist - Cosmic Shimmer
Tools
Fiskars Shape Cutter & Circle Template
American Crafts Notebook Border Punch
Hobbycraft Star Punch