I started from the balloon requirement and picked a Christmas party photo, but I then struggled to actually include them. I managed the title, gems and triangles, but my ribbons are printed cardstock laser-cut pieces so I'm not sure they count.
Supplies: Paper - Elle's Studio Live Laugh Love, Pebbles Welcome Christmas; Letters - Tim Holtz; Baubles - Unknown; Laser-Cut Ribbons - 49 and Market; Stickers - Studio Calico, American Crafts; Gems - Hobbycraft, Love to Craft
(Page 6 for 2026)
I based my page on this month's sketch from
For the Love of Pretty Paper and started by cutting the Starburst Square to use as a mask with distress oxide ink behind my photo area. I followed this by cutting the inner parts of Stars Background 2 to give me a selection of stars to spread across the page.
Disclosure - I received the digital cut-files free of charge from Twilight Crafts. All other supplies are my own.
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 have umpteen albums on the go at present, but one that I have badly neglected is my 2022 annual album. For the past few years I mostly kept the annual albums up to date as we went along, but this year that's been a failure. We're in October now and I have made precisely five pages. I'm starting to rectify that with our Easter holiday in Yorkshire for which I've made two pages previously.
I try to use a kit of papers for holidays so that they make a distinct sub-section in my annual albums and for this one I have a mix of papers from Simple Stories and Bo Bunny which share a similar colour palette though the Bo Bunny collection is cleaner and brighter than the Simple Stories papers.
I'm sharing another page from our Scottish cruise today, with a single photo of Marwick Head in the Orkney Islands soon after sunrise.
The photo's about 4.5" x 8" so I trimmed a little off one end to mat it on one of my 6x8 papers. I then layered that over a couple of L-shaped scraps positioned to look like larger pieces and added strips of paper and glitter tape below the photo.
I wanted to put the title above the photo but the descenders on the M and H gave me a potentially awkward space which I filled with stamping for a birthday challenge from For the Love of Pretty Paper. I added another patch of stamping at the bottom to match and then layered embellishments over it and wrote my journalling alongside.
I'd never heard of bleeding tissue paper before, and had no intention of buying it, so I used India inks for my page, and switched to a full circle of coloured splodges to match the first July sketch from Lottie Loves Paper.
Last NSD page now, and I confess that it's the one I like the least. I made it for the 'Abstract Art' challenge from For the Love of Pretty Paper which was to make a monochromatic page and to use large brushstrokes.
I based my page on Sketch-n-Scrap's Sketch #225, making my background from a mix of painted brushstrokes, washi tape and paper scraps.
I've reached that point in my NSD scrapbooking where I pull old pre-printed photos from the albums to work with the challenges, rather than making pages I would have made anyway and tweaking them to fit.
The challenge in question is 'Pointillism' in the art-themed series from For the Love of Pretty Paper, which was to use primary colours and lots of small punched or die-cut shapes. I chose a single sheet of checkerboard paper for my primary colours, die-cut a pile of hexagons from the middle and used the edge squares to frame my page.
Firstly the 'Fauvism' challenge at For the Love of Pretty Paper asked us to use any two options from complementary colours, a single-coloured paper and a sketch by Lisa Sikorski, and I managed all three.
Secondly, Hey Little Magpie set a tic-tac-toe challenge, and I chose the left column - one photo, a border punch and stitching.
My single photo is one my husband took of our son eyeing up the cakes after a family funeral. My colour scheme was largely driven by the strip of tea cup paper, which is a branding strip that I thought was too nice to throw away. I considered rotating the sketch to suit a portrait photo better, but that tea cup strip dictated that I kept to the original version.
Aqua sits opposite peach in the colour wheel and I had a 6x6 floral paper that combined the two colours; the rest are all single colour papers.
I called my 2019 album 'done for now' more than a year ago, but there was a gap in my daughter's story that I wanted to remedy. We looked at various universities for her, including Sussex where she ended up but, although I took photos on some of those visits, I didn't take any at Sussex. Thus the scrapbooks go from us looking at other places to her starting at Sussex without any mention of our visit and her decision to make it her first choice.
When I realised this, I decided to take photos when we collected her at the end of the spring term (March 2020) but Covid disrupted that and I eventually took them in March this year. I particularly wanted spring photos so that they would match the time of our original visit and the trees and flowers would look right.
I took four photos of the buildings that surround Library Square, and used them for the 'Conceptual Art' challenge at For the Love of Pretty Paper. This challenge was an oddity as we had to work from a printed list of instructions without seeing a picture of what the final layout should look like. I'll admit that I didn't follow all the instructions, but I felt it was more important to make a page I liked then to stick to them rigidly and be less happy with the result.
It all felt too left-heavy to me, so I pushed everything to the right by extending the paper across the top of the page, adding an extra square on top of it and spreading out the layering of the vertical papers and photos. I also rotated the banners at the top of the page, added some labels at the bottom left and dropped the line of bunting.
I also linked up with Hey Little Magpie who set a much more straightforward challenge to use three or more photos on a page.
I used an NSD sketch from Hey Little Magpie with another art-based challenge from For the Love of Pretty Paper. This one was Classicism which asked for lots of paper, one of three colour palettes and a classic technique.
I've ticked off two more NSD challenges today; I'm glad that both groups I'm following have a two-week deadline as it's a less pressured approach.
The first is a simple one from Hey Little Magpie to be inspired by a grid, and the second is the 'Land Art' challenge from For the Love of Pretty Paper. All their challenges are based on different art forms and for this one I chose two map papers and a travel theme from the options available.
My photos are from a cruise to Iceland, Greenland and Norway back in 2017 (one per port of call) which I placed in a grid with a map paper to hold embellishments in the sixth square. This is just a summary page for my annual album; the holiday has one of its own as well. I based that album around Photoplay Paper's Boarding Pass collection, which made it the obvious choice for this page.
