Happy Days

Christina's Page

This is the fourth and final page that I made for the Chinese Whispers game in the Mind the Scrap Facebook group. As always, I was scraplifting a page from Christina, and as soon as I saw hers I knew that mine would be a close copy, using insta-cards and a beach photo.

I'd imagined that beach photo being one of my children, but it appears that I've already scrapped them all so I went back to our university days and some really old photos of us on the beach at Teignmouth. There were two, so I adjusted the page slightly.

I wanted a cloud print for the background, but I couldn't find one so I compromised by painting white cardstock with mist. I arranged a grid of 3x3 cards at the bottom of the page and cut the sun and cloud from a 4x4 card. The title came from one of Shimelle's prompts for her 25 Days of Scrapbooking Words last month.

Supplies
Cardstock - Colorset
Paper - Imaginesce
Insta-Cards - Simple Stories Good Day Sunshine
Wood Veneer - Make & Create
Letters - October Afternoon
Labels - Sarah's Cards Printable
Washi Tape - Little B
Enamel Dots - Simple Stories, Echo Park, My Mind's Eye
Mist - Cosmic Shimmer, Docrafts
Ink - Ranger

Tools
Big Shot & X-Cut Travel Mini Dies
X-Cut Circle Punch

Give the Boy a Spoon

I have another page from our Chinese Whispers game in the Mind the Scrap Facebook group for you today. This time Christina gave me a monochromatic page with a big block of photos. I rarely scrap black and white photos, so I knew from the start that my page would be a more colourful affair.

My starting point was to find a set of three photos that could be cropped to squares and I turned up some of my nephew as a toddler. Next step was to find a background paper; I wanted a bold print but one that was small enough to 'read' the pattern around the edges of the page.

I cropped and arranged my three photos on the page, and decided to use the fourth quarter for both title and journalling.

Supplies
Paper - Karen Foster Design, Hot Off the Press, My Mind's Eye Bright
Letters - Hobbycraft
Stickers - My Mind's Eye, Jillibean Soup
Flair - Unknown
Washi Tape - Little B
Ink - Ranger

Tools
Big Shot and Cut & Make Doily Die
Hobbycraft Star Punch

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

Journey of a Page

My Starter Page

During June and early July, I played two games of Scrap Whispers or Chinese Whispers, one on UKScrappers and one in the Mind the Scrap Facebook page. In both games we formed teams of four and passed a scrapbook page from one person to the next, scraplifting it in turn to make a chain of related pages. I thought it would be interesting to start my chain with the same page in both groups and see how it evolved as different groups of people worked on it.

We had the reveal at UKScrappers first, where I played in a team with Mags, Sue and Elaine. 

Mags was first, and cleverly adapted mine to a double page:

Sue was next, lifting Mags' page, and she returned to a single page with a striking black, white and red colour scheme:

And Elaine was the final person to play. I love the fact that she kept Sue's colour scheme while also unknowingly scrapping the same subject as Mags:

A week later, we had the reveal at Mind the Scrap where I played with Clair, Judith and Christine.

Clair was first to scraplift my page, and dropped the bottom photo:

Judith was next, with her version of Clair's page, keeping a very similar design:

And Christine played last, rotating the page and switching to a single large photo:

There you have it. Six pages that all came from mine. Although only two of these scrapbookers saw my original page, the design came through strongly and is still visible in the final pages too.

There'll be another round of Scrap Whispers at UKScrappers in September so if you're interested and not a member of UKS yet, please do join us. (Open to all, not just the UK.)

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

Art Attack

Cindy's Page

This is the fourth and final page from the game of Chinese Whispers that we played recently in the Mind the Scrap Facebook group. This one started from Sarah and I was last to play, scraplifting Cindy's version as always. 

I chose to scrap a couple of photos of my husband and our friends' son painting together on holiday. I'd already printed them at different sizes but I added a piece of patterned paper to them to make a photo block similar to the one on Cindy's page. I backed it with strips of patterned paper from a 6x6 pad and switched it to the opposite side of the page to suit the direction that the people are facing in the photos. 

Since it's a page about painting, I decided on an inky background for my page and used a variation on the packaging technique. I inked up a piece of 12x12 acetate using colours to match my papers, spritzed it with water and smooshed the colour around before laying my cardstock on top. I cut a set of icons on my Silhouette to match Cindy's snowflakes, and spread them around the page as she had, but I preferred them in clusters. I cut my title on the Silhouette too, and moved it to the side as I had more space there.

These were the pages that came before Cindy and me - inspiration from Missy Whidden, Sarah's version of Missy's page, and Jo's lift of Sarah's page:

Mine is so different from that starting point, but the progression is clear to see.

Supplies
Cardstock - DCWV, American Crafts
Paper - My Mind's Eye Quilting Bee
Sticker - Cosmo Cricket
Enamel Dots - Doodlebug, Studio Calico
Ink - Ranger, Memento, Hobbycraft
Mist - Mister Huey's

Tools
Silhouette Portrait & Paper Issues 'Circle Fun' Cut File

Dinosaur Court

I'll admit that I was initially flummoxed when I received Cindy's page to scraplift in the third week of our Chinese Whispers game at Mind the Scrap as it's not my normal style. I left it for a few days hoping that my subconscious mind would work on the problem and decided to break the page down and take some of its elements rather than make a faithful copy.

The first step was to find a similar shaped photo - long and narrow - and I picked one of the dinosaurs in Crystal Palace Park. It had been my Facebook cover photo for a while so I knew it would suit that shape. The subject made me think of Basic Grey's Archaic collection, which has a dinosaur print, but I knew that I had killed it with a 'starting point' page sometime last year. That page had a row of layered scraps across it and I hadn't used it yet, so could this be my chance? I dug it out (complete with the remaining scraps including some tiny pieces of dinosaur paper) and decided that this would work perfectly if I added some spotty vellum above and below the papers.

I removed the smaller pieces that I had stacked on the left, and added more paper pieces to the right. I matted my photo, and cut a couple of tags from the dinosaur print paper. Having positioned the photo (which is actually a pocket with four more inside) I surrounded it with the tags, more scraps, stickers and chipboard frames, throwing everything I could find at the page. 

It's not an exact copy of Cindy's page, but it's definitely related; not my usual style, but I really like it. That's one thing I love about playing Chinese Whispers with scrapbook pages, the way it forces you to do something a little differently.

These are the pages that came before Cindy's and mine, Jo's inspiration page and her own copy:

Sarah followed mine, and this was her version:

Supplies
Cardstock - Bazzill
Paper - Basic Grey Archaic
Vellum - American Crafts
Letters - My Mind's Eye
Stickers - Basic Grey, Tim Holtz
Ink - Docrafts

Tools
Fiskars Postage Stamp Border Punch

Let's Bake

This page is the second one that I made in the Chinese Whispers game that we have been playing in the Mind the Scrap Facebook group. I played second in this chain and was scraplifting a page from Cindy.

I took the multi-coloured circle in another direction. I've had a hankering to make a rainbow page made up from lots of bits and pieces - stickers, die-cuts, gems, buttons, etc. and this was the perfect opportunity to put it into practice.

I marked out an 8" circle on my page and divided it into six sections, then stitched the inside and outside edges with six colours of embroidery thread and filled in the middle with an assortment of pieces from my embellishment drawers (which I sort by colour).

The photo is from a recent holiday when I was baking with our friends' son. I matted it on a couple of layers of paper and placed it on the same side of the circle as Cindy had hers, but closer to the middle to show as much of the circle as possible. I couldn't put my title on the circle as Cindy had, so I ran it along the side of my photo. I love these puffy letter stickers; they are smaller than Thickers and have more dimension than flat stickers making them really versatile and I shall be buying more.

Supplies
Cardstock - Bazzill
Paper - My Mind's Eye
Letters - American Crafts
Thread - DMC
Embellishments - My Mind's Eye, Jillibean Soup, Paperchase, Studio Calico, Doodlebug, Trimcraft, Dovecraft, Crate Paper, Pebbles, Teresa Collins, Making Memories

Tools
Fiskars Circle Template
Paper Piercer

Run London 2017

I'm a member of the Mind the Scrap group over on Facebook where we've recently been playing 'Chinese Whispers' with scrapbook pages, passing a page from one to another and scraplifting it to produce a chain of related layouts. We played in groups of four, each picking a starting page or sketch and passing it round the group in turn so we each had a go at each design.

I wanted a layout with one main photo and space for lots of minor photos in order to scrap this year's London Marathon which one of our friends was running with one of her friends. My plan was to show all the different groups of people who were taking part, but to focus the attention on one main photo of 'our' runners. 

I eventually decided to scraplift one of my own old pages, from the Flåmsbana (Flåm Railway) in Norway. This was the original page (from December 2011), with only four photos and hardly any embellishment, but with plenty of scope for changing it to suit my current purpose. 

There's not a lot of colour in my photos; they're predominately grey but the reds and blues led me to a spotty paper from Photo Play, and I picked a grey triangle print as a neutral background. It needed livening up though, so I smooshed some ink and water on it using the 'packaging technique'; this gave me some colour behind my circle of photos without adding any large layers of paper.

More embellishment this time, an indication of both the change in my scrapbooking style and their general availability. I sort most of my embellishments by colour and that was really useful here as I picked out an assortment of pieces from different manufacturers and used up some older bits like the pinked chipboard circle. 

I passed my page to Sarah, who passed her version to Jo, who passed to Cindy; these were their pages.

Supplies
Paper - Pebbles/Jen Hadfield,  Photo Play Paper, American Crafts/Amy Tangerine, Echo Park, My Mind's Eye
Letters - Hobbycraft
Die Cut - Jillybean Soup
Stickers - Elle's Studio, Jillibean Soup
Chipboard - Making Memories?
Enamel Dots/Stars - Marianne Design
Ink - Docrafts, Ink It Up!
Mist - Mister Huey's

Tools
Fiskars Shape Cutter and Circle Templates