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.)

Dunstanburgh Castle

Back in May, Sarah posted 'Five Sketches in Five Days' in the Lottie Loves Paper Facebook group. I did three before I ran out of month, and had actually printed the photo and chosen a paper collection for the fourth, but got diverted into making Scrap Whispers/Chinese Whispers pages in June.

More recently, our router died and my computer and printer wouldn't talk to each other without it; I had to go back to pre-printed photos, and I picked up this page again.

The photo is from our Easter holiday in Northumberland, when we walked along the coast late one afternoon to Dunstanburgh Castle, a ruin on a headland that's not accessible by road. Being a page about a castle, there are no people in the photo, so I'm linking with The Studio Challenges blog, where a recent challenge was to scrap a page with no people.

I stuck fairly closely to the sketch, just moving the title cluster down to the bottom to get some separation between the two pieces of arrow print paper.

Supplies
Cardstock - American Crafts
Paper - We R Memory Keepers Free Spirit
Letters - My Mind's Eye
Enamel Dots - Echo Park

Tools
Big Shot, Little B Arrow Dies & X-Cut Camera Die

Sailing By

Scrapbooking challenges are easy when a sketch matches up with a page that's in your head! One of the six sketches that make up this month's challenge in the For the Love of Pretty Paper scrapbooking group had two row of portrait photos, and I have a set of ship photos that I envisaged scrapping as two columns. Rotating the sketch gave me the perfect pairing.

My photos are from earlier this year when the tall ships race left Greenwich, accompanied by a 'parade of sail' for the first part of their journey. We live near the Thames and drove to Rainham Marshes to watch them sail by.

There's not a lot of colour in my photos other than the blues of the sky and water, which I didn't want to repeat in my papers, so I tried them against various backgrounds, looking for an interesting pattern that wouldn't overwhelm the pictures. I eventually picked a pink polka dot on mottled grey background that reminded me of clouds and matted all my pictures on burgundy cardstock, which contrasted nicely with both the photos and the background.

The banners in the centre of the sketch became one vertical strip of anchor paper, and I moved the title to replace one of the photos (along with my journalling).

Supplies
Paper - Fancy Pants Country Boutique, Kesi Art Kiss My Neon, Studio Calico Atlantic, American Crafts/Amy Tangerine
Letters - American Crafts
Stickers - Studio Calico
Enamel Dots - Doodlebug

Thali Mondays

This month we have not just one sketch challenge in the For the Love of Pretty Paper Facebook group, but six. I'm running out of month but I will do most of them eventually. I've started with Sketch 4, and combined it with one of the alphabet challenges in the same group; we're picking a random letter of the alphabet each week and a couple of weeks ago the challenge was F is for Food.

These photos are of my husband's dinner on the last two visits to our local Indian restaurant. They offer a Thali on Monday nights which consists of a platter with smaller portions of a starter, two mains, a side, rice and a naan, and you have a free choice of almost anything on the menu. Excellent value for money and a good way to sample new dishes.

I stayed fairly close to the sketch in this occasion, just swapping over the positions of title and embellishment, and working with small angles to my layers rather than having everything squared up.

Supplies
Paper - Glitz Design Sunshine in my Soul
PL Card - Crate Paper Boys Rule
Letters - American Crafts
Word Sticker - Glitz Designs
Washi Tape - Little B
Puffy Stickers - Fancy Pants
Enamel Dots - Marianne Designs

Tools
Big Shot & X-Cut Ticket Stubs Die

A Week of Walks

This page has been fizzing around in my head for a couple of months now, and I finally got it down in paper due to a weekly alphabet challenge in the For the Love of Pretty Paper Facebook group. We're going through the alphabet in random order, and recently had J for Journey so I took the opportunity to record not one journey but six, the walks we did each day on holiday at Easter.

Silhouette Vacation Photo Frame

My page was inspired by a cut file from the Silhouette store, but I wanted to hand-stitch the circles on my page. 

I picked a photo of our holiday cottage for the centre circle and then one from each day radiating around it, choosing photos that had the best sense of movement (or journey!) through the landscape. I cropped them to circles and arranged them around the page until I was happy with their positions. Then I was able to mark out and stitch all the frames, always a lengthy task.

This page will be the first one from our holiday in the album, and act as an introduction to the week. There's a bit of journalling to summarise the week, plus I've captioned each photo with the day and location.

Supplies
Paper - Flair Designs, 7Gypsies
Letters - Pink Paislee, Basic Grey
Stickers - Paperchase, WHSmith
Pearls - Kanban Crafts
ink - Ranger

Tools
Fiskars Shape Cutter & Circles Template
Kreaxions Circle Cutter
Big Shot & Little B Arrow Die

25 Days of Scrapbooking Words: 7-18 July

This month, Shimelle is sharing 25 prompts for scrapbooking titles and journalling on Instagram and in the Facebook group Scrapbook Like a Superhero. She's also discussed each prompt a little further in this blog post. Rather than joining in daily, I'm sharing here in two batches.

7. Oh Happy Day
Not a title I've ever used, but I was making this page as the prompts were published, and I was stuck for a title so I (almost) used it. I just changed it to Happy Days since my journalling was about many happy days rather than just the one that the photos came from.

8. A Single Word
I'm copying Shimelle here in picking my most recent page with a single word title; this is from mid-May.

9. Sing a Song
I made this page for a National Scrapbooking Day challenge, but not blogged it yet. I'd thought of the title while on the walk and saved making the page for a 'song title' challenge since I was sure NSD would throw one up, but then I actually entered it in a tic-tac-toe instead.

10. Something Big
I had one photo from last Christmas day and it wasn't particularly good, so I went with a large title to add some impact to the page.

11. Something Small
I could look at this prompt in two ways - either the smallest letter stickers that I've used, or a title that takes up the smallest space on the page. However I think this older page wins on both counts.

12. Something Stacked
Not something that I do very often, and I thought that my example for this prompt would involve a Silhouette cut file (where I can stack up the words and manipulate the fonts to make them all the same length) but then I came across this page.

13. Something Tall
I used a tall, skinny font on this page, enabling me to get a long title into a small space. I also placed the letters a little closer together to reinforce the meaning of the words in the title.

14. Something Simple
Most of my titles are very simple; for travel/holiday pages they are usually just the name of the place or building. Here's one from our holiday last year:

15. Something Said
I really didn't think I had a page for this prompt, but going back to 2011 I found one with my children and their cousins playing in the garden. One of their favourite games at the time was to all pile on top of each other in a heap, while shouting 'Bundle'. The tag on the right tucks behind the top photo.

16. So Much Colour
On the whole, I don't like mixed colour fonts, and I stopped buying multi-coloured letter stickers years ago, but I still have a few and sometimes mixed colours are the only way to go, like this one.

17. Puntastic
I haven't found a page for this prompt; when I do think of a 'punny' title I run it past my daughter and/or husband, and the pitying looks they give me (that's not funny, and how on earth do you think it is?) stop me from going further.


18. Repetition
Shimelle suggests using an opening phrase as a title, and starting each paragraph of journalling with the same phrase. I did something similar for one of the pages I made for a recent cruise album. I wanted to include all these photos in the album, but they were random shots from the day, taken at different times and different locations. I linked them all with the title 'Look Around' and started each paragraph with the word 'look': look up; look sharp; look down; look across; look out to sea.

There are 13 more prompts to come and I'll share my responses to them with you at the end of the month.

Outdoors Birthday Card

I had a card-making frenzy last month as our family and friends have lots of birthdays in June. One of those is my husband's and his hobbies include hill-walking and painting, so I turned to the former for this card. 

I bought several packets of these trees a good few years ago, and had just one left so I decided to design the card around it. It's very simple - a map background, a circle of cardstock and a strip of sentiment paper.

Supplies
Paper - 7Gypsies Avignon, Craft Creations
Tree - Jolee's 

Tools
Fiskars Shape Cutter & Circles Template