Just the 1

I completed just the 1 LO in the last week as I have been spending time socialising with friends. For this LO I approached it differently to normal, I decided on which paper I wanted to use first and then looked for a photo to use. I typically do it the other way around so found it an interesting little challenge. 

TFL

Christmas in July

Well it may have been August by the time I posted this, I have been thinking all things Christmas in July over the last couple of weeks which for me means starting to soak my fruit for this years Christmas puddings and cake! It is somewhat of a tradition that I have been doing for quite some time now and it actually reminded me that I took photos a  few years ago that I have been meaning to scrap of the Christmas pudding making in action. I dug out the photos and went fossicking through my Christmas themed stash and put together this LO

About a decade after everyone else...

I have bought myself a Big Shot to play with!! Yet to get myself any dies yet but I suspect there will be a Christmas list of them soon enough!!

About to scrap a whole lot more

So I resigned from work this week with no plans other than to take some time out for me for the near future so there is going to be a whole lot more scrapping going on soon enough! I have completed another 2 LO's lately for my wedding album.

This is 1 of my favourite photos that the photographer took at the wedding of Mum & I hugging. I wanted to make it quite a soft, girly LO and pretty much based the whole page on the mother & daughter circle embellishment that I had.

The next was a fun pic of my shoes which I created myself by hand sewing the bling onto the ankle strap for a 1 of a kind pair of red velvet shoes. My original plan was to have a simple look with just the red flock balls ribbon but as I was searching for it in my ribbon stash I found loads of beautiful ribbons so I decided to make the page a real feature of different textured and patterned ribbons, ric rac and lace! I love the end result

Same challenge, different take on it

I enjoyed the last challenge set so much that I gave it a 2nd go. 

This time however I chose to make everything on the LO old stuff and thought what better than old scraps of favourite papers in times gone by where I have held onto small bits that were left over for use again as well as old buttons and flowers. Even the photos I chose to use were old! The result is a LO about my 30th birthday when I went to Pettavel vineyard for a degustation lunch with my parents and David. 

I completed a challenge!

Lorraine set a challenge to use something that you have had for a year but haven't used because it is "too nice" and I certainly have many items of stash that fall into that category so I decided to accept the challenge!

Here is what I started with:

There's lovely raised glitter flourishes and a big glitter heart and I thought it would forever be destined for the "too nice to use" pile but I threw all caution to the wind and created a page that contains the notes from David's wedding speech!

I would have to say that I am really happy with the result but I am not sure if it has given me the bug to go and use more of my special reserve stash just yet!

Mid year progress report

So on NYE I said I was going to spend more time scrapping. My last post hinted at the fact that I was not being very successful and I am sorry to say that I haven't really got to the point of spending some time each week however, I have been spending more time than I had been and better yet, I am really enjoying it when I do so I guess that is something right?! I do have a handful of LO's to share.

The first is a simple, clean (well for me anyway) LO of a weekend getaway David & I took over a year ago to Nobby's Point on Phillip Island. It was a sunny day but it was freezing and blowing a gale! Made for some great photos but 1 of my favourites is a picture we took of ourselves with the waves crashing in behind us. 

The next is a fun LO of a pic I took of David posing next to a giant bull on the Bund in Shanghai which is a copy of the bull that is on Wall St in New York

Just a couple of weeks ago, Mum & I went to a performance of Imperial Suite by the Australian Ballet and it was spectacular! I started this page the very next day with a flyer I had picked up after the show. I really love the page and is quite different for me as I have used lots of stickles and glimmer mist which I buy but never seem to use (and when I do I tend to hate the result...but not this time!) 

Now onto a few for my wedding album. The first is a photo that still makes me laugh. Hidden journaling under the "giggle" card reads: "Whilst we were getting ready, Michelle picked up my perfume to smell it but couldn't work out how to open it. She spent at least a minute trying to figure it out before I came over and simply lifted the lid off! We giggled for so long about it." Even though the rest of my wedding album focuses heavily on red (the wedding colour scheme) I chose to do this page in soft pastel colours as Michelle is such a girly girl and loves pink and purple.

The next page I have only just finished this morning and I am really pleased with it despite not being anything like I thought it would be when I first started! It was meant to be a simple page...that was until I stamped onto the background and hated it so then needed to cover it! Happy I did though as I love the new direction that the LO took. It is a photo of my bridesmaids helping me get dressed and although it was a posed photo I still like it for the memories that it gives me.

Final photo to share is yet another for the wedding album. It is posed pics of my giving my bridesmaids their gifts which was l very rushed and staged but an important moment to capture all the same. So as not to overwhelm my wedding album, I have kept this page quite basic. 

No-one is perfect...right??

OK - so this was meant to be the year of taking more time for myself and making sure I do things that I love more (including scrapbooking). It was a nice thought that lasted until mid February, maybe even early March but here I am in mid April, over Easter, yet again stressed out and working too many hours in the day to take time out for myself. I have actually managed to landscape my backyard in my limited spare hours which is at least some "me time" but there has been very little scrapbooking. I do have some pages to show you that were done back in February / March but I just hadn't got around to uploading here.

The first is just a quick and simple LO of my first ever ballet. Not as a performer! As a spectator. I really enjoyed it and will certainly keep a look out for any other ballets coming to town.

The rest are for my wedding album. The first is my favourite photo take at our engagement party.

The next is a very different LO to the rest of the album. It is of Mum & I taking some time out at a wedding expo to muck about in a photo booth which was really good fun and a chance to escape the stress of the organisation and vendors.

The next 3 will end up being a set of 5 when they are finished

My something old is a locket that was owned by my Great Grandmother and has pictures of my nan & pop's wedding day inside it that was attached to my bouquet.

My something new is my wedding dress (so many new things to choose from)

My something blue was made by my maid of honour and is our wedding date embroided in blue thread to 1 of the underskirts of my dress

Still on track

Well it has been difficult at times but I have stayed true to my resolution made on new years eve to get back into scrapping. I have only managed 2 layouts in the past 2 weeks, 1 for each of my ongoing albums.

The first is a simple LO using scraps of old paper and is about the first time David and I found our block of land which was an incredibly exciting experience considering we spent so much money on it - sight unseen!

The next page I love and took quite a bit of time to create due to the amount of detail and layering. It is a sneak peek of my wedding dress from my first dress fitting. There is some secret journalling in the envelope that talks about my disappointment with the dress as it was not what I wanted but as it was a requirement of the church to have my arms covered, I had to give up on the dress that I really wanted as the option to add sleeves to my original dress were horrible and there was a nice option with this dress. I may not have loved my wedding dress but at least I love the scrapbook page of it! haha

Until next time...

Happy New Year (for 2013 & 2014!!)

Well - it turns out I haven't been on my blog since September 2012 and truth be told...I haven't really done much scrapbooking in that time either however - an awful lot has changed! I am now a married woman and am living in our new house that we built last year.

I made a new years resolution (for 2014) to take more time out of my week to do something for myself which includes making sure that I spend a minimum of 1 hour per week (not much I know but I have honestly struggled to even do that much in 2013!) scrapbooking. True to my word, 3 weeks into January at least, I have been taking time out every week to scrapbook. Obviously having not done anything for so long and having so much happen last year - I have plenty to scrap about!

I had already mentioned that David & I bought a block of land which means a whole new album had to be started - completely dedicated to the building of our house. Here is my first page of 2014 that is for "our house" album. This page, titled "Close but no Whistler" is about a house that we loved and wanted to build. We put a deposit on and everything was going really well until 2 weeks before our land titled. I received a call from the managing director of the company who simply said "sorry but it is not financially viable for us to build on that side of Melbourne." With that 1 sentence I was devastated as I really wanted the house but also because it meant that we would have to go and find another house design that we liked.

As I said, 2013 was a busy year, in part because we were building our house but also because David & I got engaged on NYE 2013!  Another big life event warrants another album dedicated to the organisation of the big day which is pretty much the only other thing that I have scrapped this year!

This is the opening page to our wedding day album titled "Enjoy the little things..." For NYE we went to Albert Park lake to sit and enjoy a picnic together.

As the night went on, it got cold so we packed up the picnic and left Albert Park Lake after the kiddies fireworks at 9.30pm and went back to the hotel so I could get a jumper. It was when we were back at the hotel that David presented me with a single red rose and a present to unwrap which required the use of a key I had been given by David and asked to keep it with me a week earlier to unlock a padlock. Inside the box, David had printed a whole heap of photos of us together and had narrated a story on the bottom of each picture. Once I had finished reading the story, I turned to David who got down on 1 knee and asked me to marry him! Obviously I said yes and we then went to a bar for a drink and to watch the fireworks. These are the photos of us just after he had proposed.

David proposed with a proposal ring so that we could design the ring together (which was so much fun!) I had to dedicate a page to "The Ring!" I had had this embossed script gold leaf paper for years and had attempted to use it many times before only to back out because it was too nice. It was the obvious choice for this page however I then struggled to know what to do with it. I came up with the idea to use lots of different size and shaped frames and use scraps of paper in each of the frames with the central frame showing a close up of the picture of my ring. I really like the end result as it is quite different to any LO I have ever done before.

Planning had taken over by the end of February but Mum & I decided to go mother of the bride dress shopping at Chadstone on her birthday. It started off with high tea to give us enough energy to embark on such a challenge - especially as Mum hates shopping at the best of times! The funny thing is, I managed to capture just how much Mum dislikes shopping in the series of photos of the 4 dresses she tried on in the space of 1 hour. We ended up going back and buying the first dress she tried on.

Dress shopping for my gown wasn't much easier! I had a style in mind that I wanted and when that didn't suit me at all, it was back to the drawing board. There were so many dresses that I tried on and looked at online. Here is the first of what will probably be many LO's about my wedding dress selection...there is a long story to it all but that is for another LO!

The final LO I am going to share in this post (I didn't realise just how many I had actually managed to complete in the past 3 weeks!) is a LO about making all of the invitations. That alone is probably the main reason why I didn't scrapbook all that much (or blog at all) last year as they took forever to do! I actually really like this LO even though it is very different to what I had originally intended to do when I first sat down to tackle a LO about the invitations. I was originally aiming for a clean & simple page where I used the invitation but then I thought about how I felt when making them and how long they took and I decided to make it really busy with lots of journal cards spilling out of the invite to symbolise just how many individual elements there were to make!

That's all for now - I will continue to post what I scrap with the aim of spending at least 1 hour per week to sit and create.

TFL