On a roll with challenges

After my successful attempts at last weeks challenge, I popped back over to UKS and found this weeks challenge which also resonated with me. This is my take for April week 4 challenge. We have just marked the centenary of ANZAC troops landing in Gallipoli on April 25th, 1915.

The challenge was to use 2 photos, both photos are from what I took when I went to visit Gallipoli a number of years ago. The memorabilia is a cluster of ANZAC badges in the bottom left and the oval picture of a soldier which my Mum has been using as a book mark and finally to use stickers which my title is made up of alpha stickers.



The paper was in my too good to use pile but as soon as I saw it (when searching for something else) I knew I had to use it for this LO and even bought myself to "trash" it with ink mists and paint to get the style that I was after.

I might have to check back in on UKS and take a look at the next challenge...who knows...I might actually make a habit of scrapbooking again (although I think I need to make a habit of getting completed LOs in albums as they are currently just sitting around)

TFL

First challenge in a while

I wandered over to UKScrappers for the first time in an awfully long time on the weekend and looked at the weekly challenge. I liked it so much that I decided to have a go at it...twice!

The challenge set was to:

1. scrap a photo of yourself, 
2. to use paper that you had been holding onto for a long time,
3. to have an interactive element on your page.

The first page I came up with is this LO of me posing on the Great Wall of China. This paper has been in my "too good to use" stack for a very long time now but I have started to realise that I have consigned most of my paper to this pile and am fast running out of reserves in the "ok you can use this because I don't love it" pile! Maybe that is why this challenge spoke volumes to me. The interactive element on the page is the date circle and compass which can be turned around and the travel tag can be pulled out to reveal the date and section of the wall that we walked.









My second shot at the challenge is a LO of our vows on our wedding day. I love the structured look of this LO as I have somewhat abandoned this style for more eclectic, messy and random LO's over the last few years however I would say that this LO is true to the style of scrapping from when I originally started, complete down to the interactive element of having the journalling (in this case our written vows) underneath the photos. I'm not sure if I was 100% true to the challenge of scrap a photo of yourself as there are more people than just me in the photo but none the less, the challenge inspired me to make another LO for my wedding album which I now love.

The "paper" is actually a printed transparency that I mounted on metallic black card stock. It is hard to see in the photo but it actually adds a really nice shimmer behind the transparency.

So that is it...1 challenge...2 interpretations and a slightly smaller "too good to use" paper pile.

Scrapped but forgotten (to blog)

Whilst it looks like I have been absent and not scrapping, I have actually been scrapping every now and then, I just haven't blogged so I now have quite a few pages to share.

The first is a very simple LO of my Dad holding a lovely owl at Cardiff Castle many years ago. I have used mainly scraps of paper and some very simple embellishments.

Next is a LO that explains how David proposed to me with a photo of the collection of photos he had created a story on and the box that they were in along with my proposal ring.

The next is a rather bright and busy LO of a lovely statue in Glasgow bus station of a couple hugging. This photo was sent to me whilst David was living in Glasgow with the caption that he can't wait until he can give me a hug.

One for the wedding album, this is a page to document me heading out of the room and on my way, a step closer to getting married. I used butterflies on the page as I had major butterflies in my stomach at this moment - more because I was terrified I would fall down the stairs! I was holding onto that banister so very tight :)

I really like the relaxed feel of this photo of myself and my bridesmaids on the way to the car (we were all fed up with posing for photos already so it was nice to be actually doing something and capture a nice photo)

This is my Dad's Steiff bear "Big Ted" (no points for choosing an original name)! It is such a beautiful bear, even half a century after it was given to him.

I love the finished product of this LO. The photo is 21 years old now of Christmas day. My Dad had received a new camera (in the days before digital existed) and a range of accessories for Christmas so my Nan and I had to sit whilst he played around with it. Fair to say that I was fed up but my Nan seemed to be more than happy to play model for hours on end!

My final page to share this time around is of the same Christmas day. This photo has always made me laugh as you can see my Dad's hand with camera remote trying to take a family portrait. My Nan didn't quite get the idea and looked directly at the remote and not the camera :)

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

Slowly does it...

I am trying to make time for scrapping more often. It is hard to imagine that I used to do 3-4 pages per week and now I can't even get around to doing 3-4 pages a month (or quarter!) There are a few positives to that though, not needing nearly as many albums to store the multitudes of pages but also every time I do get around to sitting down to scrap it is like a discovery process with all of my old stash that I forgot I had!

Here is a page that I did with lots of leftover papers that I seem to hoard and forget about with a photo I had forgotten about. It is a picture taken on our trip to China earlier this year. It was our first morning exploring Beijing and we wandered into the people's park where there was a hive of activity going on. There was a large group of people twirling these long colourful ribbons and as any scrapbooker would, I took out my camera to start taking pictures of the wonderful shapes and colours. No sooner had I removed my camera from it's bag than this man ran in front of me (he had previously been sat on a park bench drinking a cup of tea) and started twirling and dancing and well, just generally showing off. We stood and watched his performance for a few minutes because he was so funny (and amazingly talented!)

I must have been in the mood to do bright, over the top pages this week as the other page I have completed is a silly picture of David and I. I can't even remember where we were when this was taken but as per usual, David was pulling silly faces whilst I was trying to get a nice picture of the 2 of us. Who knows what people will think in 50 years time when they look back at photos of us! Anyway, I realised that I haven't really used my sizable stash of paper and silk flowers for an awfully long time, probably ever since the lovely roses and other detailed blooms started hitting the shelves so I decided that I would use some here.

Friendship isn't a big thing...

I was taking a look through all of my stash and started reading some of the rub on quotes and when I read the quote "Friendship isn't a big thing...it's a million little things" I was inspired to scrap a LO of my friend.
It's a simple page but I think it works well.

Updating August

So August as a month has flown by but I did manage to do some scrapping inbetween all of the hecticness.

I was Baptised on the 12th which was a long time coming (since January!) so I decided to scrap a page of the ocassion quickly.

This is the first page where I have used my newest addition to my stash...crackle paint! I did a class at Create on Ormond in Geelong where we were taught how to use it so of course I have had to experiment.

It has actually been quite a productive month in terms of scrapbooking though, I have completed quite a few pages. And speaking of Create on Ormond, I purchased a challenge pack whilst in store which was all about monochramatic scrapping and only being able to use the elements that you were provided with. Loved the challenge, here is what I came up with.

I, like many, love macaroons and have even started making my own. This LO is all about the first batch that I made. They took me all day but the result was worth it! A little rough around the edges but they certainly had the 'homemade' feel to them.

Over Easter this year, David and I went on a little holiday and 1 of the things we went to do whilst away was cherry picking. It was the first time I had ever gone fruit picking and I did quite enjoy it (although I would have enjoyed it more if it was not 40C!) I spent most of my time hiding in the shade of the trees.

Now this LO was 1 that I really challenged myself with as the photo was so dark (all you can see is the tea light on the table and some reflection of lights coming off the water) I wanted to make it a bright page

 But my favourite page I completed this month was of a muck around photo that David took of us when we were in Phillip Island. I loved the paper and just loaded up on some more layered embellishments at the bottom of the page.