Single & double

Good morning!

I had time and a little bit of energy left yesterday evening so I sat down by the desk and took care of a couple of already planned layouts. The first has three photos of my son sitting on the porch "reading" a magazine. In my pile of papers I had no news print paper but I found this vintage ephemera paper which I cut apart and layered behind the photo block. I used a darker blue cardstock piece as a foundation for the main block. I used up the last white color in my Uniball Signo pen *sob*. I got a smaller piece of that blue cardstock left and divided it to be the foundatin for two smaller clusters of embellishments. I decided on a green washi and some retro chip board I got from a pen friend a while ago. I added some smash sticky notes, enamel dots and acrylic paint splash in a couple of colors. I'm pleased with the result, I just love the photos!

 

Then I took out the photos from my daughter's dance recital in May and decided to make it a two-page layout. I used a green soft patterned paper and a paper called "Soiree" from House of Three, it has the text on one page and the green polka on pink on the other side. I added doilies, washi and paper flowers that I had misted with my Liquitex inks. I added doilies, washi and paper flowers that I had misted with my Liquitex inks. I found some bling clusters that I had recieved from a penfriend and I thought they fit the color scheme. In hindsight I wish I had cut apart the bling clusters and added them sticking out from my other embellishments clusters but that is too late now. I added Thickers as title, some journaling and last, but not least I drew frames in the empty white spaces.

Here is the left page:

 

And here is the right side:

Side by side they look like this! I'm sorry about the glare.

This week has not been as creative and/or productive as I was hoping. I don't feel very good about that but I haven't had much choice. Today is my last day at work before three weeks of summer vacation. Tomorrow is Midsummer Eve and the weather is... how shall I put it... soaking wet and then some! It is unfortunate ofcourse and I feel sorry for the kids at day care who were going to celebrate there and had already picked flowers for the midsummer pole and wreaths yesterday. Hopefully it will get better after lunch.

I hope I'll be able to scrapbook some during the vacation evenings we spend at home and I will update here as soon as I have something to show you! Have a wonderful Midsummer and may the lovely weather be with us all!

Hugs!
//Åsa

Weekend layouts

Good morning and Happy New Week! Only four working days before summer vacation and Midsummer celebration! Midsummer celebration is BIG in Sweden, in my opinion it is the best holiday of the whole year and this year we have so much flowers it will be lovely! Perhaps we can make our own midsummer pole and dance with the kids! That would be just great!

Today I have two new layouts to show you. The weekend was not what I was hoping for scrapbookin'wise. We had some problems with bedtime with the kids and it took soooo long time! When I finally came to my desk (both on Saturday and yesterday) I had no inspiration left at all and I went to bed rather quickly. Anyway, I managed to turn the backgrounds I made last week into layouts and I'm pretty pleased with both of them.

This first layout with an old 2009 photo of my daughter is on a background made of papers from the Take Note collection from Doodlebug. I have the 6x6'' paper pad and I decided the size of my paper pieces so that the clip pads would come out whole. When I had glued all the small pieces down I showed it to my hubby and he thought it was pretty and asked if I were going to cut it up into pieces :) 

With all the colors and patterns going on I thought it was important not to clutter the whole thing with embellishments so I decided to keep it simple. I made a washi banner and added some washi in the corners. I had to add the black cardstock for the photo to "stand on" otherwise the photo would have floated around in space and it didn't look good at all. The banner turned out fine and I will use that technique soon again!

 My next layout has a background made from my 6x6'' "He said she said" paper pad from Teresa Collins. Here I choose the size of my pieces from the size of the tiny journaling cards in the pack. Then I took out my bag of vintage bits and pieces and made a layering pile, as if the multitude of different patterns weren't enough :). But if you knew the lady in the photo you would know that there could never be too much of anything. I was a bit worried since I mixed the white based collection with cream vintage papers but I went with my gut feeling and I'm pleased with the result. The lady is my grandmother. She passed away in 2008 at the age of 86. This photo was taken when I was a kid. In the journaling I've written about the various things I learnt from her for example peeling shrimps and playing cards.  

 

 Hopefully I'll be able to scrapbook during this week. Next week we're going on a trip and I will be working on photographing instead of scrapping, but it is fun as well.

Take care and have a great day!

// Åsa

I love paper

Goodmorning!

Yesterday evening I managed to finish two layouts and to make two backgrounds and I feel I'm getting back to my "happy scrappin' place" after a couple of days with performance anxiety. Not anything near a scrapping block but enough to have me fall asleep on the sofa instead of even trying to scrapbook.

I took one of my home made kits and got started. I've tried not to make monochromatic layouts all the time but I always seem to come back to that and here I ended up in a white=>red color scheme which followed the colors in the photos of my daughter really well. Monochromatic is right in my comfort zone.

I used my new small doilies and I think those were just the right size for me and I like the cute effect they give. What a lovely embellishment for such a tiny price! I made a classic design with three clusters and a heavy title at the bottom, it seems to work for my multi photo layouts and I like it. It only bothers me that I seem to get stuck in that type of layouts and I'd prefer if I could vary my style more. 

 

I know I said I was done with multi photo layouts for a while but I seem unable to stick to that. These are photos from my daughter's last session for the semester at swim school. Just the other day I found a package with those small bluish epoxy rectangles in my stash and I thought it would be super fun to use them with these photos. I added some of my new bling and I some wood veneer arrows to point out my little girl in the group. The title says "swimschool" and the Swedish abbrevation for "spring semester-13". I spelled it with raw chipboard letters from my old Heidi Swapp stash and then I covered the letters with glitter glue.

 

Now in hindsight I think I should have matted the photos (perhaps with white or teal) before attatching them to the dotted paper but I didn't so I'll have to live with this.

When I had done these two I sat down and cut papers from two of my 6x6 paper pads into squares and rectangles and then I glued them onto white cardstock to form kind of a quilt of patterned paper, a grid with different patterns but from the same collection. It was hard to get the pieces to fit, my paper trimmer isn't very straight when it comes to this kind of accuracy but I managed to get two really fun looking backgrounds which I will use when I sit down to scrapbook next time. I will have to force myself to only use one photo for each of these projects because I don't want to cover up the pretty backgrounds too much. I want to start now!!

Have a lovely day! Hugs!

//Åsa

Following rules

Good morning!

Last night I decided to go through my paper stack and try and find paper that fit together. When I found a pair or a bunch that matched I put them together in page protectors. One of my scrapbooking idols, nicolejones911 on YouTube, said she used to do that when she got a new kit and I thought it was a good idea to get a start and not forget about a nice paper that I want to use. I have a pack of page protectors that I only use for planned layouts, it was a purchase long ago that was wrong, the page protectors are for ring binders and I use post bound, but I'm happy I have them and I use them alot.

I used to plan layouts starting with my photos and then adding to it but I have changed that totally. Now I choose paper and then I add photos after that.

I filled all my page protectors with nice combinations and then I choose one to work with. The background paper is an ancient one from Basic Grey, it has a lot of things going on but the colors are really soft. To spice it up some I combined it with the Marvelous Madeline paper from American Crafts' My Girl collection. It has the speech bubbles on one side and the pink chevrony print on the other side. I used up half of that paper for this layout and I'm already looking forward to using the rest of it for another layout, the colors are just darling sweet.

I placed the speechbubbles and my small blocks of chevron around the large photo of myself and then I added a couple of small bits and pieces from my new home made stash. Some got a little color from ProMarkers but not much, I liked the white. Some wood veneers, journaling and an acrylic alpha title and some mini alpha stickers added the finishing touch.

 

Lately I've been kind of obsessed with "the rule of three" and placing embellishment clusters in a visual triangle over the page. I guess you try to hold on to the few design principles you know. So I was a bit troubled that I got more like four groups or embellishments on this page but I finally decided to relax and just go with the flow. To the delight of my OCD-part of the brain i saw that I actually got kind of an odd arrow effect towards the left and my journaling with my eyes in the middle. Iäm pleased with that. The title says "It will be alright" and the journaling is about my wish to sometimes see into the future just to be able to let go and trust that everything is going to be alright. 

Have a nice day!

//Åsa  

Stamped elements

Good Monday!

During the weekend there has been a really interesting topic up for discussion over at the forum at Two Peas. It has been about getting the effect and style that Glitter Girl has without spending a fortune on elements and premade bits and pieces. The discussion has collected a wonderful list of tips and suggestions and the topic is really dear to me since I like to have lots to choose from but my budget is kind of pushing my money in the direction of paper instead of printed paper embellishments. When I get my hands on a pack like those bits from Amy Tangerine it is a special & rare occasion. But just like alot of other scrappers I like the look with lots of things going on. So, what to do? I loved all the suggestions that came up in the thread and I got alot of inspiration from that and I started thinking of the things I had and the things I wanted to have and suddenly I realized that this is the perfect opportunity to use some of all my wonderful stamps which I sadly seldom use (mainly due to pure old laziness).

I went through my stash of stamps and looked for the ones I thought looked fairly current and that could be used as elements for embellishment and/or layering. I also looked for those that could be colored. I took out my stamping paper that I use when I stamp and color for card making and I stamped with my Staz On, it is the ink pad I think works best for clear stamps. Then I stamped like a mad woman and after a couple of packed pages I sat down in front of You Tube and watched haul and process videos the whole evening while fuzzy cutting out all the elements I had stamped. This is the pile I had on my desk when it was time for bed and I feel so inspired about all this! I will color these darlings with my ProMarkers when I'm about to use them and I hope it will be a nice addition to my stash of elements.  

 

I hope you'll have a nice Monday! Hugs!

//Åsa

More tags and cards

Hi again! It was a lot of fun to use those labels I made the other day and I thought perhaps you'd like to see another pdf I've made. It has labels like these and are alot more colorful than the one I posted yesterday.

You can down load it HERE if you want to take a closer look and perhaps even print it and use it in your layering!

//Åsa

My first two

Good morning! The kids had a sleep over at their grandparents yesterday and now it is before breakfast and we haven't fetched them yet so that is why I'm up with a new post eventhough it is weekend! Other people might go out to a movie and a fancy restaurant when they have the kids at the grandparents but we spread out our crafting supplies over half the house, stayed up until 2 am and loved the fact we could leave everything out until morning. Yeah, you know you are a carfting nerd when...

Anyway, I havenow opened all the embellishment packages and found suitable storage for everything I bought. I have set up all the things I need to start the next "50 layouts" challenge. It feels like I'm getting ready for a crop or something but I'm just making sure I have all the possible inspiration at hand!

On Friday I managed to find time for some paint splash making and I'm very pleased with the colors and the small bottles! I might need to get some more of those so that I can have my black and white in the same type of bottles.

So last night I started take two on the Facebook challenge to create 50 layouts before shopping. So this is my layout #2.1 and I'm so pleased I don't really know where to start! I just love the Amy Tangerine bits! They will not last long in my stash! The little people wood veneers are just darlig cute and I'm so hapy I finally found some, they have been out of stock like forever and here in Sweden I have never seen them for sale before. I was so happy to find them just in time for my "embellishment replenishment"! It was super fun to start using my new papers and I'm in love with the water color effect on the patterned paper! I tried out my new home made splashes for the first time and I'm so pleased with the result! I will use those a lot! This layout is about our morning routine at the moment. The photos are from just a couple of weeks ago and we are on our way to day care in the morning.

The next layout, #2.2 is also with very recent photos. We celebrated the first really warm summer evening a couple fo weeks ago by having a huge family water gun battle in the garden. It was so fun, I laughed so much and we got soaking wet all four of us. I had planned this page in a page protector and choosen the patterned papers and I liked the combination of that ancient old paper as a mat and this new wood grain print from Studio Calico as the "main event" on the page. But when the page came together I noticed that the wood grain was covered up alot and I thought that was sad so I went to my stash and tried to find a replacement. Ofcourse I couldn't find one, you can't just really replace perfection, can you? So I ended up using it anyway, but I cut out all the paper behind the photo block so that I'll be able to use the wood grain some more! I thought that was the best thing to do, almost like eating the cookie and having some left at the same time! Here I used some of the labels I shared with you yesterday and I'm really happy I made them! I also used some free printables that I found online (the orange camera and Oh shoot circles). The yellow dots are leftovers from the yellow alpha chipboard set and I splashed some black paint over the diagonal clusters for some extra interest. I'm really happy about this layout and about the memory itself!

 

I hope you'll have a wonderful Sunday and that it will be a sun-day for all of us! Take care and come back soon!

//Åsa