Hi

What great weather we are having, I been busy at the allotment for the last couple of weeks getting it ready for the new veg plants growing in my greenhouse, hence not a lot of pages being posted.

I have been working on my page for my craft club mini kit challenge but I can't post it until next week after we have all got together and seen what everyone else has done with it.

The page below is one I finished last night and I really enjoyed doing the stitching. I will definitely be doing more stitching in the future although I have only got four different coloured threads, I feel the NEED to shop for more colours.

I am not usually a pigeon lover but I had to save this little beauty from my 3 cats on Sunday when she was spotted in my garden sporting a broken wing. She had a racing association leg ring so we knew she was not a wild bird. My hubby registered her on their website for lost racing pigeons and found what to feed her (wild bird seed). I put a cardboard box in the shed with her food and water and blocked up the cat flap. After leaving her to settle in quietly over night my DD went to check on her and found her nice and cosy in the cats fluffy bed !!!!!!!!! Her cardboard box was untouched and there was bird seed scattered all over the shed, luckily though the owner just lived round the corner so she went home Monday evening so Bramble could have her bed back although it had to be cleaned first YUK.

My latest page is (for a change ) one of me as a baby that I started at the club on Monday and just had to add the finishing touches to at home. The papers are all from Basic Grey's sugared collection and the title in Bazzil, it was very easy to do a page when all the papers are matching usually I search my paper stash for different makes of papers the go together.

It was also a bit strange to scrap photos that I had no memories of as my pages are usually of my family.

Mini Kit

At last nights club meeting I gave out the mini kit to everyone, lot's of ooh's and aah's at the papers but more concern for the mesh and what could be done with it on a scrapbook page! I will be looking forward to the results of this kit challenge as it's contents are a little bit different. Unfortunately due to the bank holiday we are not meeting up again until 11th May! But I am sure it will be worth the wait.

Sketch Challenge results

Last night my craft club met and we all displayed our scrapbook pages from this sketch challenge which also had to include the colour brown.The sketch is from Page Maps.
The sketch is a double pager and everyone was a bit worried about the amout of photo's they would need, so I said they could just do half the sketch, but as you can see everyone managed all of it.
You will have to excuse the quality of the photo's as they had to be taken at night and indoors, never a good combination!

Banham Zoo

Here's another very quick double layout from our trip to Banham Zoo last summer, I had so many pictures I just cropped them all so they were equally sized on both pages and put some scraps of pattern paper along the bottom and sides. The title I decided to do in different fonts so that it didn't look too uniform. I haven't put any journaling on these pages as I couldn't think of anything more than the photos already said. A bit lazy I know but it's the kids easter holiday and hubby is off too so havn't been getting much time to scrap. ( woe is me ).

Quicky!

Here's a quick page I did of my girls playing in the garden when they were all little. I got the inspiration for it from a page called Hugs by Ali Edwards that was published in this months Creating Keepsakes magazine, although Ali's page was very clean and calm looking compared with my bright colours but the photo's didn't look right with the paler papers I had.

The pattern paper I used was from a DCWV stack and the brads were Dovecraft. My title letters were cut out of Little Sizzles self adhesive cardstock which was the first time I had used it but it was so easy to stick the letters down compared with trying to get wet glue on little letters.

I got realy stuck last night trying to start a page of me and a friend at Alexandra Palace craft show last year, I found some papers I liked (nice and bright of course) but thats as far as I got. Nothing seem to inspire me for the layout so I ended up putting it all away again hoping a fresh day would bring fresh ideas.

Happy Easter.

Distressed look!

I've posted this page that I finished today. It was a bit of a trial as I wanted to have a go at making my page look old and distressed, I had been seeing other peoples pages with this affect and liked the way they looked aged. I am quite pleased the way it turned out but will probably use either old photo's or black and white ones next time to complete the look.

The papers I used were some old Kay & Co. ones I bought in in a bulk mixed box but lend themselves nicely to the distressing as they already had that worn look to them. The title was cut from Bazzil and then sanded, inked with cream to cover the white core a bit and then inked the edges with brown.

I enjoyed doing the little bit of hand sewing under the photos, it added a bit more interest and texture without looking out of place.

The flower stems were cut out after using a Crafters Workshop Template to draw them on the Bazzil, then gave them the same treatment as the title. The flowers themselves are some artificial flowers I bought cheap and took apart, then just cut some circles from the scraps to place in the middle.


My journaling will be tucked behind the photos as I have long story to tell with this page and there wasn't much room left on the page for it. I have tried to think about my journaling before starting my pages recently as I kept getting unstuck at the end with not being able to say as much as I would like on my page because I had not left enough room!

Thanks for looking.

New blogger

Just finished adding my new header and am ready to go with my new blog. You will have to forgive any mistakes for a little while as I am a complete novice when it comes to blogs and have already deleted a couple of posts as they went a little wrong!
I will be posting some of my layouts as and when. I will also post the challenges and results from my craft club.
We are going to have a mini kit that I have assembled at our next club meeting so it will be interesting to see what everyone will come up with, it's nice to all have the same papers, ribbons etc.
At our last club meeting we had a demonstrator from Particraft to show us some stamping tips and I was impressed with the quality of the inks and stamps she was selling so when I receive the stamps I have ordered I will post images of them.

Are you like me (and probably all scrapbookers) as the name of my blog suggests a big fan of patterned scrapbook paper? Even though I probably have enough papers to last many scrapbook pages I can't help drooling over new papers, they seem to get more beautiful and creative I suppose to entice the likes of me to buy more than we know what to do with.
I do like to make my own embellishments from scraps of paper and a few punches as it means I have more to spend on papers! My other weakness at the moment is stamps as they also enhance my pages quickly and easily. One of the challenges at my craft club recently was to add stamping in some way to their pages hoping some of them would find it rewarding.

The Easter holidays are upon us with more photo opportunities as the weather warms up leading to more scrapbooking of course! My layouts do tend to be about my 3 girls as I am trying to document their lives for them to remember in years to come. I want to start an album about me and my life. Although I have only managed one page it's a start!