Not strictly a scrappy layout.

Oh dear, off the pathway already, I intended to make this a scrapping layouts only blog, but this week I was tempted off the straight and narrow by an amazing little bargin in Asda.

When it was all the rage to alter lunch boxes, in a moment of madness I bought 4 of the ones in Asda for the mega bargin that they were at the time. No idea why, or what I was going to do with them.

I covered one and filled with with a mini album of shared holidays with my bessie mate and her husband, giving it to her for christmas. One I decorated to keep all my distressing scrappy stuff in, a-la-Tim Holtz and one I used to store my most precious recipe cards in. Trouble was the recipe cards, made on A5, had to lay flat to fit in the box, and were not easily accessible. So they got hidden away and never used. Plus I had used one of those colussus paper packs and soon decided I didnt like it.

Back to this weeks Asda bargin. This little accordian file box was only £2 and as soon as I saw it I knew it would be perfect for those recipe cards! When I got it home I placed it on the scanner and scanned it in to make my own paper, with an exact match to the outside. Then I set about pulling all the previously made cards apart and making a new set.




Supplies
Cupcake bazille (this cuts into 2 lots of A5 and a strip left for matting
Light pink card from local card shop
Home made scanned in paper ( I later found out that the remains of my KI Memories Holiday collection Joyful skinny stripe matched perfectly also)
Heidi Swap chipboard flowers
TLC chipboard frames
Button Up cooking buttons
Prima Got You flowers
Beads/small sticky jewels.
Paint

I used kristen font to type the recipes into word boxes, double framing them and printing out onto ordinary printing paper. These I matted.

Having cut the cardstock into A5 I simply covered them using my own made paper ensuring it was slightly smaller than the cardstock, so as to give a narrow border/frame.

I used the chipboard flowers, cut in half and glued on the back as index labels. Then it was just a case of using emebellies to decorate




Flowers - 2 prima flowers, layered and center filled with jewel
Labels - strips of chipboard, covered with gesso, and painted orange.Printed using small Pixie alphabet stamps and stayzon black ink.


Oh and one card I used a sunburst punch to cut out the alphabet on a very old bit of alphabet paper.

Christmas kit book

This one I feel a bit guilty about because I was the hostess of this swap and never got round to sharing (slaps own wrist).

I ran a christmas kit swap over on the Pad forum - the idea was to make a christmas kit up for your swappee, and then by a certain date after all the christmas fever had died down, use it to make a Layout (or in my case a word book), using the said kit. There was some fab work from the other girls involved, but as I say I never quite finished mine or got round to showing what I had made. Time to put this right.

At the time there was lots of experiments on UKS using bought or home made word books so I wanted to see if it was something I could do too. I took a long time choosing my word and used some instructions I found on the UKS site supplied by Jackie - Danyaz on UKS (thank you so much for sharing), who says:-

"here is how i made it;
type your word, lets say xmas, using rockwell bold font, using 550 as font size and print out onto paper.
get some mountboard or similar, longest bit should be 13 inches long and about 6 inches high.
cut the letters out. place the s at the end of the longest card and draw round it lightly, trim the width of card so its the same size of the s, now cut the s out but only cutting out the first half of the s, repeat this with the a,m and x, make sure you trim so they are all the same width.
now lay the word out making sure there are even spaces for each letter, now cut the excess card from the other end where thew holes will be, holepunch, place bookrings in and away you go.
hope you all can follow this.
have fun,"

Supply list
Bit difficult this as it was a secret kit but some of the stuff in it that I used was from KI Memories Holiday collection and Joyful collection.


The hardest part of this was choosing the word, christmas too long, xmas too short, but since I wanted to record all my decoration attemps over the years finally settled for Deck the Halls. I had to play about with the sizes Jackie had given to get it to fit, and the 'Deck the' part involved some fiddling in word. I used word art and overlapped the text onto a rectangular box so that I could see it was right before printing out and cutting with knife and glass mat.

Background of book cut from KI memories Holiday collection, Joyful Sentiments double sided cardstock,
Parcels cut from KI Memories Holiday collection, Joyful Multistripe, patterns were highlighted with Icicle stickles and then all mounted onto 3D Foam pads.
Ric rak is actually a doodlebug paper frill.
Eyelets included in kit.

Cropping the photos to the correct size was a bit of fun!

Lights on the tree, photo kept very simple on the small page.

There was a lot of bling involved!

Gold floss my own, ribbon from kit, bauble cut from Joyful stipes.

H first run round with Sukara pen and then green stickles,

words from another sheet of Joyful but cant find the reference.
The snowman I put in the hearth each year.

I used a christmas stamp from my collection (no idea who by) and my sukara pens to colour them in. More tree lights, we have a lot of lights INSIDE our house!

Finally some patterned paper! still from the Joyful Collection.
The stamps are the little £1.49 ones from Papermill.
Photo is a little basket that was originally full of winter houseplants given to me by Wane's mum as a chrissie pres. I kept it and filled with pinecone people, which I bought at a craft fair a zillion years ago.

More of same supplies. Once started this was kept very simple. Laura dressing the tree.

Kelly and Ollie putting up decorations.


Just bits of decoration around the house.



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Close up of one of the table decorations last year.




We had our christmas lunch at Laura's last year. This is the table.



Patern paper is Joyful Twinkle, and the letters are from the same collection.

And that is as far as I have got because I keep forgetting to buy book rings to put it all together.



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No laptop

I wanted to keep this blog up to date with the stuff I was creating, at the time I created it, but sadly my (only a few months old) lappy hit a virus and doesnt work. It went off to my youngest DD's OH to be mended but I havent seen or heard any progress in two weeks now. MY eldest DD has lent me her very slow, very old (about 8 years) laptop so I can at least connect, but its not too keen on some tasks I want it to perform. (Like finding software and drivers in order to scan and stitch my 12x12 LO's LOL)

Of course having no internet for a while did force me into being a tad more productive, and alongside having a REALLY tidy scrap room, I have got on with a few more pojects. Obvously since I couldnt print out any photos, I wasnt as productive as the amount of time I had available but here is the stuff I did get done.

I have long been a huge fan of Carol Jansen's 3D work, and fell in love with a LO she had created using Carolee papers. I wanted to scraplift it as it stood, but couldnt find the papers she had used on line anywhere. So I did the best I could using what I had.





I used mainly Autumn leaves stamps to make the flower patch, colouring in with water colour paints.
The bit underneath the photo is a Doodlebug strip, covered with some bazille, I trimmed the curved edge using my corner rounder and then punched holes equally along it. Then one of those 'happy accidents' the glue on the back went over the holes so to stop the LO being sticky I filled them with some green microbeads that have lurked in my stach for a couple of years. I discovered that unlike anything else I unsucsessfully tried to use to adhere microbeads, ATG tape works a treat!

Some more chipboard letters covered in glitter and volia. Not much like the original but I like it.