Have a very

Happy Christmas!!

Just remembered

that I have a blog and really should be keeping up with it.

I would say its all the hussle and bussle of getting ready for christmas but that would not be very true as I have done just about everything needed to be done apart from the baking which Laura and I are doing together tomorrow. I guess the real reason is that life is just not really exciting enuough at the mo. Although .....

Sunday I took a trip down to Margate to look in the Craft Central in Wyvale garden centre. I've not been there before, and now, on very short notice the whole company has shut down, so there were huge discounts to be had, so all those posting on UKS were saying. Armed with directions from multi-map off I went.

I was a bit nervous because in the past, any times in fact, when Kelly was a babe, I would pack her in the car, pick up my mum from work and go off to Ramsgate in search of the market. We would start our journey full of enthusiasm and a long shopping list, only to get lost on the isle of Thanet. Because once there, every single road seemed to be the same and there are an awful lot of roads over there. Eventually Kelly would be car sick and we would give up and come home. Why am I retelling all this? Because the Wyevale is built on the very site that the market used to stand on!! And once more I very nearly didnt find it, as my multi-map instructions were far from accurate, missing out the final turn off into the road where the shop is.

I am glad I did find it, because what a bargin I managed to nab. I had lost hope in getting my electronic die cutting machine, not being fussed on if it was a robo or a cricut, as my birthday money had fallen a long way short of even a second hand model, and with supply work short on the grounds bills are taking priority at the moment. But they were selling the ex-demo model for £75!!! Well over less than half price of a new one!

Today I have been playing with my trial copy of design studio and sure-cuts-a-lot and have made some funky named labels for the place settings I am doing for the christmas table. I need to save up now for the full software and for a new mat as the demo one is rather tired. But wow! What a bargin! One happy little bunny here.

About 6 weeks back I discovered the wonderful wonderful talent of Irene Tan who has a brilliant blog full of new and exciting techniques. I thought I would try a few out. I worked on this Lo for 6 days, and then before I had finished it Irene was chosen as a guest for Pencil Lines. Rather dispiriting for me she said in her interview that a LO takes her from 1.5 to 2 hours! I was still working on mine so I was a bit reluctant to share. I really am pleased with the result though so here it is for me to crow!

Supplies

Basic Grey Obscure
Bo Bunny chipboard swirl
Floss
large flower from Dunelm
gold sequins
Ranger Glossy Accents
Small paper roses
Autumn Leaves stamps
White sukura suffle pen
Heidi Swap ghost hearts
Wooden letters
Ginger cotton fabric
white embossing powder
Chocolate brown acylic paint
eyelets and brown fibres
Ranger distress ink Vintage photo
script background font
Journalling block (sorry it had no name on it)

Bear with me there was alot of work

Use a large square of scrap paper to make a mask to create large square frame with distress inks, remove mask and straighten/highlight edges by ruling and marking with black pen.
I turned the photo to B&W in order to enhance it a bit as it is a poor 1980's photo. I then stamped using stayzon and the AL swirly stamps and distressed edges with more of the vintage photo ink.
I used the chipboard swirl as a template for my sewing, and used the herringbone stitch shown on Irene's blog to 'fill in' with sewing floss, adding some seed beads as I went.
I readied the flower by taking it apart and only using three layers. I enhanced it using glossy accents to make faux water drops and to glue on sequins. Then I stamped some more of the AL swirls where I was going to position the flower. Once it was dry I attached the large flower in the middle of the swirls with a brad through the centre.
The hearts were matted onto brown fabric at the back and then on the front more of the AL stamps were stamped onto the hearts and then I doodled with the white suffle pen.
I inked the edges of the journal box and slipped under the corner of the photo.
Once the brown paint had dried on the wooden flowers I used a larger AL's stamp to emboss white swirls over the letters.
HUGS was made by printing out the letters onto spare paper, carefully cutting them out to leave a stencil of the work. I then used the stencil and more Vintage distressing ink to form the letters and then the large background script stamp over the stencil to decorate the title. I used the suffle pen to hand script the word love and to highlight some of the swirls by the flower with doodles.
Finally to add a little balance and to fill the corner space I added the fibre bow through two eyelets and to write my journalling.

Another christmas greeting

Since this seemed to go down so well yesterday I thought I would make another.


Untitled-2.psd

christmas greeting

I've not done this for a while so I hope it works.

I was admiring a stamp the lovely Clare Brown had used on one of her christmas cards and wanted to duplicate it using photoshop. I couldnt find a font that looked similar though until yeterday when Scrapdolly shared a halloween transparancy on her blog and told me the font I needed was pharmacy.

It didnt take a minute to make and I thought I would share. I've uploaded it as a psd file so that anyone who wants to can play about with sizes etc.

Untitled-1.psd

More cards.

Rubbish photos - I really must try taking them in daylight.



This is a scraplift of a card by Tracie on the Penny Black Saturday challenge site. I made the snowflake background paper by using studio g stamps and green and red cats eye chalk inks. The red scalloped edge I cut using the rounded corner punch technique and then run it through the swirl cuttlebug folder in my zipemate. The decoupage reindeer is a free download from http://funkyfairyinspirations.blogspot.com/


Last years papermania christmas paper pack, Stampendous retro stamps and Studio g sentiment stamp, coloured with watercolour pencils, stickles added for dimention and a peice of floss to hold it all together.



I'm rather chuffed with this one, a bit more work. Paper is Foofala from 2005, layered onto green cardstock, ontop a strip of ribbon. Santa is image from weeds and wildflowers 'A Wildflower holiday' Stamp is another Studio g, pointsette is quickutz cut from tissue paper.

Not as expected

I had hoped that this blog would get me crafting more and I was going to attempt to get a little something on here every day. Hmmm, not happened has it. In fact this really hasnt turned out at all like expected as apart from one LO all I have been doing is Christmas cards of late, and I really didnt want this to become a card blog.

However, my reason for the blog was to keep track of everything I make and how I make it, supplies ect. so I will have to put up my cards.

Here goes (sorry quality of photos is not good, hoping santa will bring me a new camera)




Background, cuttlebug winter words folder
Magnolia tilda stamp (tilda with sled)
Crimson and Blake watercolour pencils
Stickles
Ice blue cats eye chalk ink

White space overkill?

I took a little surf around some of the digi blogs tonight. I haven't done this for a while and I was a little dissappointed. Most of them had no LO's on them but were only advertising kits for sale, and those that did have LO's tended to go for the very minimalist look - with a tiny photo stuck up in a corner and a few elements placed around it, leaving the rest of the page full of white space.

Don't get me wrong. I think white space is very difficult to do and even harder to get right. But I saw one LO with a tiny tiny photo in the top rh corner of a 12x12 LO - not at all in eye line and so small and insignificant I could hardly see it.

And although these LO's are probably wonderful works of art, I feel they are getting away from the whole point of scrapbooking .. the photo!

However not one to critisis something I havent tried myself, I have had my own go, and while I was at it, try out the technique from Weeds and Wildflowers. The blog there has started giving photoshop and digi tuts every tuesday and this week it was text around a shape.


Background paper and elements all from Carrie Stephens Spontaneous delight kit.

(Oh and can you spot the typo? I stupidly didnt save as a photoshop file so I cant amend it so will have to live with it!)

Latest pencil lines sketch

Whenever I need inspiration I log onto Pencil Lines and always find just what I am needing to get me started, it really is a brilliant site with some great designers.

This is my attempt at this weeks sketch. NB I still have to put the Goodwear buttons onto the flowers to match in with the other Goosefair LO's.

Supplies

S.e.i. Winnie's walls flora
s.e.i. Winnie's walls papered wall
Aspen Bazille
Black cardstock for matting
orange sukuara souffle pen
Transparency paper

More Goose Fair Layouts

I did add a fancy new background paper for my blog but it was taking sooooo long to load that I could read all the posts before getting to enjoy it, so I have taken it off and gone back to plain black.

Plus I think the Layouts show up better on black!

Here is what I have been up to the last couple of weeks.



Supplies

Crate paper Katie collection
KI Memories Noteletts
Plain Bazzille
Ribbon from my own collection
Fowers from sei Winnie's walls fab flora
swirls hand and cut out (see LO below)
Goodwear Buttons

Doing it digitally

I discovered that my hits count went up because a certain smacker on a certain smack blog wasnt too keen on this blog - moaning that I had given instructions on a scraplift. Mmm pity they cant read since that particular LO only had supply lists and a credit to the original and not instructions.

To be honest I was a little hurt that someone had been so unkind, but then I thought, well hey, I am doing this blog for me, not them, because its to remind me what stuff I used and how I went about each LO - already there are LO's in my albums where I look and think.. I wish I could remember what paper that is. And lets face it, I' m not sitting here forcing anyone's arm up their back making them read my stuff.

So this is a very quick digi LO using the latest free Miss Mint kit. And since there are no techniques apart from digi ones, and no extra bits of kits or any hybrid work, I am not going to say any more about it!

Using my computer

I've just finished this LO and am now beginning to understand why being without a laptop to play on, even for a short week, was so distressing to me. It also goes someway to explain why I find crops so difficult.

I simply cant craft without a computer!!!




This LO needed quite of bit of hybrid (as its termed now, I've been using a pc for scrapping since I started way back in 2003). I used a sketch from The Craft Diner (sept week 3 by Mel at A Trip Down Memory Lane) so the first thing I had to do was print out my photos to fit the sketch.

Supplies

Bazille cardstock
plain chipboard
Dreamweaver stencils opaque embossing paste
yellow sun and summer green cosmic shimmer mica pigments
PP - Autumn Leaves French Twist Petite hibou
s.e.i. Winners walls, fab flora
cherry arte Summer green
k.ology stitches rub on transfers
ribbon
Basic grey euphoria chip stickers
goodwear flower buttons
floss
chipboard index tag
peewee glitter
free digi kit Beth's through the year July Kit from Lighthouse designs by Beth


To make

Print out two photo, mine are 16cm x 12cm and 10cm x 12cm. place on page with a small gap between the two and add a small bit of the Petite habou to fill the gap.

The corners are made by cutting a small square heof chipboard in half diagonally. Mix some of the two shimmer powders and some of the embossing paste together to get the correct shade and then roughly '' spaste'' the corners. Hand draw swirls onto the summer green paper, and cut out. Cut two of the smaller flowers from the sei paper. Layer over the dry chipboard corners. Sew some floss through the centre of the buttons and glue onto flowers. Add to LO.

Rub the flower transfers up the sides of the photos.
in t
Add chip letters to make the title.

The index chipboard tag had a double sided glue strip on it already but I didnt want to use it in the intended way, so I covered the glue in green pee wee glitter. The word on it was upside down so I used my computer and photoshop to select and fill a small rectangle with colour, add text and print out. I glued that over the original word.

The Journal tag came from the digi kit but was blue, so using variations I changed the colour to fit the LO, added the text and another small photo (converted to b&w) before printing out on cardstock (see why I need my computer so much) and adding to the LO using 3D foam tape.

A bit of ribbon between the two photos pulls it all together.

We do it digitally!!

Yay! My laptop is back and as good as new - literally. Wayne had to reset it to factory settings. So its taken me a while to download all the software I use regularly (ACDSee, Picasa,) and load up all the other necessities, photoshop taking the most trouble to get installed.

Finally though, I think I am back where I was before (minus the virus) and to celebrate I did a quick digi LO.



I used a kit called Fraisy by Coco&Ca, and it is mostly just layering elements of the kit on top of each other. I did recolour the swirls and then rub out some of them so that they fittedSty. I also added all the text, including the title which I filled with a glitter style layer.

I bought a packet of strawberry seeds, I didnt really think it possible to grow plants from seeds at home, as we had always bought plants ready grown from nurserys before, but it was really easy and they all managed to give me quite a bit of fruit. They are a wild alpine variety and are in fact still fruiting, although coming to the end now.

Another scraplift.

There really is nothing new under the sun, and with so many brilliant examples about it is so hard to not want to scraplift some of the great stuff about.

This is another scraplift attempt, of a layout by Lisa Bond, found in Scrapbook Inspirations mag issue 42 to meet the sketch challenge for July. Anyway this one was done really quickly but I do like it heaps. Not being able to print out new photos on Dilbert, I found a wad of printed photos that had already been through photoshop and decided to scrap some of them.




NB 'tis the scan that is crooked, not my LO!

Supplies

French Twist pp
Doodlebug frill
KI Memories Felt Fusions Free stickers off a mag (cant recall which one)
Button from scrap
Orange paint
White sukara pen
Ellison Thin cuts Curlie girl font
Die cut flower

No hidden techniques really, just cut all the bits to size and stuck them on. The only bit of 'altering' I had to do was paint some of the felt orange to make it match the pp.

The photo is of Martin (my DH) stood by the pool of a villa we hired in Menorca in 1996. Not a holiday we really want to remember much about really. We went with my best mate and her family - she had fallen off her horse a few weeks prior to us leaving and only had the plaster over her broken elbow removed three days before we flew out.

Then the villa, although lovelyish had a pool with no shallow end (and my mate's DH doesnt swim, just likes to stand in the pool with us) plus the villa was on a main road that was described as being quite but which had motor bikes screaming past it at all hours of the day and night.

Topped by Kelly ending up in hospital because she developed glandular fever, and there was even some doubt about her being allowed to fly home.

Still as this LO prooves, even the bad times are worth scrapping!

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.



.
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.



.

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.

Looks like little effort spent

.... but this weeks Pencil Lines sketch LO had taken the best part of a day. Mainly because I have made most of the elements from scratch.

Here is what I did;

Supplies

BG Lolipop
Valerie Brown digi kit - 'A good Life'
Chipboard sheets
Ellison qk alpha Curlie Girl
Bazille cardstock
MM Notelette (thankyou Mel)
Scraps of cs
glitter
shimmer paints
sheet of transparancy

One of the examples on Pencil lines this week was a LO by Janine which had used several photos instead of one large one. I wanted to do the same, but am usu ally hopeless at croping them to fit. This time I decided that while I was cleaning the photos up in photoshop I would use a layering technique to fit them all into the larger space. This took a while but did mean I could change the pattern and size of the photos until I was happy with the spacing, something you cant do when you are cutting with scissors. I flattened the image and printed it out as one photo.

I gutted the sheet of bazille so that I could double mat photo. Thats when the fun started.

I wanted to match the colours in the BG cs but didnt have anything to hand so I decided to use some of my digi elements as hybrid stash. The flower is from 'A good life'kit although I altered the colour and flood filled the middle with blue. I printed it out and glued on to chipboard to provide some texture. The 'remember this' tag was part of the kit but the summer fun I had to make myself in photoshop. The Butlin book plate was also a digi element printed out onto white cs, glued onto chipboard and then chalks were used to give a fawn appearance. This was glued on using foam pads.

The other chipboard elements I cut from a variety of dies on my zipemate, and either covered in paper, painted with cosmic shimmer or glittered. The title was cut from the curlie girl die cuts in chipboard and blue paper scraps, which were glued over the top of each other and stuck on.



The journalling is computer printed onto transparency.

The florishes on the flower are rub ons from the French twist kit from Scrummy Cafe.

Waiting for the glue to dry

While waiting for the glue to dry on the letters for my latest layout, I thought I would write up what I did to make it again, as it prooved so popular last time.




This layout was done as part of the Summer Stash Bash being run on UKS throuhout August. This one uses a Becky Fleck Page map and is part of the Tuesday Technique challenge - to use stamps somewhere.

Supplies

Fancy pants Floral Chic My sweetie paper
Autumn Leaves florish stamps
MM alphabet stamps
glitter
Some chipboard or back of notepad
Green and white acyrlic paint
Cosmic shimmer powder (blue, green, red, yellow)
Transparency
Doodlepack digi kit by Iona Havenaar
Sheet of transparency
G;ossy accents glue

The sketch called for four photos but I didnt have four in a 'set' so as last time, I had to mess around in photoshop before I could get started. Having picked these photos they seem to match the paper so well I just couldnt resist. And the paper was way too prrruudy to cover up, so instead of using the sketch as it stood I changed things a bit. In order to use ALL the pretty pattern I used my snap off craft knife and a glass cutting mat to cut out the flowers and swirls in the pattern just enough to slip the photos underneath.

I gutted the back of the top photo in order to use the back of the double sided cs as the journalling block.

For the stamping part of the challenge I used the swirl stamp on the naked chipboard, using stazon black ink after painting the chipboard with acrylic paint using a sponge brush. I dabbed white paint into the green to match the green paper. When dry I carefully cut the swirls out and glued on to make the journal frame.

Still using black stazon I stamped the title with the MM foam alpha (gosh its a while since I used those) and then using the same technique as before, smeared glue over them and then glittered with pee wee glitter.

Finally, the bubbles are printed out from a rather old digi kit by Iona Havenaar, called Doodlepack. I resizes some of the round tags which looked a bit like bubbles, printed them out onto a transparency, then used red, yellow, blue and green cosmic shimmer powder to paint a rainbow effect. Once glued onto the LO I added a 'bubble' of rangers glossy accents to make them 3D.

Make do and mend

Back in the 'good old days' scrapping supplies were no where near as plentiful, varied or as easily attainable as they are nowadays. Looking at all the new CHA stuff being previewed on various sites and forums made me think back to when I first started scrapping. There were NO bricks and mortar shops selling craft goodies anywhere within a 100 mile radius of where I lived - come to think on it there still are very few. Internet shopping was very new and scary, international Internet shopping virtually non-existent or something someone else (who was rich and clever) did. About the only three ways to get stash were a) get someone you knew and trusted to post it from the USA, buy from QVC or Ideal World, or c)go to trade shows.

Even at shows, the choice was limited, you were lucky if there was much more than cardstock, a few sheets of pattern paper, and eyelets or snaps. Well that's what I came away with on my first visit anyways.

So in order to make a half decent page, you had to be very adept at making your own embellishments. Paper piecing was all the rage, loads of eyelets threaded with ribbon, that sort of thing. Even when all those things we love to use on our layouts now started to reach us from across the pond, I was still proud of the way I could usually make my own version - shrink plastic, hand cut titles, I even once made a very ornate key using nothing but cardstock, my computer and a ton of glitter. I layered cardstock to make my own chipboard letters. I scorned those that used pre-made items as 'cheating' and taking the easy way out.

I still don't have loads of the latest up to the minute, money and an overwhelming choice often stopping my hand on the buy now button. So I thought I would share the process of this LO that uses so little in the way of modern fancy bits and much of my very old stock.

Oh and my other problem is lack of photos - in the '80's before the advent of cheap digital cameras, processing film was expensive, cameras were for high days and holidays, one film often having to last for nearly 6 months!

So for this layout I only had two very poor quality photos to work with. Thank goodness for photoshop! It took me quite a few hours of cleaning up, enhancing and cropping, enlarging to get these three alternative looking pictures, but I wanted to do Sketch 87 on Pencil lines so I persevered.

Supplies
1 sheet of steel blue bazille
1 sheet light blue bazille
1 sheet of (old) Chatterbox scrapbook walls courtyard blossoms
half sheet of (old) Chatterbox scrapbook walls sky lilac
Black floss (very old reel from when I was at school!)
blue cotton (from a mixed pack bought in sainsbury)
Stickles - star dust
Peewee glitter, light blue (bought in 2000 at that first show!)
Set of chipboard letters (possibly HS but not sure as have had for over a year,) Staedtler triplus fineliner pen black (bought cheap in Sainsbury)
Foam pads bought in poundland
Black stayzon ink
White reeves acylic paint (in Tesco sale)

Tools
Corner punch large and small sewing needles
Herma
PVA glue
Autumn leaves stamp circle jounal/scroll
Chatterbox doodlegenie twitterpated

I double matted the large photo onto light blue cs and then onto the chatterbox courtyard, rounding all the corners as I went on both photo and layers. I matted the smaller photos once onto light blue cs. I positioned and stuck down.

I found a flower on google which I printed out and used in two sizes as a template for the flower (I am hopeless at free hand drawing) I matted both onto the light blue cs and then positioned and using foam squares, made into the 3D flower. At this point the flowers didnt stand out enough so I doodled some stitching around them with the black pen. It seemed logical to follow the stitching around the frames on the photos.







I knew I wanted a florish but wasnt sure how to go about it. I needed a thinking stage, so I left it on my desk and came back the following evening. I used the doodlegenie sheet as a guide and using my coluzzle pad underneath, and the larger needle, I punched out the holes to embrodier the swirls. I really wanted blue floss for the sewing but had to make do with black as that was all there was in my sewing box. When I had finished one swirl though, it was far too harsh against the blue so to tone it down I sewed the light blue cotton around each stitch. Happier I did the second swirl, but I was still not convinced it was right.

In an experimental mood, I used the stickle to run a thin layer of glitter along the threads.

Sewing took another evening up.

Stamping the journalling block took only a minute, finding a quote to go on it that I liked took up another whole evening, and then I hand journalled as by now I really didnt want the fuss of trying to print it and line up all the lines on the stamp.

I came away for another evening to think on how to do the title. I knew I wanted to use chipboard but I only had one pink set the correct size, everything else I had was too big for the proportions. In the end I carefully peeled the pink layer off and then used white paint to colour the letters. This still was too harsh so I used my finger to smear a thin layer of pva glue over each letter and sprinkled with peewee glitter.




I finished off the title with some Heidi Swapp rub ons and I am quite pleased with a LO made mostly from old stock and scraps.