New Year's Eve

This year has gone so fast. They seem to get faster every year! It seems like only yesterday that I was sharing my favourite layouts of 2010.

2010 was the year that I got even braver with paint and ink, thanks largely to my Scrap365 team mate Lisa Saunders :) The great thing about this layout is that it inspired other people to get a bit messy with paint and ink too. My GoGo pal Sheena told me that this one was inspired by my spring LO, and doesn't it look fab too.
This one is one of my favourites because I love the Rocket Age range, and the colours and because it was one of my favourites of the Scrapfactor competition.
I think that this is the only double layout that I created this year! When I started out all I did was double layouts and now I just don't do them. I should though, especially when I'm doing my wedding album. I'm pleased with how this one came out though and Crate Paper Toy Box was another of my favourite ranges of 2011.

Speaking of wedding albums, this is my favourite of my wedding layouts so far. I have got a little carried away with making paper flowers this year but I do think that they enhance a layout and they are well worth the time it takes to make them. This is one of the layouts that won me 'Scrapbooker of the Year' runner up in The Scrapbook Magazine too so it's hard not to have a soft spot for it.

Another Scrapfactor layout here, this time with no photo. I've done layouts without photos before but this is the first one that I have thought worked. I love that Connor's first writing is now commemorated. When it comes to my favourite GoGo Getaway class of the year it's a hard choice. I've so enjoyed teaching at the retreats and day events and meeting our members. I think that this layout just squeezes past some of the others though. Again, it's partially because I love the paper range, but I also like the composition and the shiny elements.
This one is a favourite for two reasons. Firstly, we had so much fun hunting Easter Eggs in the Park and secondly, the kit from ScrapaGoGo was fab and worked well with this composition.


Today I have set aside for Scrap365 and am keen to get started on my first project for them :) I hope that you all have a wonderful New Year's Eve and that 2012 is full of lots of wonderful memories to capture on film, and later on a page x

Catching up on 2011 Part 5

Layouts towards the end of the year have been few and far apart as I did some maternity cover for my colleague and was working more than usual. But I did enjoy my GoGo kits each month.

This layout commemorates Connor's first day at school. He had done so well and seems so happy to be at school, which is a massive relief.
This is the first of my Honeymoon layouts. We went to Italy and travelled from the North down to Verona. This photo is of my at Juliette's house in Verona, standing on the balcony.
In half term we visited Disneyland Paris courtesy of Connor and my Mum. We all had a great time (although we were all tired at the end of each day) and this layout shows Tony and Connor meeting Buzz Lightyear. Connor was talking about this moment just this week.
Here is another of my 'Milly' layouts. She's such a beautiful cat that it's hard not to take photo after photo of her :)
I think that that is me caught up for this year :) I'm all set to share my Chinese Whispers Layouts on New Years day when we post for the first time.

Catching up on 2011 Part 4

And of course, there have been lots of ScrapaGoGo layouts each month. I've shared some of them already, but here are some more from the fabulous August kit.

This first layout is about our many trips to Legoland. Dad bought Connor and myself a Legoland pass for Christmas/Birthday last year and we've loved being able to visit the park as often as we've wanted. The photos should be even more vaied this year, since Dad got us a Merlin pass!!


And here is a layout from my Hen do. We had a Murder Mystery Dinner with a cast of celebrities and I was Cruella De Vile. I couldn't find a costume that was exactly what I wanted, so I made one and I collected lots and lots of dogs to drag along behind me too :)

Catching up on 2011 Part 3

There have been wedding layouts aplenty given that the official photographer took 1600 photos and there were more from Tony and our guests.

'Father of the Bride' with a photo of my Dad:
I created this layout using the ScrapaGoGo hybrids for November:
And these two using the November kit:

This one is one of the ScrapaGoGo Chinese Whispers lifts:
And this one was using ScrapaGoGo's September kit:
Here I stamped an image and then painted the colour into them:
I saw some beautiful Aruna Seth shoes in my pre-wedding search but they were £550. I decided to fashion my own version in purple with some £12 shoes from Shoe Direct and some butterfly brooches from ebay for £2 each :) Here is my layout recording that fact.
At the GoGo Getaway in October I was looking at Lisa's laouts and saw how she'd splattered some paint very thickly so that it was raised off of the page. I love it and gave it a go on my wedding cake layout here.

I made my own cake with layers of coloured cake covered in cream icing with a cascade of printed acetate butterflies.

Catching up on 2011 Part 2

In November I entered The Scrapbook Magazine'Scrapbooker of the Year' Competition. I created two new layouts for this competition and entered one of my ScrapaGoGo layouts.

The first layout is 'Here comes the Bride'. I made lots of handmade flowers for this one and used a black and white photo from the wedding (obviously).

And the paper embellishment continued with a ruffled circle for my second layout 'pretty kitty'. I won a whole load of wonderful stash and it was like Christmas when it arrived.

Happy Christmas

I wish you and your families a very merry Christmas. We shall be enjoying a turkey lunch at my Mum's today before picking Connor up from his Dad's house. Judging from the pile of presents under the tree, Connor will be opening presents until bedtime!

Catching up on 2011 Part 1

I've been backing up my photos for 2011 and clearing my laptop ready for 2012 and have realised just how many layouts I've not blogged. Time to share some :) So, in October I taught four classes at the ScrapaGoGo GoGo Getaway. It was great to meet some more members and I had a really great time.

My first class was 'Love you to the Moon & Back'. The concept was using lots of shiny things.
That included some fab foil Thickers from American Crafts...
...and some kitchen foil layered with October Afternoon 'Rocket Age' paper.

Next up, with a focus on a tiny little paperclay food mixer, was my Recipes canvas.

The mixer was made using a silicone mold from etsy and some paperclay which we painted silver using acrylic paint.
I was amused during my next class when some lovely ladies came fully prepared for the mess in aprons and gloves. But by the end of the lesson the joke was on me and I was covered in paint, even though I wasn't doing any painting!! This class was inspired by a graffiti wall and was based on the Hambly Brick Wall transparency. There was lots of paint and a really grungy feel to this class.
The concept behind my final class was the colour wheel. We went with 'hot' red and 'cold' green.


Before the delegates arrived we met and decided on March 2012 Getaway concepts, which was very exciting. March 2012 is a sell out and October 2012 only had a few spaces left last time I heard. The wonderful ladies at ScrapaGoGo are already taking bookings for 2013 though so why not treat yourselves here ?? :)

An Early Present

I was given a very early Christmas present today and asked to join the 'Scrap365' Design Team :) I am so excited!!

'Tis the season to be GoGo

So did you catch the ''Tis the season to be GoGo' projects on the GoGo blog this month? If not, then do stop by and have a look at the ways in which we used some of our kit scraps for Christmas projects.

Here is mine, a paper flower covered wreath. I found it quite therapeutic making all those flowers :)

It's really pretty in real life and the photos don't quite do it justice. I was going to give it away as a present but Connor wouldn't let me. He wanted it in his room instead. Bless him!

Another quarter of a year gone in the blink of an eye

I don't know where the time has gone! Christmas is only a few weeks away and I've not updated my blog in a while. I deactivated my Facebook account this week and now my blog is one of my home tags instead so it'll remind me that I've been neglecting this page. So much has happened in the last few months. There's a GoGo Getaway to report on, Wedding layouts to share and Connor's been up to alsorts of LOs with him as the subject too. Today was Connor's school fair. I volunteered to do a scrapbooking table for the children. I decided to lift the LO I did in January and use the photo that we've used for our Christmas cards this year. I precut pieces of patterned paper and gave the children some buttons and stars and let them get messy with glue. They seemed to enjoy themselves and they were all concentrating so much it was nice and calm and quiet in our little corner. You might be wondering who the little Father Christmas is in the photo. That would be Minx. Sadly, Bailey bit me one too many times and we decided that it was only a matter of time before Connot got bitten and we weren't going to take that chance. The breeder kindly took him back for us and is trying to sort him out and then rehome him. Bailey was fine when he was at my Dad's house and he saw no signs of aggression so we're hoping that with a fresh start away from whatever it was in this house that made him act aggressively, he'll be the cute and cuddly pet that he could be all the time instead of just some of the time. Anyway, Bailey and Milly were thick as theives, chasing around the house after each other and curling up together on the back of the sofa and Milly was lonely with Bailey gone. Enter Minx. As the name might suggest, Minx is a little horror. She climbs up my curtains, pinches food off the plate when noone is looking and generally has a lot of personality. We were saying 'You little Minx' so often that it stuck ;) She is quite cute though. Not as gorgeous as Milly, but cute. We thought that Milly was still quite a small cat until we got Minx though. Now she looks big and fluffy with the fluffiest tail you've ever seen.

I have scrapped my first picture of Minx and I'll share it with you another time.

It's all getting exciting over at ScrapaGoGo as we get in to the spirit of it all. The December kit is stunning! I haven't dared get started on it yet because I want to have the time to enjoy it. We have a little Christmas treat planned though so that should be fun.

Time to watch X-factor now. Bye!

Psst!

...I have a secret and it's linked to this sneek ;)

Quick update

Wow! Is it really that long since I blogged? The months have passed in a whirlwind of marking, end of term madness, scheme of work writing ready for September, wedding plans and house renovations and not a lot of scrapping sadly :( I'm getting married on Sunday and am away for a week and then I need to take a long look at my life to see what can give!

Have you spotted the chance to win on the ScrapaGoGo blog?
x

Scrap Factor Week 11 Back to the Future

So I've been knocked out of Scrap Factor and it's time to say thank you so much for everyone who has supported me and voted for my layouts over the last ten weeks. I really appreciated it :)

Week 11's challenge on Scrap Factor was to rescrap a photo that you'd scrapped before.



This baby photo is me at about six months old. I first scrapped it a couple of years ago for a weekly challenge based on a sketch. When I looked through my old LOs this one really stood out as needing to be redone.

Having decided that I was going to go for the ultra pretty Crate Paper Emma's Shoppe Collection papers, I really struggled to decide what the main colours should be for this LO. I sometimes get some dulux colour chart strips out to help me and I decided that the green was a good contrast for the floral design of 'Emma's Shoppe- fabric' I even decided to use the palette on the LO. I bought a whole set of the wonderful calendar papers from KI Memories and the green one was perfect for the LO.

The focus of the design was UTEE embellishments and some more paper flowers. I used three techniques for the UTEE. The first was pouring a thin layers on a heat resistant mat and then pushing leaf cookie cutters in to it to cut leaves. The second was pouring the UTEE on to the mat in swirls. And the third was pouring it in to a mould to create a yellow flower.

Supplies:
Crate Paper 'Emma's Shoppe Collection'- 'Playhouse', 'Dresses' and 'Fabric'
KI Memories Leafy Calendar
Prima Softees Annabel
UTEE Brightz 'Green Zinnia' and 'Sunflower'
Etsy rose mould
October Afternoon 5&dime word stickers
Dulux green paint strip
Acrylic paint
Doodlebug Loopy lou Ladybird
American Crafts thickers sunrise
Zoophabetz safety pin
Making Memories coloured staples
Martha Stewart butterfly punch

Scrap Factor Week 10: Scrap without patterened paper

I really appreciated having the weekend to work on this LO because June is a stupidly busy month for me and patterned paper is such a go to even that I needed to think about this challenge. But as it turned out it wasn't as hard as you might expect. I decided to make my papers from two pieces of cardstock- one kraft cardstock and one core'dinations black cardstock with a blue core. I used a Bananafrog stamp to add a pattern to the kraft cardstock and a file to rough up the core'dinations and reveal the inner core. I ummed and ahhed about colouring in the circles but in the end I decided against. Was I right?

The photo is of our new kitten, Millie, who joined the family on 3rd June 2011. Finally a girl in the house and chose to use blue! Ooops :)

Supplies:
Kraft cardstock
Core'dinations Black Magic collection 'Freeze'
Jenni Bowling Label Frame
Cavallini Ppaers & Co. Butterfly rubber stamps
Maya Road Kraft Doilies
American Crafts Thickers 'Sunrise'
Prima Marketing Inc. 'Sculpture Flowers'
Staz on Black ink