A Little Gift

A friend recently asked me to help her to decorate a photo album to give to a family member who had recently had a daughter.  I'm always happy to help someone in any way I can, but if scrapping is involved then it's even better :)

This is what I did for her and she was delighted:

These books are from Hobbycraft and they are on special offer at the moment.  I bought this one to do my 'All about us' book for our fostering endeavours, the creation of which is on my 'To do' list for October half term.  It was a bargain at just £2.00.

What's the best bargain that you found recently?

GoGo Getaway October 2016

GoGo Getaway October 2016 is coming up in just a few weeks and delegates have made their class choices now.  We've been giving sneak peeks to everyone and here is the first of mine:

I think that this class is one of my favourites that I've ever designed for GoGo.  It's a two layout class; one technique, two ways.  I use the same products to make a wintery class and a summery class.  I'm excited to show it to the delegates and see their take on it.  It's amazing how different a class can look with just a change of photo.

GoGo are now taking bookings for March and October 2017, oh and they've announced a Manchester event for November 2017 as well.  It's all GoGo!!

The big C

My new (academic) year's resolution was going so well.  Scrapping and blogging daily and enjoying my reclaimed me time.  But then tragedy struck and my step-dad died.  It's a story that more and more families know only too well but this is the closest to home that cancer has struck.  Ray was diagnosed in July and just 9 weeks later he died in a Phyllis Tuckwell Hospice.  I spent some time with my mum and Ray at the hospice before he died and on the day that he died and the staff could not do enough for us.  It's not a job that I envy but they did it with great care and humility.

Ray has been my step-dad for 26 years.  He married my mum after we'd been on our own, the three of us, for seven years.  You can imagine that things didn't always go smoothly when joining a family with teenage and pre-teen daughters in it.  But I think that Ray had a good life. He has three children of his own and five grandchildren including my son.  He loved spending time with Connor and he did that quite a lot, especially before Connor started school and when there was snow!  

My final Hey Little Magpie challenge from the other weekend was Niki's sketch challenge.  This had a big shape on it and I decided to go with a decorated circle.  

Harvest

This photo is of Ray and Connor collecting plums from the fruit tree in the garden.  As you can see, this is serious business.  I love the composition of this photo though and it's lovely to be able to scrap the memory of Ray doing things with Connor.  

I love this textured woodgrain paper and bought a whole pack of it a while ago from Hey Little Magpie.  This time I used a white ink pad to lift the grain before sewing a circle on to the page and decorating it with all manner of embellishments.  

At the end of the weekend Hey Little Magpie had a prize draw and I won a prize!  I wasted no time in placing my order, including a whole lot of Illustrated Faith products, which is something I'm planning on getting in to having recently bought a journaling bible.  That was very exciting :)

Go Going to Wanborough!

Being at Wanborough yesterday brought back some happy memories of our GoGo Day Away visit back in April.  It was called Inspiration Inbound and GoGo Lisa and I helped delegates to create a whole lot of lovely layouts to complete a whole album over two weekends.

On the Friday night we traveled down to set up the hall, ably assisted by GoGo Janice.  We loved the crates that we'd found to display the goodies for each delegate.

And then when Saturday came around GoGo Lisa and I put on our 'uniform' of a grey apron and scarfs and got to work.

For this weekend we used project life cards and cream cardstock for each layout and combined them with different gelato techniques and handwriting hints to create layouts that complemented each other but were each very different.  

These are the layouts that I taught.

Love you

The Story of Our Lives

Best of Friends

Magic Kingdom

One of our favourite parts of preparing for this weekend was scouring the shops for goodies to put in the embellishment bags.  It was almost as much fun using all the elements on the layouts though!

The following weekend we put up a load of sketches and our examples of the sketches on the Facebook group so that people could add even more pages to their albums.  It was great to see the delegates take on each sketch.

An Audience with...

The Boy in the Suit

Finding Sherlock

And finally we finished off with some challenges.  My first was to do a top heavy layout with all the detail at the top of the page.

Memories of a Sunny Day

This was followed quickly with a nod to Shakespeare in his anniversary year, in that delegates had to use some Shakespeare on their layout.  

All the World's a Stage

Then finally, it was a layout challenge that relied on boxes of interest.

You & Me

So as you can see, the same supplies used for each layout produced a number of different layouts by virtue of how the pieces were assembled.  

It was such a fun (and exhausting!) weekend.  And it's not long now until the GoGo Getaway!  I can't wait.  

One technique, two ways!

Today I'm teaching a class at Wanborough, one of my favourite places to be.  Twice a year there is a 48 hour crop in the village hall and it's a lovely bunch of ladies that attend.  

For my class today I chose some really gorgeous papers from the Somewhere in Time Bo Bunny collection. People liked them so much that the first kits sold out within 2 hours so I added a second kit in a different colour way but using the same techniques and one technique, two ways was born.

Harry Potter?

Quidditch

These papers just instantly reminded me of the Great Hall doors at the Warner Bros. Studio Tours: Making of Harry Potter, which Connor was lucky enough to be selected to open.

This is another set of photos that I still need to scrap.  We have so many! I chose a photo of Connor and I in the Great Hall and another of Connor meeting the Quidditch players for these two layouts.  The focus was on making flowers in two ways; origami and rolled.  They were mixed amongst flowers bought from the growing range of flowers at Hobby Craft to create a pretty floral layout.

Wanborough ladies, don't forget to upload your finished class by 9 am Saturday 8th October to be in with a chance of winning a prize.  

This post is dedicated to The Scrap Cafe.  Why not join us for the monthly crop or one of the retreats in Reading?

Bethan Louise

One of the challenges on the Hey Little Magpie Challenge weekend was set by Jackie.  She wanted us to scrap using a recipe.  We could use any of the following but nothing else:

Cardstock as your background
1 stencil design on the background
6x6 paper pad
2 No. 1 x 12 inch stripes of patterned paper
Vellum
Chipboard
Wood veneer
Enamel dots
Stickers
Stamp word and cut out
Title : Thickers and a small alphabet
mini word stickers
Hidden journalling
Washi tape
Flair Badge

There was quite a lot of options there but I still cheated ever so slightly.  So I cut the 1x12" strips in half so that I could put them top and bottom and I didn't have a 6x6" paper pad so I used a piece of 6x6" paper cut from a 12x12" piece.  

Bethan Louise

This is a photo taken at my sister's baptism in 1979.  Interestingly when I showed my mum the layout she said that she'd never seen this photo before, so I guess it was from my dad's collection.  I love yellow and this paper is just gorgeous.  My background is cardstock but I used a stencil and some white embossing paste mixed with some yellow paint to add some texture to the layout before I added the photo, stickers and flowers.  I ended up buying some enamel dots from Hey Little Magpie because everyone was using them and they look fab!  

What was the last item of stash that you bought?

Reminiscing once again!

This morning Facebook reminded me that 7 years a go I was in Germany for the weekend, taking my son to visit his father who was working there at the time.  It's another occasion when I amassed a stack of photos and I was looking back over my blog to see how many of them I had scrapped back then.

There are a few like the photo on my I am not a Robot layout here, Favourite things layout here, Pumpkin Patch layout here, Conker Face layout here and Hoffest layout here.  But there must be a whole load of photos from this weekend that I still have hovering in my photo box waiting to be scrapped.  So I will be digging them out and including them in this weekend's to do box.

How old are the oldest photos that are on your 'to scrap' pile?

Shine!

Today's offering is another from the Hey Little Magpie Challenge weekend.  Julie showed a really gorgeous layout to inspire us to make a layout using a grid.  It made me wish that I had the embellishments she had and that I had a crocheted flamingo!  But I don't so I went with a photo of the boy taken at our studio shoot a little while ago.

Shine

I really love this photo of the boy and as you can see from the journaling the case was taken as a prop for the photo but Connor climbed in it and the photographer got this shot.  In trying to find some paper with a blue theme I found this piece with blue dots but the different colours gave more scope for adding other embellishments without the whole layout having to be blue.

The layout turned out well, but I wish I hadn't put the 'happy' in the left hand corner.  It's glossy accented on though so there's no budging it now.  Have you ever regretted putting something on a layout?

Remincsing about the Olympics

I don't know about you but I was totally hooked by the Olympics and then the Paralympics this summer.  I don't think I really got in to the Olympics until London 2012, although I do remember the likes of Daley Thompson and Linford Christie from the 90s.  We were lucky enough to go to some Olympics in 2012, but one of my favourite parts of the Olympics wasn't the sport itself.  It was the Olympic trails around London looking for Wenlock and Manderville.  I have dozens of photos of the boy with the Olympic mascots and am planning on making an 11x8" album eventually.  I have the album bought already but that's not saying much since I've had it for four years now.

This photo is one of my favourites from those trials and it fitted this bingo challenge from Agnieszka during the Hey Little Magpie challenge weekend.  I chose a diagonal row from the card which gave me washi tape, wood veneer and sticker.

Olympic Trail

I really enjoyed getting a little messy but leaving lots of space on this layout and then layering up with lots of embellishments.  Perhaps I'll recreate this one in 11x8" for the album?!  

Tiny Dancers

Good morning all!  I hope that you are all enjoying your weekend and being a little bit crafty :)

Today I'm sharing the challenge set by Rachel Millington during the Hey Little Magpie Challenge Weekend.  The challenge was simply to use paint and stitching.  I love paint and I love stitching so this one was a pretty good challenge for me.  I don't get to use a lot of pink so I decided that since the photo is black and white, I would treat myself.  This photo was taken at my sister's wedding last October.  It's my cousin's daughter and my sister's page boy doing some barn dancing and it's one of my favourite from the wedding album.  They only met that day but they danced so well together.

Tiny Dancers

To create this layout I painted using big strokes and a lot of paint both at the top and the bottom of the cardstock.  I also used a brighter pink to create some splatters of paint on top of the paler pink solid blocks of paint.  Once that had dried I used a sewing machine to stitch the circles. I always draw a circle in pencil as a guide but I often do more than one circle so that if it's not absolutely perfect, it doesn't show.  I decided to go with the musical link with some musical note patterned paper and the gorgeous pink flowers on a blue background, linked up with some Prima blooms, October Afternoon Stickers and washi tape from my stash.  I bought some enamel dots from Hey Little Magpie this week and they've gone on pretty much every layout, and this one is no exception. The layout is finished off with a title in Thickers and a little bit of journaling just to capture the date and venue. 

I'd love to see how you've used paint and stitching on a layout so please do link to it in the comments below :)

A Magpie Challenge

I'm pretty proud of myself this week.  I've managed to do all but two of the Hey Little Magpie Challenge Weekend challenges.  The other two aren't really my bag so I'm done!

This was Claire Fader's  challenge, which was to create a layout based on this advert:

It's a really interesting idea, isn't it?  For my layout I decided to go with strips of paper rather than a solid block.  I used some Prima and Glitz papers for this one along with Simple Stories stickers from their Say Cheese range since I was scrapping a photo of the boy and Donald Duck.  We went to Disneyland Paris last October and I thought that he would be too old to want to meet the characters but no!  He wanted to meet them all, which was lovely.  And it meant that I got loads of photos which can be a challenge now that he's older.

Totally Quackers

The balloons replace the bags hanging off the swish, or in this case the title, but I had to put them the other way around.  The layout is finished off with selection of October Afternoon and Simple Stories stickers.

I really enjoyed this one and am really interested to see all the different layouts that are being created from the same point of inspiration :)  If you're playing along, please feel free to link your blog in the comments so that we can see how yours turned out.

Have a great Saturday,

A look back

Next weekend I'm off to Wanborough for the autumn 48 hour crop.  Today I'm looking back at the class that I taught there two years ago.  I can't quite believe it was that long ago!

Catch of the day

The background of this layout was created using a piece of acetate, some distress inks and some water.  Firstly I put two complementary inks on the acetate, one hot and one cold.  Then I spritzed it with water and placed the acetate central to the page in a square.  You can see how the ink splodged out on the page.  I used the acetate to then create some panels by stamping on to them with Staz on.  I love to cut out flowers from patterned papers and these are gorgeous colours.  

The photo is of the boy crabbing in Old Felixstowe.  It's one of my favourite photos of the summer.  It makes me want to go back and do some more crabbing :)  

I'm looking forward to teaching at the crop next weekend and have some lovely Bo Bunny papers to play with.  

Thanks for stopping by!