Pretty dance photos

For those of you who live in my part of the world, you'll know we've been having a cold, wet summer, so it was no surprise to hear the well-used phrase, "will you do some craft with me?"  The only surprising part being that we were almost a week into the school holidays before I heard it!
Last Friday night Maddy had her dance concert, so I pulled out the last of last year's photos to scrap, and Maddy decided to do an accordion album incorporating photos from both years.  She didn't get very far, so maybe I'll show you her creation later, but here's one of the pages I did:

It seems appropriate to me that some of the last pages (if not the the last pages) of the year should incorporate exactly the sorts of things I've been working on using all year.  In this case: older papers from SEI "Aunt Gertie's Garden" and various Scrapbook Walls collections, as well as an assortment of tags, ribbons and flowers.
And with that, I'll say goodbye and wish you and yours a very merry Christmas!
 

Product challenge to self: paper strips

It's the first day of the school holidays, and before I got stuck into all my chores, I wanted to finish this page. It is based on the December Scrapbook Boutique challenge, which is to use the colours blue, pink, red and white.  After a couple of false starts, I decided that this would be a good project to challenge myself to use  only paper strips. Since I decided to store my paper strips separately to my other off-cuts back here, I've found I've turned to them often.  I won't pretend the quantity has dwindled that much (or at all), but I'm using strips at about the same rate that I'm adding them! 

I hope I'm forgiven for adding a tiny bit of other colours to this page, namely the pastel word and letter tiles.  They were just too perfect for this page, and just scream "baby girl".  As my baby is now 8,  the number of baby girl pages I have still to make are pretty limited!

For embellishments, I sewed the ribbon hearts on the machine.  I just folded as I went - no agonised pre-planing here! - and just finished them off with a button and word tiles.

November Stretch your sketch.

I had the November "stretch your sketch" sketch from Two Peas up on my ideas board for a couple of weeks or so before it occurred to me that if I added another photo at the bottom, it would work really well for the rest of the photos from this day when Rohan was "teaching" his little cousin how to skateboard!

Here's what I came up with, this time for Rohan's own album:

It has been a while since I last used the Silhouette - even the kids had noticed! - so I used it to cut the arrows and stars for this page.  No off-cuts today, the multi-coloured paper is from the most recent papers I purchased and the stars and arrows are from a 6" pad.  The orange which mats the photos comes from a pack of Basic Grey "Indian Summer" papers I bought a couple of craft shows ago.  I don't know why I bought them - the colours and patterns don't often work for me! (I think I just saw the words "Basic Grey" and "special" together and my brain just went to mush!)  So anyway I am slowly working my way through them, often in tiny doses like you see here.

11 photos on a double-page-and-a-bit

Today I want to show you a page I made based on Shimelle's latest 4x6 photo love for November.  The concept is to use a photo protector between the two pages of your layout in order to add an additional 4 photos and 2 4x6 journalling blocks.
I don't own the actual 6x12 divided photo protectors that Shimelle demonstrates, which hold 3 landscape photos on each side.  On the other hand, I do own a truck-load of the 12" ones, and I was quite happy to cut one down.
(A couple of years ago, I bought a whole lot so that all the un-scrapbooked photos could be held chronologically in the same album as my completed pages.  That's what I do with my kid's albums, but I very quickly realised that the cost to do that with the family photos would be astronomical, hence all the spare photo protectors)

I felt a bit like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat as I was choosing papers for this layout, I kept on finding more and more Basic Grey "Marjolaine" offcuts in my stash.  I ended up using 3 of these papers and some of the matching stickers.  I only ended up adding my own Mini alpha stickers for the sub-heading, and some tiny flowers and brads.

Product challenge to self: sue's RAK

Life for me, at this time of year (like the rest of you) gets pretty hectic. I thought finishing TAFE would give me a bit of breathing space, but no sooner had I finished, the school I've been doing my placement at offered me 7 days casual work!
So it's only now I'm getting around to telling you that I had a bit of a winning streak last month, winning two challenges in a row at Let's Scrap, as well as the monthly sketch challenge at my local scrapbook store!
To the right you can see the lovely goodies I received from Sue, and you'll see how I've already used some of the flowers in a moment.

Here are the lovely My Mind's Eye stamps I received for the second challenge.  I am so excited, they are just the sort of versatile stamps I can see myself using over and over again!









Here is the first page I made using Sue's flowers:  it's the sort of story to warm any crafty mother's heart.  If you've been following my blog you may have already seen some of Maddy's lovely creations and know that she loves to join me for a bit of paper-crafting goodness.  Because of this page, I will never forget how proud i was when I saw her ink her edges for the first time - I'm not sure if it's a skill I taught her in a formal sense, or whether she just picked it up by watching.  Either way, she's a natural!

Did you notice I used the same letter stickers to make my title as she was using in the photos?  And yes, I did ink the edges with the same shade of ink as well!

This page was inspired by Shimelle's weekly sketch last week.  I started it between finishing work Friday (I finish at one) and picking up the kids from their school, then finished in bits and pieces over the weekend.

These photos were taken during our Christmas card photo shoot 3 years ago, the year Maddy had a broken arm.  I love that, other than the flowers from the RAK, everything on this page is very much from the stash.  Behind every single one of those circles at least one element has been cut and stretched to fit!