Hybrid Scrapping...

I have been thinking about the PSE/digi course by Jessica Sprague now for several weeks and yesterday I made my mind up. I'm signed up and I can't wait! I think it will be a great help for me with my hybrid scrapping/cardmaking. Also a handy thing since I'm still pretty new to PSE. Only a few days until it starts *excited smile*

And talking about hybrid things. Here's a layout I made which is almost completely hybrid apart from a brad, a few jewels and my white cardstock:

It was created using the most yummy kit by Natalie Braxton and Emily Merritt called "Celebrate The Everyday":

Oh and before I go, I must tell you how I totally L-O-V-E the new Nintendo Wii Fit & Balancing Board. It's just the most fun ever...!

Glitter Mania...

I have officially made the most glittery layout in my scrapbook life - by far! LOL! Glittery papers, glittery die-cuts...even a super glittery transparency frame :) But is there such a thing as *too much* glitter...? I'm not so sure :)

Anyway, if you have a moment spare, please pop over to A Trip Down Memory Lane and check out my latest on-line step-by-step class. Lots of photos to show you the process of making it. Thank you :)

Busy, Busy, Busy...

Today is just one of those days when everything happens and I don't even know in which end to start LOL! Busy, busy, busy! Stash arrives, making minibook for Lilypad project, taking photographs, editing, more Lilypad kits are uploaded to work with for Friday, got Donna Downey's new books in the post (when will I have time to read these?), had to sort stuff for my blog, then suddenly I'm very honoured as I get a surprise e-mail with a magazine assignment with a Friday (!) deadline etc etc. And in all this, the Wii Fit game and Balancing Board that Ross ordered for the Nintendo Wii arrived this morning - so we're looking forward to having a play with that tonight.

...and somehow on top of all this (and much more than I listed) I want to sign up for this PSE course by Jessica Sprague. I must be mad! LOL! It's not that I want to get into digital scrapping really (love paper too much) but more to get even more familiar with PSE and also I think it will help me with my hybrid work. :) We'll see what I end up doing...

Supplies: Scenic Route papers, Photo frames from "Feb Surprise Cluster pack" by Nancy Comelab, Making Memories flower, Autumn Leaves and October Afternoon stamps, American Crafts Thickers alphabets.

More Scrapping...

Just a quick post for today. I have been doing some more playing with Nancy Comelab's fantastic photo cluster frames. :)

Supplies: Making Memories papers, die-cuts and curling tag, Photocluster from the "Feb Surprise Pack" by Nancy Comelab (the Lilypad), Doodlebug ribbon, American Crafts Thickers alphabets and Autumn Leaves stamp.

Loving These...

I have just discovered some fantastic photo cluster frames by Nancy Comelab at the Lilypad. Can't believe I didn't spot these before. They are of course originally made for digital scrapping - but wow are they great for paper scrapping too!! :) I can see myself making lots of layouts using these. Below is my first one and I'm pretty sure I should have another one ready and done for tomorrow. :)

Supplies: Scenic Route "Salem" papers (who said you can only use a Halloween collection for Halloween layouts?! LOL!), "Polaroid Photocluster 02" by Nancy Comelab, American Crafts Thickers alphabets, Love Elsie and Autumn Leaves stamps, Making Memories curling tag and Creative Cafe journaling stickers.

Scrap Your Day...

Did you see this post yesterday? So are you ready? Are you going to take part in this cool project by Shimelle? *excited* Erin you were asking about this: Go here to download a suggestion for how to make/prepare your book and go to the bottom of this post to download a photo fact sheet. Hope that helps :)

Shimelle prepared a few kits for the class (though you can do it with whatever supplies you have and since the class is FREE - what have you got to lose? LOL!) and I got up early on the morning they went on sale and managed to get mine. Prepared my book (according to the prompt she e-mailed us who bought it) as soon as the kit arrived so it's been ready to go for a while now.

Really excited about it this morning and as of 09:56 I had already taken 57 photos LOL! I have left the cover for now and will decorate it at a later time. My inside pages have been prepared like Shimelle suggested. Here are some photos of a few of them:

Oh and I almost forgot, Marja and Jackie - you both asked about my little clothes peg bag and where you could get the fabric: Ebay! :)

Ready...?

I am. Are you?

My Little Project...

Before showing you my little project from yesterday I just wanted to answer Bunnymommy who asked about this layout. I got the "perfect squares" by using the 2" square punch by Woodware :)

Onto my project... I was in the kitchen drying some dishes the other evening when my eyes fell on these little hooks (for towels, oven gloves etc) we have on the side of a kitchen unit. It suddenly dawned on me that the plastic bag we have for our clothes pegs was not the prettiest sight and that maybe I could so something about it...

So a purchase of fabric and some cord later and I was ready to go. I decided to go for a really happy-summery fabric since clothes pegs are essentially a summer thing...and let's face it, how fun is it to hang washing? So anything to make you smile, right? :) And what better than some cute owls! So out my sewing machine came and this is what I came up with. A simple drawstring bag to hold the pegs.

Much better, eh? And yes I am very aware of that it needs a round with the iron. I'm working on it. Kinda. You know. Sometime it will happen. I think. Maybe.

My Opinion On...

...the "Tag Curler" that I won from Making Memories.

Firstly, I have to say that this is something that I would never have bought myself. I'd seen pictures of the tags but they were so poor that I couldn't really work out what they did and how the end result looked. So I went and won the Tag Curler at the MM blog. "Cool" I thought - nice to win a prize. :) But to be honest I still thought it would be one of those tools that would just end up lying unused on a shelf somewhere... Hand on heart - I didn't think I would like it at all.

So yesterday I thought I might as well try it. I grabbed a random ribbon. Okay a ribbon I didn't like (just because I expected it to go in the bin afterwards if I'm being honest here LOL!) And you know what?

I was pretty impressed with the result! :) I can actually see this becoming something I will use quite a bit on layouts and cards. I'm amazed and pretty impressed. I'm not saying you should rush out and buy one - it's not exactly something you *need* in your basic tool kit, but for me - having won this - it's definitely something I will use. And *nearly falls off her chair as she never thought she'd say this* I can even see myself buying some more tags when these run out!! OMG - LOL!!

Leaving you with a little pic of a small project I'm working on at the moment...

Loved Doing This...

As some of you probably know, I'm taking the 5 week "No Place Like Home" on-line class by Shimelle. This is the last week *sob* and it's been great. Friday's prompt showed this really cool layout by Shimelle. Hers was 12x12, lots of mini photos and a small minibook in the middle. I adapted mine a bit. I'm scrapping in true A4 so I had to adapt the amount of mini photos to fit to my page and I decided not to make a little minibook in the middle (I'm not one for hidden journaling usually) and use this for my title instead. This is the result:

I used Scenic Route papers, American Crafts Thickers and some leftover alphabet stickers from other brands.

I really love how this concept turned out and I'd love to do something similar as a "yearly" or "monthly" layout - that would be really cool way to show off lots of photos and bring back lots of memories. :)

My Prize...

Remember this? Well it's finally arrived :)

I had never seen a Making Memories "Tag Curler" in real life as of waking up this morning. In fact I still don't know just how they work or indeed what the finished result is LOL! We have no scrapping shops nearby so I have to get anything I need on-line (can be tricky at times judging colours on the monitor!) and just hope it looks good in real life.

I have to admit that a "Tag Curler" is probably not something I would have ever bought if I had not won this, but it will be fun to try it out and I'm looking forward to have a play with it - hopefully this afternoon. I was pleasantly surprised at how many packs of tags (I thought I would get one) Making Memories had included - very generous of them :)

Oh and do you know what? It's nice and GREEEEEN - yay :)))

Yummies...

I was a bit lazy with downloading these photos off the camera. The parcel came from the US just before the weekend and I even though I took the photos I never got around to downloading them onto the computer. Bad me LOL!

Some yummies by Heidi Grace. She's released several new collections, but you can't buy everything and the "A Bird's Tale" collection was definitely the one that was most for me, so I picked a few selected bits from it (each collection range she does is huuuge LOL!)

And then some random other bits. A few American Crafts Thickers alphabets that I use lots and lots of. Maya Road stamps and rub-ons, SEI papers ad rub-ons etc.

Guestbook...

I've been busy finishing off my guestbook. I have covered 6 family visits from Sweden. That's 6 double-spreads in the book. There's enough room for 5 more (5 double-spreads) so that will be for any future visits.

I have just kept the pages very simple (so not too much fun to show on here), cardstock photos and the "printables" from Shimelle. I have put the cardstock in the album and cut out the "printables" for the future pages too - that way the whole album will be the same no matter when I finish it. That's why I'm keeping the pages simple. Otherwise it would be easy to use embellishments on the first few pages which I will have run out of when I come to do the later entries.

This is how the cover turned out. Pretty much a copy of Shimelle's cover:

And this is my title page inside - I used a very similar theme to my cover:

Crazy Cards...

So when I saw Kate's new doodle releases for Friday (today) the other day I both loved them (as they looked great!) and was a bit lost as how to make them into cards. How do you put fries and burgers onto cards?!? LOL!

A few rounds (okay, *quite* a few!) of Mario Kart on the Wii later - while my brain was busy designing cards - and I had some ideas. Lunch anyone?

The cards have lots of little details that are hard to pick up in the photos. Jewels, liquid pearls, glitter etc...

Again, not really possible to see but there are lots of 3D effects. The hotdog, ice-cream and donut are actually cut out and mounted 3D onto foam.

Oh and I nearly forgot - if you fancy some lunch - check out Kate's doodles that I used. :)

Edited to add: Nina you asked about Scrap-Room and the postage. With my add-ons it's normally about $12-15 (yes US dollars) Hope that helps. If you decide to sign up (you'll love it!!) I'd be very grateful if you'd mention my blog - thanks :)

Scrap-Room...

Very happy as Photobox gave me very speedy service and the photos I sent off for yesterday afternoon arrived at lunchtime today with the postman. That meant that I could continue the guestbook album which I started on yesterday. Yay! No way will it even be finished today, but at least I can make a good start :)

Guess what else has arrived with me? The latest Scrap-Room kit. Ad it's a good one! Averaged through all the four part kits, I would say this is my favourite for a while. This is what I got:

...and the embellishment add-on:

...and finally the stamp add-on:

Busy...

Busy, busy making stuff today. But fun too!! :) I have been making two cards with stuff from the Lilypad. I can show you them on Friday when the kits are released by the designers.

Then I started this cool guestbook project by Shimelle...

I'm going to do a double spread with info and pics for each time family came to visit/stay from Sweden. Will be a nice thing to have when it's completed. :) I'm going to add some of the visits (that's already taken place) and then half-pre-make the pages for future visits so it's easy just to fill in details and add photos. I have lots and lots of cutting to do and I'm hoping the emergency photos I sent off for from Photobox this afternoon might be here tomorrow...

What Do You Do...

...when you make something you're not sure you like? The concept was there. A cool and funky homemade 3D frame - for Shimelle's class. Hers was house-shaped and had flowers. That wasn't me. For some reason I really struggle to work with flowers. So I made mine rectangle shaped...

But I still can't get along with it even though I like the colours I picked, and I like the concept of the frame. It works at an eye level...but anything else and I don't know if I like it (something with the 3D effect). It's in the bookshelf in our living room at the moment. When I walk past, I think "mmm maybe it's not so bad after all". But then I sit down in the sofa (ie see it from a lower angle) and I instantly am not sure again LOL!

I'm actually working on something at the moment which I'm not sure I like either. Not the best start of the week, eh? LOL!

Monday Scrapping...

I liked the photo technique that I used on the layout yesterday so much that I had to give it another go using another colour and another digital paper. The result turned out like this:

Supplies: Papers, die-cuts and stickers by SEI, American Crafts Thickers alphabets, digital paper by Rhonna Farrer, plus some ribbon and ric rac.

I have had a question on my blog (by Justine) and the same question left in a gallery comment at a forum (by Tammy): you were both asking what I use to print my digital images onto, to use on hybrid cards etc. I use very smooth white cardstock. Though you have to be careful with this as some paper and cardstock soak up a lot of ink and the image becomes a bit "fuzzy" looking. So the best thing I can suggest, is to try out a few different types. Also I know some people who swear by printing onto matte photopaper for hybrid stuff. Just give it a try and see what you like best :)

Rhonda - yes the duck pictures you asked about are indeed from IKEA :)

Scrap Time...

Been busy playing with PSE, doing this cool photo technique and then of course had to scrap the photo too :)

Supplies: Making Memories papers and 3D flowers, American Crafts Thickers alphabets and Doodlebug jewels. Digital paper by Rhonna Farrer.

A while back I bought this fun magazine (well, they call it a "book" but to me it's a "magazine") by Jessica Sprague called "Computer Tricks For Scrapbookers Vol 2" and I decided to follow one of the tutorials. You kinda incorporate journaling next to your photo and then you merge that with a digital paper to create this cool effect:

So the photo goes see-through and you see the paper colour and pattern through it. Pretty funky I think :)

Quick Update...

Only a quick update today as it's been a busy day here (we've been playing the new Mario Kart game for Nintendo Wii all day - yay LOL!). Got another hybrid card to show you using some cool stuff from the Lilypad:

Firstly I have used the cloud background paper by Rachel Young from the "Good Day Sunshine" kit. Then some cool birdies and other stuff by Jacque Larsen and a funky doodled frame by Jenna Desai. I have outlined most of the element by pen and added a few of my own doodles & coloured in bits of the frame etc. Oh and some jewels just had to go onto the flower of course :)

Doodle card...

I hope you're all having a great Friday :) I've been busy playing with paper and glue. Making this funky 3D photo-frame-thingy at the moment. But it's not ready yet so I'll have to add that to my blog another day.

Made this card using Kate Hadfield's "Baby Girl Doodles":

The baby doodle packs she's made are just sooo cute. There's also a boy version and a more neutral one too - just in case you're making the card before the baby is born and you have no idea whether it's a boy or a girl :)

Yesterday I spent making this photobook for my dad - it's a birthday present for next week:

I love making photo books using my Bind-It-All. I cut covers from chipboard. Cover them with cardstock (inside and out) and add a title. Then I use double-sided-tape to put the photos back to back (this takes a looooong time if you have many photos though - this book took me nearly all day LOL!) and then bind it all together. The title of this photo book is "Julen 2007" which means "Christmas 2007".

Moving Layouts...

I don't know about you, but even though I took some photos when we last moved, it never entered my head to have moving photos printed. I guess it's because of all the bags and boxes. Very cluttered photos which both wouldn't look so nice in your album and would be hard to get to stand out on your layout (because of the "busy" photos").

Anyway, one of the prompt from the "home" class that I'm taking was about scrapping the "Last time..." of something. Last time when you had visitors, last time you moved etc. I decided to go with the "moving" theme. I printed my photos smaller than normal (to make them less "busy" and hard to scrap with")...two from the old place and two from the new. This is the result:

Supplies: Scenic Route and Making Memories papers, American Crafts Thickers alphabets, Jenny Bowling journaling label and digital Chipboard Buttons by Kate Hadfield.

Thanks so much for all the sweet comments that were left for me yesterday. They really made me smile and cheered me up a bit. *thank you* :)

A Better Day Tomorrow...

...that's what I'm hoping it will be. Sometimes things just get to you. People say things which make you upset. You shouldn't let it get to you - but it does. It's one of those days. So I'm sad. And upset. But I'll be ok. Hopefully it's a better a day tomorrow.

Supplies: Making Memories papers, clip and 3D flowers, American Crafts Thickers alphabets, Jenny Bowlin ticket stub and journaling block plus some Love Elsie stamps.

Rhonda - Sorry to hear about your mum. Thank you for your sweet comment. I can't believe that I have inspired someone to start scrapbooking and being creative again. That sounds so special and thank you for writing that. It made me smile :) .

"Walk In The Park" - Layout Class

Please feel free to use these instructions to make your own layout. You are free to link to this page from any forum etc if you wish. Please do NOT copy this information and/or photos to use for your own classes/forums/webpages without permission.

Supplies needed:
Love Elsie – Toby – “Culture”
Love Elsie – Toby – “Thoughts”
Love Elsie – Toby – “Carry On”
Love Elsie – Toby – Big ribbon pack
Love Elsie – Toby – Tiny ribbon pack
Love Elsie – Toby – alphabet cardstock stickers
October Afternoon – Candid Camera stampset
American Crafts – Thickers – Latte, Foam, Black
American Crafts – Thickers – Daiquiri, Foam, Black
American Crafts – Playhouse Chipboard Stars

Also needed:
Glue (I use Herma removable)
Black Slick Writer
Charcoal Chalk Inkpad (optional)
Stapler
Scalloped scissors (optional)
Scrap piece of white cardstock

Start by cutting your patterned paper (“Culture”) to size. I scrap in true A4 size, so I cut mine to 29,7x21 centimetres (cm). Please feel free to adapt to another layout size if you prefer. We will be using the striped side of the paper for the base of the layout.

Also pick your photo. I’m using a standard 15x10 cm (6x4) photo in a landscape format. If you’re working on a bigger sized layout (say 12x12) then a larger photo would also work great.

Get your patterned papers and cut the following:
• 18x7,5 cm piece from “Culture”
• 11x9,5 cm piece from “Thoughts”
• 12x3 cm piece from “Carry On”

Use the scalloped scissors on one of the long sides of your “carry On” piece. Then use the chalk inkpad on the edges of all pieces. Attach onto layout as shown in photo below (the long strip of “Culture” starts 1,5 cm in from the left side of my layout). Attach your photo in place.

Pick two ribbons that you like. I picked the “go, see, explore” from the big ribbon set and a brown ribbon from the tiny ribbon set. My green ribbon is 27 cm long and the brown 25 cm. I have cut them at an angle on the right edge. Attach along the bottom of your layout and staple in place. Use the Thickers and Toby chipboard stickers to make up a title of your choice. I like to outline my stickers with a black Slick Writer so they stand out better.

Finally add some chipboard stars. I picked three lime green ones. Pick a suitable stamp from the set, stamp onto your piece of scrap white cardstock, fill in with details, edge with chalk ink and attach along the left side of the photo.

I hope you enjoyed my class! Wishing you lots of fun creating your own version!

Lilypad Goodies...

I have been using some Lilypad goodies this morning while waiting for my next class prompt to turn up. First a very quick tractor card:

I used the Vehicle Doodles pack by Kate Hadfield. The tractor is originally green in the download pack, but I needed a red one so I had to re-colour it. Worked great :)

Then I played with some of the new April Collab kit. I had this idea the other day to make matchboxes a bit more pretty, so I grabbed some this morning and had a go. This is the result:

The super cute owls are from Natalie Braxton's "Hoo Do You Love?" and the backgrounds are papers from Amy Wolff's "Barely There". Borders are hand doodled.

Another Scraproom Layout...

Yay another reason to use the funky "Zoe" collection by Elsie. And another layout from the on-line class that I'm taking. The title was a suggestion in today's prompt, to start "In My Home There Is A Room..." and then to fill in the rest in your journaling. I really liked this idea (and it gave me a reason to use lots of Thickers!) so I went for it:

Supplies: Love Elsie "Zoe" papers, cardstock stickers and epoxy stickers, American Crafts Thickers of different fonts, doodlebug jewels plus black & white pens.

Jennifer - you asked about the dimensions of the "My Home Town" minibook. I have just measured and it's 8,5 cm by 9,5 cm. :)

Can't wait to see what tomorrow's prompt has in store for us. So far I'm totally loving this class :)