Happy New Year!

Wishing you all a very...

"Goin' Nuts" Layout Class...

I designed this class as part of my on-line class work for A Trip Down Memory Lane. 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:
Making Memories – Noteworthy – Delaney Floral
Making Memories – Noteworthy – Delaney Ledger Circle
Making Memories – Noteworthy – Delaney Die Cut Scallop
Making Memories – Noteworthy - Adhesive Glitter Clears #30886
Making Memories – Noteworthy – Diecuts Glitter Box #30287
American Crafts – Thickers – Shoe Box, Pink Glitter #42383
American Crafts – Thickers – Gift Box, Black #42759
Doodlebug sugar coated brads (4 to match your flower diecuts)

Also needed:
Scraps of white cardstock
Glue (I use Herma removable)
Black journaling pen (Zig Millennium)
Charcoal Chalk Inkpad (optional)

Start by cutting your “Floral” paper to size. We will be using the blue side with dots of this as the base for the layout. 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.

Pick your photo. I’m using two landscape photos at 10x15 cm. I have trimmed them a little at the top and the bottom so they measure about 8,5 cm tall.

Cut a corner from the scalloped paper (10x10 cm) and two strips from the “Ledger Circle” paper, rip one of the long edges of each piece and then ink the edges.

Attach your paper pieces to your background using the photo below for placement. My bottom strip starts about 2 cm from the bottom edge of the layout and my top strip starts about 5 cm from the top of the layout.

Glue your photos in place and cut off any bits that hang over the edge of your layout.

Cut two narrow strips from the “Ledger Circle” paper, rip one of the long edges on each, ink the edges and attach to the layout with the orange side up.

Use your packs of Thickers to make up your title. I chose to place part of my title on top of my photos.

Create a little flower arrangement partially overlapping the right top corner of the right photo. Use the diecuts and the glitter clears plus some Doodlebug brads for this.

Finally add a square journaling diecut from the pack to the top left corner, journal onto strips of white cardstock, ink the edges and glue in place.

Your finished layout should now look something like this:

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

Christmas Lights...

A very simple page spread from my Christmas journal today. Documenting my love for Christmas and my love for Christmas lights. I have loved it ever since I was little. I remember all outside trees had white lights in Sweden. But there was one garden in the neighbour hood where they had coloured lights in their outside tree. Wow! I L-O-V-E-D them. And I insisted on going to see them with my parents every time we went for a walk. I would just stand there and be totally amazed with a big smile on my face. Little has changed... :)

Christmas Pages...

This is another spread from my Christmas journal. I wanted to document the decorating of the tree and the differences I find between England and Sweden. I have been grown up with the tradition of taking in and decorating the tree on the 23rd of December. Christmas is celebrated on the 24th. You do see inside Christmas trees up before this in Sweden, but I also do think that the 23rd is probably the most common day to do your tree on.

In England not so. Here (I get the feeling?) it's a lot more "random" when you do it. I love Christmas so we do it early...last week in Nov/first in Dec. That seems to be about as early as you decorate the tree here in the UK. As you go for a walk, lots and lots of trees are up in houses by mid December. So different from Sweden and so interesting. I love it as we always get to decorate the tree twice (in different countries!) :)

Eating Crab...

Just wanted to come and share another layout from the Cathy Zielske class. (And yes my layout is straight even if the dots make it look like it's not...just a bad photo of it, sorry!)

And yes I did indeed make a layout of a crab. And it's not the first time either! I love crab, it's something I have been used to eating since I was little and the love for it definitely comes from mum. So I wanted to scrap it...and use the great photo of it on the plate LOL! Sorry if you're not a crab person ;)

Christmas Fun...

I hope you all had a great Christmas :)

Just sharing a little fun Christmas decoration that I made using a digital kit. You could of course make it however long you like...

[Supplies: "Woody Bits" CD Muckosky (the Lilypad)]

...and another page spread from my Christmas journal:

Merry Christmas!

Just wanted to pop in and wish you all a very MERRY CHRISTMAS! :)

Whether you celebrate on the 24th (like me & my family) or on the 25th, I hope you have a very special day filled with lots of Christmas magic :)

[Supplies: Sketchbook Alpha - Kate Hadfield, Sweater Weather - Kate Hadfield, 'Tis The Season - Kate Hadfield, Funky Forest - Amy Wolff (all above from the Lilypad), DJB Smarty Pants - Darcy Baldwin (SSD)]

"A Day Out" Layout Class...

This class was designed as part of my class work for A Trip Down Memory Lane. 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:
Making Memories – Noteworthy – Hillary Lace Flower
Making Memories – Noteworthy – Audrey Scallop Ledger
Making Memories – Noteworthy – Artisan Edge Blue
Making Memories – Noteworthy - Hillary Green Floral
Making Memories – Noteworthy – Diecuts Glitter Box #29723
American Crafts – Thickers – Platforms, Black #42813
American Crafts – Thickers – Sprinkles, Aqua #42802
Maya Road – Trees Singleton Stamp – SMP855
Doodlebug sugar coated brads (3 to match your flower diecuts)
Ribbon (I used one by Maya Road)

Also needed:
Glue (I use Herma removable)
Black journaling pen (Zig Millennium)
Staz’On black inkpad
Charcoal Chalk Inkpad (optional)
“Office” date stamp and green ink (optional)

Start by cutting your “Hillary Green Floral” paper to size. We will be using the green side of this as the base for the layout. 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.

Pick your photo. I’m using one portrait photo at 10x15 cm.

Cut a piece of the Artisan paper, roughly 15x25 cm. Ink the edges.

Attach the Artisan paper to the bottom left corner. Cut two strips of paper. One from the “Hillary Green Floral”, 2 cm wide, and one from the Audrey Scallop paper, 1 cm wide.

Attach the Hillary Green paper strip on the left side of the layout. Cut a piece from the Hillary Lace paper measuring 16x5,5 cm and attach this 2,5 cm from the bottom of the layout and against your Hillary Green strip of paper. Next attach your photo – again against the Hillary Green strip and 6 cm from the bottom of the layout. Now take the Audrey Scallop strip of paper and attach along side the Hillary Green strip (so it overlaps your photo).

Pick a journaling box that you like from the die-cuts pack and glue in place. Use the Maya Road tree stamp to overlap this.

Choose a label, write or stamp your date on this, thread the ribbon through and put in place.

Add some die-cut flowers and write your journaling.

Make up your title using some die-cuts and two different kinds of American Crafts Thickers.

Finish off by adding some brads to the centres of your flowers – and you’re done!

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

Cathy's Class...

I'm still really enjoying Cathy Zielske's Big Picture Scrapbooking class. I can't believe it's only a few days left now. It ends on Christmas Day. After 12 weeks of great layouts, handouts, slide shows and videos it's going to leave a little empty hole. Though I suppose I won't notice it for a little while...

With all the Christmas stuff and the Christmas journal on top of that I have kinda accepted and made the decision to save the last few assignments until January. No point in stressing through the classes just for the sake of it. I found the decision a little hard to make but once it was mad it felt very right. So you'll definitely see me working on this class for a few weeks after Christmas too.

This layout was done for one of the assignments (and yes it's straight - it's just me who can't take a photo straight LOL!) but I don't know...I'm just not 100% super keen on it. Maybe it will grow on me :)

Christmas Journal...

Ooops I have kinda neglected taking photos of my Christmas journal and posting here. I'm still doing pretty good on keeping up with it but certain days it's a little more of a struggle than others to squeeze in some time to sit down and get an entry done :)

The photo (top of left page) shows a Swedish Christmas tradition of lighting candles each of the four Sunday's before Christmas. On the first Sunday (1st of advent) you light candle no 1. On the second Sunday you light candle number 1 and 2...and so on. You would normally have homemade gingerbread cookies and drink glögg (a hot drink similar to mulled wine) with blanched almonds and raisins in your cup. It's so cosy and really the "taste of Christmas" to me :)

Our Card Making Day...

A few weekends ago we made our Christmas cards for this year. I think they should all have safely arrived now so I don't mind posting photos of the day. Basically each year I make what I call our "Christmas card prototype". It's just a card to test out the ideas and have as a guideline for making the rest. Then it's kind of a factory line assembly thing going on. This is what it looked like in the middle of doing them...

I love my Cuttlebug and was very pleased that a) I remembered to use it and b) I found a way to use it both on the card and the envelope. :) It's kinda become a yearly tradition now that I make the card prototype and then we sit down together and make all the cards. Once I go through all the little stages with Ross, and show him how to do all the different techniques, he's really great at them and we have a really cosy time making cards while listening to Christmas music :)

Yet Another Card...

I'm still in the mood for making Christmas cards LOL! There have been some great Christmas kits uploaded at Sweet Shoppe Designs over the last few weeks and they are just impossible to resist. As one of my CT assignments, I was playing with a kit by Melissa Bennett called "Dear Santa" and came up with this reindeer card:

[Supplies: "Dear Santa" by Melissa Bennett (SSD)]

Super Cute Kit...

Today I have been having fun making Christmas cards and playing with this super cute Christmas/winter kit which I got by Mindy Terasawa (from Designer Digitals):

I really can't get enough of her fantastic cute little critters. And then Christmas on top of that. Just perfect for me :)

Here are two of the Christmas cards that I made using the kit by Mindy:

Christmas...

Sorry for no update yesterday. I had totally planned to do one. But I'm not sure what was wrong with me. I just felt like I had been emptied of energy and I could hardly even sit up on a chair. Mega exhausted! Seriously thought I was coming down with something. Head hurting like mad too. Today I feel better though. Head is a little "numb" and I still don't feel like I have all my energy back. So I'm going to try and take it a little easy today...or as easy as you can when it's Christmas next week LOL!

Anyway, I'm off to get some things done and I'm leaving you with some Christmassy photos...

And The Winner Is...

And the winner of the $5 giftvoucher to Libby Weifenbach's store is...

_______________________

Randi said...I'd love to get a Cricut Expressions! I have the baby bug, but I find myself needing to make bigger things! :)
12/12/2008 5:26 PM
_______________________

Congratulations Randi! :) Please leave your e-mail address in the comments section and I will contact you asap with the details :)

I got a little behind on my Christmas journal this weekend as I did no scrapping at all. So I better get off the computer and work on that. In the meantime, here's a photo of the next spread of pages from the journal:

Loving The iPod Touch...

OMG I'm sooooo in love with my iPod Touch. Best "gadget" I have had in ages. But the "applications" shop in iTunes is almost too addictive...so many fun things to download and many of them free. It's easy to lose hours just browsing through the lists LOL!

Here's another hybrid Christmas card that I made this week playing with a super cute penguin kit from Sweet Shoppe Designs:

[Supplies: Jolly All The Way - Christy Lyle (SSD)]

Oh and I almost forgot: it's still time to enter the giveaway for a chance to win a $5 gift voucher to Libby Weifenbach's shop at SSD. Look here for details if you're interested :)

Christmas Cards...

First of all there's a blog giveaway going on, if you didn't see it yesterday you can check it out ---> here :)

Today it's Lucia in Sweden...such a cosy tradition, I'm kinda sad I'm missing it. Oh well.

[Supplies: Holly Days - Penny Springmann (SSD)]

Got this Christmas card to share with you today. It's a hybrid card that I made earlier in the week as part of my Sweet Shoppe CT work.

Blog GIVEAWAY...

Exciting...!

I have a $5 gift voucher to Libby Weifenbach's store at Sweet Shoppe Designs to give away to one lucky blog reader. She has some great digital kits and some amazing alphabet packs to choose from :)

To be in with a chance of winning, please leave a comment telling me what scrapping item you'd like most of all for Christmas (yes you can only pick one LOL!). Don't forget to make sure that there is some way of me contacting you if you are the lucky one :)

Comments need to be left before 08:00 UK time on Monday morning the 15th of December 2008.

Good luck! :)

Cards...

If you remember a few days back I said that that I'm sort of following Shimelle's Christmas journal prompts and sort of not. I follow them when it suits the things that I want to document and I don't follow them when I have other traditions etc that I want to feature in my journal. So the 3rd prompt was supposed to be about "cards" and I decided not to do it. Why? For the simple reason that we made our Christmas cards a little later than usual and...well, it was just as simple as: they were not made by the 3rd :)

Instead I swapped it to day 6 as we sat and made our cards on Saturday. And yes I say "we" as I got Ross to agree to make them with me as long as I had made a "card prototype" and showed him what to do. It's something that we have done for 2-3 years now and it's so cosy. Christmas music playing and making cards together. :)

Thanks to those of you who commented on the iPod Touch blogging yesterday and told me about your fave applications etc. I sat for a few hours last night searching for applications and downloading lots of stuff. So much fun!! :)

And before I go, Abi - you left a comment saying you'd just got a Cuttlebug (yay! Loooove mine :)) and wondered if I'd got any Nestabilities to go with mine. The answer is no - I'm trying to stay away from looking at too many other companies' dies at the moment because I just don't want to be tempted LOL! I'm sure I will look into it in the future sometime but at the moment I'm just happy playing with my embossing folders. :) If there are any "must haves" though, please do let me know ;)

*** Please come back tomorrow for a blog giveaway to one lucky reader... ***

Fun, Fun, Fun...

Sorry for not updating yesterday. I was a little bit busy playing with my new iPod Touch which arrived yesterday afternoon. I have just discovered a whole new world - all the applications on iTunes. Wow! I can't believe how many different ones there are. If you have an iPod Touch or iPhone - please let me know which applications are your faves :) It feels a little overwhelming to me at the moment LOL!

Anyway back to my Christmas journal and the next spread of pages...

On the left side I wanted to document the Swedish tradition of having Glögg (similar to Mulled Wine and it is available in IKEA for anyone outside Sweden) and gingerbread cookies. A very cosy tradition which definitely screams (and tastes!) Christmas to me.

On the right side I have tucked a photo into an envelope of our new advent calendar which I made last month...and there's also a bit of journaling on the back of the envelope about this which you'll see next time I take some photos of the journal. :)

The Lights...

This is the back side of my "lights" entry in my Christmas journal. I had a request from Christine to hear the story so I will do my best to type it up here though it's long and I doubt I can remember all the steps... LOL!

Right, we put the Christmas tree up on a Saturday afternoon. We didn't bother testing the lights first because we knew that there was one or two lamps broken and we thought we could easily get replacements. So lights go in the tree together with baubles, tinsel etc. We turn it on. A quarter of the lights are not on. Not good. We check the time and realise we might just make the local garden centre before it shuts. We scribble down the voltage/watt for the bulbs and rush off. We find some in the right strength and buy two packs. Off home again. They do not fit! Just a tiny bit too small.

We move some around to establish if indeed all the non-lit ones are faulty or if it's just a chain reaction from one or two being broken. Result? Suddenly we have HALF the lights not working. *sigh* Too late to do something.

On Sunday we go out and return the lights. Go to another shop and buy new replacement lights. Come home. These do not fit either! Back out into the city centre this time...resigned to the fact that we have to buy a new set of lights instead. Can't find anything suitable. Too few lights. Or coloured. Or something else wrong. So many people about. So much stress. So many shops. Nothing. Give up. Go to an out of town retail park and finally find a set of white lights with about the right amount for our tree. Go home. Untangle the old lights while baubles and tinsel flies everywhere. Add the new lights and straighten tinsel and baubles into place. Turn on the new lights. Good. But doesn't it look a little dark I say....?

We wait until it's totally dark outside. The tree is dark...too dark. It looks depressing. We can't have it like that. So we get the volt/watt figures off the back of the box and spend Sunday evening searching the internet for some brighter ones. It seems impossible. Surely people can't want lights that makes the tree look black? We're starting to get a little disheartened about it.

After work on Monday we eat quickly and then try to make some shops before they shut. Three. Nothing. Fourth one and we find a good set. But it has too few lights. So we decide to buy an extension cable that splits into two and two sets of lights. Come home. Untangle the "dark lights" from the tree (baubles and tinsel flies off again no matter how careful we are). Test both sets BEFORE we add them to the tree. One is faulty! *sigh* We still decide to add the set that works to the tree just to see that we like it. Another arrangement of the tinsel and baubles. Lights look good. Finally!

Tuesday comes and after work we again have to eat quickly to make the shops. We take back the "dark lights" and get a replacement for the faulty set and go home. Test them. They work. Add them to the tree. It looks good - just how we wanted it :)

So it only took us four days to get the lights sorted...four days of rushing about everywhere, having to through food into ourselves quickly just to make the shops, never sitting down and re-doing the tree I don't know how many times LOL!