Roundup

Just a quick roundup of a few things today...

Cards for Boys
...are not soooo difficult, I have found lately:

that's a special birthday, that is

To get the pennants - which are stickers from Echo Park - to stand up, I first stuck them onto some paper, just up to the point where I wanted to curl them away from the card, and then adhered them by the remaining sticky part.

just like they're fluttering in the breeze

And I employed the old paper-weaving technique again for a friend's birthday card. A friend who plays the bass in a band. A hippy living, reggae loving friend.

that's another quite special birthday

Paper Piecing
Just a quick share of something I worked on for a certain wedding anniversary last year:

 

Stuff Going On
Don't forget the Gauche Alchemy DT Call, running till the end of the month. And don't forget the March Madness at Scrapbook Challenges - we're taking bets now, and the competition starts tomorrow! You gotta be in it to win it!


Intelligent Product Packaging
I really appreciate it when a manufacturer thinks about their packaging. Check out this freebie I got from Revlie's class:

ooh, canvas flowers!

And then you look closely, and see that they've also given you a nice thick acetate sheet with beautiful white doily patterns on:

I like acetate with patterns on. A lot.

Has anyone else come across really intelligent packaging of scrapbooking products? I want to hear about them! And why do you like them? Because they're green? Because you can reuse them? Do share!

Scrapbook Challenges: March Madness

...and it really is. Madness. They're pitting us DT against each other in a knockout competition where forum members can win big if they predict the right winners. It's dog eat dog, each woman for herself... and other fighting terminology that's suitably kick-ass for the level of this contest.

Get on over to the forum to find out what exactly it's all about, and how you can win big!

The Handmade Wedding

You've all seen by now all the handmade things the wedding brought along - now it's time to scrap about it all!

The sketch this week at Scrapbook Challenges made me so happy about sketches and scrapbooking. It was one of those moments when you've been waiting to scrap a certain idea or certain photos for a long time, and one day the answer just pops up.

The sketch looks like this:

And after I put my page together it looked like this:

Scrapbook Challenges sketch #285

What I used for this page: Doodlebug Love Potion patterned paper, Echo Park Style Essentials Upscale Black Quatrefoil and Grey Dots & Stripes patterned paper, Echo Park Happy Days patterned papers & alpha stickers, Rayher wooden hearts and bobbins, Toga chipboard alphas.

Quite to my surprise, I'm building up our wedding album pretty quickly. And it's looking pretty sweet.

Get over to Scrapbook Challenges for this sketch, and all of the March Madness going on this month. As ever, you could win something for your participation!

The Official Duties of a Bridesmaid

I mentioned here that I certainly asked a lot of my bridesmaids. But even though they had a lot of official duties on the day, I think they enjoyed getting ready with me in the morning. I enjoyed it too, at least until the timing got a little tight.

This double-page layout, made from the sketch below, shows snapshots of us doing our hair and make up on that special day.

Scrapbook Challenges sketch #284

Here's the sketch, up this week on Scrapbook Challenges:

The single pages:

Elements used: Echo Park's Happy Days, Crate's Emma's Shoppe and Cosmo Cricket's Early Bird

Elements used: Prima flowers, Gauche Alchemy stamps

Just want to say thank you again to the polka dot princesses who were so amazing on the day!

A Day to be Proud

Such a busy month for layouts! - It's a good thing I have so many photos to scrap these days.

Scrapbook Challenges has another sketch up on the forum - this time, there's a bit of choice, with different photo formats and different size pages. It certainly makes for a good challenge!

I chose this sketch:

why was I scared of this sketch?

...which is actually squashed up a bit in order to make an A4-sized layout - something I normally like doing, but just to be difficult I stretched it out again to fit the regular 12x12.

My layout, I confess, came together very quickly. The reason? I was scared.

Scrapbook Challenges sketch #283b

Why on earth was I scared? Well... I talked (boasted?) here about how my layouts hardly reflect the sketches I take inspiration from these days. BOOM! That was the sound of me falling back to earth. I am trying to keep a 'togetherness' in my wedding photos - for example, I've used a certain Tim Holtz Bitty Grunge circle stamp somewhere on each page (even here, although you can't see it) - and in that framework I just couldn't see any room for manoeuvrability with this sketch. I didn't want to experiment and mess up the continuity of my wedding album. Perhaps I didn't want to distort the sketch too much because I wasn't feeling confident that day. Mainly I just didn't want a dud page in my collection. So I stuck to the sketch like glue and the result is a verrrrrrrrrry clean layout - almost boring, I find.

The colours work, and I changed the matting paper to a frame, but otherwise it's not much different. I get that the challenge isn't to take a sketch and interpret it to oblivion, but I guess judging by my recent interpretations I was expecting a bit more from myself.

At the end of the day, I am happy with it as a page in my wedding album, and since that was my primary objective, I can say I've succeeded! Perhaps a break from wedding photos is in order?

I'm in the Mood for Love

About a year ago, we started trying to decide on a song for our first dance. We didn’t necessarily want a first dance, but as we’d been taking swing dancing lessons (Lindy Hop, to be exact), we admitted that we were certainly going to dance, and that one of the dances would naturally have to be the first one. So we threw ourselves full swing (hehe) into the search.

Now, between us we have a lot of music. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot. Not just in sheer volume, but also in the range of eras, genres, levels of fame and success, and sources and styles. Choosing from that seemed an impossible task. In total we were searching for 5 songs – 1 for our first dance, 3 for the town hall ceremony (entrance, signing and exit), and 1 for our own personal ceremony after dinner. The song for the first dance we thought we’d decided on by the time May came around (the others were finally settled on during the week before the wedding…how that stressed me out I can’t tell you). And it is the little story behind this song that helped me make my valentine’s card this year.

My parents came to visit at the end of May and, naturally, we told them about the song. We talked a bit about the artists and how we’d come to know them, and then practised our dance a little.

Cut to the moment on our wedding day after our first dance, when we were called aside by my parents and given a very special gift: the album on which the song appeared, on original, unplayed vinyl – signed by the surviving female singer. This surprise was an even bigger one than seeing my parents jiving – Where? How? When? – of course, we were amazed.

They told us that at a vintage fair they’d gone to in July, Keely Smith had been there signing autographs. She was old, and frail following an illness, but she was there and full of the edge she showed when she performed on stage with Louis Prima. My parents headed for a record stall, looking for one thing only – and found it. She was happy to sign, apparently punching my dad on the arm for giving her a pen that didn’t quite work, and happy to hear that some ‘young people’ were still interested in her music. My parents went home triumphant and full of glee.

Since all the DT at Scrapbook Challenges have been challenged to incorporate a love song into their projects this month, I’ve made an easy decision and gone for this one.

first card I've been happy with in a loooong time!

Don't forget, if you haven't already, get on over to SC, sign up, and get your share of the scrappy love!

Interpretation: The Debate Continues

Following on from my previous post on the Inspiration Debate, I’m going to talk a little bit today about Interpretation, since it’s loosely related to those aforementioned copyright laws and the difficulties involved with intellectual property rights, the internet and so on.

It is very often claimed that any given creation is not a copy of another, it’s an interpretation, which is pretty much like saying ‘it’s OK, I’ve put my own spin on it’. This is OK, until the claims start to be made over creations that are  in fact copies, or uncredited, or both. The problem is that all of this is subjective. You might think something is a rip off of something else, but I might not be able to see it. I absolutely don’t have any answers to this one. Again, it’s a situation that is developing every day, and we are just trying to keep up with the fast-paced changing world of instant online connectivity.

So to completely go the other way and run from the debate, I’ve kind of done the opposite with the layout below. It’s made from a sketch, but it is very loosely based on the sketch. For many reasons (two of them being printer related, causing me to feel like this) I switched things up and did my own thing.

In the past, before I was scrapbooking regularly, I did sometimes look at a layout that was supposedly based on a sketch and wonder how the artist got from sketch to layout, as I couldn’t see any resemblance. Now that I’ve been more active in scrapbooking circles, I see the interpretation process a lot more clearly. And frankly, these days I’m disappointed if a layout is too closely, too precisely based on a sketch – what I find inspiring, like the majority of us, I’m sure, is seeing different people’s different interpretations of a sketch (yep, I used 'different' twice there intentionally). More than that, I find it fascinating that a small group of people like a design team can come up with different layouts for a sketch and no two are even remotely alike.

This is the main reason I love sketches so much these days. Not so much because it takes out of my schedule that extra step of thinking up a design, saving me time; more because the process of getting from sketch to layout is an art in itself.

Look at what I’ve done with Scrapbook Challenges’ sketch this week:

hi, my name's Cheryl and I can't multi-photo scrap

Mine doesn’t look like that. It looks like this:

Scrapbook Challenges sketch #281

I turned the sketch 90 degrees, moved the title position so it diagonally mirrored the original, opted to go for one photo chopped up instead of multiple photos, tried to play around with the title in place of the journalling, and used wavy (literally!) lines instead of straight, moving them from the outside in.

trying to be too clever?

For the title I tried to do something a bit different. (In case you can’t see, there are Heidi Swapp Ghost Alphas on there that spell out ‘Dubrovnik’). It’s (supposed to be) a multi-way title, so you can read it as ‘I love Dubrovnik’, as ‘in Dubrovnik’, as ‘in love’, or as ‘in love in Dubrovnik’. I think I’ll try this again in the future as I didn’t quite get the positioning right on this one (the ‘in’ needed to be closer to the ‘love’, for example, and perhaps I needed to use smaller letters for the ‘Dubrovnik’).

What are your thoughts on interpretation? How far do you like to take a sketch?

If you want to see what the other DT members did, and submit your own layout for a chance to win a prize, visit Scrapbook Challenges. This month, because we feel like sharing the love, there are also extra prize-winning opportunities for new members, so come over and sign up!

Wow! Your Parents Really...

When I mentioned here that I didn’t have any resolutions this year as such, but that I did want to scrap more, a very specific part of this wish was to scrap our wedding photos. I can tell you that there won’t be any disappointment or self-flagellation on this front if January is anything to go by – here’s another layout, inspired by this week’s sketch from Scrapbook Challenges. This one’s about my mum and dad at the wedding, and has a frivolous side to it, whilst still remaining stylish and in theme with the rest of the wedding album.

At some point in the build-up to the wedding, my parents were sort of/almost dictating which songs we should have in our playlist. You would think I would have either freaked out, or cottoned on. But evidently I was too distracted. So when the first of their requested songs came on in the evening, and they picked up their feet and started jiving – yes, jiving – my jaw hit the ground like Sebastien the Crab’s in Disney’s The Little Mermaid. When we finally got them off the dance floor they admitted they’d been having secret lessons in the build-up to the wedding. In fact, they went to such lengths to hide the lessons from my brother, who lives at home right now, that they told him they were going out to marriage counselling!

They really got on board with the whole 50s-ish theme – and they loved it. AND they looked incredible. This fact was not missed by anyone – one of our friends said to me, in that voice that sounds surprised because it’s generally unexpected that such a possibility could exist, ‘Wow, your parents really have style!’… and so the title for this layout was born.

The sketch – yet another great one from Scrapbook Challenges:

this is one of THREE different takes on the sketch on offer this week

 And my interpretation:

Scrapbook Challenges sketch #280

Bobbing and Weaving, Ducking and Diving, Picking and Choosing

What feels like a really long time ago I made this tray – for me. There was a second tray, destined for the husband’s lap, which never got altered.

Until now.

Over at Scrapbook Challenges it was my turn this month to post a technique challenge – so, thought I, the perfect opportunity to finish this two-part tray project!

My technique? Paper weaving. I thought about repeating the sunburst effect on his tray, but since good old checkers are really his thing, the paper weaving idea fit much better:

he loves the black and white

It's not finished - I need to add his name, laminate it and varnish the frame, so I'll post a nice picture when I've done all that.

But I liked it so much I did some more on a birthday card for our friend:

the birthday boy's gonna so totally, like, flip over this

If you want to see in-progress pictures of me weaving paper, get onto the Scrapbook Challenges forum!

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In other news, the Gauche Alchemy mamas challenged me in December to make a video showing how to make a scrapbook layout with their mixed media products - for anyone who is stuck in mixed media canvas mode but wants to switch to layout mode and doesn't know where to start. Now, I want to add a little disclaimer here for the video quality: December was a tough month for me – it seems that I ate everything in my path, including all the hours in all the days, and I just couldn’t get to doing anything as properly as I wanted to. This project included. But to go with this GA blog post, here is the video nonetheless – and a promise that next month’s will be altogether more… together!

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Finally, my trusty assistant, DJ the Dog, helped me pick out two winners for the SC blog hop RAKs here on AndHandmadeToo:

Winners, PM me your addresses – there’s a long-awaited trip to the post office I have to make anyway, so I may as well send all the packages in one go!

Our Brilliant Stars

When we were planning our wedding, we knew from an early stage that more than mere observers, we wanted people to be involved in the wedding. So in our intricate detailing of how our day was going to pan out, we included a lot of people, and from those people, we asked for quite a lot of things.

I’m sure it’s fairly normal to ask family members to help out – all of my family decorated the venue for us on the day, my mum made all the cakes the day before, and his close family hosted welcome drinks for guests the night before – and when it comes to the bridesmaids and groomsmen, there are pre-set, etiquette-driven, certain particular tasks that fall into what you would call the ‘normal’, ‘standard’ or ‘to be expected’ category. But what we asked of our bridesmaids and groomsmen went beyond the norm – then again, our whole day did, too.

We assigned certain responsibilities to each of them, such as asking one of the boys in braces to be the music monitor; we got the polka dot princesses to manage the quiz during dinner by collecting and marking the answer sheets; they all ushered the tables into the ceremony room for our own personal ceremony after dinner; and they each invented and asked vows to the bride and groom to make sure we were going to look after each other. They did a lot more besides this – an awful lot. For that we are eternally grateful, and so touched by the distance they went for us.

It’s for this reason I wanted to make this layout a fairly uncomplicated page: to show off the simple fact that we are so thankful for these friends and what they shared with us on our wedding day; they really were superstars. The true meaning of friendship came out on that day and we will not forget the feeling of immense pride and joy at having these people present at our wedding.

It’s another Scrapbook Challenges sketch – up this week on the forum – in fact, I designed this one myself (except Brynn, SC Queen Bee, jazzed it up and made it look all snazzy like that):

it didn't look this good when I handed it in

The double-page version looks like this:

i tried smooshing it all onto one page, but it's better on two

And a rare double-pager from me looked like this:

Scrapbook Challenges sketch #279

Using only Bazzill cardstock and MME Quite Contrary patterned paper, a few snips of Happy Days paper, alphas and journaling cards, some Happy Days and For the Record stickers, AC Thickers and Bitty Grunge stamps from Tim Holtz to get the circles into the layout, I created a panorama of what I hope is love, gratitude, awe, respect and happiness.

they really were superstars!

Thanks, you lot, for helping to make our wedding day so awesome. We will not forget. x x x

Hold On Tight

Well I hope everyone enjoyed the SC Blog Hop - there were certainly a lot of you hopping around and leaving comments! More Scrapbook Challenges today - I have sketch #278 to share with you.

Participating in the weekly sketch challenges can earn you the title of Pick of the Week or even win you a prize. Most importantly, the sketch itself and the layouts made by the DT can go a long way to nudging you out of a creative rut or giving you the confidence to try something new.

If you've been hanging around here for a while, you'll remember my horror story about my wedding hair. I won't go over that again (if only to avoid the pain of recounting it) - at least not entirely. But now I've made a layout about it, it's kind of hard not to retell this aspect of the wedding day.

I think my hair and make-up girl fainted when she heard the driver of the caddy say 'since we're running late, we'll have to take the big roads' - big roads being the inner city ring, which dips up and down and in and out of tunnels, and is two, three and sometimes four lanes wide. She assured me the style would hold (what else could she say?) but I think it was the major disruption to traffic flow caused by the beer festival that saved my curls: after we got off the ring, every road we turned down was blocked, leading us onto progressively smaller and slower roads. Going slower meant less wind, and less wind meant precious moments more of preserving my carefully curled wedding hair.

The photographers followed behind us in the car and sneaked this shot of me and my mum holding on for dear life:

Scrapbook Challenges sketch #278

I used Echo Park's Happy Days collection primarily for this layout, but you'll find some Crate (Restoration), Lily Bee (This & That), Melody Ross and American Crafts in there as well.

love that AC ribbon

This is the sketch - create to your heart's content and upload to the SC gallery - but always remember to hold on to your hair!

Scrapbook Challenges Blog Hop

Welcome to the January Scrapbook Challenges Blog Hop! This January we're celebrating more than a new Design Team - there's also the small matter of having moved away from Ning to our very own site. This makes for easier interaction between us all, which means more inspiration for members!

If you're on the Hop, you should have joined me from the talented Anna's blog. Before moving on to the Blog Hop sketch, I'll tell you a little bit about me. I'm a recently married freelance editor living in the inspiring and interesting city of Brussels, Belgium with my dog and my husband. I'm a little bit punk, a little bit rock n roll, and I like to push myself to achieve new techniques and methods. I've been scrapbooking for about five years, but it's only really in the last couple of years that I would venture to call myself an artist. It can take a while to get started and then to keep up with the online community, but I've found that eventually you find your rhythm.

Anyway, onto the customary sketch. SC challenges you to make a layout based on this sketch and upload it to the Forum for the chance to win a prize:

Or the double-page version:

For my take on this sketch, I squished up the two pages into one:

capturing our arrival in London this Christmas

yes - that is a cell phone circuit board under the title!

And now the moment you've been waiting for: the prizes!

1. For completing a layout based on the above sketch and uploading it to the Hop On section in the Forum, you stand to win this pretty prize:

2. For leaving a comment on every blog of the DT, including the start and the end points, you could win this following amazing prize:

3. One new member who joins between 13 and 15 January will be selected at random to win the following sweet prize:

4. Finally, I have a RAK to offer to two lucky readers:

a whole bunch of interesting bits and pieces

To be selected at random for the RAK, you'll have to tell me in your comment on which date I got married. You'll find it here on my blog. Hint: it wasn't this year :-)

So, leave me a comment and then move on to the next blog on the Hop: the amazingly gifted new DT member Livy!

Scrapbook Challenges Sketch 273

It's been a long time since a Scrapbook Challenges sketch came about. The transition from Ning to SC's own site has been a priority though, and well worth it.

The sketches are back now, and number 273 has produced some brilliant interpretations from the DT. The sketch:

Scrapbook Challenges Sketch #273

My interpretation is... well, autumnal (just coming out of summer). That's the mood and season I was in when I made it - and that's how long it's been since an SC sketch! So nothing very Christmassy here, but inspiration nonetheless, I hope:

a rare photo of my dad

I used a rare photo of my dad from Father's Day this year - he's holding a chocolate orange (his favourite) cupcake that I made for him (and that I have to admit were even too sickly for me).  I used a lot of different brands on this page - Websters', Cosmo, Lily Bee, Basic Grey, Crate, Sass - because I wanted to get that brightness of colours going.

still loving those circles

Here, I punched a circle in the base layer and adhered some patterned paper to the other side to show through the window.

OK - over to you! Go to Scrapbook Challenges, sign up if you're not already a member, and find the inspiration!

Scrapbook Challenges - New Site Launch

Scrapbook Challenges newsflash: the new site is open and awaiting your registration! With a great new look, better interface (meaning waaay easier to use) and its ever-inspiring sketches and challenges, Scrapbook Challenges is reaching for the stars.

Go register now to become part of it, and join in with the opening celebrations for lots of chances to win goodies!

Front-Page News

Thanks to the skills of all our camera-toting wedding guests, I have a few really excellent pictures to work with while still (yes, still) waiting for the official photographs.

I've started our wedding album, people. Monumentous! And true to form, my organisation head wouldn't let me make any pages before I'd made the front page. Scrapbook Challenges' sketch 271 - out this week, so go and play along to be in with a chance of winning a prize - helped me pull this front page together.

The sketch:

#271

I used the photo of us taken by my bridesmaid that I mentioned before. What this photo doesn't show (thankfully) is the tourists milling around, also taking photos of us; the random man wheelbarrowing a Mannekin Pis statue across the courtyard; the Spanish lady asking for a photo of my bouquet; and the other random man in a kilt trying to get in a photo with some of the bridesmaids.

it pulls together elements we used in the decor with some Echo Park goodness and some American Crafts sparkle

It does show a moment of calm just after we were declared husband and wife. It shows a style which, despite the twists and turns and the doubts and criticisms of the journey, I'm forever glad we stuck to our guns over. And it shows - of course it shows - the thing that lies at the centre of it all. Love.

told you I was loving circles and stars at the moment

and how could I resist the polka dot heart?

Look out for more wedding album pages very soon!

Finding the Vintage

Looking back, it's fascinating to see how ideas for our wedding developed into realities. It all started with a shape:

Then the music we were listening to began to change. We started taking dance lessons. I finally sang to his guitar. I tried to do different things with my hair.

And after I braved the red lipstick, there was no turning back.

My interpretation of Scrapbook Challenges' final September sketch, here:

...took on a distinctly vintage theme, using some fabulous 4heures37 paper and a Crafty Secrets Creative Scraps embellishment. It features a picture of me looking distinctly vintage too. Gauche Alchemy brought me the heart stamp in the top left corner and the famous ouchless cardboard, and I'm sure you can spot the Cosmo Cricket Circa 1934 paper in there too.
 

In other news, my mail art video tutorial is now available. A little snapshot of our trip to Copenhagen. Coming soon: wedding stuff. I promise!