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?

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!

Our Own Little Christmas

Although Christmas is supposed to be a family time - and I'm not complaining about that - we've had scant opportunity to explore other options over the years. As we've both lived away from home since we were 18, each Christmas was taken up with visiting sets of parents - separately, at first, and then together (meaning we have to operate on an every-other-year basis).

In 2009, when we moved to Brussels, it was the Belgian parents' turn to have us. But because of one thing and another, in particular horrible snowstorms, we ended up waking up in our own house on Christmas Day. It was perfect - we had smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, a glass of Bucks Fizz, and a few presents in our dressing gowns before having to pack up into the car and trek down the empty highway to the family dinner. But we didn't have any real decorations - we'd just moved in in October - save the home-made wooden heart garland that my parents had lovingly put together.

toadstools can be christmassy too!

Last year being the English parents' turn, we didn't bother with decorations at all. But this year, we are here, newly married, at home, much more settled - and we have just put up our tree. It's there in the corner, twinkling and smelling all christmassy, and it embodies a lot about our own little Christmas - we've made the place all festive, we are now husband and wife, we will work all the way up until the 23rd and then have a cosy Christmas Eve, and wake up on Christmas Day in our own place, with our own tree, and we will be here to enjoy its beauty.

So, you wanna see it?

{heart cushion from Ikea}

Punky Scraps only have one challenge this month, because they know how busy we are all going to be with the last-minute shopping. It's a sketch - an incredible sketch:

# 36 from Nat. WOW!

I felt very christmassy when I was thinking about what to do with this sketch. And so, my first Christmas layout (yep - ever!):

I have s.e.i. and their Winter Song patterned paper to thank here

I used mostly ancient stuff - bling, alphas, epoxy stickers, sequin shapes felt flowers - but also some Emma's Shoppe accents and a lot of stamping and painting and misting.

sideways close-up

Here's to the next few weeks and a happy, exciting build-up to Christmas 2011 - our first as a married couple.

Why not play along? It's a beauty of a sketch. Head over to Punky Scraps for some more inspiration from the DT - it's not all christmassy, if that's not your thing!

Creatively Scrapping

I'm on a bit of a roll with layouts lately. Perhaps I'm subconsciously trying to hit 50 before the year is out.

Creative Scrappers gave me a hand with this one. They're on a stars fix at the moment, which suits me just fine. This is how my thought process went: stars - nautical stars - nautical - boats - harbours - the harbour on honeymoon. And a layout was born.

Creative Scrappers sketch #184

I'm loving this streak - I'm using up scraps, using paper that I bought ages ago and can't remember why, and combining it all with newer bits and pieces too.

ah, stars! how I love you

Why not go join the fun at Creative Scrappers? They're very, very, very good. You'll see.

Happy Days

We'd already been planning our wedding for a long time when Echo Park's Happy Days collection came out. To be honest, I was so consumed with making wedding decorations that I hadn't really thought ahead to what the post-wedding scrapbooking would be like. Echo Park saved me the trouble, in the end. More than that - it was a match made in heaven.

Of course, recently I've been getting stuck in to that post-wedding scrapping, recording our happy day.

This layout you've already seen:

Materials used: American Crafts Thickers (Rainboots in Aqua Glitter Foam); Bazzill White cardstock; Echo Park: Dots and Stripes in Concrete, Happy Days chipboard accents, Happy Days element stickers, Happy Days journalling cards, Happy Days paper (Checker Board, Little Flowers reverse side); My Mind's Eye paper (Lost and Found Union Square Perfect "Happy"); Tim Holtz Bitty Grunge stamp set.
{Scrapbook Challenges Sketch #271}

I stitched and stamped before sticking down the paper strips. Then I added a printed swallow, a Cricut-cut nautical star and an RSVP - all from the wedding invitations - as extra memories. Finishing off with Happy Days chipboard shapes and Thickers was a doddle.

Why so easy? Well, Echo Park has pretty much decided my theme for me - I still want to be quite free and 'different', but I do want to have some main colours and motifs running through the pages. And Happy Days is perfect - you've seen the photos of the wedding. It should help me reach that subtle theming I'm after.

I made another Happy Days layout last week - taking into account this layout too, do you think I've achieved continuity?

Materials used: Bazzill Dragonfly cardstock; Echo Park: Dots and Stripes in Concrete, Happy Days alpha stickers, Happy Days element stickers, Happy Days journalling cards, Happy Days paper (Checker Board reverse side); Gauche Alchemy Punchinella;Tim Holtz Bitty Grunge stamp set; Toga alphas; vellum.
{Creative Scrappers sketch #181}

For the border, I cut up the remains of this chequered vellum I've had for years and machine-stictched it on, then drew a couple of extra outer lines with a black pen. To make the chevrons, I cut a strip of the reverse side of Happy Days Checker Board paper, and then cut this strip into squares. Keeping the squares in a line, turning every other square 90 degrees gave the rough pattern; then it was just a question of lining the stripes up and trimming the edges. I did the same with the Dots and Stripes paper.

yummy!

Since we went for cupcakes as the wedding cake, the Happy Days element stickers had to be used: cupcakes, layer cakes and sundaes - yummy! I cut around the cake on the journalling card a little so it could stick out over the photo. Then the title - punchinella, more chevrons, and lovely pure alphas.

And finally, my piece de resistance this month...

....take one deep photo frame from a well-known supermarket chain, take it apart, and make it your own!

Materials used: Echo Park: Happy Days alpha stickers, Happy Days chipboard accents, Happy Days element stickers, Happy Days paper (Ads, Retro both sides); Gauche Alchemy Punchinella and various Mixed Media Color Kits elements.

The frame comes with a super-thick inner mount that is quite wide, providing a great working surface. I drew around the mount directly onto the patterned paper and then simply cut out the shape I wanted to partially cover the mount. I did a teensy bit of fussy cutting to get the Retro flowers; glued some GA elements onto some thin wire and stuck them down behind the big chipboard title; and then just layered the rest up.

because the frame is so deep you can really go to town on the layering

on the subject of matches made in heaven... look at this Echo Park Happy Days chipboard accent with a vintage mini film negative from a Gauche Alchemy Mixed Media Color Kit

It's All About The Journey

I'm loving this artistic journey I'm on, and I'm finding myself fascinated by the twists and turns a journey can take, and how each new avenue leads to change, influence, adaptation and improvement. All those terms are subjective, obviously, but I really mean them in a sense of how happy I am with my creations and the direction they are heading in.

A journey can be so many different things.

This life journey I'm on, for example: I'm married now, and I feel like we can take on the world. We will go places together. 

All this and more fed into this layout as I was making it for this week's Punky Scraps sketch challenge. I wanted to pay homage to life and living, to enjoying and experiencing the journey as we are on it, not just after it's finished.

Don't you love it when you look at something you've made and it makes you happy? I used: Basic Grey Basics and Wander paper and Wander rubons, American Crafts Thickers and Toga Alphas, Sassafras Lass bunting sticker, Heidi Swapp Ghost Alphas, Glitz transparency, Echo Park For the Record journalling card, and Gauche Alchemy goodies (feather, sequins, plastic embroidery grid, map, foot paperclip, WOODGRAIN PUNCHINELLA!) 

how great is that foot paperclip?!

Go check out the sketch and the other DT members' awesomely punky work, and share a tiny slice of their journeys too.

Caddy Love

Lily Bee Designs are starting to offer sketches for inspiration - and they're good.

I joined in with the first one by creating the second ever page of my wedding album. This was the sketch:

For over two years we had known which car we wanted for our wedding. And for over a year it had been booked. It was a 1956 Cadillac Sedan de Ville... this 1956 Sedan de Ville:

*sigh*

Why the sigh? Because at midday on the day of our wedding, I received a phone call from the car company, saying that the Sedan de Ville wouldn't start.

look! look how calm I am!

I went into Seriouser than Serious mode. The company offered me, instead, a Rolls Royce in silver or a Jaguar in British racing green. There was no way I was letting this slip away from me - the car was a big part of our vision, and my underlying desire was always only for everything to be coherent - so of course, I simply said that no, neither of those options were any good. That's when the company told me that they might have another Cadillac... it was from 1960, just about on the edge of what would work for me. It was also from the higher price range, but they would provide it at no extra cost. Naturally, I said. Then I heard the word 'tailfins' in my ear, and I was sold. Relieved, too.

Less than an hour later, the Caddy turned up. It was only at this point - while I am having my hair painstakingly put in place - that we discovered it had no roof. Now, I can look back and laugh at how I've always liked the windswept look. But on that day, at that moment, the journey to the Town Hall (we were running late, and there was an annual Beer Festival taking place which meant road blocks and diversions on top of that) was the most stressful of my life* because the wind in your hair is nice and all, but not what you want on your wedding day.

Anyway, back to the layout. I wanted to stitch on my page. I've cleared the way to the sewing machine again so I can stitch on my pages once more. But for me, to stitch the circles would've been too obvious. So I brushed on some acrylic paint, didn't like the look of it, and smudged it with a cotton wool pad. And then I was happy.

see them circles and stars again...

I used some paper and stickers from Lily Bee's Picket Fence collection, and combined them with Echo Park Happy Days bits and pieces, with some sparkly Thickers thrown in and Tim Holtz stamps.

still loving those nautical stars I made for the invitations

I didn't win the sketch competition, but the sketch was a great starting point for a layout that I'm happy with. 

The official photos have arrived now so I'm planning, planning, planning... how many pages can you fit into a post-bound album?

*coming in a close second is the one on which we transported my fish in their bowl from Norwich to Brussels by car. They learned about tidal pull that day; not to mention a little surfing. One of them was so traumatised it jumped right out of the bowl that evening after we'd arrived and went to fishy heaven (which was either somewhere under the sofa or in the doggie's stomach).

 

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!