Wow, these half term holidays just whizz by. I suppose it was a bank holiday on Monday, and I did go into work yesterday for half a day, but it seems to have gone really quickly and I seem to have spent a great deal of time asleep - I guess all those early starts and going back to work after 10 years have finally caught up with me. This layout is one I did for a challenge - I can't remember exactly what it was, except I had to use a transparency. The transparency is the bit with the brown flowers printed on it, by Papermania. Actually, this is a bit of a Papermania fest, apart from the Bazzill dotted double swiss base, the flower brads and the journal spot. The papers are from one of Papermania's new lines - I got it in a goody bag, and I don't think they are half bad. Also, instead of just piling 3 of each of ten designs into a pack, this time they have reined it back a bit and incorporated some plain coordinating heavyweight pp. Either way, I thought the formal patterns and cool tones of the paper went really well with these pictures, which are interior views of the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Norwich, where we went to my nephew's christening in April. I took lots of this kind of shot, prompting the question, "What kind of person goes to a christening and comes back with more pictures of the church than the baby?". My response? "A scrapbooker, of course!"
One good thing about scrapping having to take a bit of a back seat is that I really haven't bought much stash over the past three months or so. I have actually been making inroads into some of my older stash! This layout used up some Dovecraft papers from a while back, some metal alphas I have had forever, and some MM square brads which are positively ancient. The most recent purchase on here is the Tim Holtz journaling ticket, and that I must have had for at least 8 months. Quite satisfying!
Can go together. This layout is about the "birthday tree" outside our house - so called because it flowers every year around my son's birthday. The tree's blossom are pink, so it was a perfect excuse to incorporate lots of pink into the layout - the papers are from 3 Bugs in a Rug "Celebrate" range, and were part of the stash I won back in February in the SE Scrap in the New Year contest. The flower and leaves are Quickutz die cuts - the leaves though were not cut with a leaf die but with the oval Christmas ornament die - lateral thinking!
It is a lovely day so far today, and the forecast is for it to continue. It's actually been pretty good for a few days now and set to last the whole weekend. It's amazing how much more positive you can feel when the sky is blue and you can feel the warmth of the sun on your back. Feeling vaguely celebratory, I've posted a layout I did a couple of weeks back featuring my son on his 10th birthday. The pp are by 3 Bugs in a Rug, and to cut the small circles I used a Quickutz die which is one of a doublekutz Christmas ornament set. I even did some hand stitching. The buttons are from a variety of manufacturers, but mostly Basic Grey. The present at number 10 on the clock is a Quickutz die too. Having placed all my circles there was nowhere sensible to put the journalling - except around the edge. My only real problem with the layout is the photo - why is it that the photos I take of the important occasions are always so bad? It's always the same, birthdays, Christmas - never any really good shots. Still, it wouldn't be right for the quest for photographs to interfere with actually making the memories, so it's just as well there are lots of ideas out there for making the best of poor photos!
