What I made with the March scrapbooking kit
I’m ready to call my March kit done, with a total of nine scrapbook pages and two cards from those supplies – but this marks a little change from what I’ve done so far this year. I added more from my stash this time around than previously – three sheets of cardstock and two sheets of patterned paper for full 12×12 backgrounds, plus two partial patterned papers. I also used some enamel dots and adhesive pearls, mists, and baker’s twine. I think I still stayed quite to the ‘spirit’ of the kit, but does it feel like cheating to have added so much? Or is that just being resourceful? I’m curious as to what you find most useful, if you have an opinion. I have a feeling it will just be a month-to-month decision based on what I fancy scrapping and the balance of paper to embellishments.
Here’s a look at everything I made and what I had left over at the end, if you prefer things in video form! But you can see everything here on the blog too. I’ve posted five already: Dance All Summer Long, with two photos, All Over, with a single photo, Girls’ Weekend, with two photos, Definitely Disney, with five photos, and Talk Amongst Yourselves, with three photos.
This page required a sheet of kraft cardstock for the background, and a dark brown Mister Huey ink, but everything else is from the kit. I hadn’t been quite sure how to scrapbook this slightly odd photo of us on the beach in Thailand. It looks very distorted because it was taken by someone else with my camera, but I was using my wide angle lens at the time, which isn’t really meant for this kind of picture. In the end I decided to just tell that story as it is – that sometimes an odd photo of us together is better than no photo at all!
This page was created in an almost identical format as the fox page from the February kit – by taking all the scraps left on my desk, and cutting most of them into rectangles to layer onto a sheet of white cardstock. I really love this vellum over white, and there are many shades of pink and many shades of white, off-white, and cream, which is a different look for me but with so many shades together, I really like it. I added the Amy Tangerine cloud stamp to the diagonal line of ink droplets to emphasise the rainy day theme – just to try something a little different. This page is for my Olympic album, and tells the story of how we had not a single rehearsal in dry weather. Not one.
Sometimes my pages go so wrong by sheer stupidity. I had this page all designed in my head, with the cluster of envelopes to go along with the photo of the letter (a thank you note from the Prime Minister – sent to thousands of people, but still: I somehow doubt there will be many other times that letter head appears in my post!) and a bit more embellishment in a triangle around the page. When making it, the envelopes all went together politely and the skyline stamp even worked on the triangle wood veneer pieces even though they were quite small. Then I went away and left the finished page on my desk for a couple days, and in unpacking something else, I may have stacked something on top of it and well… there is a giant mess of spilled ink right below the photo. I had to go back and add more embellishment and try to balance it and cover it and make it work. So while the ‘you are awesome’ sticker is from the kit, as are a few small paper scraps, the hello die-cut, the label sticker, the twine and the enamel dots are all outside elements brought in to save the day. I’m not sure about this yet… but mostly I think that’s because it was finished in my mind and having to add more to it to cover a minor disaster has just changed the composition and it’s hard for me to figure out if it’s okay or not! But at this point, I’m living with it and getting it into a page protector before anything else happens! This page will be opposite an A4 page protector to hold the letter itself, which I want in my album but I don’t want to embellish.
Then I started working on a little something that looks like this, which might start rumours. But before anyone worries that I’m giving up my 12×12 pages for a daily documentation album such as Project Life, rest assured I still love my 12×12 very dearly.
For one, if I did the traditional weekly double page about daily life, quite a lot of my daily life is… scrapbooking. At how many levels can one scrapbook about scrapbooking? That seems a little over the top for me, as well as a sure-fire way to create a never-ending spiral of stuff that ‘needs’ to be scrapbooked! That’s not the point of Project Life at all. Instead of keeping that sort of regular everyday album, I like to include divided page protectors just here and there amongst the rest of my 12×12 pages, as they are perfect for making a page from a few random items plus some pretty paper to tell a story of any particular day or activity. This past weekend marked nine years since The Boy and I went on our first date, and this Sunday we had a lovely if simple day that included lunch out along the river, an exhibit about how clocks were invented, and a planetarium show. I included a couple phone photos from the day and my ticket stubs, then plenty of pretty paper and some random notes about the day. The photo at the top right is of a new statue at the observatory, of Yuri Gagarin. I really, really wish someone clever would start a comedy Twitter account for ConcreteYuriGagarin, with local news and updates written through the voice of a cosmonaut, but sadly I don’t think anyone other than me would find it funny. And I don’t even think the statue is concrete – it must be granite or something, but that just doesn’t sound as comical as Concrete Yuri Gagarin. See, this is the sort of stuff I record on everyday type pages. I’m not sure I want to leave a complete record of that level of things only Shimelle could ever find funny.
With the final pieces of the kit, I made two cards: one very pink (with a card base from an old Making Memories Valentine set) and one more vintage (with the Jenni Bowlin button stickers on a cream cardstock base).
And that’s that – nine pages and two cards! The March kit is still available, by the way – as I write this, many items that sold out earlier are back in stock and the only thing currently out of stock is the turquoise option for the letter stickers (the pink and black styles are in stock, and the letter stamps are half price). If you have posted your projects for the March kit somewhere and would like to share a link, do leave one in the comments so we can see what you’ve created!
Now I’ll start working with the April product picks, and I’ll have projects and videos to share with you very soon!
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