Apparently I decided this album needed a little something. Or it was cold. So I stitched it a quilt from fabric paper. I’m sure that makes total and complete sense, right?
I love log cabin quilt designs because they are so quick and simple and just a little bit mathematical, getting the pieces lined up so it all looks at once random and orderly. Plus I keep meaning to use this slightly older stack of Dear Lizzy fabric paper, so this seemed like the answer. I cut all the fabric paper into two-inch strips then pieced it together on a sheet of kraft cardstock, and when the square was complete, I machine stitched it in that spiral-box until my eyes were crossed! The edges seemed too harsh on the album, so I cheated and added a bit of crocheted trim around the edges, then fancied up a tag for the title. It’s all stuck to the front of a 12×12 American Crafts album with copious amounts of double-sided tape.
I’m guessing the tag will eventually be worse for wear, but the quilt is flat so it should be fine, provided I don’t do something stupid like pour my coffee all over it. (You laugh, but I did that to myself today so it seems entirely possible.)
There’s a quilter’s step-by-step for the log cabin design here, if you fancy giving it a go!
I hope you’re having a lovely week so far. What is everyone working on?
From this starting point to this final page. I stayed with even more from Nightfall (including those blackboard label stickers that are just beyond cool) and added a bit more of the blue paint. It’s Speckled Egg, which is one of the new colours in the Jenni Bowlin collection of paints and inks for Ranger. (It hasn’t arrived at Two Peas yet but I would think it would be there soon.)
I’m not sure why this photo really said autumn to me since it was taken indoors, but it was an autumn day and we’re wearing what is very much our autumn uniform, so perhaps that is it. I’m not sure if you can make it out from the photo so small, but this silly self-portrait is in a hall of mirrors so it’s a bit like we’re on repeat ad infinitum! A big group of school kids had just stepped out and for about thirty seconds we were the only people in the mirror so we grabbed a shot quickly before the next group came in the door.
Top row, L to R: one, two and three. Bottom row, L to R: four, five and six. Click the corresponding link to see the page in more detail.
Thirty-five pages posted so far for last week’s starting point and they are all so very different! Anywhere from one to four photographs, some have lots of writing and others just a little. These six are just a few of my favourites. See all the pages here.
Find more Scrapbook Starting Points here or follow the board on Pinterest here.
Happy Saturday! Here’s a new starting point for a scrapbook page. I threw in a layer of paint this week, but obviously you can leave that out if you prefer. But if you have plenty of paint and you’re not using it, consider this a kick to give it a try!
This week I’ve started my page with the Nightfall collection and I’m thinking of something autumnal, despite the sudden burst of summer weather we’ve had in London this week. (Definitely not complaining – it has been lovely to leave my jacket on the coat rack for a few more days!) What colours and themes are speaking you you lately?
You can definitely put your scraps to use, and perhaps show off one full sheet of patterned paper you particularly like. If you like to follow measurements, this starting point uses papers cut to 11.5×11.5, 2.5×9.5, 3×5, .5×8.5, .25×3 (all in inches). Or you can estimate and use what seems to work.
I’m curious to see if you add lots of photos to the empty space of focus on one or two photos right in the middle of the page. If you create a page this week, please link it up below and share it with everyone!
Tomorrow I’ll be back with my finished page from this Starting Point plus some favourites from last week’s challenge. There is still time today to add your layout there.
Have a beautiful weekend! Oh, and don’t miss this weekend’s giveaway either!
Scrapbook Starting Points is a weekly challenge. Click here for more Starting Points inspiration.
This weekend, one commenter will win a set of Digital Angel Stamps from Little Musings. These printable delights are just right for Journal your Christmas and could make beautiful page numbers for your December album. Little Musings angels recently graced the cover of Simply Cards & Papercrafts magazine.
Little Musings is the adorable online store from the lovely SJ Dowsett, selling both clear and digital stamps. SJ offers snippets of life and scrapping on her blog. SJ also creates hand-drawn logos and branding for crafters and other small businesses looking for a unique look. (Plus she is extra superduper cool for drawing this portrait of me which I think is quite magical!)
These angel stamps are perfect for Chrstmas cards, so to enter, just leave a comment on this post telling us who is first on your Christmas card list this year.
Entries close at midnight Sunday UK time and the winner will be posted Monday evening, so be sure to check back to see if it’s your lucky day!
It’s the thirtieth of the month, so that means it’s time for a brand new edition of 4×6 Photo Love! Since it’s the ninth month of the year, we’re scrapbooking nine 4×6 prints on one scrapbook page. Grab some photos and join in the fun!
This month’s design principle is a pocket page, perfect for a transparency! Eight of the photos are adhered to cardstock and they can easily be removed from the pocket through the top of the page protector, so there’s no need for customisation this time. Of course, the pocket can hold more things if you like – more space for writing or even more pictures.
You might recognise that layout on the right from a recent sketch. It turned out that I had nine photos remaining from that event, so it seemed the perfect pick – plus I could take my inspiration from the colours and patterns from that page I had already created. It’s not a true double-page spread but a happy circumstance that the two can look coordinated across the page divide. You can see how I picked the supplies and how I made the layout in this month’s video.
This month I’m delighted to be joined by special guest Mandy Koeppen. Mandy has created two pages this month – one in 8.5×11 and one in 12×12 – so there is something for everybody! Find her first page here...
…and her second page here. I love how Mandy incorporated her favourite border punch into the design and got creative with the papers to hold her photos inside the pocket.
Now it’s your turn…
Every month, there are two ways to win a prize for participating in 4×6 Photo Love! The first is at Two Peas: create your page and upload it to the gallery. Be sure to tick the box for this challenge in step four of the upload process. One participant will win a gift certificate to Two Peas to go shopping for whatever you like. But there’s a second chance to win right here: on this post, leave a comment with a link to your page (in the gallery at Two Peas or on your blog, whatever you prefer) and one of those links will win Two Peas shopping money too! The deadline for both is the 29th of October.
Congratulations to Lisa for winning the draw for last month’s eight photo class! (Lisa, you will receive your gift certificate by email.) Will you be next? Just choose nine 4×6 photos to scrap and follow along with this month’s class prompt.
xlovesx
PS: Feel free to grab the button there on the left for your blog or to share this class with a friend – since it’s free, the more the merrier! And you’re welcome to use any supplies and any photos, so there’s no boundaries to your scrapping with this year-long project.
One of the dangers of really showing you a layout as it comes together is that sometimes things really don’t go the same way they are planned in my head. That happened with this week’s sketch page. But for as much as I may stumble in this week’s video as a result, it reminded me why I love the creativity of this craft. Why I love something that is so flexible and doesn’t require following a pattern to the letter. Why I love to design on the fly more than being penned in with rules and measurements and guidelines.
So this doesn’t look anything like how I imagined. I imagined all matching, small letter stickers. But that was before I realised I didn’t have a single T left in that set. (I thought I was being smart because I had run out of the letter E and this was a nice long title with no Es. Then the T had to throw a spanner in the works!) I imagined a line of brads down the right side. I imagined this pesky little flower sticker that partly inspired the colour scheme but in the end there was no nice place for it to live, so it is still in my stash and the page is in my album. But I love the problem-solving element of making a page and realising the masterplan isn’t working – find other letters, mix up the fonts, deal with the changed size and in general just make it work. I love that process.
And there was one thing I had no plan for at the beginning. In a bit of an unlike-me turn, I really had no idea what I would write about these photos. They were taken on my birthday while we waited for the bus and The Boy was generally being a bit silly with the camera. On that day, I didn’t really feel anything special about the pictures, but two years later there was just something from that made me realise this captured a very real moment of life and it really did have its place in my albums. And by the end, I knew what to write. Just another little creative challenge along the way.
This week’s sketch includes three 2×3 photos, which could be swapped for a photobooth-style strip or perhaps one portrait 4×6 photo. This sketch should be easily adjusted to 8.5×11 since there is a great deal of white space at the left side. Although I left the row of brads (or other circle embellishments) off in the end, I’ve included them here. Use them or don’t use them as you see fit. And you can add the banner back in for the title or you can just add a big, blocky title in that same space.
Julie has been blogging about purple lately and had me thinking about purple in my stash. Before I started looking, I thought I had a fair amount of purple, but it turned out to be the least represented colour in my supplies! I have been loving the deep wine-tinted purple shade (somewhere between burgundy and violet… so much so that I almost typed ‘purgundy’ but just… no.) from the Garden Cafe collection, so I like the idea of pairing that with a more obvious purple (from BasicGrey Eerie) and that pairing I love so much – yellow and grey. So that meant a mixed palette of grey, yellow, purple and fuchsia. In the light of day, I still liked it! I’m intrigued to try some of Julie’s purple palettes a bit more completely soon.
Also, I realise I make a ridiculous hand gesture in the beginning of the video. Nice one, Shim. You can forevermore use this hand gesture to mock me. In fact, I do believe it should become a night-club dance move named The Shimelle, of course.
As always, the weekly sketch is no-stress and just for fun! If you use it, I’d love to see, so please leave a link if you post your page online.
Last week was possibly the simplest sketch I’ve posted, but I love the freedom it gave everyone to make it their own. And I giggled at the comments on so many blog posts that sticking confetti to a layout is a bit pesky! Yes… it really is. But worth a try now and then! Thank you to everyone who gave the sketch a try. This is just a sampling of nine favourites. Click the corresponding link to see any of these layouts in more detail and get to know the scrappers behind the pages. Top Row, L to R: one, two, three (bonus points for scrapbooking an OSTRICH). Middle Row, L to R: four, five, six. Bottom row, L to R: seven, eight and nine.
Now… are you up for some sketchy scrapping this week? Let’s see how you adapt this idea of vertical strips and a big banner of a title. Give it a go and share it with us!
By the time we returned home from our crazy backpacking adventure, I knew I wanted to make a photobook in addition to a crafty scrapbook. Something classic and minimal. No embellishment. Just the photos and writing, hardbound with lush paper and coffee-table worthy. Something we could keep for ages and point to and remember you know that year we just dropped everything and hit the road? Let’s look at that again. And so, that book is coming to be.
When I exported all the photos from the drive we used on the road to the computer I use at home, I accidentally didn’t import all the organisation I had kept along the way. Gone were all my lovely divided events and tags and all that stuff. (I have since figured out what I did wrong but it just wasn’t worth doing all that again.) Instead of everything divided by noteworthy event and location, it was just one big batch of 9000 photographs in chronological order.
And actually, that is working tremendously well.
I’m using the same album format that Liz of Paislee Press used for this book, mostly because I loved her book so much that I instantly knew that was what I wanted. Originally I figured I could create all the templates myself, but then I kept putting it off. Now I’m using the templates from Paislee Press and I’m actually getting this done. I love that I can just open a double page spread of templates, go over to iPhoto and choose the right number of pictures and drag them over to make the pages. Because I have all the photos in one big batch, the number of photos on the templates is helping me edit which pictures to include. If there are eight photos on the next set of templates, then I look at my library and pick the next eight I want to share, in chronological order. I’m using plain white page backgrounds and one font throughout the entire book. The words are coming from a mix of my blog posts from the road, the handwritten journal I kept along the trip and my reflections now. The writing is quite therapeutic and calming, though at times it really makes me wish we were on the road again soon. In a wistful sort of way.
I’m making the pages one double-page spread at the time, then importing them to Blurb’s BookSmart book builder. I save each page as both a PSD and a JPG (just in case I catch a typo or want to change something later) and then I just upload the JPG to BookSmart, click to add a new page (1 photo – full bleed) and drag the JPG page onto the right page in the book. There may be some more efficient way of building the book, but this is pretty quick and I like being able to see it come together page by page. (The images here are the first five double-page spreads in the book.)
The completed book will be 8×10 and hardback, and Blurb will go to a maximum of 160 pages with their premium paper in that size. That’s what Liz used and I am totally doing the same. I’ve used the premium paper in smaller hardback books from Blurb and I love it – but I haven’t made a book quite this epic yet, so I am tremendously excited to see it become real. It’s definitely getting there now and I’m really enjoying putting it together and revisiting all those amazing places by looking through all the pictures.
And by posting it here, you can keep me accountable and make sure I get this completed sooner rather than later! You’ll hold me to that, right?
…something that just might be useful
If you’ve been meaning to make a photo book yourself, this week is a fab time to do that because Blurb are offering 20% off the book prices with code BLURB20 but that expires at the end of the month, which isn’t very long now! But with a set of templates – be they from a digital scrapbooking site or the drop-in templates at Blurb – you can make a photobook in just an hour or two. It just depends on how decisive you can be as you add photos and elements! If you like pages with a bit more ‘stuff’ than the templates I’m using, there are several options in different styles here – especially if you scroll to the bottom half of the page. You can also create notebooks with your favourite images on the cover and plenty of space to write. Could be a lovely Christmas gift if you’re already thinking of December! (Oh my!)
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Top row, L to R: 
