Diving in with Shimelle!

Over at www.shimelle.com there is a pretty paper party going on!  And I wanted to dive right in.  Shimelle let us view a video she had created for True Scrap, in which she scared us all to death by gathering a supply of patterned papers and immediately cutting them all up in a random fashion!  Well, I was definitely going to give this a go – here’s my selection of papers: 

These are from completely different manufacturers, and are all different ages!  They were in my ‘colour-coded’ cropper hopper along with others that got left behind while finishing off kits and such.

Then, on Friday, I cut them up!

On Sunday I started scrapping – ending up with 10 single pages and 2 double pages!  This is all I have left:

I did cheat a little tiny bit, because I knew I wanted to scrap photos from my holiday in France this year – hence the predominant greens, dark reds and browns.  Here are the DLOs:

 

I rarely do DLOs these days so that was fun!  I didn’t start the ‘Rouen’ one with the intention of making it a DLO and did the left hand side first. This ‘Vascoueil’ one is based on a sketch from Shimelle’s class

Here’s some of my favourites of the rest:

There’s a bit of journaling missing.  The ‘En Route’ page I want to write about the bike, the mileage and using the satnav.  On the  ‘Omaha Beach’ page, I want to do a bit of research and write some historical facts.  Incidentally, this page was the final one, that yellow paper is the other side of the red, yellow, blue diamond paper in the first page (it’s from Basic Grey).  I had to be very economical here, so the stripes don’t run under the photos just in between!

 

I really love this way of scrapping and will be doing it again.  I have done something similar in the past, for example, for my Week In the Life album, I used 1 collection of papers, but didn’t cut them up before I started, but by about half way through I was scrapping from strips and squares that were left from cutting up paper for the first few photos.

Pumpkins!

Mum and I made our annual visit to the pumpkin farm at Slindon:

And finally, here’s a corner of Mum’s lovely garden.  This cornus is looking fabulous and golden.  Luckily she has given me a little cutting!

Pretty Paper Stash

Today is the first day of Shimelle’s new class, Pretty paper party.  In her first prompt, she urged us to think about what sort of paper collectors we are.  Well – right now I am a scrap collector!  I used to be a kit collector, subscribing to several kits and many a month was tempted with sumptuos add-ons.  The brown pizza boxes they arrived in mounted up in an untidy pile, which just got bigger and bigger!  So about 1 year ago, I unsubscribed to kits and decided to make a determined effort to use up all that pretty paper.  But, even though I have scrapped a lot this year (I did LOAD twice), the pile reduced awfully slowly.  Eventually, I took all the kits out of the boxes and sorted them into my existing stash, all pretty paper now just about fits in 1 cropper hopper paper holder and is sorted by colour.

At that point I was overrun with scraps!  I have long since used these drawers for scraps and sorted into hot and cold colours.  Excuse the child like painting, the drawers are made of cardboard, and I like to doodle on them whenever I get paint out!

Here’s a sneak peek in the ‘hot colours’ drawer.  I went through both drawers recently and just kept the larger rectangular pieces.  Most of the paper on the top is left over from the retreat I went on recently.  It’s from Glitz Design and is just gorgeous!

The rest I tossed into a drawer at the bottom of my drawer stack.  I hope I will use these for punching out shapes etc.

I try not to worry about whether the paper is old fashioned, in fact, I often find a small piece of an older paper that I love!

How do you store/use up your scraps? 

10 on the 10th - Photo Walk round Brighton

We went into Brighton yesterday afternoon for a photo walk – looking specifically for reflections:

We parked by Brighton Dome, which is the old stables of Brighton Pavilion, hence this Indian style doorway. 

We made for the library as we knew there was a lot of glass around there!

We had lunch in one of the many little cafes in the North Lanes, this is right by the Komedia, spot the reflection!  Can you tell which is reflection and which is real in this photo?

Walking down towards the seafront. 

We were going to go on the pier, but guess what?  There was a bike show along Marine Parade!  Luckily for me, the majority of the bikes were custom and incredibly shiny!  Some great reflections!!!  It was a bit difficult to focus though as most of the shiny bits were rounded!

Brighton’s latest tourist attraction is a big wheel!  It looks fantastic, and will be open shortly.  It’s right by the pier so will have fabulous views out to sea and inland.  Think I might have to have ago even though I am a bit scared of heights! 

Finally we walked up to Edward Street to look at the progress of the new American Express building.  This is a reflection of a nearby block of flats in the new building.  Just in case you can’t read backwards it says ‘Amex makes our lives hell’  a reference to the dust and noise I should think!

Finishing off

The quilt I am making is awaiting wadding to be purchased before I can go any further with it, so I decided to finish off some UFOs:

 

The union jack was started well before the Royal Wedding, but only just now made into a cushion!  The middle cushion with the red border was a project taught by Lynette from The Stitch Witch at a recent Worthing Patchworkers meeting.  It is a technique called shadow quilting, organza overlays the middle, and we all designed our own ‘Baltimore’ pattern.

Behanid the cushions is a blanket I am crotceting, using up all the random bits of wool Mum has given me.  Unfortunately it looks very random!  I now want to buy some wool colours that go together better!

Another recent project that has been on our to-do list for ages, was to print and frame some holiday photos for our lounge.  These photos are of Venice, Rome and Prague.

Finally, here’s a winter wallhanging, started ages ago!  It was almost complete, just waiting to be framed.  But in the end I decided to bind it and I will use it as a table runner perhaps?  I might sew some beads on it – or I might just put it away in the cupboard!

Thanks to my friend Sue, I found a new website with online craft courses!  It’s My Creative Classroom, and I decided to take the Bind-it-all class.  Here’s a peek at what I have made so far:

First off, a little BIA instruction book.  Lots of practice with punching and binding!  It’s a great course with lots of tips along the way.

Secondly, here’s a little 4” x 4” book with some ingenious pocket and fold out pages.

Morning skies

It’s a long time since I took my camera with me on my dog walk.  The sky was interesting this morning, with lots of jet trails streaming across in all directions.  So I took my camera….

I’m taking another photography course with Cheryl Johnson at FeelGoodPhotos.  Here’s some of my practice photos for module 1, ‘Leading Lines’

Cardinal Colours Retreat Part 2

Ok, now to the classes and projects:

I did 2 scrapbook layout classes with SJ, (she blogs at Little Musings)

The background is glazed bazzill, spritzed with chalk ink spray and then wiped off, sort of like a resist method.  Fabby!

The second one is a paper patchwork.  I just love the papers!!  And that heart punch, what a lovely fat heart!  Both of these Los, but especially this second one were interpreted very differently by each and everyone of us.  I like that the best, that we can all have the same inspiration and papers, but still come up with vastly different pages.  I have loads of paper left, and have already made another ‘paper patchwork’ page.

I learnt how to use promarkers!  Linda and Lyn (blogging at Scrapology)  taught a brilliant class using these adorable Faye Whittaker stamps.  I actually bought this stamp as my brother and SIL have this painting in their house!

This fabulous pop up book is one of Karen Burniston’s paper engineering creations.  Thanks to a brilliant teacher (Angie) mine has turned out very well, and I am thrilled with it!  I’ll use it to put photos from this weekend in I think.

There were plenty of wonderful make and takes too.  Here’s my felt Christmas stocking (thanks Perdita), beaded pins (thanks Anita) and owl key ring (thanks Zoe).  So much inspiration, I’ll be trying out more of these!

Thanks so much to Gill and all her team for organising yet another superb weekend!