Rainy Tuesday !

It's a horrible,dark, rainy Tuesday here. Hope it's a bit better where you are !
Even in the conservatory it quite dark so please excuse the rather naff photo of this 3rd LO from the Kit.
This is another photo of my Mum with my grandparents. Again I'm guessing the year it was taken. Around 1912 I would imagine as my mother doesn't look much older than about 12 - 18 months old.
Do remember to date your photos on the back of any you take,for future generations. There's no one below my generation that is still alive to ask these things and it can get very frustrating....so remember date those photographs !!

The original photo was quite small and increasing the size for printing made it a bit blurry so I scanned it at the original size and used that.I don't ever use originals for my scrapbooking. Problem was it would then have got a bit lost on the LO. To make it stand out a bit more I welded a frame from some scrolls that are on the Cricut Elegant Cakes cart. The cart is meant for cake makers but you can also use them on the expression.


Here are some close ups of the flowers I made. I did use the odd small prima but most of them are hand made.




I'm off to London tomorrow to see the Wizard of Oz with both DD's, Emily, Molly and Jack. Charlie is a bit young just yet so he's staying at home with his Daddy and Sophie. We're having lunch at the Rainforest Cafe before going to the matinee performance....that should be fun ! I'm crossing my fingers that the rain will have gone by then !

A very Green LO !

After umming & arring about the papers in the February kit being very vintage and I was stuck for photos, I'm pleased to say that I quite enjoy working with them now :) Here's the 2nd LO I made. This came together quite quickly after I finally remembered I had a photo of my Mum taken, I'm gusssing, when she was about 21. She would have been a 100 years old this coming August but she passed away in 1970 at the age of 59.
The title is from a poem I remember seeing on one of the family history sites quite some time ago. I can't even remember how the poem goes to be honest with you but I do remember it being about a mother being the key to this persons past.I wished I had made a copy of it but all I did at the time was put it in a little book that I keep titles for when I have a light bulb moment, normally when I'm doing something else rather than scrapbooking !! The lock & Key that came with the kit was what inspired me and reminded me of the poem.
I've stamped the bottom right hand corner of the green paper with a very large corner stamp. I very rarely use this stamp as it is quite big and not suitable for a lot of LO's because of the design. It was in one of those 12 x 12 acrylic stamp kits that I can't even remember who made them now.The frame around the photo was stamped with another from the same kit.The title was cut on the Cricut out of the Storybook cart and the large green flower was made out of grungepaper, coloured with promarkers and cut with the Tim Holtz tattered flower die.

I've been making flowers all morning for my 3rd LO using papers from the same kit. This at the moment is a work in progress so pop round tomorrow and it might be finished !!!

February Kit has arrived !

The February Kit from Sarah's Cards arrived yesterday, full as usual! I really liked this kit when I opened the box but it was short lived the more I looked at it. There's nothing wrong with the kit at all I might add,it's really lovely but I had problems thinking about which photos to use with it. It's very vintage and distressed with ink. Hardly the type of paper, I personally, would use with modern photos.
I'm beginning to be a little more relaxed about it by this morning as I do have quite a few old photos that would be suitable, I just need to hunt for them !

Anyhow, I took the bullet by the horn yesterday afternoon and chose the easiest sheet from the kit, at least this would suit the photo that came to hand at the time. I have scrapped this photo before but as my daughters have an album each I decided to make a second layout so that they both had a page.
I did add a few bits & bobs from stash such as the twill sisters tape,the lace and the large butterfly.I inked the edges of the cardstock to carry on the vintage theme and also decided to place the main body of the LO off centre.The quote on the right of the photo was made on the computer and printed on to one of the " Whatnot's" that I ordered as an extra to go with the kit.

Monday again !

Do the weeks get shorter or is it just me? Can't believe that another week has gone by already.
Had a little play with some glue and paper yesterday and came up with this LO of Charlie on his 1st day at school. I've removed the name of the school from the LO for obvious reasons :)
I used some October Afternoon Schoolhouse collection for this LO. I wanted some sort of embelishment for it though and it's beyond my nature to use flowers on boys LO's don't know why but I find it rather difficult to use them although I've seen some fabby LO's for boys with flowers on them. I wanted something different to a star so I came up with a pin wheel instead !

Sketch Challenge

I mentioned in an earlier post that I won the December sketch challenge over at Sarah's Cards and part of that prize was to design an LO to feature this months challenge sketch. I couldn't show this at the time but I can now as the challenge went up yesterday.
Here's the sketch I had to work with


and here's what I came up with.


I used some of Sarah's November Kit that had some lovely autumnal coloured papers by We are Memory Keepers from their Maple Grove collection.
These papers perfectly matched Molly's costume as a little woodland nymph at a recent Dance Competition.
Pop over to the blog and have a go at this months challenge
here
and try your luck. There's a £10 e voucher up for grabs as well as the opportunity to join the DT team submissions for the April challenge.

New Tutu

Emily my eldest grand-daughter had to have a "new" (to her) tutu for the recent Dance Festival as she's outgrown her other one. It's fortunate that my daughter can hire them from the stock that the Dance School has, they cost about £200 to buy !!!! She dances very well and holds her own on stage but isn't quite in the same league as her younger sister who makes it a mission in life at the moment to collect medals & silver cups!!! Molly has far more stage presence than Emily has and by far a more confident performer. My heart goes out to Emily at times though, she always misses out by that one mark to receive a placing, bless her.So I like to scrap her little moments too.
I've used papers from a very old ( April 2010) kit that I had from Sarah's cards by GCD Studios called the Ava Collection.I'm not a lover of yellow for scrapbooking, not sure why really as I do like the colour very much, but not in scrapping! I wasn't sure about what to do with the large butterfly paper either so I cut the butterflies out and used as a layered embelishment.

New Arrival

I'm scrapping these LO's in the wrong order but I had to borrow my son-in-law's camera card to get some "immediately after birth" photos of Sophie.
I had a yummy order of Pebbles New Arrival stash from Sarah's Cards last week. I was itching to use them and here's the 1st of the LO's. I also used a sheet of the Lost & Found Madison Avenue from My Minds Eye for the text background and the " Perfect in every way" die cut. The glitter on this was actually red but I re-covered it with some pink stickles !The doyle and a couple of the flowers have been cut on the cricut as has the shaped pp.

Just a card today !

It's my friends birthday on Thursday so I'm really organized making her card this early, it's normally the night before for most peoples birthdays !
I've used the very last bits of the Sarah's cards kit for this one,punched the borders with a Martha Stewart edge punch, added a length of ribbon and made a flower from some hearts punches and embossed the top part with a cuttlebug embossing folder, added a craftworks card greeting and voila !

The fourth & final layout !

Yes, I did manage to get a fourth LO out of this months kit. The individual blocks of paper were inspired from one of the LO's in the design team booklet that comes with the Kit and was by Cathy C. Although my LO doesn't look anything like hers but the idea of using up smaller left over pieces of paper was a really good one. It enabled me to get that little bit more out of this fabby kit.

I added a few different embelishments to the individual blocks just to give them that little bit extra.

Three Layouts from one Kit !

This is the third layout I have managed to get from this months kit from Sarah's Cards. Pretty good value I think and there's still a few bits of paper left and some stickers/embelishments! You never know I might even manage a fourth or at least some cards before I finally say " that's it, all gone".

This photo of Molly was taken by a photographer that visited the dancing school she attends soon after she started taking ballet lessons when she was 3. Nearly four years later it's one of her favourite past times, she just lives to dance !!