Lily's Scrapbook

I've recently finished my 2nd ever scrapbook - I find layouts much harder than card making but I do enjoy it when I get into it.  This one was for my newly arrived great niece - who is called Lily.  I thought I'd share a few of the pages to see what you all think.  The album and lots of the stickers and embellishments were from an American Crafts kit that I picked up in December from TJ Hughes - I bought quite a few as they were a bargain £4!

The stickers and heart were part of the kit - the flowers and gems were my additions along with a few leaves from a MS punch.

The corners are cut on my cricut from the "from the nest cartridge" and then the flowers around her face are punched with a pearl drop centre.

Nestie shapes, lots of flowers and an Elzybels stamped sentiment and an old vellum quote.

I've left the quote stamps empty for Mum and Dad to write in.

This was my favourite layout - a double page spread of smiles and giggles.  Page above - Branch cut on cricut from the nest again, bird part of kit but coated in glossy accents, butterfly is ribbon.  I made my own photo corners using a MS corner punch and "snipping" into it to slide the photo in before sticking it back down to hide the snip.

Page below - This grey paper is from a gorgeous pad by GCD studios - I added a vellum border with a MS punch, and a hand coloured lily for Lily ;-) that I coloured with pencils on kraft to bring out the white when blending.  The photo corners are from an old sizzix die, as is the LOVE.  I love this photo as Lily is staring straight into Mum's eyes...

That's all I have to share tonight.  I'll be back Wednesday possible with a new card as we're out at a gig again tomorrow night - Tim Minchin this time - can't wait :-)

Craftilicious x

First Attempts at Scrapbooking

I've got a lot of scrapbooks - 6x6, 8x8, 12x12, mini, shaped - you name it, I've bought them all, but after buying they've sat, pristine in their wrappers, looking sad and lonely at the bottom of my crafting drawers, and some of them, I am ashamed to say, have sat there for nye on 5 or 6 years now.  Why?  Well up to now, I have to admit, they've somewhat scared the hell out of me.....

I can make cards, they're small, simple and for most people, a throw away item once the birthday or event is over.  But a scrapbook is bigger, and a more permanent record for you or whoever the recipient may be, the layouts are more complicated, there are photos to print, journalling to consider, embelishments, titles, double page spreads - not to mention trying to work out if your products are of 'archival' quality - its all just a big scary prospect, so I've just looked longingly at blogs and books and magazines and stroked my beautiful albums thinking "one day" I will be brave and I will take on the scrapbook challenge.

Well my friends - the whole of September was pretty much that "day"!  I did it, I bit the bullet and I did a scrapbook - and not being one to dip my toe in the water with the easy stuff, I went straight for a 12 x 12 book, to be given to someone as a gift! (and it was a boy, just to make it all a bit more complex as it was full of geology and rocks rather than flowers and glitter and manly embelishments are much harder to track down as we all know!)   Oh yes, no pressure then, just produce something beautiful, even if you've never done it before and you only have 3 weeks to do it.

This is why the blog has been pretty quiet of late - every waking non-working hour has been spent in the craft room, fidling with paper, stamps and photos and scratching my head (a lot) and going over and over the same pages trying to make it all "fit".  I have to say a big thanks to Lynne at the Craft Den for responding to my panicked questions and helping me with the last tricky layouts.  But finally I did it - I broke my srapbooking duck as it were, and, although it was very frustrating at times, and even more time consuming than I'd ever imagined, it wasn't nearly as scary as I'd feared, and I loved it, and I even think I ended up with some pretty decent pages for a beginner........

Now I can't share too many pages, as the photos aren't mine, but here's a select few:

My first page - monochrome and simple, with a border using victorian lace punch from martha stewart to add to the vintage effect.

I found gelogical papers hard to find, so printed out some pebble images and overlapped them to create a background, then found an image of rocks on the edge of a canyon, and cut them out to create a foreground - I love the finished effect.

I used a 'create a swirl' stamp to overstamp the printed poem of the glory of the garden and I think this gave a great effect, and I love the look of the "sliced" photo.

The last page was journalling stamps, and stamped tags in individual pockets for people at the retirement party to write their personal messages on.