Birthday layout! Week 20 Project Life

I made my left hand page of Project Life this wee, a full page photo of me on my birthday. I added the date stamp digitally before printing. The top left hand corner is the Week 20 title on a piece of cupcake postcard from Paperchase mounted on a paper doily, with some butterflies. The chipboard rosette and ribbon bow made from seam binding, has a tiny flag with happy birthday on it. The 51, was added on the outside of the page protector and the doily was left loose at the top, so it too could come outside the page protector.

Most of the items I used, came from last months Studio Calico kit - City of Lights, and this months kit, 35mm. I wanted to use some of the envelopes from my birthday cards too, to keep some of them, that were extra special. I came up with a way of making the album out of three envelopes, with their flaps, as hinges,  mounted on a sheet of card, covered with patterned paper, then threaded through a slit made in my page protector, so the pages could be looked at without sliding the whole layout out of the pocket.

I used some Washi tape at the top and bottom of the slit I cut, so it wont tear any further than I want it to!I have extra space here for other items from my birthday I may want to add.
I then decided to add a Heidi Swap Memory File Photo stack to the largest outer envelope.

This gave me a lot of photograph space, it's been a busy week!

I made a collage of my birthday photo's in Picasa and printed it 6x4 on my Selphy.

I made a whole page with another collage about my joint present, a Cameo! I love how it all turned out and I managed to make space on a double page spread, for everything I wanted to include!
Today has been a huge day in our household!! In fact, I would even say momentous, but I will save that for tomorrow! Time for bed! TFLx

First Cuts!!!

Here are the first few cuts I have done with Camilla Cameo! I decided to make some thank you cards for my birthday money!

I designed them myself using the software and this one I got a bit braver with!

I also purchase this Studio File from the Silhouette America and made this card and added my own cut out greeting to the pot.

I want to send it to my friend who has just lost her dog. I made it by cutting out all the pieces together on a 12 x12 sheet in scrap card, which then gave me a template I could place under my mat whilst I pieced together odd pieces of coloured card that I wanted for each part! Clever stuff hey??? I then remove the template from under the clear mat before inserting it in the machine. That way I don't waste any. I can keep the template for next time too! TFLx

I am delighted to announce the safe arrival of......

Camilla the Cameo!! I asked for birthday money from all my family and they came up trumps! So thank you to mum and dad, sister and both sisters in law and my two boys and of course hubby who added the final amount!! I can't wait to get cracking!! Watch this space!!Just need to reorganise a little to fit her in, but she can live here when not in use, on top of my IKEA mini drawers covered in lovely Sass papers!
Talking of reorganising, I spent some time yesterday getting my ribbon stash under control. I wound up the lengths and stapled each one with an SC card I had saved.

Quite a lot of work, but now takes up much less space! Ribbon has fallen somewhat out of favour but I use it to trim mini albums and things so I still needed it accessible. It has moved from an open basket on the desk top to a CD drawer out of sight, but I can still see at a glance what I have. More to the point, they are not all knotted up!! TFLx

The patchwork layout - how I made it

This layout I did for NSD has caused quite a stir and was featured on the home page on UK scrappers this wee. I have had some people ask me how I did it, so I am going to share it here, now.
First my inspiration. The challenge was to use triangles in a layout, so I went straight to Google Images, as I often do and googled triangle inspiration, lots of pictures came up and I was taken by this one and the second picture down by red pepper quilts.
I got a collection of scraps of papers and I was pretty random with my choice of colours here. I then cut each piece down to a 2" x2" square, using my Fiskars paper trimmer and if I got more than one square from the double sided paper I turned one square over to have even greater diversity of patterns. I then cut each square in half diagonally with my paper trimmer.This gave me a whole load of triangles.
I cut some strips of card stock and made some patterned strips inverting the triangles as I went along, each strip was five triangle long. I taped these in place. These then joined together to make a square shape which I centered on my background Kraft card stock and taped it down using dst.I was then able to position my photo and tuck four triangle under it. Having completed the two inner layers, I went on to  make some more triangle strips for the outer set. To place these evenly, I added my corner triangles and then was able yo space the outer strips so the background card stock was showing equally, either side. (I do hope this is making sense!!)
Finally I wanted to add some stitching and buttons to add dimension, but my sewing machine was inaccessible at the time, so I cheated and used my Fiskars stitching punch. I punched strips of Kraft based patterned card stock and then trimmed them into narrow strips which I applied with foam pads for dimension. A handful of buttons were dropped randomly on the layout and then glued in position after tying some of them with linen thread so they look stitched. More dimension was added with a few triangles, around the central photo, on foam pads and some stitching rub-ons across each corner.

I hope that explains more how I did it!! TFLx

Don't overlook the obvious! project Life week 19

This famous lady - Amy Johnson, was from Hull and I have been shopping to Hull many times and never noticed her statue before, until last Friday!

Here is the page I made with it.

I snapped this photo on my visit to Hull last Friday and it prompted some research on the net, as I had forgotten a lot of what I knew! How often do we overlook the history in our own backyard!! I met up with friends in town and we went to Pizza express for lunch as a celebration for my birthday. I snapped this statue and Pizza express and totally forgot to snap my friends!!

This is how the double page spread looked. The left hand side was four 6x4 photo's, two of which I did as collages, using Picasa. One was my NSD layouts from last weekend.

The other was a round up of things growing well in the garden, then a photo of the new walnut plinths hubby and I did to update the kitchen units last weekend.

Our pear wood units are difficult to match and the plinths were a mess. These walnut plinths blend nicely with the high gloss brown worktops we added a few years ago and overall I am very pleased with the result for not too much outlay!! We don't normally do DIY so this was a major achievement to do it ourselves too! 
Is anyone else out there still managing to keep up to date with Project Life??? By the way, don't forget to open your eyes to what is local to you and get out there and photograph it!! TFLx

Happy Birthday!

Is it really a year since my vintage tea party????? TFLx

Been Getting Messy!

This is how far I have got with my "Get Messy class" with  Celine Navarro. TFLx