"Breaking Free"

About two months ago I had a sudden inspiration to submit a layout to NZ's own scrapbooking magazine, Up2Scrap. With so many beach photos up my sleeve, I'd been meaning to make a new summer page for some time but always found other projects to start on first. The magazine submission was my driving force to finally get something done.

Of course, I created a page, didn't like it enough to bother submitting it (like most of my stuff, it's too 'safe and dull' to display anywhere other than my own albums and my blog!) and so I tucked it into my album and kinda figured I'd come back to it and work on it some more... Redo it completely perhaps..

Submission date is now closed and I never got around to reworking this layout. I'm reasonably certain I never will, thus I've decided to post it to my blog. I LOVE the photo - Char is usually quite introverted and here she is jumping around on the beach like she doesn't have a self-conscious bone in her body. For that reason it's one of my most favourite photos (taken by the girls on auto-timer by the way).

I used a cross-process effect on the photos to help their colour blend better with the layout, and to give the scene a kind of surreal feel.  Then I decided to make the photos into Polaroid style, as Polaroids are fun, spontaneous and have a sense of nostalgia which is also the feelings evoked for me by this photo. Nostalgic because this is the beach where so many of my own childhood summer memories took place.

The card poking out from the right of the main photo holds hidden journalling.

Paper - Simple Stories '100 Days of Summer'. Chipboard flourishes - Fancy Pants

Indie and the Robots - another as-yet-incomplete!

I had a burst of inspiration to put this together over the weekend, but then ran out of steam when it came to the title and journalling. As seems to be my habit, I'm posting it up although it's unfinished.  Why?  Because I'm impatient to make a post and I don't want to put up the last layout I did for my mum of one of her childhood photos, as it was a rush job I'm not at all proud of, as much as she seems to love it...

Anyway, I digress as usual!

Here's the so-far-untitled-and-incomplete Indie layout, featuring papers from Kaisercraft's K-bot range.

 The photo as it is on the layout is so much better than the way it has come out in this photo of the photo. Doesn't help that I seriously need to clean my camera lens!

I have an idea of what I want to write for this, but need a nice peaceful moment to get it together. So far, every moment has been crammed full of kids-on-the-go or my own attempts to recover from a day of kids-on-the-go (ie, that 'me time' after the munchkins have gone to sleep at last, when I sit and stare blankly at a wall and try to simply recover from the day. Lately that 'me time' has lead to me falling asleep where ever I happen to be sitting. The couch... The floor...)

Time to go, the Teen is nudging me to hurry up so she can get back to facebook, the Lily Bug (aka Bree) is pulling the house apart because she's bored and no one's taking any notice of her...

"Little Lady Muck"

I have had this paper set aside with this photo for months now, in a drawer within my scrapbook closet labelled "works in progress". I loved how the colours of Bree's outfit and the greenery behind her matched up so nicely with the colours in the paper, but had no idea where to go with it from there. Finally while the little dude was having his daytime nap yesterday, I decided to get on with it. 

At the same time, I hauled out Bree's own scrapbooking box (sheets of A4 paper in a variety of colours, stickers, pictures cut from magazines, glitter, felts, stamps) and encouraged her to "come do some scrapbooking with mum". Of course, sometimes her idea of scrapbooking and mine are two totally different ideas. She loaded her stamp pad full of small glitter stars and dumped it all on to the carpet. Then trampled stampy ink finger prints all over the carpet while trying to pick up the stars. But that was her little game and she enjoyed doing it, and the ink did scrub off for the most part... Silly me for not putting down a play sheet first, but hey the carpet's munted anyway. :/

So, here's what I came up with:

Originally I thought to make a clean simple layout with the photo mat cut all nice and straight - I even tried to measure it all up, but the effort to cut in a straight line frustrated me. Using the edge of the scissors, I roughed up the photo mat and then cut the strips at random widths for the loose weave.

The journalling was going to be within the circle flower thingie, but once I thought of what to write, I could see I was going to waffle on far too much for it all to fit. Twisted strips of brown paper into twine. Finished it off with splatters of brown paint.

The journalling:

Anyone looking at this photo would think you're a little princess. 
All High Teas and frilly flouncy dresses. Yeah right!
You love to run barefoot through muddy puddles. Dresses annoy you
by the fact that they trip you up when you're climbing trees.
This dress stayed clean for the photo due to clever diversion tactics and bribery..

Project Self Destruct

When the lad came home from work last night declaring he had plunder, then set about showing me (with great deals of excitement) a whole bunch of fibre optic cables and speaker wiring and cords and plugs for gods-only-know-what, I thought he may have lost the plot just a little. It was all stuff that had been on a direct path to the work skip but it was - so I was told - all good useful stuff.

I thought he was nuts and groaned inwardly at the thought that my clutterbug tendencies had somehow gone viral and spread to my other half, but then he revealed this...

This baby has a digital photo frame inside it, but it can play videos as well as display photos. For a fraction of a second I thought to rip the housing off it so it's not so chunky, but then my slow-to-click-but-I-get-there-eventually brain realised... This big clunky box will look AWESOME once I pimp it out!!

Actually, it'll probably look absolutely rubbish and I'll wish I'd handed it on to someone with creative flare to make it look stylie and awesome rather than cheap and nasty...   But sod it, I'll give it a shot anyway!

My initial thought was to use up what's left of my Graphic 45 Steampunk Debutante papers on it, but as I look at that big red button in the middle that says "press here" a little voice in my head says "do not press the red button!" Because you know, it's always the self-destruct button...

That's right folks, I'm sensing some industrial sci-fi/alien hardware theme going on here...

I'm. So. Excited. I. Could. Just. About. Poo.

That's all for now, but stay tuned - I have a new layout update on the way. (Yeah I know, you're so excited you could just about poo, right?)

"Nosey Parker"

After an hour or two of rifling aimlessly through a thousand printed photos and a significant stack of patterned papers, I was ready to give up all hope and go to bed. It was around midnight after all... As I began to pack away the chaos of scrap supplies I'd spread around the lounge floor (where all my scrapbooking is done), I noticed a couple of photos I had thrown upon a sheet of polka paper. 

Hmm... This might work... 

^^ That there was the voice of the sneaky little Insomnia Worm that lives in my brain, coaxing me to stay awake another hour or two as the night was still young and besides, the recent changeover to daylight savings meant my body clock still believed it was only 11pm. 

Convinced - oh so easily because I'm a pushover really - I looked around for something that might work with the polka dots. Or at least something that hadn't been packed away already. The lining of a cardboard box, some sandpaper, ink, and a sheet of stripey paper. Meh, that'll pass with a push.  

Quicksmart, photo edges were sanded. The box lining was separated so I had a mix of flat and corrugated paper. Everything - including the sandpaper - was arranged in slap-dash manner behind the photos.  The flat pieces of cardboard box were cut into journalling strips then edged with torn scraps of stripey paper. An overkill of ink applied to the edges of the 12x12, and splotched here and there. Title cut from letters in a magazine a couple of days later. Finished.

The journalling says:

You're such an inquisitive little dude.
Bet you're gonna be one of those kids
who takes stuff apart to see how it works.


I just hope you'll be able to 
put dad's model cars back together again.

I think the patterned paper is My Minds Eye, but it's all a hazy sleep-deprived blur now....