Long time no see

Last weekend I met up with two friends I haven't seen since high school. The very early 90'ies in other words. (Yep, just dated myself there.) We also had some very warm weather. This page is actually page number eight for May, but you'll have to wait until Monday to see page number seven. I created it for the monthly "12 in 14" challenge by Nina Christensen and the Stromsvigt DT. By the way, there's still time to enter the challenge for April - which was using washi tape. See link to the right!

I really love the "Pictures and words no 9" templates and digi brushes by Paislee Press. I took some inspiration from one of the templates in the pack when creating the top right card. The summer fun digi brush comes from this month's SC kit "Hello Hello". So does the celebrate summer brush that I used on the photo to the left.

Enjoy the weekand and see you on Monday!

/Magdalena

RAINBOW SCHEME

For some reason I found the Camelot PL kit quite hard to work with. I liked the kit as a kit, but my pages don't fall together as they usually do. The cards don't go together and I'm having to adjust the colors of my photos very often. For this spread I had so much color in my photos, and I just gave up on finding a coherent color scheme. I decided to go all out rainbow! So here it is:

Materials: SC Camelot PL kit with Arthur and Lancelot addons and some bits and pieces from older kits, Paislee Press "Pictures and words no 9"

/Magdalena

KID'S ART

Do you add your children's art to your layouts or PL? Most of the time I put the whole drawing in a page protector and add it as an insert. This time my daughter had drawn the cutest little self portrait as part of a larger drawing. I loved it, but didn't want to add the full page, so I asked her permission to cut it out and add it to "our book" as I call it.

Beside it I added a quote from her that she often says while drawing. "I am totally fan-TA-tic!" She can't say the letter S, so she leaves it out. 

I've seen other ways that people have added their children's work to their pages. Here's an example from Barbara Picinich where she scanned them and added the images to an empty white document. Love that!

Catherine Davis made an awesome layout featuring the scanned art work in small frames on her page.

And Pam Baldwin added her son's writing to one of her layouts. An idea I'm totally lifting!

If you have any links to your own work featuring children's art, or you know know of someone else's that I haven't posted here, I'd love to see!

/Magdalena

SWEET BOY

I have two layouts to share about our boy today. The first one I made for one of the SC NSD challenges - using kit leftovers. I had a few bits and pieces of paper that I handcut with my scissors and stitched across the bottom of the photo.

Materials: Bluegrass Farm scrapbook kit plus puffy hearts from Copper Mountain

The second layout uses a mix of the new Camelot kit and addons. The photo is printed on matte presentation paper, and I really liked how easy it was to stamp on. When stamping on regular photo paper I never get clean print even when using Stazzon. 

Materials: Camelot scrapbook kits plus Arthur addon kit, yellow enamel dots from old Tabasco addon, Mister Huey's in inky black and Versafine stamp pad in onyx black, Fiskars small star punch

There's a sequin shaker window below the photo, but it's a bit hard to see in the picture. I liked how I was able to match the colors of his shirt to papers from the scrapbook kit.

I also love my boy with no front teeth! 

/Magdalena

MAY DAY

Starting out with my first PL spread for May. This was a rough one! I like working with color in my spreads and keeping them fairly coherent. 

I printed the photos for the first page in color and then tried to make a spread, picking out cards. I even started glueing things down, and printing journaling on some of the cards, but I just didn't like it. The photos didn't go well together and they didn't go with any of the cards either.

So I had to toss all the photos, reprint most in black and white instead and pick other PL cards. Some of them couldn't be re-used, which I was a bit sad about. I managed to rescue two of them by punching circles out of one, and cutting the bottom off the other.

I ended up being quite happy about those remodeled cards, so it all worked out for the best. My second page is all about May 6th, which would have been my dad's 80th birthday. He died in 1999. I added my favorite photo of him and printed out a poem I found on Pinterest. I thought the card with sky and clouds fitted well for it. 

 

On this day the preschools in our community presented an art exhibition at the local library, featuring the children's work. After the exhibition we went out to dinner together.

 

The spread ended up coherent in color after all, which is how I like it!

/Magdalena

The naked scrapper

I should've named myself The Naked Scrapper instead. LOL! I think I may have embellishmentophobia. The paper is always my first focus, and then it's photos, title and hopefully some journaling. I rarely have a plan for the embellishments. It's the same for layoouts and PL. They always come last and sometimes I have to force myself to add them, because I know the layout will look naked once photographed. 

I know there are a lot of scrappers that pull together the supplies they intend to use before they start a project. That seems really practical! But can't do that because I rarely have an idea to start with. I bring out a patterned paper and stare at it until something pops into my head. 

Like with this layout about my father. He should've had his 80th birthday on May 6th. The journaling is a list of things I want my children to know about him. 

As I was looking at this black patterned paper it reminded me of an old wallpaper. I also remembered thinking the gold puffy dots looked like tacks. And an idea was born! I printed out some old photos I had scanned into my computer a long time ago. I didn't care that they weren't very sharp. It adds to the vintage feel. 

I "tacked" the photos to the wallpaper and added foam adhesive under a few of the corners. I the printed my journaling on cream cardstock and added my title. It says "About Your Grandfather". I also added some phrase stickers.

And I was happy. I didn't need more. But I knew it would look boring after being photographed.I should add something to the journaling page. I didn't want to. But I tried, I really did. I thought about adding a banner above the title, or maybe a cluster of embellishments. It didn't look good. Then I noticed the foam dots, and thought hey, let's add a full stop after the title. So that's what I managed. A tiny little gold dot to tie the pages together. I had to laugh at myself. 

/Magdalena

PS: For those of you that wonder about the photos it's my father in his 30's top left, and my parent's wedding photo next to that. Bottom left is my father as a baby and my grandmother behind him. Next to them is my father at 3 years old with his cousin Inga. 

Telephone challenge

Everyone in my group has finished their layouts. It was so much fun to see the progression of everyone's work. We started out lifting this gorgeous layout by Melanie Louette: 

We were 8 people in the group and I was number 7. This is what I made:

To see the layouts in beween and how it all ended up, look here!
We'll be doing this again, so why don't join us next time?

/Magdalena

NSD with Stromsvigt

Two posts in one day! That's how you know it's NSD. It's time for a little blog hop with the Stromsvigt DT. And a chance to win THIS STAMP! Don't you love it?!

If you want to buy this, and more fabulous stamps visit the Stromsvigt Etsy shop. That is also where you'll find the stamp I used for my layout:

To see more spring themed projects visit the blogs of Nina Christensen and Katharina Pradel. For a chance to win the "Thanks you rock" stamp sign up on Nina's blog. Good luck and Happy NSD!

/Magdalena

NSD with Studio Calico

I am so excited to finally get to tell you about my part in NSD at Studio Calico! I am one of eleven rewards members that have been asked to do a challenge and post it in the forum. You can find my challenge here!

My challenge is to use digital elements for a scrapbook layout, a PL spread or a card. I chose to do a PL spread because of the chance to use as many different digital elements as possible.

Here is my page:

For two of my photos I have used digital stamp brushes. They are a great way to add interest to a photo. I love using them on closeups or landscape shots. For the bottom one I did a drop shadow. It can almost give the illusion of having used a diecut. If you don't know how to do a drop shadow on a stamp brush there are great tutorials on youtube. 

I also used a free digital template from Paislee Press to do the picture with the three photos. If you have seen my PL pages before you know I use the template all.the.time. Ofcourse you don't need a template. You can also just add the photos to an empty canvas in PSE or Photoshop like I did at the bottom left picture. I added the journaling at the same time.

The red XO circle is part of a printable sheet designed by Tina Aszmus for the Camelot kit. It's in the SC shop right here. I punched out two of the circles, glued them back to back and stitched them in place. I then added a few star sequins and sewed the pocket shut. 

When adding printed journaling to a PL card I use washi tape to adhere it to a regular sized paper and run it through my printer. Mostly it works perfectly, but ofcourse this time it didn't. The card slipped and the journaling ended up too high up on the card. I solved it by sticking a cork embellishment bellow. It almost looks intentional, doesn't it? ;)

Now go make something for NSD already!

/Magdalena