The New Girl on the Team.

Hi there. It’s Jen G here with my first blog post as an official DT member. We have just had the most amazing retreat weekend - a huge thank you to everyone who came along and made the weekend the success it was. I will add some photos here in the next couple of days. For now I have some layouts to share with you.

Just a few days before joining the team I ordered some of the lush new “On The Bright Side” papers from My Mind’s Eye. I’m always drawn to papers with red in them – real red, not pinky red or orangey red but RED. The “Red Wood” paper is a really nice shade of “real” red. Once that sheet had caught my eye most of the coordinating papers fell into my basket too. I had some snowy day photos in my “to scrap” pile so I set to work. This is when I hit upon a dilemma I come across now and again. I have 3 sons aged 7, 5 and 3. I am fairly methodical in the way I scrap photos of them. They each have their own albums as when they are older I hope that they will want to take them with them when they fly the nest. Ok, when they first leave home I am sure they will not give a hoot about the scrapbooks mum made! But hopefully when they are older with children of their own they might reconsider. When I scrap a photo of all 3 of them I have to decide which album to put it in. Occasionally I want it to go in all 3 albums so I end up scraping the same photo 3 times. That is what I ended up doing with these photos. The layouts are all very similar which speeds up the process and gives a little uniformity to the pages.

The first page is for my 7 year old. He is the ringleader – if he strikes a silly pose the other two are sure to copy. Thanks to this, the only snowy day photos I got of them all are silly ones! I cut out a line of chevrons from the "Blue Wood" and the "Red Wood" papers and layered the photos on top of the "Multi Chevron" paper using the patterns from both sides. The little camera details are cut from a sheet of Echo Park This & That “Instamatic” paper. I used some red American Craft Chipboard Thickers in "Apartment" along with some American Craft Remarks letter stickers for the title. I mounted the whole page onto coordinating red cardstock to finish it off.


The second page is for my 3 year old. I accidentally cut the chevron paper horizontally instead of vertically but it turned out to be a happy accident as I liked the arrow effect this gave. I stuck to the same title as it was the silly poses that I wanted to record.

The final page is for my 5 year old. I stuck to the arrow style strips as I preferred them and again I used the same title. The “handsome and charming” sticker came from a sheet of My Mind’s Eye Miss Caroline “Dilly Dally Best Stickers”.

So, I have 3 layouts from just 5 pieces of patterned paper, 2 colours of cardstock and some American Craft alphabets. There was also so much left over that I will back tomorrow with a fourth LO made with the same paper range. I'll also post some retreat photos, but to tide you over, here is my favourite!

By the way - how do those of you with several children arrange your albums? I’d love to know!