Cartoon crazy

Hi everyone, Tracie here!

I have always loved cartoons, I find it fascinating how an artist can take an image of someone, simplify it and yet at the same time exaggerate it to create their likeness. It's a talent I have always both admired and envied.

I wanted to bring something of that style into my layouts.

For my first page I wanted to create a simple 'story board' - unfortunately the photos I'd chosen, that I'd been meaning to scrap for a long time, didn't really tell much of a story. I was able to get around this by using some of the Echo Park element stickers, to note key points.

It has often been remarked upon that I may have a bit of a potteries accent, and this is what this second layout focuses on.

We have a regular cartoon strip in our local paper (The Sentinel)  by the hugely talented cartoonist Dave Follows, which is written entirely in the Potteries dialect. I shamelessly copied one of these to use on my layout leaving the heads of the characters off so I could replace them with photos of me and my other half!

and finally, for my last layout, I handcut a simple mask to recreate the planet in the photograph, I then punched out a few stars, and with the simple addition of some October afternoon tidbits, my layout was complete!

If you've got any cartoon layouts you'd like to share with us, we'd love to see them!

Going loopy

Hi ladies, Tracie here! Hope you've all had a lovely Christmas and are settling back into normality again now?

When I came to do this month's blog post I couldn't shake off the Christmas crafting I'd been doing and it made it's way into my layouts!
After making several of those ribbon trees that are dotted all over the net, I was folding ribbon in my sleep! so it didn't come as a great surprise that when I put them aside to do some scrapbooking, my ribbon turned into paper and I was busy making loops to fit my page!

For my first layout I wanted to create a border between the journalling and the photo to fit in with my theme of being 'next door' - the gorgeous Basic grey range Serenade worked beautifully with the old photo of my lovely nan

I had lots of little strips of paper left after finishing this one so I just folded them to the reverse side (the joys of double-sided papers!) and used them up on my second layout as 'ribbons' for my kite.

I thought you might all be fed up of Christmas and winter layouts now, so decided to bring a little sunshine back by scrapping a summer photo! Which reminds me, I really must apologise for the dismal qaulity of the photos, but someone appears to have stolen the daylight in these parts!!

Well, that's it from me for now, apart from to wish you all a very happy new year!

I used the following products:
Basic grey serenade
Echo park
Queen and co tape

Embellishing your Chistmas!

If you're as unorganised as me, it's that time of year when any spare cash is being plunged into (starting!!) your Christmas shopping, and the odd festive scrapbooking treat for yourself may well be pushed to the back burner. With that in mind, I decided this month to choose just a few brand new select seasonal embellishments that I could easily mix in with paper and other bits already in my stash, so as not to break my budget and to help me feel good with a bit of stash busting.

I plumped for the gorgeous Sleigh Ride vellum embellishments from Crate, a star mask and some tin badges from Studio Calico....and then, as you can see from the picture below, ever a slave to my patterned paper addiction, I crumbled when I saw the sweet "Rudolph" paper in the Crate collection!

The first page I made with my goodies records a recent "Santa Jog" my fiance and I took part in for the British Heart Foundation. I started my love-hate relationship with running earlier this year when I embarked on the C25k programme, and although I still can't profess to being able to run 5k yet, I really have developed by running ability more than I thought I ever would and it has helped me to loose 24lbs so far. My commitment to the programme does dip when I find it challenging - so my "darling" other half entered my into the Santa Jog without me knowing as a way to step up training efforts!

Click on the picture for a larger image

I began by using the rear of the Rudolph paper as my base - I loved the geometric tree pattern in pale ice blue. Wanting to get those cute deers in on the action - I popped a slice along the bottom of my page. I love that scrapping in A4 allows me to use a patterned paper as my base sheet and still have some left over - especially when they are gorgeous double sided designs like this.

I layered lots of the vellum tags on top of each other to create an area where my title would go - I loved that their translucent nature allowed the patterns to still subtly show through. The map tag was a must for my running themed page! For my title itself, I used some of the lovely letter stickers from the Echo Park Photo Freedom sticker sheet I used last month (read the blog post here). I created the date using a December sticker from the same sheet, and the one of the vellum numbers that are in the pack from Crate. 

You may notice a little silver star peeping out from behind the photo. I had a go at using the star mask and sweeping some Liquid Pearls through it. It was a little hit and miss; if you pulled the mask of too soon the pearls would pool into a blob, and if you left it on too long, the pearls would pull away with the mask and take a little of the paper with it too. But it was fun to try something a little different. I simply taped the mask into place, squeezed a little Liquid Pearls through each hole, and then swiped over it with an old store card.

 I topped each up as needed until the Liquid Pearls was flush with the top of the mask.

Underneath my picture I popped a row of punched hearts to represent the charity that organised the event. I punched them from some Kraft, but felt they needed something a little extra. So I took a scrap of card, and covered it with some washi tape. I added the strips at an angle as I wanted the striped to be reminiscent of candy canes.

After trimming the rough edge so it would fit, I popped it through the same heart punch.

This gave me a strip of candy-cane striped hearts. I cut a few free from the chain with a small scissorsand added them at random to my original strip of Kraft hearts.

 

The final touch to the page was adding some more of the badges to the corner of the page. I used some of the vellum numbers as decorative frames for them - they were the perfect size for the job!

For my second page, I managed to avoid patterned paper completely - a rare thing for me! I decided to use a piece of the delicious new dark Kraft for my base, and the star mask with some white Mister Hueys to create a background. I absolutely love filling the house with candles at this time of year, and wanted to record some of those little pockets of glowing light.

With this in mind, and looking at the "fading" pattern on the mask, where there is a heavy concentration of stars at the bottom and then fading away towards the top; I decided that I would pivot the mask around a point at the centre of the page, to create a pattern that appeared to be "glowing" right from the middle:

I wasn't too concerned about the overlapping marks you can see in the middle - I had three photos and I knew I was going to put them in a triangle formation (like a Christmas tree!) right in the middle so this would be covered. The important thing for me was to create an effect of the stars radiating towards the four corners.

Similarly, I wasn't worried about the untidy misting at edges where the mask hadn't covered (or the punched "nibble" out of the top left corner!), I always have a border to my pages and knew I could cover this up with that. However, this time, rather than mounting my page onto a sheet of card stock for this, I decided to make a border with some lovely wide washi tape. I created neat mitred edges by folding back the tape as you can see in the picture below, making a firm crease as a cutting guide, and then trimming the excess away with a scissors.

With my base completed, I was ready to start on the pretty bits! Here's my finished page:

 For my title, I altered the "Let it Snow"vellum tag to "Glow" using some of the stickers on the second Echo Park Photo Freedom stickers sheet I used in November. I kept the embellishment simple, allowing the photos and the misted background to be the focal point.

A few dotted pearls and wooden stars added a small, festive finishing touch.

Finally, for a very quick make, I whipped up a tag for a special friend:

I misted a scrap of kraft card using the star mask. The concentrated band of colour at the bottom of the tag was card below the edge of the mask that wasn't covered - I loved the contrast between the block of colour and the star pattern so decided to include it when I cut my tag shape, rather than trim it away. A quick strip of washi tape, a tin badge and wooden stars, and hey presto - a hand made tag in minutes.

 

As mentioned by Jen in her post, we can't at present share direct product links with you like we usually do due to the exciting happenings over at the shop! If you haven't already checked out the brand new and totally revamped website at its temporary address - go now!!!

That just leaves me to wish you a very merry Christmas from me, and a happy New Year!

See you in January 2013 xxx

Freedom Scrapping!

I'll admit I am not one to jump on a bandwagon of any kind, and it can take me a while to get my head around any current trends in all aspects of my life - I think there's a little part of me deep inside that like to be different; whether it's a form of rebellion or pure stubbornness I don't know!

One such scrapbooking trend that has passed me by is the week by week/month by month multi-sized scrapping in a single, pocketed protector. I think it looks absolutely fabulous and I love the work I see by all the talented scrapbookers out there, and the idea of having a detailed photographic account of daily life is so cool for the future - but it's just not for me at the moment. I scrapbook in a nature that I can only affectionately refer to as "shambolically" ( I scrap whatever I fancy whenever inspiration grabs me, it could be an old photo of a special occasion from when I was a child, or a mobile shot that I snapped the day before) which perfectly suits the limited time I have to enjoy my hobby. And to paraphrase a famous scrapbooker from across the pond, I'm ok with that. I just go with it.

Unfortunately for me though, sitting back from this trend does mean that I'm less inclined to look at products which are designed with this style of memory preservation in mind, as I pressume they won't work with "what I do".........so it's just as well that, being an Echo Park fan, I decided to check out their brand new Photo Freedom range, and I was really excited by what I saw! The 12x12 sheets are primarily intended for multi-sized scrapping projects, with their designs split into journaling cards that are perfectly sized for that method. But I was drawn to the beautiful colours and patterns of two of the releases, and we all know I can't refuse a nice bit of patterned paper, so I snapped some up and set about working with them - A4 style!

Here's is my first page, using products from the "Today's Story" release:

Using a piece of grey chevron paper as my base (don't forget you can find links to all the products in the shop at the end of the post!),  I set about utilising a single sheet from the range to provide all the other colour and pattern I needed.

First, the bright, geometric "Love" journaling card made the perfect anchor for my design to flow from, and with a sticker from the amazing value-for-money matching Elements Sheet (the 12x12 sheets are absolutely jam packed with really useful stickers and elements and costs just £2.99!!) layered on top, provided a title:

Next, I used a selection of other journaling cards from the same sheet to cut pretty hexagons to use as a mat for my photo. I added interest to them by cutting away/adding heart shapes to them, and adding a doodled border to give them all a uniform feel.

A further journaling card from the sheet, decorated with ampersands, provided a perfect base for a note of who was in the pic and a little embellishment cluster.

The very generous Element sheet was laden with stickers that I found hard to choose from - I have loads left, including tags, arrows and alphas that are super useable and I'm looking forward to popping them on future pages. You can see here how I made a little cluster at the top of my page using a few:

and here how a couple were the perfect match for each other to add a bit of interest to what was just a random silly photo:

For my second page - I decided to see how far I could push the Elements stickers from the "Happy Moments" range.....would I, a patterned paper addict, be able to create a page I loved using mainly stickers?!

This time a sheet from Lily Bee's Persnickety formed my base, and a journaling card from the "Moments" 12x12 sheet helped form my title, along with some of the cute alphas from the stickers sheet.

I used lots of stickers to form my compulsory embellishment cluster - pretty border stickers were chopped down to size in place of patterned paper, and given the doodling treatment before being adorned with photo corners, arrows, starburst stickers layered together to make a flower, and a couple of washi flags!

To the right, more stickers from the sheet provided a date, and some of the fab speech bubble stickers made ideal spots for my journaling.

I popped a pretty frame sticker in the bottom corner of my page, and filled it with more from the sheet, layering them with 3D foam to add a bit of depth and interest.

Again, I used doodling around my page and around the elements to bring them all together.

I have lots of stash left over after making these two pages - I was really surprised and pleased at how far the supplies went, even when used in a "traditional scrapbooking" manner. The colours and patterns of designs also work easily with other things I already own so I'll look forward to mixing these in on future projects. Both pages also came together really quickly too by my usual standards; and even limiting myself to just one 12x12 sheet and the elements stickers from each range still gave me plenty of scope to create a page without wasting time scrabbling around for extra supplies.

So, whether you're a Project Lifer, a Document 2012er or an "old fashioned" scrapper like myself - be sure to check out the Photo Freedom ranges and see how they could be incorporated into the way you preserve your memories :)

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