Happy Holiday

Seeing Ann's mini album in the ATDML gallary reminded me of a little album I started at Christmas and finished at Ann's crop in February.  I had purchased a pack of Simple Stories Daily Grind as a Christmas present to myself - well how else does a girl get exactly what she wants? I then decided to make an interactive mini album with photographs of our summer holiday.

I wanted to make a small album that I could get plenty of photos in and to try a few interactive techniques.

It has a double slider on the front page - pulling the top card makes the bottom one pop out also!

 

 Lots of pages with pockets of various shapes and sizes for my photographs

A double centre page.

And finally a little flip book with four pages for a series of photos of Gracia and Josh at the beach.

 

So there we are - a little 6 x 4 mini album that has a total of  28 photos in!  A perfect reminder of a perfect holiday.

Messy Play!

I love all the mixed media pages that are about at the moment but as much as I love them I struggle to get too messy.  Last year, I took a huge leap out of my comfort zone and had a go at a mixed media page - I did enjoy the process and also liked the result.

I thought I would have another go and as I had some white paint and some Glimmer Mists to hand decided to limit myself to these.  If the truth be told, I was tired and didn't want to go hunting through my stash for other potential messy items.

I started by painting the white paint onto a piece of black card with a 1 inch paintbrush.  I then watered some of the paint down and sprayed this over the unpainted area. 

Once that was dried I used pink and blue glimmer mists - getting quite a lot on my hands!

This needed to dry before I could continue so I took the opportunity to have a good soak in the bath to remove any evidence of ink on my hands.

The next day I layered patterned paper, journaling blocks, stickers and chipboard elements onto my page with my photos and the page was finished.

I think I am a controlled mixed media scrapbooker but who knows - this time last year I would have laughed if you had told me I would enjoy messy play so maybe this time next year I will be getting very messy - I do doubt it but you never know!

Give It A Punch!

For the February DT I was sent some Simple Stories papers and embellishments.  I absolutely love anything from any of the Simple Stories ranges and this month had Say Cheese and The Daily Grind to work with.   

As I do every month, I ‘pinched’ several photos from my daughter’s Facebook page to use at my crop and really liked this one of her with two of her medic friends.  Unfortunately, the title is not quite right as one of the gang is missing, Marta had gone back to Portugal, earlier than planned, as she was unwell.  I loved that they all decided to go out for tea and cake before they returned to their respective homes for Christmas and that they all wore their Christmas jumpers.  

 

Now, I always take a bucket filled with punches to my crops and nearly always bring them home again unused, this month I was determined that I would use them! I knew I had the large snowflake cut outs and gingerbread men buttons to use on the page but was at a loss as to what else to do.  I then thought – ‘get those punches out’ so I did and made a swag of flowers for the bottom of the photo.  I didn’t feel that the page had come together very well as the large snowflakes seemed at odds with the flowers.  I took it home, still unsure what to do and the next morning as I was putting my punches back in their storage box realised that I had a snowflake one.  I punched out some smaller snowflakes from white paper, dotted them in the flower swag and was very happy with the result as the extra little ‘pops’ of white brought everything together.

So are you up for a little challenge – use your punches this month and post onto our Facebook group to show what you have done.