Black and white wedding photos are cool!!

Hi all! here's some pages I have done lately! - mostly this week but the innocence one is a bit older.




I had a mini scrap camp with Shel on Anzac day this past week - 24 hours of scrapping and taking over my lounge room. She has been working a wedding album for our cousin Lisa and she gave me some photos that she wasn't going to use... so here is a page for the Heidi Swapp Scrapjack that I really love. I drew white lines over the edge of the photo like Heidi sews and it looks so cool!
This page of baby CJ and how he got his name was for Pencillines sketch 28. I don't love it - it is a bit too straight and boring for me, but it is ok.

busy busy busy

I have been busy applying for jobs (that must be about over 10 now - but that doesn't seem like so many over 3 months!) and scrapping whenever I can. I was picked as the random winner for the no. 8 wired dare and then got the email that I was going to be published (must send that page off tomorrow!!) and then I opened up the Blue Bazaar newsletter and found one of my pages as the spotlight layout right at the top!!! and so it feels like I am getting somewhere.

Not sure where... but somewhere for sure! I did a couple of pages to apply to go on the design team for the new Aussie sketch blog and since everything else is going so well - maybe this will too! I have not done too many sketches but it was cool. Deciding which bits to keep and which bits to ignore and which extra bits to add . Here is the first one I did: Farmgirl. I wanted to have the contrast of pretty and functional - thus the flowers and the screw brads. I really like how the yellow came out when i heavily sanded the edges of the photos. It is always a surprise when you do it!! It is a pretty busy page with 5 photos but I think I like it.

then the next sketch was pretty plain, I thought and very controlled... too straight for my current style. So I changed the border to a parallelogram (I know that is spelt wrong but I don't know what is right!! I really like the circle of dots on the flowers. Ali Edwards does those alot, although I am sure she has a stamp and didn't do it by drawing around a lid and then doing the dots by hand like I did!! The colours so didn't scan properly - the frame was a dark maroon and the flowers quite orange but they look almost the same here!then the last item was to send a page of your own and the sketch of it. I chose a page I had done recently - as a Layout comp on SBBD, and the did up the sketch of it afterwards. This page has been really well received on the gallery and Shel helped me decide which one to use.

So heres hoping! I think it would be really fun to be on a design team. and since I am churning out between 4 and 8 pages a week these days, I reckon I could handle the pressure!

I have probably done a lot of pages that I haven't put on here lately - I have been splitting them between SBBD and Blue Bazaar and only adding a page or two each day or few days. I am still doing all the challenges and comps I can find and especially love the scrapjacked ones! It was definitely Adrienne Looman who has inspired my latest development although I looked at her album on 2peas again the other day and my work isn't really that much like hers, but it was seeing her work and trying to 'jack' it that opened me up to new things. I now use a white background alot, have things grouped together instead of spread apart, do a lot of penning - outlines and doodle/drawing of my own design. I also use mixed alphabets a lot - a different font for each word usually. that didn't come from Adrienne I don't think. I also seem to be doing a lot of monochromatic colour schemes. I seem to have to push myself to add more colours! Then occasionally I go back to something more like my older stuff and I don't like it as much.. See here are a few:

This one was for a dare - add a little sparkle , and the PLAY and other dark looking bits area actually bright silver glitter sprinkled onto glue... but you can't tell here!this is one of my favourites - an absolute favourite photo of Nelz and a beautiful paper for the background. I got it cheap because I think it is a deleted line.. I can't believe they would delete the whole line!!! it is just gorgeous!And wo! doesn't this one stand out after all those white and light backgrounds. I like thins , but was not entirely happy with the title and journalling. I think that let it down.Oh well I guess I should go to bed... and wonder if I will get any of the jobs I have applied for!!!

Guess what!!

I'm Gonna be published!!!

I wanted to make the font huge and flashing... but didn't know how and the computor I'm on doesn't even let me have normal formatting options!!!

but I am soooooooooo excited!!!

by the way it is the water one that I have posted before and the mag is scrapbooking memories.

Go on!! tell me how cool I am!

Have I changed?

I have been doing a lot of scrapbooking over the last few weeks and I think I have noticed a change. Participating in challenges and competitions has pushed me and I ahve discovered new ways and new approaches and I think i have adapted my style. I am definitely faster! I will often do 5 pages in a day if I get to focus on that all day, which is way more than I ever did before. Here is my gallery on Scrapbooking by Design. I have been so productive that I have felt a bit like I am showing off or ovewhelming them by putting everything on there.

But I love to get feedback about my art, so i keep doing it. I have experimented a little with a couple of other gallery/forums - kiwiscraps and blue bazaar . When you post a picture it only stays visible on the recently posted section while it is the 8 - 16 or 20 latest to be loaded. People will see these when they first log in, but once it is off that page, they are not so easily found... there fore a site with fewer members will mean your things will stay on that section longer, and busier one like blue bazaar with hundreds of members will mean that they will move off that section fairly quickly. So in that sense SBBD is better because there are only - I can't remember - 30 odd members. but then fewer people will look at the pictures.

Then there is the 'personal album' issue. It has not been easy to figure out how to organise on each site. SBBD was probably the easiest and you could move your pictures into albums after they had been posted (seems to be impossible on blue bazaar and kiwiscraps) but then the numbers (views etc) appear to be split between the 2 'copies' of the pic - one being in the album and one in the main place. I don't know about everyone else but i wan't to know how many times my pages have been viewed compared to each other, and to see which ones are the most popular. This isn't possible when the numbers are split.

On Blue Bazaar it isn't possible to view all of your pages at once unless they are in your private album and then people can't easily find them. That is no good.

Then there is comments - Kiwiscraps don't seem to have comments on the pics at all. this is a negative I think.

at the moment SBBD is my fave but that is mostly because I am most familiar with it... I think I will keep adding a page or two to BB each day and see how that goes. I like the style and standard of pages there the most.

OH well... how about some pages?

I did this one for the NZ dares blog - secrets. I love this page - used an idea from a magazine that I have wanted to lift for a while and I have been trying to use buttons for weeks!It refers to my mental health!!! no I'm not crazy, but sometimes it feels like it! and I have been struggling lately while trying to sort out how I feel about work - I get so confused sometimes that I feel like I lose who I am. but as the page says - I always get found again!!

I did this one along the lines of the another one I did recently - beauty - that I really liked... this one of cody has the same sort of title, the same curly doodles and the same 'one-colour-ness'. I have done a lot with my own doodles lately - since I did the Adrienne Looman jack. My style has really developed since that challenge!

This blue one of caylah was based on the water one I did, that has had a huge response on the SBBD gallery. I wonder if this will get the same sort of responce.

Another theme that has come through is 'real' journalling - real stories and deep feelings. I was really pleased with this one 'whats up ahead dad'. When I found this cool picture I wanted to write what Shaun might have said if he knew the future and could talk about it candidly at this point in time.

I also did these ones - and one about the times I considered separation many years ago and a couple that I can't remember right now.

Re-do s!

I had the hugest compliment the other day - Jo Kneller (Design team member at SCrapbooking by Design) chose one of my pages as her first 'scrap of the day' it was my water one - one that has had huge beedback on Scrapbooking by Design gallery. ....Thanks so much Jo!!

ANYWAY, when I finally went to check it out I saw that Jo is doing a challenge on SBBD about redoing old layouts.... and I was sure that I had written about this but looked back and either I never did, or I am losing my mind. Either way here are a couple of examples of my redos:

the original was... aaah not one of my favourites. I had wanted to include the fabric I had made the dress out of but that hadn't gone so well. and I was experimenting with mixed stamps for the journalling. never did like the overall.


but I did like the photos - particularly the oval ones, and they were al matted and good. So I UNDU-ed them and used the photos as they were, matted as they were, just adjusted the layout added some chinese coins and rubons, cut the fabric into smaller squares and ... Ta-da! I love the way it looks now!
Another one was this one of alyssa - same mixed stamp disaster but the rest I kind of liked.

I reused most of the main elements but had to replace two background papers - I was disappointed that I didn't have any of those left as they were both favourites. but I was ok with the replacements I eventually scraped up. I ended up giving it an actual title and a bit of journalling:
What makes a person photogenic? I don't know - a certain confidence that allows them to relax even in the shadow of a glaring lens - maybe. Perhaps it is early exposure to the camera or a theatrical personality at heart. All I know is that some people have it and others just don't.

I think the fibres still age the layout as a whole but i like it.