Melman Went To Scotland!

Thought I'd kill some time waiting for the baby by making some simple layouts of Melman!

Pencil Lines #230

Having tea at Scotland Street School, Glasgow.

One of October Afternoon's Thursday sketches.

Edinburgh Castle, Science Centre in Glasgow and meeting the statue of Greyfriars Bobby.

Felt quite productive making these, getting multiple photos scrapped in graphic style seems to be the way to go at the moment.

Creative Craft World Challenge

This time the Creative Craft World challenge was for black, white and silver. I thought that would count me out, as I didn't think I had any silver, but it's amazing what you can do with acrylic paint, glossy accents and silver Pixee Stix!

My mother at the Camera Obscura in 2006 and John in 2010. I didn't quite get John standing in the same place, but it's close enough!

Ex-yellow BoBunny chipboard swirls, jazzed up with paint, GA and Pink Paislee's Pixee Stix. I've never tried that technique before and now I want to sprinkle glitter on all my chipboard!

Project 12 - July

Once again I've had to take photos in less than perfect conditions, which is a shame, because I'm actually really happy with the way this Project 12 turned out. Best one in my album so far.

{click for full size}

I left some gaps for stuff I don't necessarily want plastered over the net, they're filled in now.

Paris Again and The South Bank

This first one I've made as a Companion Piece (oh yes, I watch too much Project Runway!) to Paris Monmartre
. There were quite a few offcuts that I wanted to use up rather than refile in my paper box and potentially forget all about.



I also used the negative image that I accidentally created when inking a doily for a layout that I seem to have forgotten to post. Anyway, I kept the inked paper as I figured I could use it at some point!

I can see now that it is massively missing journalling, so I may have to sort that out.




These are some of the elephants that we saw on the South Bank (we're in London now) after our trip to Macbeth at the Globe. The little elephants were on a paper of zoo creatures that I original bought because it has giraffes on, but now I've used the elephants and the lions!

Tatty 1 and Tatty 2

I'm trying to do more with layering, journalling and putting things together myself rather than following sketches all the time. I made this for the latest weekly challenge at UK Scrappers. I should have added a third colour to the background, it's missing some Shabby Shutters! It's just Mustard Seed and Scattered Straw



Tried to cluster some journalling boxes, first time of trying this.

Chopped up and coloured in one stamp to make a cluster. Never tried this either!

Twisted Sketches #55

A bit late in putting this one up, and I haven't done Twist #56 yet and #57 will be up today! Still, the twist was to use Flags, so I made some banners out of ribbon and came up with this:


The photos are all old shots of me, various quality, especially that one in the middle of my 7th Birthday!

Once again, I've used Jo's papers. Thanks Jo! These are all K&Co. paper snob in me wants to know what they're called and I think they may be Mira, but I'm not sure.

This Castle Hath a Pleasant Seat...

The UKS weekly challenge involved using a Shakespeare quote. Well, of course, it had to be Macbeth. What else is there?! So I went for this quote:


The picture is John writing his postcards in the cafe at Edinburgh Castle. This took ages (to me anyway!) over three hours. Just finished it in time to watch the England v Slovenia match in the World Cup.

Mojo Jar - June Dip

This month I had "Scraplift from a Teamie's Gallery" - so I lifted from Maria.


I decided to scrap the "wonderful" chandelier that adorned one of the ceilings at the Retreat back in March! The amazingly freaky thing.

Paper Snob?

I did these two layouts last month when I thought I'd see if I really was a Paper Snob! I made a layout using some cheap American Crafts products that I bought from the home store round the corner. Now, don't get me wrong, I do like a lot of what AC does, enjoy their Remarks stickers, cardstock, Thickers, Flair, blooms, buttons etc. On the other hand, I tend to not like their papers. Maybe it's the design, or the colours.

Until I bought this cheap kit I hadn't realised that AC seem to have two types of paper. Thicker, double-sided papers and much thinner single-sided papers. They also must do a slightly inferior type of alpha as well. I made this first layout mainly using the bits that came in the kit. There were some odd photo matts in bizarre shiny card, as well as the thin papers, and non-sticky alphas. I had to re-glue the title down twice because it wouldn't stick.

There was nothing wrong with the Flair or Remarks, but in the end, I wasn't happy with this layout. So I thought I would scraplift myself and use some papers that I love with all my Paper Snobby Heart - October Afternoon's Thrift Shop - and see if what I came up with was something I preferred.


To be honest. I'm not entirely sure which one I prefer. I think I like them both. I suspect I chose the wrong subject matter for the second one. When I saw that old London map paper, I couldn't wait to use it, but the only pictures I had of London were these few of Alex, which I took at the British Musuem (circled on the paper!) on my iPhone.

Of course, as it turns out, the second layout uses AC Thickers in both the title and in some of the chipboard embellishments!

I think I still am a Paper Snob, I do prefer working with thicker, double sided papers with gorgeous prints, but I know I can use the other sort as well.

Father's Day Challenge

Here's my entry for the lastest Creative Craft World Challenge!

Well, the biggest challenge was choosing which picture of my Father to use and trying to avoid doing yet another Road Trip layout as those albums are full to bursting! So I decided to pick one of the most recent. I took this last month on a trip to Duxford. Each year we go and stand in 'Farmer Bob's* Field' and take pictures of the planes.

This year the Parentals are going to be away during the Flying Legends display, so we went during the Spring Airshow instead. Different sorts of planes than the ones we usually see, no Corsair and more modern fast things.

Here is Daddy, taking pictures:


and here's a close up of the plane. I think it's Sally B, but I might be wrong:


As you can see, I've chosen to do this Challenge as an 8.5x11.

EDIT: I won!

*no idea if his name is really Bob, but it's somethig to call him!

Road Trip... again!

Last week's challenge at UKS. I did get it done on time, I just didn't upload it to my Blog on time.

Layouts for No Reason

I do keep making layouts for challenges and never seem to make them just for myself. The Paperclipping Roundtable seems to think that this can sometimes be bad for your personal creativity, so I've made up a few that aren't sketch based. I'm also loving 8.5 x 11 as a size at the moment, not that I have any albums of this size, I just like the rectangularliness of it.

This first one is Melman at Risby Barns in April. John took the shot of me standing by this giraffe print, Puppet on hand, looking silly. Not one person looked as us and the cafe was packed. Oh well, so much for being embarrassed.


I bought a piece of Three Bugs paper on purpose as it had giraffe and lion strips on it. I've already used the Lion strips. I took some elephant pictures earlier this month, so now I have to keep hold of the elephant strips! First use of my new giraffe stamp.

This next one is another of my old pictures from the hot air ballooning days. This was taken on a trip to France, we'd landed in Farmer Lambert's field and they invited us it for coffee and a drink (it was about 10am, time for a Mirabel).


I was penpals with the girl in green for a while. The farmer kept his guns in the downstairs toilet and the fly papers were so full of flies that they were fighting to get a leg on. Good fun had by all. :)

Twisted Sketches #49

This week the Twist is "colour", here's my take:


This is Tiddles. He was one of the cats that lived next-door-but-one when I was little. His real name was Linus, but I wanted to call him Tiddles.

One day my parents told me that Tiddles had moved house and gone to live at an old people's home... of course, that's not what had happened to Tiddles. :(

Sketchy Thursdays & The Mill Pond

The local cheapy shop is suddenly stocking a whole bunch of American Crafts products and on Saturday I bought myself one of their albums that came with some of the Travel range. This is one of the lines that I bought pre-Road Trip so I'd be ready to scrap it when I came home. I'd actually run out of it, although I'm not the biggest fan of AC papers, so I thought some more wouldn't hurt.

Of course, it's the cheapy end of their ranges and is single sided and thinner than the papers I originally bought. This makes me want to pop them away and ignore them! So I've attacked them straight away and done a couple of layouts from them using as -yet-unscrapped Road Trip photos.

This first one is for Sketchy Thursdays 5.6 - The Scenic Route.

Valley of Fire State Park, Daddy and the beautiful hire car!

I then went right outside the box with this one for The Mill Pond's latest Write It Challenge. The task was to incorporate your title within your journaling and try something different with your title and or journaling that you personally have not tried before. Well, I've certainly done that! I've never done such a large title and I've certainly not stamped and cut out such a lot for a title before either. My journalling is between the lines of the title:

I'm not happy with the large balloon, but I'd stuck it down before I realised that I should have folded a piece of paper and just done half a balloon (like paper dolls). I rectified that for the tiny balloons and you can see the lines up their middles! I do enjoy making that grass, although it is time consuming.

A close up so you can see the journalling / title / grass and balloon.

I'm not sure the journalling is visible in the picture, but the gist of the story... Mark is a friend of my Dad's and we knew he'd be at Albuquerque for the Balloon Fiesta. We hadn't arranged to meet up, but after the mass ascension on the second day we were there he just found us on the field! It's a BIG place and it was amazing how he managed it. A little bit of home in the middle of America.

Official 2008 Balloon Fiesta Gallery.

EDIT: I won!

Sketchy Thursdays 4.29

Getting at the last minute with this one, although I made it last week. Forgot all about it in my layout tidying session and filed it away. These are a couple of the pictures my father took as slides way back in my childhood and as recently had made up into digital copies so they can be printed off as 'normal' photos.


This layout proves that there was a time when I was able to run races, win them and wear leotards. Those days, however, are looong gone!

Have started using Glossy Accents more now that I'm figuring out how to use. There's a pleat in the strip across the bottom and I've GA'd the flower element and stuck it on for height. Should've taken a close up of it as it looks a lot better in real life.

Twisted Sketches #46 & Gutter Girlz #36

I doubled up with this layout. It's partly Twisted #46 and partly Gutter Girlz #36. I started it with the Twist of "touch":

You see, I'm being touched by Max Grodenchik who plays Rom in Deep Space Nine. Eventually the character of Rom becomes Grand Nagus of Ferenginar and everyone knows that the Ferengi are motivated by profit. Max wrote something on the photo about profit, so I can only hope that the touch of the Grand Nagus does, indeed, help me to gain profit. Even though I'm not only a small-lobed female, but also a hew-man...

It was then that I realised that actually there was my Gutter Girlz entry - I'm a Geek and it's no secret, everyone knows and I don't care that they know it!

Sketchy Thursdays 4.15

This week was a layout for Sketchy Thursdays and for Who's That Girl. You should be able to read from the picture what my Right Now points are!


I've come to realise that I don't have many storage spaces for my 12x12s so I've decided to make a set of 8x8s as I actually have a spare album for them! Besides, I'm still having a good time stroking my October Afternoon Thrift Shop (yum yum)

Obviously, however, I'm still taking pictures of my layouts perched on the radiator.

Mother & The Map

Just something I did for fun this weekend. I've been gazing at this sheet of chipboard for months and not used it. Then I thought I should just use up all the flowers in one go on a layout without any patterned papers. This is the result.

My mother, supposedly studying a map, when, in fact, she's standing guard so that walkers don't come wandering over while my Dad is peeing behind a hedge...

The chipboard was part of a kit and I can't remember what company made them.

October Afternoon - Cherry Hill

Obviously I also managed to overlook the posting of all my Cherry Hill layouts. I only noticed that today while I was stroking my shiny new OA: Thrift Shop....yum...

Easter trip to the Dorset coast in 2009 to go fossil hunting.

John and I at Forde Abbey (also Easter 2009). I'm not totally happy with this pic as I'm squinting into the sun!

The title is a line from a Polly Scattergood song.

The Winter Garden at Anglesey Abbey a few years ago.

Erm... somewhere I was taken with my parents that I can't remember... there were sheep and peacocks...

The Grand Hotel in Brighton where we stayed during a work retreat in 2006.

Gutter Girlz

This is my first time submitting to this challenge site and it looks like fun! I've been wanting to scrap this for a long time, well, not the picture, but the quote. It was such a memorable part of our Road Trip that I knew I'd have to eventually, but scrapbooking has always come across as so sweet and innocent that I wasn't sure I really should be using the F-Word... *horrors*!

Of course, that's crazy. Scrapping is a personal experience. I could have created this layout, put it in my album and never shared it online. Then my Teamie Sue posted the link to the Gutter Girlz and I realised that actually I can scrap what I please and can even show it off!

So, here's my entry for Prompt #35. I've used the Prompt - Road Trip, and the Product - a Map. I've not used the song as I don't know it and it won't play from the GG website here in the UK.


Let me point out that my father doesn't swear, which is why him saying this was so funny.

We'd travelled from Vegas (you know, crowded, buildings, lights) and were on the way to Mesquite. This involved going through a large expanse of nothing. Big skies, endless desert, hills that were pretty much mountains and long straight stretches of freeway. There'd been an hour or so of this when my Dad comes out with his now-classic "There's fuck-all here!"

To be honest, I think he was bit worried that we'd be stuck for two weeks looking at nothing!

Of course, we then detoured through the Valley of Fire State Park and that was that. There isn't fuck-all there after all, you just need to learn to appreciate the desert for its beauty.


The photo is actually Navajo Bridge, so I've journalled about that rather than about the Valley of Fire, but it symbolises big skies, desert, etc and shows that there are things to be seen in the desert after all.

It wasnt until after I finished this layout that I realised that I have blatantly scraplifted Gutter Girl Susan! I must have seen it, registered it and forgotten all about it. Sorry about that, Susan. :(