Retreat - Road Trip

Oh yes, I'm STILL scrapping Road Trip 2008! I keep finding parts of the trip that I've not covered and need to be in the album(s).

Jerome was one of those places that we never intended to visit, but we needed a post office and this was where we ended up. We hadn't researched the place before we went, so we didn't know it was "America's Most Vertical City" and the "Largest Ghost Town in America"! One of the places we put on our (rather long) list of places to be revisited.



Leaving the Wigwam Motel after a night listening to the trains chuffing loudly by.

The tears were actually accidental. I tore the paper a few times when distressing the edges, so I used that layering technique to fix it and I'm quite pleased with it.

The last picnic before heading back to Las Vegas and the flight home.

Vegas Baby!

My Teamie Sue gave me this piece of paper as part of our 12 Days swap. I've been looking at it and stroking it for ages, last week I decided to do something with it. Rather happy with how far one piece of paper can go.

Meteor Crater

Made use of a discount code last week and bought myself some boy-themed BoBunny, Blast Off! Figured it won't hurt to have some boy papers, even if the boy in question is now a couple of days overdue and starting to make me uncomfy.

The papers came really quickly and they're stunning. I wanted to cut into them straight away, but I was a little lacking in space related pictures. However, good old trusty Road Trip 2008 helped me out with these photos from Meteor Crater.

Had a quick play with my new alcohol inks to make a spacey nebula-like mat for my photo and I took the journalling directly from my Road Trip diary.

New Tim Papers

I'm weak-willed when it comes to stash offers, so when I saw an offer for two Tim Holtz paper stashes that came with a set of Salvage Stickers and a Distress Ink in a colour I don't have (Tea Dye), I had to do it. Really I should be saving for Frankie and not spending baby money on stash, but paper keeps, right?

At least I cut right into them rather than stroking them for so long that I didn't get a chance to use them this side of the Impending Arrival.


This one is Retro Grunge. I'm not sure about the large prints on them, but the smaller versions are very usable and the backs are in nice plain (distressed) colours, so I will probably end up using the backs more than the fronts. I do need a decent journalling pen though, none of mine really show up or work well on this shinier type of paper.

Had great fun inking the tag!

The City of Truro at the National Railway Musuem in York. This is Crowded Attic and even features a little steam train on one of the papers, so that had to be included. This is my favourite of the two ranges, but I'll get plenty of use out of both.

Retreat Layouts 3

Oh yes, even more Road Trip! Although, to be fair, as the plan was to use up scraps and most of my scraps are Road Trip related, it's hardly a surprise.

This time I'm using up MME - Breaking Free.

The extremely windy Elephant Butte! Managed to use the planned butons this time... and Sue's mini alphas. Thank you Sue. :)

Pima. The tour guide made us have this photo taken.

Retreat Layouts 2

My next pre-prepped kit was MME - Round and Round to get some more of my never-ending supply of Road Trip pictures scrapped.


A bit basic, but does the job. I'd planned all sorts of things with buttons before I came away and then totally went off the idea. All the buttons returned home with me!

This was an attempt to include some tourist information leaflets. I'd dragged so many home from America only to leave them in a folder and never look at them. Again, this is a bit on the basic side, but my excuse is that I just couldn't sit fussing over it for too long before having to get up and sit on the recliner in the sitting room! In fact, I did the stitching in there. Annoying puffy feet.

All the final pieces of Round and Round gathered together and plopped down! I'm pretty fond of this one and I even did some fiddly cutting out.

My Mojo Came Back!!!

Over the past few days I've been doing layouts just for the hell of sticking bits of paper to other bits of paper. Never mind contest entries or UKS weekly challenges, just cos I want to. It's been months since I've felt this inspired and, quite frankly, I'd better enjoy it while I can, April 12th isn't all that far away. Eeek!!


Holbrook, AZ. The Cozy Cone... I mean the Wigwam Motel, lit up by neon at night. I used a sketch from the Page Maps Book for this one.

My father watching the birds at the Welches Dam RSPB reserve back in July last year.

Massive Weekly Challenge Catch-Up!

I did get all these done on time, but my lack of mojo and general enthusiasm has meant me not taking the pictures in time and getting them loaded onto UKS. So here are a bunch of layouts for weekly challenges taken yesterday in rather dodgy light!


Baby Blue / 3 of Something / Bunting / Celebration
Last Christmas with both sets of Parentals.


Ice cream colours / Change / Stripes / Journalling
Me as a child. I was able to use up a lot of bits of Crate Paper - Blue Hill that I've had lying around for ages.


Guilty Pleasure / Chocolate Brown / Circle
John and I indulging in morning tea at Little Bettys in York. I saved one of the doily things that go under tea cups to catch the drips - gotta love emphemera. Also managed to use one of the beautiful Lakeland doilies that I've been stroking for a while.

Different Fonts / Inspired by Nature /Make an Embellishment
Used some of the skeleton leaves that Daddy found for me at a boot sale. :)


Panorama / Stamping / Altered Lettering
This one is actually current! Grand Canyon from North Rim. Stamped journalling boxes and painted thickers.

Up Up and Away!

Haven't touched anything but the Kaisercraft for days! Here are the latest three - you need to click to enlarge:

The Breitling Wing Walkers do their wing walking at Duxford before the Flying Legends fly past. It all looked like great fun until you realise that they have to climb off the wings and back into the planes in mid-flight!

One of the balloons at Albuquerque. I took this one especially because of its patchwork look and thought it would be a fun one to scrap. It's taken me almost two years to get round to scrapping it! Used my Martha Stewart butterfly for the first time and adapted an idea from the Studio Calico blog. They suggested creating faux washi tape using the material tape you get from the pharmacy, I thought I'd give it a go by stamping onto masking tape. Seems to work!

Another balloon from Albuquerque. For more information on the Zia of New Mexico click here.

Very bizarrely all the photos on the layouts have brightened after I took their pictures! On the layouts the colours in the photos are much more muted as I used the desaturation technique on them. Running them through Picasa to sharpen them up seems to have brightened them up as well...

Albuquerque

One of the latest Kaisercraft lines is Up, Up & Away. Well, rather obvious that I'd have to have some of it, plenty of uses for balloony papers. I bought the clear stamps as well, they feature three balloons and a nice journalling ticket. Plenty of practical uses and hardly an indulgence!

Used Merly Impressions for the first time as they specialise in Kaisercraft and WOW! Awesome service. So quick, emails to let you know they've dispatched, such a simple thing and yet many companies don't do that. The package was parcelled perfectly as well, attention to detail! Not to mention her sending three of the Kaisercraft magazines as well. Such fun to browse through and get inspiration from.

This was my first time using Kaisercraft paper as well, but I can safely say that I'll be back to Kaisercraft AND Merly Impressions in the future.

One of the tips in the magazine was to desaturate photos so that they match the earthier tones of this collection. So I did. Here's a layout with an ex-bright photo that has been desaturated. It looks so much better like this.

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.

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!

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. :(

Twisted Sketches #38

The Twist this week was for "stripes", which I've done. I'm not happy with the way this came out. I wasn't fond of the huge expanses of patterned paper, so I doodled some swirls on in gold pen. Of course, you can't even see it in the picture and it's not very clear in real life either!


The picture is yet another from Road Trip 08 (they keep coming!). This is the cabin in the woods, the nice-on-paper Jacob Lake.

Pencil Lines 174

Not done a Pencil Line for a while. Still not getting good shots of my layouts. :( There has to be a way round this... Anyway, this is Albuquerque, Old Town, featuring a bunch of chillis.

Mojo Jar - February Dip

My February inter-team team was "Scrap a Favourite Holiday" from Janet. So, of course, I went for a photo from my Road Trip!

The Corsair at Pima has its wings up, which is a bit of a shame, but I took it's picture anyway.

Twisted Sketches #32

This started off as a two picture layout, it went wrong! I did get the stamping in though.


Honestly, I'm not entirely sure I like this layout, but it did mean I finally scrapped this impossible picture of my father trading pins in Albuquerque.

WC - Jan Week 2

Our final day in America and we were unable to find the beer we wanted, so we settled for some Arrogant Bastard, which was pretty good in the end. The label is actually readable in the picture, but in case you're wondering here is their website: "I am not a fizzy yellow beer drinking ninny here under false pretenses"

The challenge was to scrap Forbidden Fruit (I really shoudn't be drinking beer) and to use ribbon and bling. All bases covered.

Sketchy Thursdays 1.07

I've been oddly uninspired by the Crate Paper - Season collection that came as part of a kit, so for this Challenge I made an effort to use it, although I'm still not convinced by it. I chose a picture of my Father and I in Zion National Park during our 2008 Road Trip. Nearly filled three albums now with Road Trip pictures and I still have many pictures left.

In order to jazz it up a bit I added some paint to the background, doodled on everything, stamped and hand cut the title and stitched round the circle. I had assumed, when I was planning it out, that it would be a speedy scrap, but it took me hours in the end.

Nerdy Note: The doodling on the title is the ornament used for cross stratification on a graphic log. One of the most dramatic parts of Zion are the cross bedded Navajo sandstones.

The January Dip

My January Mojo Jar dip was a sketch by Susi. This is the result, using titles from Sue!

My Dad in the Valley of Fire State Park.