Monday 31 October 2011

A Little Halloween Treat

Happy Halloween!!!!

I have a few bits  and pieces of Doodlebug's Spook Town collection to give away.



If you are interested, please leave a comment here and I'll get a name out of a hat next Sunday.

And come back, as I'll have a very exciting giveaway soon ;-)

Monday 17 October 2011

Looking for inspiration

 I am guilty on saving pages of magazines, bookmarking, pinteresting lots of inspirational ideas and not using them effectively.

To combat this, sometimes I am deliberately using a sketch, photo or a design as the starting point for a layout. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.


Michelle La Grue found this sketch by Becky Fleck:


I strayed from the sketch, but still you can see where I found the inspiration:


And this cute shoe (by JoyFolie) I found in Pinterest:


what the inspiration for this layout:

I used everything this time, the colour palette, the stripes, the orange and white round shapes.

Wednesday 5 October 2011

A quick mini book

Last month I posted a flag book. The spine of the flag book is a concertina to which you attach paper strips and it got me thinking that I could make a mini book that way. I was almost sure that I had seen something like that before but couldn't find the source.

After I finished mine, I saw a beautiful one by Michelle La Grue, but you have to take my word for it, I took  a quick look and can't see it in her blog.

Summer last year I took the kids to the city centre to buy a tweed cap for my Dad (more of it later). Since we had the whole day, I decided to bring them to visit the National Gallery, the National History Museum, with a stop for lunch in the Kilkenny Design Centre and some fun in the ]Merrion Square playground.

Of course I took my camera  and I planned a mini album based on the trip. It was all the be designed digitally and printed in 6x4 photo paper. One thing about me though, it that I loose steam pretty quickly. If I don't finish something say a week or so, I get bored and start to do something else. Which is what happened.

Last month, I was sorting out my stuff when I came across the printed pages. Then I remembered the idea to make a concertina-based (must find out the proper name for it) mini book and it all came together quickly.


The cover is acetate - I stuck the title there. The spine is held together with Studio Calico fabrips and coloured bias tape (by Lily). The page that you can see through was done digitally; the photo, the border, the background and the sellotape are all digital elements put together in PSE.

And there some of the pages:


I can't resist a colourful wall. And colourful umbrellas.

 Mosaic floor in the National Gallery


 My son modelling the cap.


The journaling is too small to read and way too long also so I'll give you the short version:

My Dad asked me to buy him a tweed cap for him. I told him it was made of wool and unsuitable for where he lives (Brazil). He insisted it was made of cotton because he read it somewhere that it was cotton. No, he wouldn't trust his daughter who lives in Ireland nor his son-in-law who is Irish. So eventually I bought him a tweed cap knowing very well that it would never be used.

*Patterned Paper: scraps from Basic Grey, 7gypsies and October Afternoon among others.
*Digital elements: You are here by Paislee Press and Queen of Quirk,  among others.
*Other: Studio Calico Fabrips, bias tape