One page of my Summer mini album

At the beginning of the summer holidays, I asked my children to list the things they wanted to do. I told them that not everything would be accomplished (get a cat? no! spend €50 in Claire's? no!) but at least it would be something to aim for.

Last year we made the list, but I never made the mini album I meant to, this year I decided that I would work in the album and have it ready by the end of the school holidays.

School starts tomorrow, and I only have a couple of pages to finish, so i am quite proud of it. Hopefully I'll have it ready by tomorrow so we can look it together and see how much fun we had in the last two months.

I'll share the cover and some pages later this week - today I only have one page, our trip to Cascais, Portugal. The left page was inspired by a layout by supertoni, for a scraplift challenge in Studio Calico's forum.

Here's supertoni's original layout:

Thanks for the inspiration, Toni!

Joy to Photography

It was a shock to realise that it's been more than a month since my last blog post. I'll try to get back to blog regularly and more important, scrapbook more often.

Here's one I've made for a challenge, I had to lift a page from Christine in her SC gallery.

I choose this layout to lift:

And came up with this:

I think it is a lift of a lift, since it seem that the original was based on a sketch by Kelly Purkey for her sketchbook class.
I was an extremely fun thing to do, thanks for the inspiration Christine!

(*) I now noticed that I forgot to stick the "to" in the title which is supposed to read "JOY to photography"...

Inspiration doesn't mean results

Lately I have been feeling like this - I felt  inspired, but when I sat down to make something, the results were pretty disappointing. To try to get out of this hole, I decided to change my usual way of doing things:

- I hardly ever scraplift, my inspiration comes either from the photos or what I around me, a dres, ads, interior design magazines, cd covers, etc. So now I'd try to see a layout that spoke to me and scraplift or use as a base for my own. (*)
- Limit my choices. Since I had just purchase a scrapbooking kit (November's Studio Calico kit), I'd try to use it to the max.

I am not so good with rules - I quickly go of on a tangent, but it did help me to have some guidelines, even if it was to break them.

This layout is a scraplift from one by Lisa Truesdell, as seen in the October issue of Creating Keepsakes magazine.  I want to start submitting for publication and CK has a running call for layouts inspired by ones featured in their mag.

*patterned paper: Scenic Router (grid), My Mind's Eye
*small tag: Fontwerks
*Circle (behind photo): My Mind's Eye
*Letter Stickers: Making Memories (green), October Afternoon
*Punches: Martha Stewart (lace), Woodware (scalop circle and small circle),
*Flowers: Prima
*Stamp: Studio Calico
*Also:  Stickles, sequins, string and thread

It is a close scraplift, besides changing the design from 12x12 to 8.5x11, I didn't stray much from her design. But while hers is stunning, mine is average. Not horrible, but you would'nt pick this one up from a crowd, would you?

Analyzing it, I think I didn't nail the colours right, there's not enough contrast, there's not enough punch. I tried to use lilacs and purples and that never works for me. I wear these colours but have difficulty using them in scrapbook pages and would never thing of using them in the home.

A step in the right direction I think.