Cut and Fold, my way

I wanted to try making the cut&fold versions a little nicer, because the edges of the pages could get a bit ragged over time, I think.  It occurred to me that folding the folded-edge pages deeper, then folding the pages to be cut just a bit, would possibly work to make it all a bit more substantial.  Also, the extra thickness would make even a few lines look fat:

I think it DOES work.  I folded the alternating folded edge pages to about 1 1/2 inches, then folded the pages to be cut to just overlap the edge. The design was my daughter’s name (at her request!) and it used about 110 lines,

You can see the cut edges look more solid.

And look how distinct the flourish is!  I’m adding that template as well, download it here.  I thought about doing the same flourish at the bottom, flipped vertically, but decided to go another way!

Wish I had taken a photo of the process, but basically I took a strip as long as it needed to be, and scored and folded an inch either side.  I stuck the photos to it with very thick pop-dots so the really stood out.  Slipping the scored and folded tabs in between the pages, I stuck them to the pages.  That makes it all stand out from the surface quite nicely.  These are photos of DD with her helper at her disability skating group Spice (Special People on Ice) – Spice is one of the things she loves best in life.

I did use another Basic Grey line, (Dawson, I think) but one that is the boyish companion to the girly version (Sophie?) but the colours worked perfectly with the outfits.

Another project that manages to mix scrapbooking with book folding!  I like it.  The cut&fold method seems to lend itself to adding photos to the face of the book, unlike the proper folded versions.

I may have to figure out one to make for DS, so I can properly photograph it and do a tutorial.  I am well out of practice LOL! Will be on the lookout for used book shops this weekend…

Book folding, Basic Grey and a fun project

I mentioned before that I thought the cut&fold heart could for the basis for a fun scrapbooking project.  And so it did.

I did the cut&fold, then removed the pages from the spine.  I covered the spine and the covers

then re-stuck the pages to the inside.

and I punched holes at the top and at the bottom of the covers to run a chain, before sticking the final bit

Now, I wanted the heart to be wider, and the book more open.  It took me a while to sort out how best to do that – turned out it was easy.  I cut a handful (ok so maybe 2 or 3 handfuls!) of strips of black cardstock, and slipped them in between the pages (at every edge-folded page, not EVERY page) and that opened up the heart and kept the book fat and open enough that the chain stayed in place and didn’t slip down because the book COULDN’T close, even a smidge. I printed a photo and stuck that inside the inverted heart fold.

This is not a great picture but it is a more accurate depiction of the placement than the later one.

In the end, it looks like this – can you recognize Basic Grey Obscure? And can you see how skewed it looks cause of the angle of the photo?

I am so sad to see BG is over.  I so love it.  I have a box that has scraps of loads of early collections, hoarded. I thought I would add a couple of projects – still one of my favourite mini-books, also of my son and daughter:

That is a board book.  From the front you read in to the middle, then flip it over and read to the middle out.  How they’ve changed!

And one of my fave minis:

Also Obscure.

I would love a quilt made from this collection.  Maybe they will convert to a fabric company instead…..

 

Geek buying

DH loves his Geek app.  We’ve bought everything from hair extensions for DD to try out (don’t ask) to power cables and adapters, and USB sticks and arty stuff.  Recently I got this leather piercing wheel that is so much fun to play with

At only £3 it was well worth it! Back when I played around making faux postage, this perforating tool would have been super handy! Not perfect but not bad:

And the perforations make for a nice only slightly ragged edge when torn.

I also took a chance on some markers – they have a HUGE range there.  The Paint Pens are very cheap.  Unfortunately the ones I got are more Promarker and less Copic, with a chisel and a bullet tip rather than a brush.  The colours are nice enough and they were not as much as shown on the current page (I want to say under £20 for the box) but I can’t find this set on there at all.

And they have a ton of other stuff worth looking at – how cute for Smash books and Planners are these little sticky tabs??

and these?

Both of those pack are £1, and these are £2:

We’ve had very good luck with our orders.  It does take time, and they come in very piecemeal, not all at once, but we’ve never had a non delivery and the one electronic item that had an issue, they just refunded the money and told us to throw it away.  Everything else has been great.

Might be worth a look….

 

Odd bits

One of those odd bits of things posts.  Firstly, remember I ordered a set of 11 Tunisian crochet hooks from China, via Amazon?  They cost about £3 (with shipping!) so I didn’t have high hopes.  When they came, one of the hooks was missing its top:

I contacted the seller and asked for a replacement.  They offered me 50p off.  I said no thank you, I wanted the hook.  They warned it could take a month, and I said fine and forgot about it.  Yesterday the package arrived.  Now, I have no idea wh this keeps happening to me, but rather than getting JUST the thing I wanted – one 5.5 mm Tunisian crochet hook to complete my set, I got nearly ANOTHER COMPLETE SET.

I say “nearly” because it DOES contain the hook I needed to replace the broken one, the 5.5 mm, it has all the other hooks in the set as well, EXCEPT the 4.5mm hook!  So for £3 I got 20 hooks.  Can’t complain about that, but not sure I need duplicates of all of them.  I might offer them to my crop ladies, see if any of them are keen to try Tunisian crochet….

My MIL is such a wealth of info on all the “womanly arts” – sewing, cooking, knitting, crochet, quilting… I always have a handful of things I set aide to ask her advice one.  She grabbed my socks, the ones I’ve mentioned before, that needed only the grafting of one toe to be wearable, and sorted it for me in seconds (including, to my dismay, repairing moth holes, I’d let them languish for so long) and completed a shawl, then knitted another one, blocked and mailed it off, then knitted another one.  All in less than a week.  She confirmed my decision for the binding fabric for one quilt (phew) and gave me a great tip for the socks I decide to cast on so I could be making one and get all her tips for sock knitting while actually knitting a pair, so I’ll hope to remember them.  We popped in to Tiger on a trip in to town, and I scored some cute yarn for £1 for a 50 gm ball!

I wonder if I can trick DS into thinking they are shades of grey?  I may need to pop in and grab a bit more.  And see there in the corner?  £1 washi tape too!

 

I was rushing, and the rolls were all higgeldy piggeldy on the rack and no time to look at all of them, but the B&W dotty one was ALWAYS going to be useful so I grabbed it.

They are off on Thursday and we have a packed full last few days so all I can say is you’ll see me when you see me….

More unseen layouts

I did manage to track down a couple of the layouts from that unpublished book, and thought I would share.  I am still sorting and de-cluttering but I can see a couple of weeks more work.  I’ve managed on corner of my room so far. But there is still SO much more to tackle.

So here you go – My version of a Halloween layout:

Looking back at the text, it seem clear I was approaching they photos from a clean & simple angle, and focusing on multi-photo layouts. Shimelle was doing more her style (at the time) and more single photo layouts.

Her version:

And yes, our lounge really WAS that bright turquoise!

And on of DD with Granny – I also did more double pagers, based on what I found:

while Shim did more single photos – and in this case B&W

Hope you enjoyed the blast from the past.

Unpublished book

This is most def. a weird post. As you will have noted, if you visit here regularly, I have been de-cluttering.  It is amazing the things you find.

Eons ago, perhaps 10 years ago, I did a couple of book compilation projects for a publishing house.  The first was a greeting cards file.  The way it was done was a bit odd, to me.  Basically they sent me a stack of magazines the house also published and my job was to select projects from the magazine and, if at all possible, lift all of the photos they already had used then write text to turn the brief magazine info into a fuller project + technique entry.  This was the final product.

None of the projects inside were my work, just the text. Inside was a little tool kit and a projects book and a techniques book

After that, I did a similar craft file, which was on stenciling – don’t still have that one, or at least if I do I haven’t come across it yet LOL!

But after THAT, they asked me to do a Scrapbooking book.  That one was meant to have original work in it, as well as framing text.  At the time I said that my feeling was that a one-person book would be less interesting if the style the person (ME) used was not to the buyer’s taste.  I suggested adding another scrapper to the mix, they agreed, and I asked Shimelle. She said yes, and we set to work.  We made layouts and wrote text and just when it was nearly time to hand over the results, the publisher came back to us to say the people they were compiling the book for (I THINK it was Reader’s Digest for some reason) felt the market wasn’t strong enough and had pulled the plug.  DOH! Luckily we got paid, and they sent back all of the layouts.  I sent Shim the layouts I did using her photos and she sent me the ones she did using MY photos.  I never mingled them in my albums, just cause they weren’t MY work, IYKWIM.  But I did keep them in another album.  And I found them.

Here are a few, but not all she made. I love them all.  I want to go back and find at least a couple of examples of the ones I did using the same photos so I can share her version beside my version.  From what I recall she did her style and I tried to do a completely different style – more along the Clean & Simple lines so there would be a stark contrast and show how different a scrapbook could be.

I thought you might enjoy seeing these as I am pretty sure they have never seem the light before and it’s a shame cause they are lovely.

Shim was one of the first scrappers I met in the UK when we moved over the second time and she still inspires me over a decade later.  I am so delighted to have her layouts using my photos. I hope you enjoy seeing them – finally.

Memory Book progress

As I mentioned I am making a memory book for DDs departing youth group leader.  It started life as an ugly plastic office binder but with a little decoration it now looks like THIS:

Sorry the photos aren’t great but I think you can get the idea.  DH and I are deep in the bowels of the garage, finally sorting out the chaos and I just snapped these quick. All the pages follow the same basic colour block idea, the Boy and Girl pages keep the punched border consistent throughout, and each has a photo and a message.

The UK purchased page protectors are meant to be “anti-glare” but I think they are a little hazy – not as nice as US 8 1/2 x 11 ones, but at least they are A4 size and fit the binder’s 4 hole rings.

There is also a slightly adapted poem from Dr Seuss Oh the Places You’ll Go.

and an image from Winnie the Pooh

and a final word:

There are photo sleeves for 4 x 6 photos, and sleeves for cards, and writing or art from the disabled youngsters who attend the scheme.  They love it so far, and think the recipient will be very happy with it. So if they are happy, *I* am happy!

Back to the garage now.  Pah!

Layout using the printables

I decided to have a go at making a layout, using nothing more than my printables set  (and just a bit of patterned paper and title letters) cause I am SO out of practice.  This is what I ended up with:

 

Soooo annoying.  The background looks light blue on my left monitor and pure white on my right monitor. And the striped line is totally straight on the LAYOUT but damn if it doesn’t look totally wonky in the photo.  And the striped texture of the cardstock is totally lost.

Oh well – it was just a bit of fun, and after so long it’s was just to remind me how much I love scrapbooking.

Look back to yesterday to see the download. And happy scrapping!

Printables – lots and lots of printable bits

UKS is running a Summer Scrapbooking Challenge.  Niki, from Being Scrappy, has done some fab classes – many of them have step by step videos to accompany the samples.  She is totally running the show on this one, so I thought I would make a set of summer-y, multi-use printables accompany the challenges.

There is a LOT on two pages!

And yes, I printed and cut them all out – call me crazy but I had to make sure they worked!

Sorry the colour is so bad but it’s late and dark and the light in my office is rubbish

What do you get?

• four journaling boxes
• five  2″ circles and two half circles
• five 1 ” circles and six half circles
• four sets of photo corners
• five large triangular arrows
• six chevron arrows
• six banners
• eight flags
• ten word strips
• two colour strips

Phew.  The colours will depend on your printer settings.  I printed these using Matte photo paper, Vivid Colour, and the Graphics setting.  On plain paper, standard settings they are slightly softer, the pink more rose, the blue more dusty, etc.

The two page PDF is tiny, under 1 MB – and you can download it HERE! Some of the bits would surely be useful to Project Life folk as well.

Hope you find them useful!  And you can pop on to UKS to see the challenges here – Niki’s videos are on You Tube but you won’t be able to see the attachments unless you are logged in.

Happy scrapping!

Box book

Remember a few weeks back I was working on a mini made from a cardboard box? Well, I’m not done with it yet but am closing in on it!

I had planned on calling it Brother in a Box but I just could not shake the association in my head of “in the box” feeling like “in a casket” – bizarre, I know, but once something like that gets IN to my head I can’t get it out.  I still wanted the BOX part and had to go with what has to be the most OBVIOUS title, Jack in the Box.

I had been saving this cereal box, with the intention of covering it and using it as a min-book housing and here was the chance.

You can see the mini-book fits it perfectly.  I am also dithering about the title – on the book? on the BOX? on both? the SAME title on both??

Doh!

I think it will have a button and loop closure – but not sorted that out either.  Love the paper – WRMK Nonsense.  Has to be one of my all time favourite paper pads ever.  So bold and colourful and playful, and a great mix of boyish and girlish colours, blues and greens and pinks and oranges, with yellow and white as well.  It’s yummy.

With luck I’ll finish it maybe over the weekend.  Sadly my crop has been cancelled (well, to be fair it was out of schedule due to the Newbury show last weekend, our usual slot) so I won’t be able to finish it there.  When at home, so many things just get in the way and keep me from focusing on a single task – which is why I have so many UFOs in my room. {wink}

Have a great weekend.  DD is due home this afternoon so it’ll be fun to have her back!  Of course that might ALSO keep me from finishing, but it’ll be worth it.