Challenge completed

The UKScrappers website has a great forum section and one of the regular features is a weekly challenge.  This week the theme was anti-valentines day, so the challenge was to include mostly black and white (and definitely no red, pink or hearts or flowers), to use three photos (not a pair!) and to use a four-letter word (but not the word "love") as a title.

It was easy to choose which photos to scrap but harder to decide how to arrange three on the page without it looking too much like a standard photo album.  I think my final arrangement works well ...

 
It was interesting to do this LO as a 12x12.  I normally scrap all our family photos in 8x8 albums and these photographs would have been scrapped very differently at that size - this LO just wouldn't work scaled down to that size as the photos would be too small.  As I do so much of my scrapping at 8x8 size, it's very liberating to scrap 12x12 LOs and to have all that extra space to play with.

It started with a stitch ...

The first craft I really got hooked on was cross-stitching and I still do a lot of it now.  Scrapping and cardmaking take my full concentraction, but cross-stitching I often do in the evenings while the TV is on - I don't feel the TV watching is such a waste of time when I'm getting something else done too!

My current project is a large design of orang-utans; the chart is from this book and is pictured on the front cover -

The reason I am stitching orangs, apart from the fact that they are very appealing, is that my eldest son is going on a school expedition to Borneo in 2012, so this will remind us all of that.  It's a very large design so it may take me until then to complete it!  Here is progress so far (from the top right-hand corner of the design) -

From card-making to scrapbooking and back again ...

My first forays into papercraft were in the form of basic card-making.  After a while I discovered scrapbooking.  At first I used the same stash for both crafts but using differing techniques.  But over the years my scrapbooking style has changed and developed and now I find my card-making looking more and more like my scrapbooking - this latest card is a good example (it's a birthday card for my FIL - the photo is quite an old one but a favourite, especially as it was taken around this time of year doing one of his favourite things, enjoying the outdoors).

The materials are mostly from a ScrapaGogo kit (September 2010).

My first ever blog post, who'd have thought it!  I've made a resolution to spend more time following inspiring blogs and less time playing silly games on Facebook - let's see how long that lasts!


Here is my first posted scrapbook layout.  There was a sketch challenge at the last crop I went to; the challenge was to follow the sketch and also to include staples, something black, and a number in the title ...

... So, the sketch was followed, there is a number in the title, staples on the ends of the ribbons, and blcak pen used to add faux stitching around the edges of the letters.  Whilst not my usual style, it's very pleasing and has given me ideas for the future.