What a difference a stamp makes ...

... well, after a very busy couple of weeks, I finally found a little time for scrapbooking at the weekend.  I'm still working through family photos from last year, so this is one of my 8x8 LOs - please excuse the limitations caused by the small size and my desire to scrap as many of each year's photos without running into tens of albums for each year!

I loved the paper as soon as I saw it and luckily, although it was originally a 12x12 piece, it still works when cut down to this size.  But after I arranged all the elements of the LO, I thought it lacked a certain something, needed a little extra interest ... then I had a rumage through my lovely new stamps and found the perfect image ... the flying birds are not part of the original paper but are stamped on in a matching ink, and I think they complement the rest of the LO perfectly

Stash and stitches

An exciting package arrived this week - the stash I ordered using some of my birthday money :-)  I chose some more GORGEOUS Tim Holtz stamps and another ink pad (a girl can never have too many ink pads!) ...

I even managed to find some scrapping time this afternoon and use one of the stamps in a LO (not one worth sharing though).

And, as I was asked recently how my orang-utans were going, I thought I'd better post an update (if you missed the original post, it's here ) -

National Scrapbooking Day

How appropriate - I've just found out that it's National Scrapbooking Day, and where did I spend the day - at a crop!  (For anybody who doesn't know, a crop is an event where scrapbookers gather and scrap (and also chat, stroke stash etc) )

I've just committed myself to join a new CJ (Circle Journal - a "travelling" scrapbook that gets passed from person to person, each person completing a layout, until it gets home again), so I used today to get mine started.  For the first time ever, I made the book from scratch, cutting my own chipboard covers and cardstock pages before embellishing and combining them - not actually as difficult or impressive as it sounds, but it's cheaper and more satisfying than using a bought mini-album.  The final book is just under 6x6 in size, a good size for posting.

This CJ is an "open" CJ, where each participant chooses the theme for their own book.  My theme is "stash" - I'm asking each person to use some of their new stash, or favourite stash, or old stash they thought they'd never use ... basically it's an excuse to have fun and to create a book of ideas and inspiration that I can use when it finally returns to me.  So for my own inital layout, I just had to use some of my gorgeous new Tim Holtz stamps and inks (plus a bit of tissue tape) - I had great fun creating it and am quite pleased with the way it turned out ..   

Tag card

I always find it much more difficult to make cards for men, especially when I don't have a good recent photo to use to make a photo card.  With my Uncle's birthday coming up, I was feeling a little lost, but then I found some stickers and papers I'd forgotten I had and cobbled together this personalised tag card -

One of the beauties of having so much stash that you forget what you've got - it's such a pleasant surprise when you find just the right thing :-)