Take Inspiration from an Autumnal Page

Ok, so I really struggled with the challenge this week on Shimelle's blog which was to take inspiration from one of her autumnal scrapbook pages. If you hop over to her post, you can see a process video of how it all came together.

I had to abandon this page half way through as it really wasn't working - I'd aligned everything to the right, as in the inspiration page, but a good night's sleep later, I realised that that meant your eye was drawn to the shed, rather than the people. A quick flip of the page, and suddenly everything worked much better! As well as the layout, I also took inspiration from the leaf motifs and found some paper with some simple leaf shapes which were nice and easy to cut out!

The background paper is from the Simple Stories Sn@p! basics collection and the rest of the papers are from my scrap box. The chipboard pieces are from the My Mind's Eye Market Street, Nob Hill collection. The short journalling is on a piece of vellum which gives a really subtle look.

Take Inspiration from Planners

Do you use a planner, or a diary? No? Me neither, in fact I often forget to even put things on the electronic calendar I share with my husband, so I thought I was really going to struggle with this week's challenge on Shimelle's blog, which was to take inspiration from planners. The examples shown both use elements of routine but, really, when your daily routine feels pretty mundane and boring, it's not exactly something inspiring to scrapbook, so it was back to the pile of photos I had printed.

I discovered that I'd printed 7 smaller pictures of some of the meals we'd eaten on a recent holiday to Corfu, so that seemed like a good start! My original plan when I printed these was to put them in a 3 x 3 grid, with embellishment and journalling in the other two spaces but, when laid out, it didn't really work so, going back to the planner idea, two rows, like two pages in a diary, worked much better!

The papers and embellishments are almost all from the Simple Stories Summer Vibes collection. I did also feel the need to use a couple of planner stamps from the Heidi Swapp Hello Beautiful icons stamp set, just because!

Cut Your Scrapbook Embellishments by Hand

Anyone who knows me knows that I really don't have the patience to fussy-cut anything when it comes to scrapbooking, but this week's challenge on Shimelle's blog is to do exactly that!

This is a double-layout of one of the places we visited during our holiday in Italy last year. The strip of green patterned paper either side of the photos is the In Flight paper from the Hello World collection from My Mind's Eye, and all those flowers (and the journalling spot) are from the Dear Lizzy Neapolitan line from American Crafts.

Needless to say, not all of the leaves attached to the flowers made the cut, and this really took an age, but there are a few flowers left to be cut out for other pages of this trip.

Go Overboard with Stars

This week I've been having fun playing with my new Silhouette Cameo. While much of using pre-designed cut files is pretty straightforward, there's still a bit of a learning curve to be taken to design cut files yourself, but I'm working on it. I'd already purchased a stars cut file from the Silhouette store and had a photo of a partial lunar eclipse from last year ready to scrap so the challenge this week on Shimelle's blog - to go overboard with stars - was ideal!

I love the look of layouts which use a cut file and back the shapes with different papers, but I hadn't realised just how time consuming it is to do that! Needless to say, it took me a while, but all the different papers are from the Galileo paper from the Shimelle Starshine Collection from American Crafts. The different sized blocks of colours and patterns were just the thing to back the stars, and although I used pieces of the Gemini paper and Keppler paper from the same collection as photo mats, all the other layers under the photo are leftover scraps from that original Galileo sheet.

I popped the cut file up on some foam and backed it with another sheet of black cardstock - I love the shadows this creates. The additional stars are wood veneers covered with platinum stickles glitter glue for that bit of sparkle.

Take Inspiration from a Colourful Border

This week's challenge on Shimelle's blog is to take inspiration from a colourful border. My page for this challenge is something slightly unusual for me - a do-over. I originally created this page a few months ago - I think it was probably the first page I created using photos from our holiday in Italy. At the time I wasn't too enamoured with what I'd created but, like many of us, I considered the page scrapped and in to the album it went. Whizz forward a few months and most of the other pages for this holiday are complete, and this page was sticking out like a sore thumb for two reasons:

• Most of the other pages for this holiday are on plain white cardstock - this page was on a busy background
• The papers were from a completely different collection to the other pages from the holiday - I obviously didn't have a plan in mind when this page was created!

So, here's the re-done page.

I kept the thin mat and the embellishment clusters from the original, but the other matting layers and background paper were discarded. Instead, I used the In Flight paper from the Hello World collection from My Mind's Eye as a second mat and a selection of washi tapes and a border strip to enhance the embellishment clusters. And, just for good measure, I added strips of tape to the top and bottom of the page. I've no idea of the brands of tapes I used, but I normally buy them from Hey Little Magpie who always have a great selection!

I'm much happier with this page now and it sits much better with the other pages in my album.