Eye in the Sky

Yes, I'm still using aeroplane embellishments, but this time it's not the usual travel or plane photos! On the way home from a trip to Scotland earlier this year, we flew over my husband's home town. Rather unusually it was a very clear day, so he took a photo (as well as a photo of the airport as we were taking off).

I love this map print from the original Shimelle collection from American Crafts and it really reminded me of the view you get of streets and houses from the sky, so it had to be used for this layout! On it's own, it's a bit busy, but adding other papers from the same collection really works to soften it.

The Midori D-Clips paperclips are one of my favourite plane embellishments, and the mini clouds, cut using a Memory Box die, are really cute with them. The big arrow is an old chipboard arrow from my stash, painted with cream acrylic paint, and the centre backed with more paper from the Shimelle collection.

30 Photos!

Following last week's post, I wanted to share the layouts I put together last weekend. We recently went to an airshow and, as you can imagine, took hundreds of photos - some more successful than others! I went through the photos to try to decide what to scrapbook and, several culls later, I had it down to 30 photos. I didn't, however, want to create 30 pages - or even half that - there are a couple of small stories, but not pages-worth so, the solution was to use a pocket page.

The pocket page sits between two co-ordinating full-sized pages, both with large photos and smaller square photos. The journalling spots - outlined plain white cardstock - are common to each page and this helps to tie them all together, as well as keeping to a narrow colour palette.

The background papers are the double-sided Frisbee paper from the Making Waves collection by Fancy Pants and the rest of the papers/embellishments are from my stash - there really aren't enough aeroplane embellishments available!

Photo Overload

Do you ever have too many photos to choose from? Maybe it was just one day and you don't have huge amounts of things to say about any of them, but you love the photos? I regularly have this problem and have found the answer to be pocket pages.

This page will sit between two regular scrapbook pages with my most favourite pictures from the day's sightseeing in Corfu Town during our recent holiday. We have brochures too, so those will go in a smaller pocket alongside them.

I've been using the Summer Vibes collection from Simple Stories for all of the pages from this holiday and these are no exception. I've used the 3 x 4in cut-aparts to back the smaller photos and scraps to make the caption banners so we know what the photos are of!

Stitch on Your Page

One thing I almost never do is stitch on my scrapbook pages. I bought a small sewing machine for use with paper many moons ago, but I seem to be mostly incapable of stitching in a straight line with it! Hand sewing is always a possibility, and something I have done occasionally, but it's really time consuming, so it doesn't happen. However, the challenge this week on Shimelle's blog is to stitch on your page, so it was a good prompt to give it a go!

When thinking about incorporating the sewing, I wanted to create something a bit pretty and girly, and I knew I definitely wanted to use a black and white photo. Next month it will be our 10th wedding anniversary, but I haven't really scrapbooked many of our wedding photos. Our photographer gave us a lovely mix of colour and black and white photos, so I had a look through those to see if anything grabbed me. This was one of my favourite photos of the day - me arriving at the church with my dad. I didn't want to get too far from our wedding colours - navy blue and bright, sunflower yellow, with a bit of gold thrown in, so I had a rummage through my scraps to see what I could find - I think the muted yellow and the pale greeny-blues work pretty well.

I started by building the photo stack and then ran this through the sewing maching, a couple of times in each place, before sticking it to the background, just in case it all went completely wrong! The papers are a mix of Simple Stories, Basic Grey and My Mind's Eye, the gold script vellum has been in my stash for years. I decided to add a dash of pink, just to lighten the colours slightly. The embellishments are a mix of Simple Stories, Shimelle and Cocoa Vanilla Studio and, of course, the gold splatters are Heidi Swapp Gold Colour Shine.