Week off, Day One - The Layout from Hell

I have a weeks holiday :-) Time to catch up on crafty stuff, cooking stuff, oh and some of that housework (sorry, didn't mean to swear) too. Sy says she expects a progress report on crafting or cooking every day - oh dear!

Well, day one. A lie in, a bit of shopping and a walk round town (exercise is also on my list for this week). Then some crafting interspersed with helping DS1 organise the piles of stuff he brought back from uni. First up was the Layout from Hell - I had done a bit of this on Sunday but was determined to finish it today. It had been started at the last crop, the central block and the photos had been stuck down, but I was stuck on it after that, because it was just too symmetrical - even for me, the queen of straight lines. So yesterday I thought I would knock off the symmetry a bit by adding the title, some journalling and some stamps in a more random way. Well everything that could go wrong, did. I tried a large corner stamp in the bottom left corner, it didn't stamp properly and looked awful. So I dug out some flocked card (Doodlebug, I think) and cut a large corner to cover the mis-stamping, a medium corner for the bottom right side and two small corners for the top. Then I found some Rusty Pickle letter stickers for the sub-titles (Castle Dracula and the King's Palace). So far so good, and that was how I left it on Sunday.

This morning I found that a letter F sticker had dropped off the backing sheet and stuck itself onto a photo. Took the most care possible in removing it, but it still left a nasty smear across the picture. Arrgghh! So I had to print another one, which meant guessing how big I had printed it the first time - I ended up getting it right second try - and putting it over the top. I decided to stamp along the top edges of the pages, this isn't exactly perfect either, but it will do! For the title I used the McGill fancy squares punches, small and large, and punched the squares from the flocked card. Then I wanted to use some gothic-y/medieval-ish letters for the word "Romania" and remembered that I had bought the alpha set a couple of years ago but had never got around to sticking the rubber on to the little wooden blocks. Ok, so 20 minutes later..... stamps are mounted and ready to go. I stamped them on the same cream as the background of the page, punched them into little squares, mounted them onto foam blocks and put them onto the punched flock squares. They didn't really show up, so the title was more or less unreadable. Grrr! So I dug around in my thickers collection to see what letters I had left in the chestnut set, and amazingly, I had all the letters for Romania. So they went on top of the little letter squares on top of the flocked squares. The last thing was the journalling, which I printed onto Safmat (along with a few others I need to add to other pages), put it on a mat and stuck it down. Finished at last..... and actually, I rather like it now!

The second LO was a piece of cake after that, another one started at a crop, but needing some journalling, which I had also printed onto the Safmat. Matted up and stuck down, looks good!

So endeth Day One. Sorry Sy, no cooking today.