Cherry Caddy

This is my father-in-law's Christmas present - we weren't able to get up to Hull at Christmas as planned due to the snow, so DH is spending this forthcoming week up there and is taking all the pressies with him :-)

We had decided to make a little selection pack of our homemade cherry stuff for FIL, with a miniature bottle of cherry vodka, small jar of cherry chutney, cherry chocolate and some boozy cherries (not in pic). But how to package them? I had this wooden caddy, we had to take the carrying handle off to be able to fit the jar in it, but otherwise it is perfect!

I sprayed with glimmer mist in Kiwi, then stamped the swirls with stazon. Three little pearls on each side in a cherry red finished it off. I also put some self adhesive green baize underneath to stop it scratching surfaces and the carrying handle was replaced with some cord.

I do really like this glimmer mist / stazon combination, will have to use it on some more of the many boxes I have stashed away ready to decorate!

The Last Page

The last page of the album! Well, for this year, anyway.......

The pictures are taken on LG's mum's phone, so are not particularly brilliant. I printed them out as a grid with a black background for the spacing between. The paper is again a stash busting one, so I have no idea of the name! I added crystal swirls to the printed black flourishes on the corners and the title is done with American Crafts Thickers. A nice simple page to finish with :-)

Wii Master

Little Girl playing on the Wii :-) Like yesterday's post, this LO was supposed to be a very quick and easy, deadline-friendly page. I was just going to put the two pictures on the pink paper with the title underneath. But when I laid them out, it just didn't look enough so I made a middle strip and then out of the blue came the idea for the cartoon words. It's still quite a simple page, but does look much better than the original plan.

The papers are very old - I have no idea what they are I'm afraid! I punched the edges of the centre strip for a bit of interest. The title was cut on the robo and I made the cartoon words by using the autodraw shapes and text box facilities in Word - then I printed out onto Safmat and cut them out.... quite fiddly and took longer than I expected!

The grand handover was last night - we went over for a meal and LG's mum was so busy looking at the album that she let the pasta boil dry! I think that means she likes it :-)

Yummy!

I had a whole sequence of photos of Little Girl enjoying pudding - there wasn't any single picture which stood out, so I decided to use them all, by making them into a collage using Picassa.

The original plan was to have the photo and the title on the plain die cut, because I was still 6 pages away from album completion with a fast approaching deadline, so wanted to keep it simple and fast. However...... when I laid out the photo and the title, it all looked very plain and dull. So I decided to stamp a background on the die cut. Fortunately I was at the crop when I did this page - it all went a bit wrong, but with some encouragement and suggestions from the crop girls I managed to end up with something that doesn't look too bad! **thanks girls**

The flowers are stamped in a chalk ink (lavender colorbox?) with flower outlines overstamped in black. The plain black title still looked dull, so I put some clear crystals on the letters.

This page went from near disaster to one of my favourites :-)

The strangest school photo

Have you ever seen a school photo like this? Little Girl's mum gave me this cut out version of her, printed out onto plain copy paper...... So we scanned it and I printed it out in various sizes.

I wavered between a Warhol transformation of the pic and a vintage cameo look, but with time being of the essence, went with the cameo. The paper is a Creative Imaginations die cut mounted onto black cardstock and I bought the lace and flowers at the stitching show in Brighton which I went to last weekend. I also bought some Go Kreate large scalloped oval dies, which I used for the larger frame, the smaller is done with Nesties.

The lace is laid across the cut out pic to disguise the straight line at the base of it - couldn't do much about the top of her head being missing though! Then I added the flowers and crystal swirls, putting some blue pearls in the centres to echo her top and the blue lines in the paper. The tag is done with a Nestie die and attached with black brads.

I think it has come out OK, I really like the composition and the colour combination ...... but what an awful photo :-( Hopefully I will get a better one next year!

Once upon a Time

The third Little Girl album is finished!!! Before yesterday's deadline too. But then we didn't take it over to them because they had had 20 screaming kids at the party and we thought it wouldn't be a good time :-)

This is a double LO of LG in her Snow White dress, I thought of the DCWV "Once upon a time" range as soon as I saw the pics, but the paper with "Once..." on it looked awful when put next to the "there was a beautiful princess" paper. So I cut the "fairy" paper into two pieces, stuck it on top of the two "old paper" papers and cut out the two phrases from their respective backgrounds. Then I put the photos on and was going to leave it at that, but they were just 'floating', so I put some swirly crystals and some flowers (shudder!) across the pages to make them flow better. I am really pleased with the way it has come out, even though it was nothing like my original plan!

Free Spirits

It doesn't come much simpler than this! The title is taken from the name on the boat in the background and cut out on the robo, as are the brackets. The paper is probably K&Co, so that's some more of my stash busted!

I have finally received some photos from LG's mum - talk about getting blood from a stone ........ I supplement their pictures with the ones my DH takes. Part of the problem is that they don't actually take very many, apparently there are no Christmas photos this year for instance. But then that is why we started this whole thing, eight years ago with Big Sister, so that they would have something to look back on.

Conkers!

You all know how much I loooooove flowers - *not* - but these photos just seemed to call for them, so I had to buy some especially LOL. Little Girl and Big Sister having fun gathering conkers - they are lovely photos although I haven't managed to take a very good picture of the page.

The strips are done with EK Success and Martha Stewart punches, the paper is probably Doodlebug and the title is done with American crafts thickers. I doodled the dots and stamped the faux stitching.

Face Paint

This started out as another very simple Little Girl LO ........ just the cardstock background and two patterned papers with the photos on top. But it looked very plain, so I decided to add something, well a few things as it turned out LOL.

The strips are done with an EK success punch, the swirls are die cut (largest one is Sizzix, other two are Marianne D), then I added eyelets, pearls, a bow and some doodling for good measure!

The title is done with American Crafts thickers - jewelry box I think - but they were white and really too bright for the background so I coloured them with an ivory promarker ..... first ever use of a promarker on a page LOL.

The deadline for handover of the album is approaching.... 12th Feb is LG's birthday. But I am having trouble getting photos out of her mum, so I don't know if it will get finished or not..... I reckon there will be at least six more pages, possibly eight, to do and LG's mum doesn't understand that scrapping takes time, so I am a bit worried that I will get emails with hundreds of photos the night before :-( We shall see!