Middlest

That middle child. Where does one begin?? She is so affectionate, so sweet and kind and wears her heart on her sleeve. She is broken hearted at the slightest thing, and passionately loves her family. She sees beauty in nature and simple things that the others bypass. That middle child is also highly volatile, insanely messy, short tempered, and ends up in the most trouble. She swings from glass half full to glass half empty in a second. She's very extreme, and has been right from the beginning - picture the new mother wheeling that hospital bassinette up and down the ward halls in the wee hours with the tantruming newborn. Good times.  The girl is extreme. Extremely beautiful in so many ways, extremely hard work in so many ways. The middlest. A constant puzzle yet a delight.

One of her sweet things is to leave little love notes for us all around. Just this week she made a hollow cupcake out of playdough. The top icing part of the cupcake was not attached to the base and acted as a lid. She left her creation on the kitchen counter with a note that said 'open'. I lifted the 'lid' or the top section of the cupcake and inside was a tiny note about how much she loves us. Yes, she is heart warming.  She is particularly attached to her Dad (who is particularly attached to her), and this little note was found on his bedside table one evening.  She wasn't too happy when she saw this layout scrapped because 'that note was for Dad to keep! Not to go in my scrap album!!'  Hopefully one day she'll be okay with the fact that I borrowed it for this layout. I love scrapping their original work like this - it's been a long time since I scrapped such stuff.

PS. Really should have taken a photo of that playdoh cup cake - it was all green, but it was gorgeous! Might ask her to re-make for me this weekend.

Three layouts, only slightly late. :)

Just a bit late this time - not as late as last week!

Not much scrapping mojo happening this week, but I can show you some layouts that I did a couple of weeks ago.

The photos for these three layouts are from last September!  So they have been hanging around waiting. The photos themselves weren't highly inspirational, but the event was exciting enough to be scrap worthy and I knew it was a memory that my girls would want documented, as it was a great day for them - meeting their new cousin only hours after she was born - and after waiting months for it to happen!

We live only a street away from my sister and her children, one of which is Olivia, the baby in these photos, so we see a lot of them. My girls have a strong relationship with their little cousins so it was good to have this moment captured and remembered.

Here are the three layouts show my girls meeting their cousin. I know you've seen the pics before if you were reading this blog last September! The three layouts all show strong similarities in design and style, and especially with the black freehand line that I was big on two weeks ago when I scrapped these! The patterned paper is from a remaining sliver of an old piece of American Crafts paper (which I still LOVE). The titles on the lower two images are the old American Crafts rub on alphabets. I find it very satisfying to use up old supplies! The hearts I had to draw and cut out, as I don't have a heart punch.

Hope you get an idea or two from these three very simple layouts, each slightly different. Must do a sketch challenge soon! Bye for now. x

Lateness and some kiddy layouts

Oh yeah - very very late Friday scrapping post. My apologies - my head just hasn't been where it needed to be.  Well on this slightly rainy but most pleasant evening, I attempt to post a very late post!
Here's a layout!

 

I shared this photo that I took of the girls on their last day of school together last year. 

I popped the text on the photo in photoshop elements - something I haven't done for a really long time but something I used to do all the time. It was nice to revisit the idea.  If you want to put white journaling text over a dark photo then you need a program such as photoshop or something equivalent. If you wanted dark journaling text over a patch of light on a photo, you can actually just run the photo straight through the printer and it will print right there on it. When I do this I make sure I do a test run so I know exactly where the text will print.  I run an A4 white paper through first and then stick my photo right over the text on the paper exactly where I want it, then I ran the paper through the printer again, photo stuck on. However, because this is white print on a dark background, you need to do that in photoshop or equivalent first, cause printers don't have white ink! The title is letter stickers.

I've got heavily into the free hand black line around stuff lately, and the last five pages or so that I've scrapped all have this line.  I usually scrawl a little something so that I don't have to connect the ends of my line. You don't want to over think this free hand line, or go too slowly. You just need to cruise along confidently, and I find looking past my hand to where I WANT to draw, rather than watching my pen line as I go, is effective in getting the pen line to draw smoother and go where I want it to go. It doesn't have to be perfect. Embrace the imperfection of freehanded-ness!

I scrapped this on one of the last few days of the school holidays, which means I had a little friend with me who wanted to scrap too. I didn't pay too much attention to what she was doing at the time, but as I packed up later, I found her little masterpieces and will put then in her personal little scrap album that contains all her own pages. She decided against journaling on the first layout, showing a photo of her baby cousin, but I thought it was cute with the brads, rounded corners and elephant punch outs! Won't lecture her on the importance of telling the story - she is only 6 after all, and the event certainly kept her occupied while I scrapped! No complainin' here!

 

On this next layout below, she did journal but didn't want to hassle her Mama by asking how to spell stuff. She had just finished Kindergarten, and she's still working on the spelling of words!! Here's the translation: "Lucy and Daddy are enjoying their hug. Daddy's copying me."

 

This last one she narrated her journaling to me while I was on the computer and she asked me to print it out on white. Love the journaling. Unfortunately it is true about the squeezing - done totally in love! Close up of the journaling on the last image.

 

Thanks for popping in, will see you next Friday with more layouts all of which will include a freehand drawn line in black pen!  Hopefully I will be less tardy next week!

some more collages via templates

Friday evening has rolled around once again. My intention, you know, is to post in the morning, but as it turns out I don't usually have time to sit down til late evening. This week everyone started back at school, and I became an introvert, a hermit, a recluse. I crawled into my shell and have basically stayed there all week. Such extreme weather as it seems to always be this time of year. Minus 36 in my husbands home town in Canada, total blizzards over half of USA, 40+ degrees here and major cyclones,  floods and fires, lack of power everywhere from here to North America. Crazy!

As just mentioned, it is as my girls say, 'hot diggedy hot' here, so I decided to take the week off from my normal work and just gather my thoughts, try to organise the innards of my house, and tried to coordinate the timetable and afternoon activities of three kids. Piano lessons, gymnastics lessons, saxophone lessons, and oh the ballet lessons.

Honestly, life is turning more and more into a military operation. I planned a timetable for all the school recesses and lunches.  See they don't eat normal things like sandwiches. And I can't really blame them I hated sandwiches for lunch as a kid. So we have the 'plan' which includes things like cheese, crackers, pasta salad, chopped up veges and dip, tortilla breads, caesar salad, crackers with a tuna dip that they construct at lunch, muffins, banana bread, cous cous, deli cold meats, yogurts etc. I know it sounds a bit silly, and it does take a bit of effort, but I really really hate a lunch not being eaten and coming home!

Lots of organising and just slowly feeling my way and how life will look for this year. I've enjoyed my hermit status. But must get back to real life next week.

So onto scrapbooking. Just as a follow up to last Friday, I'll show you two more collage approaches using Cathy Z 'monthly' templates. Both layouts use photos of eldest girl taken during December. With such event scrapping, I just can't pic one pic, and sometimes many photos tell the story well.

First layout is the usual -the template was printed as an 8x10 and stuck onto black cardstock. I'm loving black cardstock right now. I just ordered a pile of it - seem to be using it all the time. 

 

The second layout I used the same batch of templates, but instead of printing it out as an 8x10, I printed it as a 6 x8, which worked out just fine. I was planning on adhering the 6x8 photo to a 8.5 x 11 cardstock, and then on a facing page do all the journaling along with just one photo, making a double page spread, but laziness got the better of me and I stuck it all on the one page. This is how it turned out. 

A bit different in design to my usual template attempts. And I felt the need to add a circle, and a brad, as I tend to always do! Remember, you can always try this non-digitally. You just need small photos (either ones that can be heavily cropped or get them printed out wallet size at your photo processing place).

Now next week, normal old fashioned scrapping, complete with the use of a black pen, and no digital stuff! Promise! x