Hand Crafted Memories

I really love using butterflies, can anybody tell? I seem to manage to stick them on everything. I also like simple, so here is a simple butterfly card.Simples!

I think it's about time for a card. I've had a run of scrapbooking but that usually leaves me with bits and pieces of card hanging around. I usually use them up on cards but haven't made too many recently. I may had to have a sort out of my bits box and anything less that 6 inches in any direction will have to be donated to the big scrapbooker in the sky. This week over on Daring Cardmakers the challenge is to make a card for yourself. I recently bought this lovely Prima stamp but hadn't inked it, anybody that knows me will know I love to use butterflies on everything. So without further ado a stamp that needs inking and a challenge I can use it for. Tah Dah! I love this card, so I think it will be one I keep!

You know when you find something that works, you just go with it. Why change it? That's exactly how I feel about the January sketch over on Scrapbook and Cards Today Blog . I made my Belgium layout using this sketch     I haven't suddenly developed a passion for double page layouts, its just that I've found some great sketches that immediately 'speak' to me. Regular readers will know that my brother likes pages with lots of photos on them, I struggle to make multi photo pages. After I'd used this sketch I looked through my brothers album and he pointed out where a couple of his favourite photos were 'lost' because I'd made a picture collage with them and his favourites were a bit small. So on with the challenge, I remade this page nothing wrong with it other than the pictures were a bit small, into these pages, the only thing missing is his journalling.  I must have made him happy because suddenly he has brought me more pages to redo. It looks lik...

After the disaster of my last retreat, I am so excited to have found a new one. It's almost on my doorstep as well. I was doubly pleased when I saw Lida de Witte is one of the tutors, remember this project I made last year. It was taught by Lida. OOOh! I'm excited already If you are interested, click on the image in the right column .

What is it that makes our mojo disappear? To follow that up, what did I do to make it return? If only I knew I could bottle it and make scrapbookers, cardmakers, artists and musicians around the world happy. Mine went missing before Christmas but seems to have come back over the last couple of weeks. Great but I don't have enough hours in my day to keep it happy. I think one of the reasons that it came back was that I kept checking out my favourite blogs to find out what everybody else was doing. I then found a couple of sketches that I loved (see previous 2 posts) and bang there it was again. Hello Mojo! Another blog I visit regularly is Shimelle's , I love how she de-complicates (is that a word?) scrapbooking. One post that caught my eye was about using getting the most out of supplies, see it here . The 4th layout/example caught my eye because here was a whole sheet of patterned paper, not cut into just there in all its glory. How many times do we not use paper because we d...

I recently found a new scrapbooking challenge blog, well new to me. I am very proud of myself for completing the Document 2010 project last year and want to keep the flow going but really want to whittle down my existing stash of photos. I'm also continuing with my brothers scrapbook for him. When I saw the January Challenge on the Scrapology blog. It happens to be another double page layout. Here is the sketch and here is my layout

What a day, last night I was driving past the office and my exhaust fell off. Yep just fell off! The car was bought brand new and is only 2 years old. So its booked into the dealership tomorrow to be looked at. I still have another years warranty on it but they have to look at it first to say if its covered. So its OK for a two year old cars exhaust to just fall off? We'll have to see what happens tomorrow. In the mean time, we have three men at work who will be celebrating the big 40. I had an idea for something very simple and rather than make cards one at a time, this year I'm going to make them in batches. Here are three to kick this idea off.     all the same but a bit different.

I love working from sketches or page maps to create my scrapbook pages, sometimes I come across a sketch and you've just got to do it. Well that's exactly what happened this week. I found this sketch  over here on the Scrapbook and Cards Today Blog . It just spoke to me and was a great excuse to use up the remnants of a kit I'd bought a couple of years ago. I'm on a mission, along with many of you I'm sure, to use stash instead of just keep adding to it. Here are my pages. Everything was Pink Paislee , and I've still got some more! This sketch is for this years project 12, similar to the Document 2010 project that I've just finished. A sketch for a double page layout is released every month to record the previous months story. I'm not sure that I want to produce an album of the year, every year. The sketches are too yummy to resist, so I may just use them to try and clear some of these holiday photos.

I have finally finished my Document 2010 project, actually it was finished last week. I had to wait to photograph December until I had some better daylight, I don't think its much better as today we have bright winter sun. I'm not complaining its lovely to see but its a bit harsh to photograph in. Anyway enough rambling, here are my December pages, there are a couple of extras because I had so many pictures this month. Again I turned to Pencil lines for inspiration of the focus page layouts, the concert page was based on sketch 216 , and the wish page was inspired by sketch 199 .The completed album can be seen in the slide show on the right of this blog.

I have been taking part in the Document 2010 project, run by Shimelle Laine and UK Scrappers, I promised I would only use my existing stash. With the exception of the album itself I haven't bought a single thing. I struggled with the November entries as I didn't do very much socially, I was so busy with work that I felt I was either travelling or preparing for my next trip.The first page uses Pencil lines sketch 218 . I managed to pull three pages together but the last one just wasn't there.  I confess to cheating a little a copyright free photo of fireworks and a flick through my Scrapbook Trends magazine and it all came together, I lifted the page from one by Becky Kent. Just December to finish now.  

Hope everybody had a great New Year. I can't believe it's all over with. Today is pencilled in to take down all the Christmas decorations and finish off my Document 2010 project. That of course is going to lead on the me having to clear out the craft room again. To keep you going while I'm busy with all this, here is another card that didn't make it onto the Inspiring you Passion CD. This CD is a real mojo booster for those of you who have lost it amongst the Christmas wrapping paper. You may already have noticed I used butterflies a lot, I've no idea what the fascination is but usually when I want a 'little something', a butterfly just seems to fit. This one is one of my favourites for cards.I'll be back tomorrow with today's efforts.