Thinking outside the box.

Last weekend I started working on a project that is a pretty big one for me.

I tend to be a single 12x12 page scrapbooker using materials from all over the place, different manufactures, collections and even different decades.... yikes, however this project in particular has been different in a few ways. I have stuck really closely to using just the one collection and creating multiple pages from the one trip. 

 In the almost two decades that I have been scrapbooking I don't think I have done either before. I had in my stash the Endless Summer collection from Cocoa Vanilla Studio which had a number of the embellishment packs so I decided to start from there and work my way through the kit. One of the interesting things that I found was that by being limited to what products I had to work with I used things that I would normally pass over, that has been challenging but I am also loving the outcomes that are starting to take form in my layouts.

 I think that we get stuck in our ways especially when we have been doing something for so long but it is nice to shake things up and try new and different things. I have always had a tendancy to buy single sheets of paper rather than a collection but I think from now on especially when I have an album or a project that I am working on I might stick to the kit format, its been an enlightening time.

Blast From The Past....

I never thought that I would EVER be using these guys again. Somtimes though the simplest of tools that get the job done. Let me take you back to the year 2002. I was new to scrapbooking, in fact most of us were new to scrapbooking. You could not just go into any big craft or variety store and buy supplies and if they did happen to have them the selection was small and very basic, no you either had to know a lady (cough, cough creative memories) or go to a scrapbooking and stamping store. But then Lincraft opened up A new store near where I lived and they bought with them MAMBI softly spoken stickers, Making Memories everything and Fiskars crafting tools. This was where I got the Fiskars shapeboss and I scored it on a great opening sale for just $80 (MY GOD, what was I thinking) and a couple of the basic shape templates. Those shape templates were a life saver, no more trying to find a jar lid or cup that was the right size of circle to trace or wonky freestyle hearts nope, I had templates that I could trace and then cut wonky with my old school scissors.....far out we have come a LOOOOONG way.

 
I would buy one of those templates every visit until I was satisfied that I had all of the basic and important shapes like circles, squares, triangles, weird flat top and bottom diamonds.....cause yes who doesnt want to cut your photos into triangles and diamonds? Putting my sarcasm away though, we have seen huge changes in the industry in those almost 20 years since my days of fluro plastic stencils and that is not a bad thing.
I am so glad that we all have many different options available for us to use in our crafting but sometimes I forget that those simple tools can do the job too.

Not so sure that I will need to use them again any time soon if at all but it was a nice moment to reflect on this hobby that I love so much and all of the changes that I have seen and gone through along the way.

These Are A Few Of My Favourite Things....

Some of my favourite things in life are the colour pink and a black and white stripe. Fun Fact: I have an especially deep love for horizontial black and white striped shirts, I really can't resit them and have then in all the styles from singlets to jumpers and in all kinds of stripe variants....obsessed.

 So this is a card that is made up of a few of my favourite things, actually a lot of things becuase I do love black, white and pink as a colour story and like a magpie anything shiny and glittered will always have my heart. When I saw this Creative8 stencil at my LSS, I knew that it had to come home with me. I have never stencilled with black ink before but I love the finished look, I wil have to play again with using black with stencils.

 Speaking of favourite things, that striped paper.
Not only do I love a stripe but that particular stripe comes from a piece of really old pattern paper that I have been hoarding for a long while.
For those who are old timers in this hobby you might remember a little company called KI Memories and some collections they bought out under the Love, Elise brand. I LOVED these lines and I loved Elsie, her scrapbooking style was a bit different to mine but she wasd a breath of fresh air for me. She loved bold colours and patterns and in terms of age and lifestyle was more my lane. I still have a few sheets stashed away from her collections and I love being able to pull them out from time to time. Getting the maximum use out of your supplies makes me super happy and I love when I can pull out something that I have had for 15+ years and incorporate it with new supplies, that makes my heart happy.

A little big project called project life....

I haven't been posting much lately on here or any of my socials to be fair but I have been actively working on a 2021 Project Life album this year.
I have always wanted to tackle project life even if it was just once but I always found it too overwhelming or I was too disorganised to keep it going past January....yep 4 weeks was just too much for me 😂😂
This year I seem to have found a system that works and I have been keeping on top of it all.

The secret for me at least is a portable photo printer, who would have thought that all that photo editing and uploading to online or a machine in store and having to make the time to go into a store and then realising you have sized your photos all wrong and you have to start all over again could be an inspiration and creativity killer.

I bought a Canon Selphy at the start of Australias covid lockdowns starting last year because I figured that if I was at home a lot I would need some photos to scrapbook so I was going to use that time to craft my little heart out. I ended up not needing the Selphy because our lockdowns were so minimal where I am and I was able to work the whole time but I did start printing the odd photos here and there, that was when the realisation crept in that maybe this is exactly what I have been looking for to help me get started on that Project Life album that I tried to start 7 years ago and that never made it past January.