Week 21 Project Life

Hi Everyone!

Popping in with a project life share tonight.

It's Friday night here in Australia, the last day of winter, and a couple weeks out from an awesome holiday for me, so things are feeling pretty good.

This spread is week 21and is made with the Clique Kits August Travellers Notebook Meadow kit (now sold out).

I put together this cute filler card by stitching down one of the ephemera pieces, fussy cutting that adorable pink scooter from one of the patterned papers, and adding some stitching and a star sticker as accents.

I also fussy cut one of the postcard graphics from a patterned paper to be my title card this week. I love, love the alphas in the kit this month.  They've been super easy to use, and have  repositioned really easily if I need to shift them.

I decided to make a larger journalling card on a 6x4 pocket, and die cut a tag shape out of plain white cardstock as a base for my journalling.  I added my go-to stitching technique at the moment with some apricot embroidery thread and a pretty bow in grey twine to finish it off.

And that's my spread done!  A quick one this week, I hope I've inspired you to grab your craft scissors, find some patterned paper to fussy cut, and create some cute elements for your spreads!

Have a great weekend guys, and thanks for dropping by today.

Hawaii Vacay Travellers Notebook Spread with Clique Kits

Hi friends!

Travellers notebooks have gained so much popularity in 2018 and it's no wonder, a spread can be finished in just a few minutes, they're pretty much a mini album (love, love mini albums), and they're just so sweet!  

Now there are oodles of card sketches and 12x12 sketches around these days, but not too many dedicated TN sketches yet, so today I'm showing you how you can adapt a 12x12 sketch to suit your TN spread.

The key to this process is that a TN when it's opened out, is more or less a square.  So all you need to do is take the 12x12 sketch, scale it down a little, and then split it down the middle.

So this is my TN spread, and just down below is the awesome Clique Kits August 2018 sketch.  First up you can see that this isn't a regular two-sided TN spread and it has definite cut line through the main part of the layout and my photo.  

To do this I cut two inserts from white cardstock trimmed to 8.25 in x 4.25in each.  Then I added some washi to the back to hold them together while I constructed my page.  When I was happy with it I ran it through my paper trimmer to re-form the two inserts, and added it to my TN.

The Clique Kits August Meadow TN kit includes 6x6 papers, so to stretch one paper from top to bottom of my TN (which is 8.25 in) I trimmed a shorter top strip and a longer bottom strip.  Since the photo area overlaps each side of the paper its super easy to cover up the missing piece.

Since this spread is about our last night on holiday in Hawaii last year, the world map ephemera piece was a great matt for my photo.  I embossed some vellum from my stash and layered it, as well as a die cut doily from white cardstock.

One of the kit papers is a page full of destination badges.  I was so excited to see this Hawaii one and new I had to use it.  I love the almost postage stamp edge to it, and fussy cut all.the.notches around the edge.

The Crate Paper Here & There word stickers from the kit were black and white, and didn't quite suit my spread so I chose these Vacay stickers as my title and set to altering them with my Bronze Metallic Sharpie pen.  They were a little streaky after one coat, but after three coats they look awesome!  So happy I tried this.

To finish off my spread I added some strip journalling true to the sketch, and called this one done.  I hope I've inspired you to try a 12x12 sketch in your travellers notebook, and be sure to check out the August Clique Kits sketch challenge, over on the Clique Facebook group.  We'd love to see your take!

Thanks for stopping by today. 

Week 20 with Clique Kits

Hi everyone!

This month I've changed up my subscription from Clique Kits, and have transferred across to the Travellers Notebook Kit, (I was subscribed to the Main Kit before).  Here's a look at the kit this month.

Clique Kits really tailor the Travellers Notebook kit to smaller sized projects, and I just love how much they cram into them. Since my main two project focuses are project life and TN spreads, I think this will be a perfect fit for me.

The first project I've created with the kit is a spread in my 6x8 project life album.

I created my title card this week by trimming two of the patterned papers into a tag shape, stitching them together and using some ephemera pieces from the Crate Paper ephemera pack to add some more layers.  I'm always trying to change up my weekly title card, and this week spelled out the dates of the week rather than using numbers.   

This week included G's birthday and I made him his favourite chocolate cake.  Since he always chooses chocolate cake I try to change up the icing and toppers each year.  This year I made a white chocolate buttercream frosting and topped it with two flavours of Tim Tams... so delicious!

I really wanted some whitespace in this spread and the wander ephemera piece was just the right amount of detail to add to this card.  To add some texture I machine stitched it and rolled the top edge.

I used one of the envelopes to create an insert, printed some journalling on the postcard ephemera piece and then tucked it inside.  I also added the gorgeous white and gold planner pin to the side of the envelope.

This is a look at the right side behind the insert.  I'm not sure if you can read the journalling, but yes we did hike 17.5km on Saturday this week.  Call us crazy but it's so nice to get out and take a hike on weekends, since we both have desk jobs through the week.

I used some super old Basic Grey attach me stickers to add the insert to my album, but you can also easily do this with any old scraps of paper.

Whenever I'm using products that aren't necessarily created for PL in a PL spread, I'll make sure to grab any ephemera pieces that look like they'd be a good base for journalling, like this Travel Bucket List card.  

And that's my spread for the week.  I'm really happy with how this one turned out, and how well the change to the Clique Kits Travellers Notebook kit suits my project life spreads.

Thanks for stopping by today!

Week 16 Project Life for 2018

I'm spending some time at the moment going back into my stash of 2018 Studio Calico kits and making sure I use them.  I have this habit of wanting all the pretty new things (hands up if that's you too!) and so easily will put aside a kit that I haven't had time to play with.  So this week I'm cracking back into the Studio Calico February Candyland Documenter kit.

My go to techniques with PL in my 6x8 album are visual triangles, and minimising the major colours in my colour palette to three.  This week I've focused on orange and fawn, with my pop of colour being teal.

Lately I've been loving creating hybrid title cards each week.  I'll generally have an element printed from my computer, and I posted on Instagram yesterday about the different textures on this one title card.  I've used alpha stickers, machine stitching, hand stitching with embroidery thread, and ribbon.  Just love these little details on a spread.

I cheated a bit with this photo and took a screenshot of an Instagram post from our son's girlfriend.  Since it wasn't a high resolution photo (being a screenshot from social media), I edited it into black and white, which always looks better with a lower quality image, and also took away the bold colours of the photo to suit my colour palette more.  

I also took to the stamp from the kit with my favourite craft scissors and cut away the only word that I wanted to use from it.  I think the original stamp was 'Love Yo Self', but this 'Love' sentiment suited my photo much more.

Since I don't have any filler cards this week I've kept my embellishments pretty simple, and after adding an orange tab die cut from a card I''m calling this week done.

So guys, it's taken me about 2 hours to get to this blog post today.  I've been having so much trouble with images on my blog turning out super blurry and pixellated no matter how much time I spend on trying to get them right. I'm normally a Google wizard, but even Google isn't helping me out!  If anyone has any hints and tips on how to keep your images beautiful on the Blogger platform I'd love to hear from you.

In the meantime, thanks for putting up with these blurry images, and also thanks so much for stopping by today!

Pocket Pages - Week 15 for 2018

Some kits just lend themselves to multiple colour palettes for different projects, and the Bookmarked (March 2018) Documenter kit from Studio Calico is definitely one of those kits.

For this spread I've been able to pull the beautiful turquoise and yellow, with an accent of red and pink. But I've also made a couple of other spreads from the same kit that are completely different colour palettes.  I think this combo is definitely my fave though!

My title card this week is a simple tag from one of the Studio Calico printables.  I've typed the week number and dates in Word in different fonts, and printed them onto the tag.

I shared on my Instagram account yesterday that I usually just record little stories from the week in my PL spreads, but this journalling card inspired me to record our dinner meals for the week.  Three of my faves this week, zucchini and fennel tart, gourmet beef and beetroot burgers, and my chicken, mushroom and leek risotto... yum!

I only realised when I was editing the photos of this spread that I made a mistake in the journalling!  I wonder if anyone can tell what it is hehe...

I loved the Happy as a Lark card as soon as I saw it in Marie Lottermoser's sneak peek even before the release of this kit.  I mean, those sweet birdies right!?  I used one of my circle punches to punch out the piece I needed from the card, then layered it with a few elements onto a filler card from the kit, including a die cut mini doily in white cardstock from my stash.

Diane Williams changed my world by putting me on to Brilliance Moonlight White Ink for stamping directly on photos.  This is my go to ink for stamping on photos now, and even if you don't like stamping text onto your photos a date stamp looks amazing in this ink too.

I feel like I've been saying this a bit lately, but this is definitely one of my favourite spreads for the year so far.  Thanks so much for stopping by today!

Week 14 Project Life Spread

Hi everyone!

It's been a couple of weeks since I've shared any projects, we've had some family gatherings which have made my heart full, but also have meant I haven't been creating as much for a little bit.

So I've had the 'Bookmarked' Studio Calico Documenter kit from March 2018 sitting around for a few months now just waiting to be used, and I love it too much to leave it sit there any longer so I've pulled it out for this spread.

This week we didn't have too much on, and there's only a few photos to get down.  There also isn't too much to say about the week, so I've left two cards essentially as filler cards.

My title card actually said 'the Story of', but gosh I had to use the rainbow puffy sticker in my title card, so I just stuck it right over the top of the 'of' and printed the dates of the week just below it.

I think it's been a while since our two Cavaliers have made it into a spread, and this photo of them is pretty cute.

All in all its a very simple spread this week.  But looking back at last year where I skipped a month in my PL and never got back to it, I'd rather have a simple spread here and there rather than a break in my album, so I'm totally happy to live with it!

Thanks for dropping by today!