It's a Creative World

Travel Journal

Hi, Mandy here.  My Husb and I were very surprised and delighted to be able to go on a last minute cruise this Summer (our first).  As many folks know, we have four teenagers and this was a very special holiday for just the two of us (kinda celebrating our 20 year anniversay a good few months ago now).  Obviously, as a scrapbooker, I wanted to do something about the memory keeping side of things.  I thought for a while about what I'd like to do and decided on an 8" x 8" Travel Journal, taking a pile of pre-made pages and journaling cards ready to go.  I packed a small amount of co-ordinated stash and a few essential tools.  I did research a way to print pictures as I went along, using a new mini printer (Polaroid GL10) that prints straight from the camera with a usb lead and pictbridge.  The quality was fab. 

Anyway, here's the finished cover, made before we went...

The front Hambly Screenprint opens...

To make the journal I began with an 8" x 8" raw chipboard spiralbound book from Hobbycraft, with a black ribbon-tie closing.  I also bought a pile of Papermania 8" x 8" plain kraft sheets, some cheap little envelopes and a 6" x 6" pad of pp (although I did use other pp and coloured cardstock).

I removed the spiral and inner pages because I wanted to be able to add pages and memorabelia as I went along, hence the 4 blue bookrings.  There's a blank example page...

I enjoyed misting and embossing some of the pieces for the front cover...

I would love to be able to say I journalled every day but I didn't.  I did print out some photos while on the cruise and enjoyed several happy hours scrapping but in the end there was just so many wonderful things to be doing that I brought home the rest of the journal pages to finish at home.  My  Husb kept a plain and simple excercise book journal and wrote LOADS so when I come to finish mine I have his to refer to.

This is me, in our little cabin, adding to the travel journal...

 

The cabin table was really tiny, but you can get an idea of what the travel journalling/scrapping was like...

We were so lucky to have had this holiday and I still have plans to finish the journal.  Anyone else actually kept up with a travel journal?  I'd love to see some links if anyone has :)

Mandy

 

Little Boxes, Little Boxes

Hi Dolly here and I wonder how many of you are old enough to have seen the title of this post and be humming the song?

Oh come on … someone must remember it!

But the post isn’t about the song but about genuine little boxes and what to do with them.

I wonder how many of you keep boxes that are pretty and cute with the view to making something in them and then never get around to it?

Today’s post is a super quick solution.

I spotted this little box when looking for a necklace. The necklace was cute, but it was the box I wanted and the way I looked at it, it was £3 for a box to fit an album in and they gave me a free necklace!

I wanted to use it for a mini book of the big cat sanctuary we had visited and it was super quick to make.

The inside of the box measured 4 ¾  “ x 3 ¼  ” and so I cut several strips of cardstock of  3”. You need to make sure it is snug but not TOO snug.

As I was using 12” x 12” cardstock it gave me the perfect overlap for flaps.

I scored the strips at 4 ½ “ and 9”and the little left over bit of 3” made the flap enabling me to stick it to the next strip with extra strong double sided tape and create a pocket for a tag.

Before I glued it down I punched a semi circular hole at the top of the opening just to make it easier to get the tag in and out and obvious that there was a tag in there.

You just repeat this as many times as you want or need to create the accordion booklet.

 

I cute two pieces of thicker cardstock for the covers, covered them and decorated them. Before sticking the back cover onto the accordion fold book I added a small loop of ribbon between the book and the cover. This acts as a kind of tab to help you pull the book out. I find this really useful as the books are often a snugger fit than I anticipated.

It is then just a case of adding pictures and embellishments.

 

I promise it is really really quick and simple and works with any size of box.

I have made them in quite large boxes as almost full sized albums and even in teeny boxes like this wedding favour box which is only a 2” cube.

 

 

Now, go grab one of those pretty little boxes you have been hoarding for ever and fill it with a quick and simple memory.

LOTTIE MINIBOOK re-visited

Hello, Eleanor here again, with a minibook I made over 3 years ago, as part of Project 2009, piano hinge style (for instructions, see my post here ).

I used fibres instead of bamboo skewers, but the principle is the same.

These are the pages, in no particular order:

The importance of compost:

Building a pond, for the frogs (in 7 years at the allotment, once we had a pond we didn't see a single slug or snail):

Hard work, frequent pauses to lean on a hoe:

Join the Allotment Association? You must be kidding (too much chin wagging, when time could be spent digging):

Saving water:

Trudging down the lane in all weathers:

We built it, glazed it, painted it, and sat on it - our shed:

Always digging to be done:

Inner peace:

Some of the happiest times in our lives were spent at the allotment.

Looking back on the making of this minibook, I realise how much I loved that 12 months of making one a month. I think it must be time for another 12 month project - I'd choose minibooks again in a heartbeat. If anyone knows of a similar challenge out there, please let me know.

Thanks for continuing to drop by, as we re-visit these archived posts, we hope to return soon with our creative batteries recharged.

 

 

 

ATeaC Swapping

Morning campers! Leanie here, hope that you are all having a good Monday and have survived the rather inclement weather we've had recently.  Did it make you want to huddle up with some crafty bits and a brew?  If so this may be JUST what you need :)

I've been so looking forward to sharing this post with you - because I know you'll all want one of these mini books!  At UKScrappers, a few of us started our own sharing circle between friends, and did an Alice-themed ATC swap. We knew many had gone before us, but all chose a character and sent them off, for Bex to bind into a little accordion book.

However, when we got them back, they were so much more than any of us were expecting - Bex had made covers that were so pretty and detailed, inside and out, and sent them all back in tea-time boxes with Mad Hatter hat favours filled with charms, along with sweets, tea and lots of love!

So, for your drooling pleasure, and to inspire your creativity, please find attached pictures.  I've also got more detailed ones going up on my blog so I can showcase the techniques everyone's used, and love that this can now be my little resource book:

Isn't that covered hat on the back cute?!

I hope this gets your mojo flowing - see you soon!

Leanne x

 

www.beautifulimpressions.co.uk

www.craftaholicleanie.co.uk

Tag or flag book

Have you ever tried making a flag book? There is a really comprehensive tutorial here.

Its really important to get your creases accurate.

I cut out all my tags from the same card stock.

I added lots of pictures and ephemera to the tags, and some scraps of my very favourite paper.

The nice thing about these books is you can alter the size of your tags, and it is a way of getting lots of photos into a minibook.

Debbie xxx

Playing with media.

Last month I went to a Media weekend at Art From The Heart.  It was taught by Dyan

 

We arrived on the Friday evening to a pile of paper, textured, ribbed, watercolour, kraft etc. By the end of the weekend I'd made this:

It was a great opportunity to try out all sorts of media and decide what you liked using and what you didn't.  My favourites were the Dylusion Inks and golden acrylic paints. I found I preferred inktense sticks to artbars and pan pastels are so vibrant.

 It's amazing what you can do with stencils when you think outside the box.

We were all asked what our least favourite colour was and then given that colour to play with!

Mine was orange, but with a touch of pink and some gesso I actually found I liked it.

Here's a lemon and lime page:

This is my first attempt at Art Journalling:

A little twee maybe, but it says what I wanted to say.  I don't think it's finished yet.

It's great to dip in and out of and has helped keep my mojo flowing and is a great record of all the techniques we used and media we tried.

 

 

 

Thanks for looking.

 

Lynne x

 

 

 

A quiet fabric book

Hello, Eleanor here again.

I've been stitching away on a small scale project, for a swap I'm involved in. It's called the quiet fabric book, inspired by a project in this book. Nine of us are making small (ATC sized, which is 2.5 by 3.5) felt books, with a theme of quietness, and each of us contribute 9 fabric pages. Mine are all the same, and will be sent to the host for distribution, so that we each end up with nine different, unique pages to bind into a beautiful soft little book.

I chose "the silence of a seed" as my page title, and stitched a botanical type illustration of the germination of a bean.

Here's one:

and here are all nine!

The very background is white felt, overlaid with woollen plaid from a sample swatch, for the soil, and cream damask from an old curtain above. I have used this curtaining for a dozen different projects, it has been so useful.

The bean itself started out as black shrink plastic cut in 2 inch bean shapes. Once heated and shrunk to less than an inch, I added coppery brown embossing powder, and heated until several layers made a thick finish.

A short length of white paper string cut at an angle makes the radicle.

As the hypocotyl grows, the seed coat (from a vinyl handbag strap, heated rather daringly, careless of fumes!) begins to rip and shrivel, 

and the first few roots emerge.

Appearing above the surface of the ground, the cotyledon has the beginnings of a leaf poking out.

Finally, the felt cotyledon has hardened and is wrinkling (with the aid of blonde moments embossing powder)

and the twin leaves have unravelled themselves and bounce gently on strong (wired) stalks.

The page title is printed onto my good old standby, cotton curtain lining, trimmed and secured with simple stitches.

It was amazing fun, planning and executing the pages, although by the ninth I was seeing wonky roots and wired stems in my dreams. I'm hoping the other girls don't mind that the page is a little bit dimensional.

It's a while until the swap is officially over, but as soon as I have pages back from the other 8 girls, I will post them here if they agree. Meanwhile I will be deciding how to bind them all, or maybe making a little quiet box to keep them in.

Finally, all the prizes from the Spring Blog Hop have now been drawn, the winners were:

Dolly's voucher - shellyj 

Gabrielle's Altered Book - Michaela

Mandy's Crazy Chick - Helen Winnicott

Laura's candy - Angelfish

Ifa's prize - Mole

Erika's candy - Kirsti

Eleanor's feltie thing - Catriona

Tracey's goodie bag - Jimjams

Kerry's flowers - Lisa

Leanne's shrine - Gabrielle.

See you next time,

Cheerio!

 

40 Top Tens Mini book

My  brother was recently 40,  I wanted to make him something special but realised I didn't have a lot of time. I decided to make him a mini book full of journaling cards that he could fill in.

I decided to think of 40 top tens for him.

I used some fairly muted papers that were double sided and made lots of pages with pockets and pull outs.

Some of the "top tens" were things like your top 10 favourite foods, singers, christmas presents and funny things the children have said etc.

I then added pictures and embellishments to the basic book.

 

I just had time to make him a card, and he really loved his mini book.

Thanks for stopping by It's a Creative World

 

Debbie x

Pinterest book

Recently I have been spending A LOT of time on line, looking at pinterest.

Whilst it is nice to see everything on a screen and it looks lovely, I like leafing through magazines and books, so I decided to make my own Pinterest book.

I started off by covering some card with orange mulberry paper.

 

The face and dress were images cut from a magazine and stuck on using decopatch glue.

The butterflies are images printed onto old dictionary pages (a car boot sale find)

The pages were a great way of using up lots of old stash.

I decided on my categories and made little tabs to separate each section.

I finally bound my book and spritzed it all over with gold glimmer mist.

My pinspiration book is now full, time to start another one!

 

Debbie x

Space-saving ideas ...

... for scrapbookers from Alexa: hello and welcome to It's A Creative World today!

A little bored of just scrapping one photo per page? Wondering how on earth you're going to store all your burgeoning albums? Unsure about multiphoto pages but would like to fit more photos in? Hopefully there will be something to fire your interest here.

When I started scrapping, I needed to fit twenty-one years worth of photos and life experiences of my daughter into two albums: one photo per page was not going to do it! Here are some of the ideas I used or developed to incorporate more photos on a page:

Make a small mini-book of photos and add to a page as an large embellishment, or instead of an extra photo. Fasten to the page protector with eyelets to allow the pages to turn.

Or make two holes in the page protector and card, sliding string of ribbon through one hole, then behind the card, and out through the second hole. Parchment pockets are also pretty and easy.

A waterfall book, with captions below each photo, takes up little space. The pockets in mine have photos front and back: fourteen photos in a space four inches by three.

A parchment strip as a backing for photos works well: folds easily, takes little space. I also love vertcial flaps the length of the page for extra photos, maps etc.

Techniques from book-making can be adapted: this pull-out tag book holds over two dozen photos, with a pocket on the inside front cover for journalling.

And then there's the double-page spread with over sixty photos ... but perhaps that'll have to wait for another time! Hoping this helps in thinking about being creative with space ...

Thank-you for joining us today! :)