Between packing to move and some health issues, I haven't had time/energy to stamp lately, so I thought I'd show off one of my favorite projects. We took a trip to London and Paris in the summer of 2007 and I was really proud of the scrapbook I made of our photos. I started out by deciding to use only three colors throughout: red, black, and white. I ended up switching from bright red (SU's Real Red) to cranberry (SU's retired Cranberry Crisp) halfway through, in the Paris part - I don't think it messed up the concept, though. On this first page, the title is laid out on Chili's coasters covered with patterned paper - I like the depth and interest that gave the page.
The envelope is one of many I used throughout the book - this one holds our plane ticket stubs, and the rest of the little envelopes each have the day's date on them and contain my journal pages from that day. I decided to just include my actual journal, since I did it on small paper, rather than write out journaling directly on the pages.
It took me some time to get used to our hotel room - it was TINY. Just enough room for the bed, really. We had to crawl up from the foot of the bed to even lay on it - no room to walk on either side. It was stiflingly hot the first night we were there, and we got a fan from the front desk to set up in the window. I loved the view, though - I felt like Wendy, about to think my happy thought and fly out over the rooftops. Which was appropriate, since it turned out our hotel was on the same street as J.M. Barrie's house (the author of the Peter Pan books), and we were right down the road from Hyde Park/Kensington Park, where he got his inspiration for the books.
This adorable Doodlebug Designs paper was my inspiration for the black/white/red theme - I just thought it was so cute. I think all of the black and white patterned paper I used throughout was from the same few sheets of Doodlebug paper.
I picked up the little cross-stitch design in the Tower of London gift shop - it was supposed to be a card to mail, but I thought it'd be a nice handmade remembrance of the trip, and it adds some great color to the scrapbook.
We took a Duck tour while we were there - it was really fun. London is the perfect place for it, because so much of the city is centered around the Thames, and when you're just walking around, you tend to forget how vital the river was to the original functioning of the city. It's also very cool to be driving down what looks like a little alley between buildings and suddenly (well, after a switch from driver to captain) be on the water.
My sister picked up these cute travel-themed stamps from Love Elsie, and they were perfect for a travel-themed background. This little pop-out London map was a lifesaver - folds down to pocket-size, but shows pretty much everything you could want to see in London. I kept meaning to get one for Paris, and for some reason never did. They're so great, though.
I like this page from Paris a lot - I didn't include many of the Paris pages in this post, mostly because I don't think I did as good a job with the pages themselves as I did with London. This one, though, I like - the hardware is a great way to showcase the Eiffel Tower ticket stub, and this photo of Sacre Coeur cathedral from the top of the Tower, lit with a beam of light shining out of the overcast sky, is one of my favorites that we took on the trip. If you'd like to see the whole book, I have photos of it starting
here.
This was a fun card to do - I found it in a magazine from several months ago and had the right paper to copy it (with some changes). I love this Cosmo Cricket Dutch Girl paper, and have been trying to find ways to use it since I got it. They pick such wonderful colors! I also have the Cosmo Cricket Gretel collection, and I'd really like to pick up Hey Sugar and Oh Joy. Be Good is really pretty, too... oh, who am I kidding... I love their vintage colors and designs as much as I love Basic Grey's papers, and the only reason I have more Basic Grey is that Hobby Lobby carries more of their sets and has them on sale so often.
I substituted some stickers I had for the rub-ons in the original I was working from - forgot completely that I had an alphabet stamp set that would have been small enough, but oh well. The stickers worked out fine, I think. The purple X is a cool little tool - it's a Xyron product that lets you make small items into stickers. I don't use it that often, but it's fantastic for tiny little things that you can't use the Duck roller or double-stick tape on.
This is the inside - I don't usually do much with insides of cards, but I love how this layout made use of both designs on the double-sided paper - I may have to do this more often! (Although, on a tangent related to using both sides and not wasting the nice paper, it would have been nice if the instructions in the magazine had said either to cut an 8"x8" piece of paper and fold it in half, or to cut paper for a finished size of 4"x8" - I wasn't paying enough attention to the photo at first and cut according to the directions: "Cut your paper 4"x8"" and wasted my last piece of the blue-front paper I was supposed to use. Oh well, I'll repurpose it for something else.)
