Made With Love by Kat

I had so much fun making my January Project Life album! I decided to make a mini album - inspired by Stephanie Bryant's awesome videos I'm going to try to make on a month... we'll see if that's a bit ambitious! But for this album I used Seven Paper's Baxter cat 4x4 album with Heidi Swapp and Maggie Holmes ephemera along with lots of other bits from my stash - I'd much rather play about and put things together myself than follow a prescribed "collection". But of course it's totally up to you how you do your scrapbooks and if you prefer to keep things simple by using collections then that's cool too! This is my intro page with a tassel made from embroidery thread, a handstamped tag and some cardstock and vellum pieces all mixed up together. The vellum "hello" and "today" are We R Memory Keepers, the cardstock is Heidi Swapp from my stash.  I started my album with some pretty simple photos in page protectors or ju...

Every Monday we play games with my best friend of nearly 30 years, Laura, and her fiance Matt. I wanted to make a spread dedicated to our love of board games, especially as we're playing a brilliant one at the moment, Pandemic Legacy.  To make this card I stuck a 3x4 filler card over a plain 6x4 card and added circles made using my large punch. I liked the effect so much I used it all over the page, sometimes with plain or glittery card and sometimes using the filler cards.  Circles from a 3x4 filler card: More glittery thickers, of course! More circles, and a chipboard sticker - I love how this one came out. The paper was from my Fine & Dandy pack - if you look above you'll see I also punched a circle from it to use on the right hand page in order to bring the design together coherently.  Luke's phone can make photobooth style images, so we were playing about with it one evening. The embellishment is punched from a 3x4 card - it f...

Two spreads for you today! Even though the album is about Luke and me, I couldn't resist including just a few photos of my beautiful horse, Chirma. The cute cards are from the Becky Higgins Sweet speciality set.  My friend Zoe died last year, and even though I'm not religious, I do sometimes wonder if she's watching over me somewhere. I have a thing now that finding white feathers is a sign that she's around - and on the morning of the championships I found one... and we won! Thanks Zoe, hope I made you proud. I kept the feather, so I included it here.  The second spread is from our trip to Yorkshire for friend's 30th. I wasn't sure I loved these cards individually, but I loved  the way this layout looked when they were combined together. 

These were two really fun pages to do that I wanted to link through the colour scheme even though they were from separate events (the local food festival and Luke's birthday). I particularly love the pictures of our friend Ella pre- and during-Dryember... she raised lots of money for Cancer Research though, so it was worth it. The cards are all from the Heidi Swapp Favourite Things collection, the washi tape was from Tesco I think!

I'm really pleased with how these pages about our Norfolk trip this year came out. Maybe it's because the trip was pretty fresh in my memory, or because I was working with photos I'd selected for the purpose, but I feel the colours and styles really work well. The cards are a mix of Heidi Swapp September Skies and Favourite Things, with a few Becky Higgins Sweet speciality themed cards thrown in for good measure.  This picture and quote is taken from a tourist brochure I picked up while we were there. I cut it down to fit over the three pockets.  As part of the journalling, I wrote about our trip to see the seals at Blakeney Point. They were really cheeky - popping up all around the boats to say hi, so this Fine & Dandy sticker was the perfect embellishment. Luke laughed his socks off when he saw this, he loved it.  It was my birthday shortly before we went away and Luke got me a bottle of Nyetimber, the award-winning English sparkling wine. ...

This was a single-page layout and maybe the first where I really felt like I was getting to grips with designing well. It's no coincidence that it's much, much simpler than the France layout, with just a couple of Fine & Dandy stickers added, along with the now-mandatory gold glittery thickers (what will I do when I run out?!). I was really happy with the little brown craft envelope, which I had to use as packaging for my jewellery business , and which has some additional photos in that wouldn't fit on the page but I didn't want to leave in a drawer. 

This is the layout from our France holiday last year. I sort of like it, but I think maybe I've put too much stuff on the page. I couldn't get it right, and so I just kept adding things... which I don't think was necessarily the right thing to do. I do like this picture we sneakily took of a Hell's Angel watching the boat jousting - definitely not what you'd expect to see on a sunny afternoon in the South of France! I made this embellishment using my big circle paper punch with a Fine & Dandy flamingo paper and some pink glittery card from Tesco. The card isn't the posh stuff, so it will shed glitter I'm sure, but I can live with that.  Here's Luke, very pleased with himself on our big bike ride. We hired bikes - brilliant and really easy. I made the little flag embellishment and added a chipboard sticker from a Dear Lizzy set. 

Day two! This was made with some photos from our first two holidays together that I'd printed out to put in a framed collage, but I printed waaaaaay too many and so they've been sitting all sad in a drawer for more than a year. Hurrah for liberating the pictures! I don't really like my handwriting on this layout, and I went back to change it a few times. I used more of the gold glittery thicker  (which I love), plus some Fine & Dandy papers that I cut from the paper pack.  "Chopez chopez" was an in-joke between me & Luke when we were in Madrid - we were both hopeless at Spanish and so started making up our own words when talking between the two of us. One evening I told him that "choppez choppez" was definitely Spanish for "hurry up", we'd had just enough Rioja for it to be funny and it became a bit of a catchphrase. It seemed to suit this little guy well... he definitely wasn't in a hurry to go anywhere.  ...