final Shimelle Challenge

the holiday packing is done and the car ready to go so I had a little time to spare - what would I do? well make another page and complete one more challenge of course. Its quite a scrap lift from Shimelle's page. The challenge was to start with a 7*7 square - I suppose I failed out the outset as mine is 6.6 * 7 it was the piece that I gutted from the Daintree river page. As they were on the same topic and will go opposite each other I thought it worked well

two more challenges from www.shimelle.com two more pages done for the album. The one on the right is Stanley in Hong Kong. I moved away from getting the Cairns done as I need two picture. It was working from a sketch. I adore that Shimelle is also providing example pages and a video to show how she does it. Love it!

The 2nd example was to use one of her pages with a bingo card/butterfly/yellow as inspiration. I finally used my Jim Holtz butterfly on a page (as opposed to using it to cut material and stitching it to t-shirts. I made it with scraps from a page I made in a class with Debbie

http://countryheartandhome.blogspot.com/2011/08/when-debbie-met-kirstie.html and it will eventually sit side by side with it. This is at least Cairns :) its some of the beautiful flowers that we spotted on our travels.

I am loving using all of Shimelle's challenges and its sure helping the final stages.

In between manic days at work and coming home to housework in preparation for heading out for 2 weeks (the weather has finally, well sort of, let me peg laundry out and get it dried I have managed to do two more pages for the shimelle challenge weekend. It sure is helping the pages get done in the album. You never know I might get to my year book sometime.

This challenge is all about using half a page and not over whelming the eyes with too much. A great opportunity to use the night shot of Cairns beach. I think that this will become the page header for this section.

This is a Retro challenge - any photo other than a 2011 one - not difficult when I am working on a 2010 trip and I even added the date to the top.

I am busy trying out new techniques on my scrapping - learning as I go to try to ensure that all the pages don't look the same all the way through - don't forget we are talking in the region of 250 (might be an underestimation actually we shall see) pages in 4 albums for one three week trip of a lifetime.

Only 4 sleeps now till the holiday!

more challenges done

although no where near as I meant to. And yes Jennifer this it 3 blogs in less than three days and the way I go it could be the last for a while!

This was the grid pattern and worked well with the 4 photos I had printed off about our cruise. I wonder a little if (a) by the time I worked through the other photos that I just lost track when it came to Cairns or (b) after the 100's that I had taken in Sydney I had a li

ttle camera fatigue. I didn't even seem to have a photo of the boat LOL

The challenge here was to use red, white and aqua. The light to take the picture was bad believe me that is Aqua. This, despite what I said yesterday is the last photo from Sydney and the link to the Cairns set as it is my plane boarding pass. through my album I have (will be) adding a page about the flight I just have Sydney to HongKong to do.

I got no where near as much as I intended to do - a later than planned get up and as usual I underestimated the time it would take to make the dresses for the bears. Hoping I will have chance to do at least a couple more this week but with only 6 sleeps till our holiday I have a lot to do in packing sorting etc.

This page I made as a way of expanding an earlier one. I needed a way to add the tour brochure into the album and am getting fed up of pockets so I found a A4 pocket - made a scrapbook page to the front with the tour details cut from one pamphlet and stuck on there and the brochure behind and then this will pocket will be sewn to the page protector behind it.

This was made using Shimelle's sketch. I had to amend it slightly so that I could use the New South Wales paper I had bought (if I didn't there was not other opportunity to use this paper LOL) added a couple things from our Hotel and yes we have a page. Simple you think soooooo why did this take me 2 hours?? too much chatting me thinks!

This page is my adaptation of the first challenge which was to print of some digital circles that Mary-Ann had provided - couple of problems here (1) we don't have a PC I can load it onto and more importantly and a bit of a disaster where this was concerned (2) we don't have a printer. SO using one of those punches I can no longer live without I punched my own circles and made a page. It was great fun.

I have had a very mixed day today. I was there at 9.30 for the opening of the scrapbook shop on its very last official day. It was very sad to see it so empty and the noise echoing. I did manage to pick up 3 more punches for my collection which has grown massively this week and suddenly I can't make a page without them ... just what did i do before LOL. Sue, Amanda and Rosamond joined me as we wandered and then Alan took our picture outside the store so that we can scrap the occasion in our year books. Not only will I miss having a local store to browse and pick up lovely goodies but I will totally miss the social occasions that came with it. Saturday crops with the girls, the occasional midnight friday one with all the 'famous' girls whose blogs I read religiously or just popping in and chatting with Ellen, Pat or Gill behind the counter they will all be a HUGE miss.

The nice part of the day was that Sue, Amanda and Rosamond came over for the afternoon and we scrapped and chatted. I tried to keep up with the prompts on www.shimelle.com but due to the chat I fell woefully behind. Hopefully I can find a little time tomorrow, while making Build a Bear outfits for Beth and her buddy Andrea to do some more scrapping.

The pages I did also have some significance = they mark the end of scrapping the Sydney part of my the other side of the world trip with my parents last year. So now Bangkok and Sydney done - only Cairns and Hong Kong to do. This (ok these!) scrapbooks have taken me the best part of 10 months so far and I envisage it could take up to a couple more for me to be finally satisfied.

I have been playing nice along with Shimelle's weekend crop and as I would like to be entered into the drawings its necessary to add them here. The first page was to work with one of her sketches. I love doing this and when I combined it with the colours from my yahoogroup challenge it all worked out very well. The page is from above the Hong Kong streets on our visit last year.

The second page was all about using stickers and from 2 different packs. Now me I am not really a sticker girl (unless you count Disney ones) so it took some searching and believe me there are 2 different ones on there. The butterfly is a wonderful Martha Stewart one - the blue came from goodness knows where and is heavily disguised with extra ribbons and buttons. This one is all ready for next month when I will be completing Shimelles learns something new every day. I adore this class- I tend not to follow the prompts too much but make a record of what we did that day. Its so nice to look back on.