Hello

Hi there friends of SAG, how are you, scrapping up a storm? Me? Well, not so much. I've increased my work hours and I've been struggling with the home/work/life/children/scrapping balance - I am not sure it really exists actually, more like a time allocation issue I would say!

Two things today. First, a friend of mine and a friend of SAG, has started a lovely monthly journaling prompt inspired by Ali Edwards' class 31 Things. I think it is something that would appeal to many of you and I know Alexa will welcome you with open arms - and, if you need some journaling inspiration, she has it aplenty. You can click HERE to find out all about it and to read her beautiful words. I've included my page here today.

Secondly, I'm about to upgrade my camera body and I was wondering if any of you out there have any experience with the Canon 5D MKII. It's a full frame camera and I want to know if the Sigma 24-70mm EXDG is a compatible lens? My preliminary research says yes, but I thought I'd check here too as I know many of you are interested in all things photography. I'm also interested in your thoughts over this particular body and the 7D, perhaps I am better off saving a few dollars to put towards a lens? I'm only at the preliminary research stage and am in the process of liquidating some assets for the purchase ... I want to make the right decision as I'll have this camera for a while.

That's all for now, let me know your thoughts.

buy yourself a gold lotto ticket

the planets have aligned, and I have finally done a page, for the first time in eons. So, without further ado:

And because I am so rusty, I confess this is a blatant, straight-out scrap lift of a page I had saved on my pinterest board. I could go back and follow the links to see who the original belongs to, but I might leave that fun follow-the-breadcrumbs expedition for you, if you are so inclined!

This is a fully digital page above, but I do have slightly different plans for it once I print out the important bits. I'll share that once I'm done, first I have to clear the accumulated clutter off my desk in order to do the real life cutting and pasting ;-)

Here's the story:

I even made the template above, even CZ failing to provide anything that tickled my fancy or get the creative juices flowing (I KNOW! how is that even possible).

Hopefully, now I've started again, I will be able to remove those mental blocks that prevented me from just getting in and making some pages (no lack of stories or photos to be used) before these grey cells of mine loose any more data!

Thanks for stopping by!

Sharon

Scrapbooking, what's that?

One of the great things about the SAG blog and all of the contributors, is that we are not trying to sell product, concepts, designs or techniques. We just scrap because we think it's fun and we like it - simple. It means we make the pages we want to, when we want to.

The down side is, we are a bit inconsistent with posting.
That's the truth though isn't it? This is a hobby and we get to it and enjoy it when we need to or when we can. Want to hear another truth?

I have scrapped two pages since the start of May. I don't count the album I made for Ali Edwards' 31 Things class. Good, old fashioned regular pages - two since the beginning of May.

Sigh.

So, here is one of my pages. It relies on a quote from my daughter, this is one of my tried and true ways to kick start some journaling when the ideas are hard to find.

Scrapbooking is fun, but not when you feel as though you are behind or that you're not doing it properly - forget about all that stuff, it's a hobby! Just enjoy the process and the page and the story, all the rest doesn't matter one little bit.

See you when I see you.


PS  Page design is my own, digital paper is from Oscraps.

Week Seven | BLUE

Hi everyone, it's a public holiday here in my part of the world so I am going to be very quick.

I love blue.
Simple.
My favourite Bazzill colour is Nightmist ... wooohooo, I can name a colour of Bazzill, pity I don't really use it any more.

If I look back over all my layouts, blue is a predominant colour, by a long way; closely followed by green. So, this is an older page, but is uses both blue and green and is one of those random pages I am really glad I have. It's a digital page made with a template based on a layout by Beth Proudfoot from the old Simple days, she's one of my favourite designers.

Next one is a new one. 12x12 in size and using a blue digital cardstock and a brush, along with some green, well, it's a yellowy green.

 
I have a feeling that there might be quite a few pages going up this week, blue is a fairly popular colour here at SAG!

Some orange (and some graffiti!)

The end of the week of orange.  I love orange, though I have no idea why? I don't like it hugely in real life, but I love it on scrapbook pages.  Just this minute, I have put together a paper layout so I could share it with you. It isn't as blatantly 'orange' as I thought it would turn out, looking at the photo, but there is certainly some orange going on! Here it is, hot off the press.







































On browsing through some older layouts this morning , in the hunt for orange, this one jumped out at me, purely on it's 'orangeness', and coincidentally, happens to be running along a similar theme to the layout above!

(And here's another photo, waiting to be scrapped.....do I have a graffiti issue???)

And do I want to go to this place below? Um...gasp...yes, please?? Sadly I can't, as it's been closed to the public (not that it was ever opened to the public, it was just an abandoned depot, which is now guarded by several large and apparently very aggressive rottweiler guard dogs!)

(Photos by Susan Clark and William Cowan respectively)

Anyway, I have been distracted, and will now return to orange! Will throw you a couple of OLD yet favourite orange pages, these being 12 x 12, a size which I no longer scrap in. I'm a 8.5 x 11 scrapper now, due to it's speediness and ease! These layouts below have some Ali Edwards influence which that circle word stamp - must dig that up out of my supplies!

 

 

See you next week, for a new colour of the rainbow, from which to be inspired!  

PS. Apologies for mid post distraction!

More Orange

Ok, so this week was a bit easier for me. Whilst Orange is certainly not a "go to" colour for me (bring on Blue week!), I do use it a fair bit...probably more than I would have thought! It seems to work with a lot of photos. Funnily enough it is not even a colour I necessarily like!! Yet it works well sometimes, so I still use it.

Anyway, this is a layout I did recently. I must apologise for the photos, I had to take them at night time, so the light was bad! Love this sketch, I use it often.

This next one is really old layout, but I wanted to show it to mention that I LOVE teal and orange together!!!

Thanks for reading! Have a great day.
Emma

Week Six | ORANGE

Well, have a look at this .... I used patterned paper!

I'm not getting the stories down that I want to at the moment, it's frustrating. Sigh.

Have a great week everyone, bring on the orange!

Purple Day 2

Stopping in very quickly to post this layout...meant to be at work right now! I rarely use purple so it was a challenge for me to find a page I'd done. I don't even seem to use it in small bits!

But I did find this layout, one I love and it does have a strip of dark purple as well as a circle with dark purple. So its as good as I can get! Sorry guys...can't wait to see how everyone else uses purple.

I'll count this for my green page that I missed last week as well!!!! LOL

Have a good day everyone.

Last of the greens

 A few more green layouts for you with which to end the week! These two layouts are horizontal 8.5 x 11's - a size that I very rarely do these days.  The second layout only uses a little bit of green pp, yet the layout still looks very green because of the photo.

  This last layout is very green, and is a 12 x 12. I seriously love green and red together!!  Looking forward to a new colour week starting on Monday!

Nicole xx

Pink - An Easy One for Me!

So last week I definitely struggled with Yellow, so I'm very happy to have Pink this week as that is much easier for me! I have a daughter, so automatically that means some layouts are Pink! My daughter is 9 and is totally not into Pink anymore (she is all about Aqua & Black!), she once was into Pink, so I have many a layout containing pink. I didn't have time to make one especially for this week, so I pulled one from the archives (hopefully I haven't shown it here before!). This layout is about my daughter and her new baby cousin at the time.

Have a good day,
Emma

Week Three | Colour

In Red Week Di posted some song lyrics, if I am guessing correctly, the song was I See Red by Split Enz.
If you know who sings the song ... I Don't Want to be a Stupid Girl .... then you will know that this week we are dealing with the colour -


PINK

Ahhh, pink. Mind you, that is not what I initially think when faced with this colour. I find pink an extremely difficult colour to scrap with, it is not a colour I gravitate towards and when I was a paper scrapper, finding shades of Bazzill that were just right, was always difficult.

I did make a page especially for Pink Week, but when I was emailing with Sharon she told me I needed to break out a bit, be adventurous and use some paper ... as in patterned paper and not just cardstock.
I really go through stages with my scrapping and right now my 'stage' is extremely minimalist as far as papers are concerned. Most of the layouts I have made this year have used a plain white or off white cardstock, as you will see in my first layout - which is also a template I made myself.



When I scrap, I do not like spending too much time deciding on papers and obviously I don't like spending time on embellishments because I rarely use them. The paper choices get in the way, well, for me, they distract me from telling the story and what I want to do in my layouts is tell a story. I like a simple design and my photos to be the embellishment for the story.

Anyhow, after a quick look through some of my older layouts I found this one that uses pink more creatively.

See Sharon, I haven't let you down! ;-)
The photo in this one was put through a couple of filters in Photoshop, it was blurry but cute enough to use.

So, that's it for pink as far as I am concerned. I am sure the girls will have many other examples to show you during the week, and, if you get the chance to play with pink this week, let us know so we can visit you and see your great layouts!

Bye :-)

Yellow - day 5

Seriously, I have a big problem when it comes to making a decision. I photograph most of my layouts so I have a big folder of them all on my photo program (iphoto). I was scrolling through the hundreds of layouts looking for something yellow, and found that I have indeed MANY yellow layouts, and that several of them were some of my favourite layouts.  Then came the decision dilema - Which to share with you?  Well I had about six that I couldn't decide between, and I've narrowed it down to two. So that I don't waste more time on procrastinating, I'm just going to throw those two layouts on this post. They are very yellow, and I really did like them both when I did them.
Today is the last of our YELLOW series - we will begin with a new colour next Monday.  Love colour!

The layouts are 4 years old, but each hold a special place in my heart!

The first is of youngest daughter, and this layout brings back so many memories of her last year at home with me, before she started school (she is now in Year 2). How we both miss that year!! Just yesterday, she said, "Can I stay home with you today, and we can be together like we used to be? We can go out to lunch, just you and me".
We have both had colds this week, so I did let her stay home one day, and we both went out for a coffee/babycino, and remembered the good old days.   Loved 2009. 

 

This second layout shows my middle girls first soccer game ever.  It too holds great memories, because she loved that first game and this is 'where it all began'. According to Amelia "Soccer is my life" and she now, 4 years later, does development representative training on Mondays, does her team training on Thursdays, represents her school with all the boys on Fridays, and plays for her local team, plus usually in an extra game for another local team, on Saturdays.  I did the laundry yesterday and was thinking to myself how we went from little pink dresses to a line full of soccer socks and jerseys.  She looks so little here - she is now a tall athletic almost 10 year old! Okay all this reminiscing is making me want to scrap! It really is great to look back on.

Nicole xxx

Red - Day Three

Sorry I'm a bit late posting today, but I'm here now :-)

So, RED. I like red. Red shoes, red handbags, red accessories.  Funny then, when it comes to making a page, red isn't my first choice of colour.  Like in real life, I like red as an accent, an accessory.  So that is how red came to be on my page.

(template by CZ) A digi page, when it comes to printing I will turn off the background, print the white bit and stick it down on a bit of blue bazzill (I don't know the colour names like Nic does).

And reading the journaling through again  it seems I need to revise my English skills, I've used two different words that mean exactly the same thing in the one sentence. I can't remember the term for that (grey matter not firing on all cylinders today) but see if you can pick it.

What do you think about red?

More Red

A couple of red blasts from the past for you. I love red! These full paper pages are from 2007 - that makes them FIVE years old.  And even though that is paint on that first layout (hello!!!) and I would never do that now the colour red never gets old!! The chubby bubby in the middle of the top photo is now eight, and these are how my other two 'little' girls look now. 

(The layout titled 'You' shows the same girl as the first photo here.  How did that happen in 5 years? )

Slight change? But how good is scrapbooking when you can look back at moments like this.  Red moments!

Nicole x

RED ...

Good morning friends of SAG!

For the next few weeks we are going to post layouts specific to one colour - a week at a time. Starting today, the colour for this week is -

RED

We may or may not be following the colours of the rainbow, we will see .. kraft is not a colour in the rainbow, but it is bound to make an appearance at some stage!

So, let's get things started.

Red appears frequently on my pages as it is one of my favourite colours, so, my photos often have red in them. I like red in titles and red cardstock - though, I am using red less as a background colour as it's pretty strong and my style is a little more muted these days. I have a few red digital papers, not as many as I would have thought, but I am still building my digital supplies.

Okay, drop back during the week and you will see a variety of pages using red. In the meantime, I have to get creative as one of the colours coming up starts with a p and ends with a k, and it's not a colour I use frequently!

Bye :-)

A quick layout

Hi Everyone,

I have a layout that is actually based around the Saturday Sketch even though I did it before the sketch was out! This is a go to design I use often, its easy to use, simple and effective. Makes a quick page, but still has room for interest with patterned paper etc.

Have a good day!
Emma

Sisters

As promised, I'm back with a new version of my sketch.

Papers are from Oscraps and the fonts are Century Gothic and Riesling.
Have a great week, I'm off on term holidays now so I won't be here next Monday, I'll see you when I get back.

Saturday Sketch | Seven

Okay, this is the one where I'm going retro. Retro as in, poorly photographed layouts from a couple of years ago before I started digi scrapping and before I really knew how to line up a photo. But, perhaps you'll forgive me when I say that all my older albums are in deep storage due to forever ongoing house renovations and this is the best I can do ....

Anyway, today's sketch is perhaps my most used sketch from my paper scrapping days. Seriously, if I have twenty pages with this exact same design I would not be surprised, it always just seemed to work for me and I liked that I could use a 5x7 photo and still fit in plenty of journaling space.

Here's the sketch.

And, here are three examples - all paper layouts.

What I like is how easy it is to convert an idea from a traditional layout into a digital template.

And, just because you have been so patient with my dodgy photos, I'll be back on Monday with a digital 'new' version of this sketch. As always, if you decide to give this one a go and end up blogging it, don't forget to link up and drop us a line in the comments ... we get excited about that sort of stuff!

Saturday Sketch #6

Happy Saturday to everyone. It's been a hectic Saturday for me with Winter Sports for the kids started up again...I love it and hate it all at the same time!

Anyway, onto the sketch this week. This is one that can be interpreted in so many different ways. I'm really keen to see what everyone does with it.

Here is the sketch.

And here is what I did with it.

Sorry the colours are a bit dull...I tried scanning this layout instead of taking a photo, but it hasn't really given me the right colours and it chopped the edge off. Oh well, you get the idea!

I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone comes up with.

Have a good rest of the weekend.

Emma

The Swimmer ...

Morning all!

It's great to see that so many of you have been visiting us over the weekends when we post a new sketch, how are you finding them? Have you used many or any? I find I return to the sketch several times during the week, I turn them into digital templates, well, my version, they are not always exactly as posted ... but I am sure no one minds! And, I often make more than one variation - that's the beauty of a sketch, it is open to so much interpretation.

My page today is a version of Di's magazine inspiration from two Saturdays ago.

It looks very similar to Sharon's sketch when put side by side, but I liked the idea of a larger photo in this one, and of course the photo could be at either the top or the bottom of the page.

I have used a white paper from Designer Digitals and Honey Script and Century Gothic as the fonts.