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.

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 Nine | Kraft

After the challenging week that was Week Eight and the Black and White theme, we are moving on to the easier, and more prevalent neutral, Kraft.

White, Nightmist and Kraft are my most commonly used Bazzill colours - I spent a lot of time searching through digital shops to find the equivalent and have come across some at both Designer Digitals and Oscraps.

My first layout is based on a design Sharon came up with, it was taken from a magazine article if I remember correctly.

This next page is a Cathy Zielske template.



Have a great week, I'm looking forward to seeing what the girls all come up with this week - I have a feeling Kraft is not in short supply!

Week 8 | Black and White

Now this week was hard. It wasn't hard to find a layout with a black and white photo, that would be cheating, but it was hard to find a predominantly back and white layout.

I had to search the archives, I've had a new layout for nearly each week up until now .... my excuse is that I had to make three birthday cakes last week, and they were all for the one person.

Gotta love U2. I didn't get to see them last time they were out, actually, I've only seen them once in concert and I'd love to see them again one day.

Black and white; any pages to share?

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!

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!

Week Five | PURPLE

I am a child of the eighties, and this week's layout is proof.

I love this movie, sure, it's never going to win any awards, but that doesn't matter, it's good film.
Escapism; exactly what I like in a movie.

As for purple, well, I use it more than I think, well I did when I used cardstock. I don't have many purple digi pages. Purple is more versatile than you think and I'll leave further explanation and examples to the others, who are more colour cognisant than I.

Purple, love it or loathe it, have you used it on a page recently?

Week Four | Green

I can't believe it is the start of the fourth week in our colour series, the weeks are whizzing by at the moment!
This week I am going to share some old and new pages, one is so old it might even equate to 'real' scrapping. I used cardstock and even cut out parts of my son's birthday cards to make a grid on the page, and, hold your breath .... are those embellishments on the page I spy?!

The next two are digital.

The last one was a tricky page for me to make, not because of the story, but because I didn't have the photo I wanted to illustrate the story. I am not sure how clear and easy the journaling is to read, but, in the last holidays the kids had a great experience with a local artist who let them fill in a canvas for him and then he started painting creatures from the blobs and drips of paint on the actual canvas. At the time, I did have my camera, but I felt that it was not the correct etiquette to photograph him at work, even though it was all a bit of fun, but, he had several pieces there for sale and I didn't want him to think I was trying to copy his work in any way. What do you think, was I too conservative, or was this the right thing to do? Nicole, what would you say?

Anyway, there are my green layouts for this week, I use green a lot so it was easier than last week!

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 :-)

Week Two | Yellow

Moving on from Red Week, we embark on Yellow.

I love the colour yellow, it is bright and sunny and happy. But, I can barely find a page with yellow included.
After work a couple of weeks ago, I came home to a busy inbox where Sharon and Di were chatting away. We eventually came to the topic of cooking, more to the point, thinking of what to cook - a complete nightmare if you ask me! Right there and then I decided to scrap a page on the topic.

I might not scrap a lot of yellow, but I certainly cook with yellow - a lot.
The page is a template of my own combined with cardstock from Designer Digitals.

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 :-)

Getting Started

Hi SAG friends!
I've been away on school holidays and had a week to settle back into the routines and sort through what feels like 50 billion photos.
I hadn't made any pages at all until yesterday - thought I'd better get with it and so I jumped in at the deep end.

It's hard making that first page after a bit of a break, everything seems slow and laborious. I like to make the journaling process a little easier and often, in this circumstance, use a quote or a snippet of conversation from one of the kids.

Here's what I came up with.

By itself, the photo is really rubbish. I was working on full manual setting and testing out I had the right ISO etc. I was lagging behind a bit on our walk, only so I could get things right with the camera - it seems my quick witted daughter had a thing or two to say in the meantime!

I made the template myself and the digital paper is from Katie Pertiet.

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!

Two Layouts

Morning!

It's the start of the last week of Term One here, I've almost made it with my baby starting school and me returning to work out of the home - phew!
I'm a little behind with showing you my version of the sketches, I was up to Nicole's and have two versions to show today.
I used the 12x12 option, one was quite literal and the other changed just a bit, nothing drastic, but fitting in with my current needs.

I haven't scrapped since I made these two pages and I'm not sure what stories I want to tell at the moment, sometimes everything seems worthy of a page and at other times, nothing feels recordable ... does that happen to you?

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.

Got My Sketch On

I had the chance to scrap a bit over the weekend, it's pretty wet down here at the moment, perfect scrapping weather. Actually, the rain hasn't been too bad where I am and hopefully none of the other SAG girls have floated away ... keep dry ladies!

I'm a week behind with the sketches, this one is based on Sharon's sketch a week or so ago.

I'm loving orange on my pages this year, just to add to the lines and the rounded corners. Are you seeing any colour trends in your pages this year?

 Amy

Saturday Sketch | One ....

Hi SAG readers!
It's been a long time since I've had something up over here, but with the first week of school out of the way, it's time to scrap.

This year we are introducing the Saturday Sketch; like our previous challenges we will have a link set up so that you can share your pages, but, unlike the challenges only the sketch setter will post a page as an example. This way you can visit us, we can visit you and it takes a bit of pressure off everyone - it's all about scrapping because we want to, not because we have to or because we have a deadline!

So, I'm first; probably the most sketch challenged of the lot - I buy those templates for a reason! I always view a sketch as a springboard, sure, it can be used literally but don't let the shapes in front of you confine your creativity, there is always scope to add or subtract and flip and rotate.

12x12 is making a come back for me, I've decided to go fully digital this year as a trial - I can get 12x12 photobooks printed easily, far simpler than single pages and I am enjoying the extra space.

I know I just said that the sketch can be interpreted in a variety of ways, but for this one I have gone literal. If you are interested in a couple of details, especially if you are taking Cathy Zielske's Type class, I have used Century Gothic as my journaling font, set at 12pt and a 24pt leading. The title is a font called MonoAlphabet that was possibly downloaded from dafont, but I can't be sure as I have had it for a while.

Feel free to link up if you decide to use the sketch, we love seeing all of your pages and don't forget to leave a comment on Sharon's post to be entered in the draw for the giveaway.

Merry Christmas ...

Merry Christmas everyone.

Thank you for your interest in our blog over the course of the year, we are all on summer holidays now and feel it's a good time for a little break.

We wish you all a safe and peaceful break with your families and we look forward to sharing many new stories and simple layouts in 2012.

December Memories ...

The Christmas countdown has well and truly begun, we have five days left at school and I have a feeling this last week is going to drag, well, that, or I am going to have to find some super creative ways to get my children out of bed in the morning!

I've been working away at my combined December Daily/Journal Your Christmas project. I'll let you in on a secret, I only journaled two pages last week, true, it's all I felt like doing, and my entries this week will be quite photo focused.

This is just a quick example of what I've been doing. Mostly I've tried to write about one story or event, this week will be harder as most days we have a couple of extra activities - list style journaling may come in handy!

Have a great week everyone!