Another of my notebooks covered

Hello again everyone,

This is a project that is a work in progress. I plan to cover all the notebooks I have, and I have quite a few. They don't all look pretty but they all have a purpose.

Long before I had heard of 'Smash' books, I have been sticking all sorts of bits and bobs, e.g. tickets, menus, telephone messages and numbers, etc., etc., into notebooks. Because, if I didn't, especially when I had a business to run, they would clutter up my desk or get lost amongst all the other paperwork.

But, of course, they aren't pretty - they are just bog standard notebooks from the stationery suppliers. Well, I don't have an office now but I still accumulate these little bitty pieces of paper that are worth keeping but need a home - a smash book!

This one is covered in a leftover scrap of patterned paper, a piece of embossed core'dinations in orange - just a test piece out of the box full of test pieces - and a couple of journaling spots from a long forgotten sheet of paper. The huge wooden butterfly has a broken antenna which I have carefully glued in place. It's been coloured with orange ink and rubbed with gold run-n-buff. The back has some drops of gold liquid pearls on it. You can see three wee bees stamped just above the title.

There's a few more notebooks awaiting similar treatment - I'm fitting them between other projects. Prettying them up somehow makes them more of a pleasure to fill :)

I'm not going to list the materials - everything came out of the snippets box, except the letters for the title and the poor damaged butterfly. And talking of snippets, I'll be adding this to Di's Crafty Snippet Challenge - Week 57 - my first visit to the playground this week!

Something I've been thinking about and while I have half an hour before Silent Witness - a 'must see' drama for me. I'm thinking of making a scrap page on our favourite TV programmes - it might amuse my grandchildren in years to come. Goodness knows what they will be watching ... indeed, what and how they will be watching ... it will be TV but not as we know it :)

It might seem from comments I make on this blog that I watch a lot of TV but, in fact, I am very choosy. If it is a good drama series and is on at 9pm, I'll go down and join the EM to watch it. I also like anything to do with skating so, much as I hate the constant commercial breaks, Dancing on Ice is on the list at the moment. I also like any of the nature watch programmes, i.e. Spring Watch, Autumn Watch, etc. You've probably noticed I'm addicted to Pointless, followed by Eggheads and for a good belly laugh, my secret pleasure is Mrs Brown's Boys. Oh, and I do record and watch, whenever I have an idle moment, many of the stamping and scrapbooking items on CNC. The EM loves anything to do with railways so Michael Portillo's train journeys are high on his list and because he was quite some ballroom dancer - Latin-American - in his time we never miss Strictly Come Dancing.  However, if I watched as much television as he does, I'd never get any crafting done!

How about you ... do you watch TV, are you selective and what are your favourites?

Off to do a bit of blog visiting now.

Take care everyone,

Card Albums - a photo heavy post!

Hi Everyone,

Saturday is almost over and here I am just getting a chance to sit down at the computer!

How has your day been? Fun, I hope :) It's been another busy sort of day for me - some of it crafting but some of it was spent taking down and packing away the Christmas decorations for another year. I always feel so sad when we reach day twelve and have to pack Christmas away ... the house always looks so dull without the decs!

One thing that I just needed to sort out was the handcrafted Christmas cards we have received, not just this year but for several previous years. We used to simply throw them away, or give them to charity, but that was before I became a cardmaker. Now I really appreciate the amount of work that goes into a handmade card and so just have to keep them.  But that means I have piles of them stashed away in boxes - not very tidily at that - they are works of art and, as such, deserve to be better treated. This year I've put my organiser's hat on and this is what I came up with.

Two card albums, one for Christmas and the other for the more general cards. They look very decorative on my brag shelf and anyone can take them down and browse through them whenever they like. The albums started life as plain, ordinary Academic diaries ... I hoard diaries, notebooks and journals too. If there's a cure for all this hoarding I haven't discovered it yet!!!

I removed the diary pages and any planner pages that had been used ... as both had been under-utilised this was quickly done. Next I raided the snippet box to pretty up the covers. First the Christmas Card Album.

The papers are a mix of Daisy Bucket Designs - the polka dotted paper - and DCWV Holiday Specialty Diecuts Stack. The title a is also made up from a mix of BoBunny alphas - Father Christmas (green) and Serenity (red). The poinsettia petals and leaves were ready cut, from snippets - using the Spellbinders Layered Poinsettia die. I'd gone through the card snippets some time ago and cut a stash of them - really handy to have :)

Here's a few more photos from the completed album.

the inside front cover

back cover 

one of the inside pages

Both albums have a plastic pocket like the one above - handy for holding cards that have a lot of dimension to them.

The second album is pretty much the same as the Christmas album, it's just covered with another mix of papers that includes the absolute last ... sob ... of that polka dot paper from Daisy Bucket designs. The other papers are from Docrafts Papermania - Happy Days and Boutique (the grey leaf design). The title is made up of letters from Docrafts Forever Friends (red) and Jillibean Soup Alphabeans (black) alphas. The embellishment flowers are simply made up of punched shapes and were inspired by one of the prompts in Shimelle's Scrapbook Remix course.

To finish here's a few pics of pages from this album.

inside front cover

back cover

inside back cover

I won't bore you with any more - the inside of both albums are unremarkably similar :)

I'll be submitting this to Pixie's Crafty Snippets tomorrow just as soon as Di opens up the playground again for week #54.

If you have hung on in this far, well done and thank you very much ... you deserve a medal :)

I hope you found it worth while and if you have the same hoarding instincts as I have, perhaps my altered notebooks have given you some inspiration too. Neither album took too long to do, and they do look very decorative on that shelf :))

I now find myself eyeing up my stash of notebooks, etc., thinking of how I can either re-purpose them or simply prettify them with some of the many scraps of leftover paper there is lingering in the snippet box!

Right, there's a half done scrap layout on my desk awaiting my attention so I'm off to finish it and perhaps even start another ... I must be the slowest scrapper on record!

I hope you all having a great weekend, whether crafting or not.

Take care and happy crafting,

Altered Notebook

Evening folks,

I've had a very lazy day today ... a slow start and an even slower day. My get up and go has got up and gone!

However, I do have this little altered notebook to share with you. And it's one for Pixie's Crafty Snippets #50.  Di, you'll be relieved to learn that this is probably my last submission for this week ... it's too cold, wet and miserable for the playground :))

It's just one of those little memo pads that can be bought in packs from Tesco's - they're an inexpensive buy and the covers are easy to alter. The papers, Papermania A Silent Night, are from the snippet box, of course, and the embellishments came out of my bun tray. It takes the tiniest bits of ribbon and paper to fit across the width of the cover.

The topper is yet another from Cardmaker's Delights - this time the non-Christmassy image is of a perfume bottle - I love the roses. I think this will make a nice little stocking filler for one of my lovelies.

I'm hoping for a bright day, instead of this interminable rain that is our lot right now, some time soon so that I can go down to the woods ... with my secateurs ... looking for some evergreens to decorate the house. I love the scent of fresh green foliage at this time of the year - and it's festive looking too.

The EM has just announced that he is going up into the attic tomorrow and bringing down the tree and decs. At last!

Take care all and have a lovely weekend.

Happy crafting too,

WOYWW - Week 90 + A Gardener's Gift Set

Good Afternoon,

It's more like What's Not Going On My Workdesk this week and what a mess. If you are wondering what this WOYWW is all about then it is What's On Your Workdesk Wednesday - an occasion when a bunch of us bare all, and show the world the state of our work desks/spaces/floors/cubbyholes, etc., - in other words the place where we craft. The head workspace keeper is Julia and you will find an awesome list of links at her blog, Stamping Ground. If you've never tried it you are invited to pop over and take a peek.

This is how the desk was earlier this morning, just as I left it when I got poorly at the weekend, so there are a couple of unfinished projects there, the Hougie board is still out, as are the flowers, scissors and dimensional squares. I keep brads in the little red set of drawers but, as you can see, it was sitting on an open copy of the Scrapbook magazine. It's open at an item showing an altered set of drawers and I was debating with myself whether I could do something similar with my wee set. Still not decided.

A couple of hours later here's the project I had been working on now completed. It's a matching notecard, seed packet envelope and notepad set I've made for a gardening friend. Here are some close ups of the individual items:

seed packet envelope- front and back



notebook - front and back



notecard

 Materials used:
Cardstock: Stampin' Up, Certainly Celery and Chocolate Chip
Design Paper & Toppers: from Joanna Sheen's Cottage Garden Papercraft CD Rom
Insert: White copy paper
Toppers for notepad: Design House, One Find Day sticker set
Embellishments: Prima e.line flowers brown, gold brads, Velcro fastener for seed packet envelope

Acknowledgements: I found the template for the seed packet on Julie's blog, Stamped in his Image. I had to enlarge the template to make it big enough for the packet of seeds but otherwise it was easy enough to make. I also have to thank, once again, my blogging friend, Sarah at The Handmade Card for the notebook idea. As usual, I used My Craft Studio Professional to make the insert using the digital punch tool.

Time for my lunch I think, then it's a trip round as many of the workspaces of the world as I can manage. I really enjoy these weekly trips to the desks and seeing what you've been up to, whether it is card making, scrapbooking, writing, knitting, sewing, whatever, and I try to get round as many as possible. If I miss any of you out I apologise but circumstances can conspire to prevent me. That's all for today.