Tea Break Layout

Taking inspiration from The Scrappiest Sketch 109 but changing the theme from 'Valentine's Day' I've made a layout this afternoon featuring a very old photograph of me working, or rather, taking a tea break at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, Aylesbury. 

It was my first job after qualifying as a Radiographer in 1980 and this photo was taken about a year later.

The shot was taken by a colleague who was a keen photographer and he developed his own photographs in the x-ray darkroom after hours. If you look very carefully you will see my wedding ring on my right hand. He obviously reversed the photo by mistake before developing it.

I've included a tag, attached to the clock face cut-out, which can be pulled upwards to reveal the hidden journaling, highlighting his error.

For the layout I used K&Co and Tim Holtz papers and stamped clock face images over the background. 

As I am determined not to increase my scrap-booking stash this year, I delved through my many boxes and found some items I had forgotten about. My collection of punches hasn't seen the light of day for ages so it was past time that I used them again on a page. 

Can you spot the three I've used from Martha Stewart?

I think it's as much fun rediscovering old techniques as it is in using new things - or am I just trying to convince myself?! 

Simple Knitting And Crochet (Or Not)

Having spent my spare time lately, not paper-crafting, but busily having a personal knitting and crocheting revival, (I've just finished another scarf, the pattern in this month's 'Inside Crochet' ) I thought I'd tell how I first came to learn these crafts and am taking part in From High In The Sky Storytelling Sunday.

I used to watch fascinated as my Grandmother knitted in her armchair, and must have been about 7 when I asked her to teach me how to knit. With the occasional input from my Mother, she willingly tried to teach me the age-old craft that she felt every young girl should know. It wasn’t long before major problems surfaced! Not with my aptitude or keenness to learn you understand. No, the problem was my left-handedness - or cack-handedness as my Mother always called it. 
However hard they tried neither woman could teach me to knit left-handedly. They couldn’t work out how I should hold the needles or which way to wind the yarn around. It was probably quite amusing to watch but I became very frustrated at the lack of teaching going on! Eventually I decided that in order to learn something that I really wanted to do, I would have to learn it their way. And so I held the needles as they did and learned to knit exactly as they did. In no time at all I was knitting and purling happily.

Next came my desire to learn to crochet, but neither my Grandmother nor Mother could face teaching me. I had to wait for my Great Aunt Hilda to pay us a visit from London. Although she had been primed in advance about my left-handedness, she was totally unable to show me how to crochet with the hook in my left hand. Having already learned that compromise was required on my part to learn new things I watched and learned how to crochet ‘her way’.

I remember being told that in my Grandfather’s day it was not permitted to be left-handed and he was forced to sit on his left hand at school. Although we are not so strict these days, the majority of people are right-handed and it’s still difficult to find teaching materials or tools specifically for people like me, although the Internet is a valuable new tool for left-handers. Over the years right-handed tasks have become easier for me and I could probably call myself ambidextrous in some things, but I doubt that even I could teach someone left-handed knitting or crochet if I were asked! This raises some questions for me; are left-handed people more easily able to adapt to this right-handed world than right-handed people are to a left-handed world? Or do we left-handers all give in and use our right hands? 

Scientists know that the brains in left-handed and right-handed people are different. Perhaps there was a genuine scientific explanation for my female relatives' difficulties teaching me simple knitting and crochet.

First Scrapbook Layout of 2011

Some of you spotted this layout on my WOYWW post this week. I had started with a sketch from Scrap-A-Little and produced my first scrapbook layout of 2011. My first page for months actually.

Having no new photos to play with has really affected my creativity and I need to get out with my camera and take some more. Unfortunately, I do tend to be a 'fair-weather photographer'!

The layout features photos of DD2 at a Halloween party. The photos are taken from Facebook and had already been put through an ageing process before being uploaded there, so they are not the best to use for scrapbooking. But as I've already said, I'm lacking new images to play with so these were better than nothing!

Using Tim Holtz paper, I drew a large cobweb starting from the top right-hand corner. Some black velvet ribbon, buttons and jewelled brads completed the page. Before I actually saw the photos, my daughter informed me she had dressed as a Victorian Vampire (whatever one of those looks like!), hence the words in the poem I made up instead of having hand-written journalling.

I must admit I'm much quicker making pages with a starting point like a sketch. If I'm trying to make my own design from scratch I can take hours to finish one layout! 

But I'm sure I'm not the only one with that particular problem.

WOYWW 2011

Happy New Year WOYWWers!

Thanks to our Great Leader we get to rummage around everyone's workdesk again. Hop over to her blog to leave your link if you want to take part in this madness. We're a friendly crowd, just excessively nosey!

Here's my desk this week. Not too much mess but I notice that the TV remote is visible!

There's nothing new to be seen today. I'm trying not to buy anything new this year (I tried last year and failed) so you can see my purple magnetic mat and large guillotine. There's a plastic box filled with brads and a couple of small drawers with ink pads. And the scrapbook page I made with lots of spare photos that I didn't use. 

Does anyone else always print too many? I have an idea in my head for the layout but it rarely turns out that way, hence the wasted photos. I also print the them out in different sizes too. 

Maybe that should have been my New Year's Resolution - to only print off what I will absolutely, most definitely use!

Matchbook Cards

What have I been up to today? I've made some matchbook-style cards. Nothing new, but if you've never made them before, I thought I'd show the very easy steps to making one. You can make them any size you like but mine start off as an A4 piece of card.

1.Take an A4 piece of base card and score and fold it down the centre to make an A5 card

2. Score 1.5cm in from each of the short edges

3. Cut off one of these edges

4. Fold the card in half along it's centre fold and fold up the remaining scored edge to enclose the front panel of the card

You now have a matchbook card to decorate.
I like to cut the A5 card in half to make two smaller cards like these;

And here's some I've decorated today 

mainly with Paper Adventures papers and stickers.......

standing up (above) and lying flat
with the fold-up bottom edge

Two more...

I hope you give them a try and have fun decorating them!