Making Memories

Note : This was first featured as Guest Designer Feature on 28 Sept 2011 in Making Memories Blog.

A good friend of mine is getting married very soon and I won't be able to attend his wedding due to work commitment.  I wanted to create a small memento that would be meaningful to him and special to her.  As I love altering items, this is when  I gave a new lease of life to a simple diskette box.  I made a mini album to fit the box, with space in the box to spare for them to keep additional notes or photos.

For this project, I hunted down all the remainder stock of Je T'adore in Singapore and used a total of three 12x12 papers from the Je T'adore paper - Tres Jolie Collage , French Dictionary and Floral Ledger and the brads and accoutrement pack.  Je T'adore is such a gorgeous collection.  The box was covered with French Dictionary trellis pattern paper on the sides,  with Tres Jolie paper in front.  The mini's pages are made from a single sheet of Floral Ledger paper and the covers from Tres Jolie paper.

In any project, a slight alteration can make a big difference in the end results.  I will share a few from this project over here.

1) The box is upcycled from an old diskette box, covered in double sided patterned paper. As the box is transclucent, you can see the pattern inside and the other pattern outside.

  

2) This pair of kissing swallows are from the Je T'adore accoutrement pack. They are originally light pale pink and I covered them in a thin layer of bronze crackle paint.  After the crackle dried, it broke nicely to show the pale pink under the bronze, giving it a bit of the vintage look.

3) Don't be afraid to mix and match. I have here 3 types of roses - a brad, a resin flatback and a paper rose.  See how well they go together?

4) Use words on patterened paper as highlights by boxing them or matting them.  This was from a phrase in the French Dictionary paper.

5) Give dimension to your fussy paper cuttings by painting them with a layer of glitter glue and distressing and curling the edges of the cut.

Hope you enjoyed the tips I shared!

FOLLOW on the right hand side if you want to be notified when the tutorial on how to make the mini album comes up in a few days' time!

Thru Thick & Thin

BY & I have been married for 10 years, so I was trying to sift through my photos for us together.  Thanks to the many computer crashes, we don't have much! So I took one that we took at the start of the year when I got my iphone 4.  The photo had been deliberately made old and retro by an app and I thought it would be perfect for a 10 yr layout.

Combined with my interest in creating "dirty" layout (which had June laughing at me for liking dirty layouts), I did this vintagey, retroey, non fluffy layout.

I'm not a frequent user of rub-ons, but on this one I applied two different types to get the contrasting letters in the same height.  I also managed to get a number of rub-ons on my fingertips... haha!

I like that imperfect look. 

Materials : Papers - DCVW cardstock, K&Co patterned paper; Washi Tape; October Afternoon rub on letters; CatsLifePress stamp; Maya mists; Tattered Angels glimmer screens.

Royal Flower

I made this unusual birthday card for a dear sister friend of mine who is going to celebrate her birthday soon.  As purple is one of her real favourite colors and she requested us not to waste money buying her flowers, the rest of the girls specified for me to make a card with a lil bit of flowers to replace the ones we could not buy with the specific words for the outside of the card.  The card is titled such and has a butterfly because once we are transformed by His grace, like a caterpillar who metamorphasised, we will never be the caterpillar again even if we deserve to be any less. 

Materials : DCVW Card base, Webster Pages Paper, AC thickers, MS Punch, Ranger stickles.

Teacher's Day

In the month of September, Teacher's Day and Children's Day in Singapore has been changed to the first Friday of the month.  Ms E prepared a number of cards for all her teachers and for one special art teacher Joanne we had something different.

My friend KP attended a class and was going to impart some of her learnings to us at one scrapbook session, but as she was caught up in a meeting and could not excuse herself, many of us were left what to do.  Basically, we never got to start the class and never got round to having a lesson.  All of us took our cardboard pieces home and this is how mine turned out to be.

This is my intepretation, sprinkled with what I think teacher Joanne is like. Sweet, electic, different and a little unique.




This is the front of the House.  It's a 3D box, with butterflies soaring away from the house like ideas generating and growing. This "House" holds an electic album of mish mash papers, pockets and sizes. 

 


The mini album inside mirrors a little of the front, and is made in a flip book style



The back of the House is decorated with Ms E's picture and is deliberately finished off with a row of kiddy pearls for that slight childlike finish


To make the album, I added components made by Ms E to personalise the inside with little embellishments, multipocket pages and sparkly stuff.  She was happy and I think teacher Joanne was to.

Materials : Papers - DCVW, K&Co, Kaisercraft, October Afternoon; Embellishments - DCVW, K&Co, Kaisercraft, Making Memories; Ribbon - own; Punches - MS. 

Three cards in August

I did these couple of cards in the month of August, but did not post them until the cards reached the hands of the intended people.  Here are a couple made for a pair of dear sisters whose birthdays fall in August.  The designs were scraplifted from a couple of cards I saw on scrapbook.com and I did my own versioning on them.

Card for Lovely was faux-stitched with sakura souffle pen and embossed with Zing glitter powder.

Similarly, the Card for Fe was also faux-stitched with pen and words written with sakura souffle pen.  This was a little more elaborate with the clouds pre-embossed to give it some texture and the pennants outlined in thin black lines to give it some emphasis.

The month of August also saw the farewell of one of our colleague as he moved to a new appointment.  I made a small card and took a pix before it was filled with words of well wishes written by all my colleagues :) 



A simple cover for a guy



The inside of the card





 Materials : DCVW card base, cardstock and cupcake chipboard embellishment; October Afternoon paper on butterflies; K&Co paper on trims and tag; Stamps from Fiskars, MLS; MS punch.