Heritage Photos - Bertil

Welcome back!

Earlier this year a friend asked me if I could help her with a special heritage project for her brother and sister.  Having saved for decades some childhood locks of hair from her siblings, my friend Birgitta wanted to preserve them with some photos into a special scrapbooked layout as gifts, but not being a scrapbooker herself, she enlisted my help.

We got the original photos (some of which were a bit damaged) professionally re-printed and the company did a fantastic job resorting them.  Then, not really knowing what supplies I should bring with me, I packed up a hodge podge collection of papers and embellishments and spent a day at hers busily playing with paper.

Luckily, the remaining collection of Webster's Pages papers by Allison Looman I'd brought with me were a perfect choice for the project and breathed new life into the beautiful black and white photography.  They also matched well with one of the papers Birgitta already had and which I decided upon for the background of the first layout.

This first LO features Bertil, aged 1, along with the lock of his hair and a handwritten note from their mother.  All three LOs feature elements of the same papers and gold lame mist spatters for a sense of cohesion, along with brown accents and lettering, twine, wood veneer or cork embellishments for that masculine feel and a narrow ruler washi tape for that hint of vintage.  I had hoped to also use some old fashioned black or cream photo corners but sadly, couldn't find any so opted for a very narrow mounting on dark black/brown patterned paper instead.  It was decided that the embellishing could be a bit more simplistic, as this would likely appeal more to Bertil.

 

Handwritten note from their mother.  Yes, it is the original.  It was a bit nerve-wrecking adding adhesive to such a precious piece of memorabilia but it was important to Birgitta that we use the original and we did take copies.

Small letter stickers for the years, by Glitz Designs.  The twirly twine is always a bit tricky to get right and glue down well but looks fab once it's done and it helps to reinforce the curliness of that lock of hair...

The original tie around the lock of hair wasn't very attractive or sturdy so I wrapped twine over top to help secure the hair further.  I also didn't want to risk applying adhesive to the hair directly so the wrapped twine gave me a good place to attach the lock without damaging the hair itself.

For the frame, we bought open-fronted art canvas frames that are 12" square and they work perfectly for scrapbooking layouts and the black wood make the B&W photograph pop nicely.

Stay tuned for the next two LOs in the series shortly (LO #2 - Syskon).

Picture Day 2009

Hello and welcome back!  So it's Monday morning and I'm *not* at work - long live the sports break!  I've been enjoying my time off catching myself up on some embroidery work (I'll share that later in the week) and yesterday I finally dug into the *huge* tower of new photos and scrapbooking goodies so you can expect some regular updates and posts here throughout the week.

However, I've had this UFO from my series of class photos sitting on my scrapping board from around the end of November or start of December.  Now, you have to understand, when it comes to scrapbooking, I pretty much never leave a LO unfinished once started (completely the opposite of my quilting, it seems...)  So clearly, that needed attention first.

Picture Day 2009

In my last 2Peas order, I picked up Chic Tags' new paper line and absolutely fell in love with this bright, bold diagonal stripe paper.  I had been struggling with getting all the embellishments to work on the shelf design but with a fresh set of eyes, I decided to go in a slightly different direction and as is often the case, it worked much better.

The pinwheel I made myself and this LO features a wood veneer camera for the running camera motif in this series.  Some little leftover bits and bobs worked in here, too.

Glammed up the title with some gorgeous turquoise glitter Thickers - I just love these and their larger size works really well with photo enlargements.  I didn't have any letter 'u's left so I snipped apart a 'w', which worked for both the 'u' and the 'r' - how awesome is that?!  Love that little OA 'look' brad, too.

And speaking of brads, I decided it was high time to really start using up some stash and used a whole bunch of OA Travel Girl and MME Notable brads, mixing and matching them together with the clusters.

So with this LO completed, I'm close to being finished this school photo series.  I have one more class photo from years ago, for which I'm struggling to find a good paper combination as despite being a professional job and printing, the colour levels aren't great and there's a slight green weight dulling them and making them look 'bleh'.  Then I need to rescan this academic year's class photo, as I didn't seem to email it to myself and now haven't a clue where I've saved it.  I've also been thinking I should see if I can find a copy of my first class photo from work when I started out as a personal teaching assistant - might have to call in the colleague cavalry for that one.  Still debating on the staff photos...

In any event, I'll be switching things up for a bit as I get to work scrapping Christmas photos from 2013 and I even have a touching Valentine's historical LO I'm piecing together in my head and may actually get done later today.

Stay tuned!

Picture Day 2008

So you may remember that over the summer my LSS hosted a scrapbook LO contest.  I entered three of my pages but sadly I was the only contestant!  The up-side, of course, was that I also turned out to be the winner, albeit by default.  Anyway, it's taken me about two months - perhaps more - but I finally managed to get down to the shop to pick up my prize pack:

A mini-kit called 'Paris' by a small (unknown to me) manufacturer name Vive Gade (I think).  The black, white and grey-themed kit contained:

• 6 double-sided papers
• 2 washi tapes (one is Christmas-themed)
• 3 designer ribbons
• 3 wooden heart embellishments

While not all of the designs are really my style, I definitely do need more black, white and grey paper in particular so this worked out well.

So as you would expect, I thought I should use some of these new goodies and make something!  I decided that I would continue to scrap my series of class photos.  The darkest black patterned paper caught my eye, as it has that chalkboard blackness to it and in white there are maths equations written all over it.  Seemed like a good choice for a school-themed page.  I also thought the numbered washi tape would work well on a school LO, too.

I wasn't able to find my original photo from my first ever class all on my own.  I think I may have given it to my parents; my step-father finds the whole international schooling concept amazing - he calls it my 'UN class' and every year I have to show the class photo and go through all of the nationalities present.  It's sweet, really.  Luckily, however, a friend had a copy, which she scanned and emailed to me (thanks, Anya!).  My photo developer doesn't print the same size as the school photography company but I enlarged it a little to a 6x8 size, which let me play with a different layout design, which was a nice change of pace.

Picture Day 2008

Here you can see I've layered the black maths paper and a light blue EP paper under the photo and I've run the numbered washi tape like a border across the page.  The background paper is one that my friend Anya gave me a few years ago and I've been saving it for a LO such as this - it even has a very subtle tone-on-tone print of children's game names in the red section at the top; if you look really, really carefully you can just make it out in the photo.

I used the Kensei chipboard Thickers that I've been crushing on lately - it's just such a fun font.  I have, however, taken to gluing them down with a little touch of Crackle Accents by Ranger, since I find chipboard Thickers are notorious for popping off.  As you'll see in the next photo, I'm continuing my trend of including some sort of camera motif on all of these photos and I re-inforced this with a CP slide frame, which I stamped with little potty people to mimic the class photo.  Cute, right?

The journaling card is from Carta Bella's Hello Again collection - the blues just worked really well with the blues already used in the rest of the LO and I thought the 'Let me tell you...' line was a good lead in to the class stats I've been recording.  The little eye glasses and 'looking back' is from the same stamp set as the potty people and the chipboard camera is from CP's The Pier collection.