This is Me album, continued

If your not a scrapbooker you might not know that this past Saturday was (inter)National Scrapbooking Day.  While plans to get together with my scrapping buddies didn't work out I still managed to stay up late and get some stuff done.

I started the day by scanning a ridiculous amount of old photos and getting things mapped out for how I wanted to tackle the first section.  I think I explained in the last post that I'm doing four sections for this album, it just made sense to break things up because my mind works best that way.

The first section is all about 'the early years' and its going to take the longest which is why I hadn't really started anything yet.

I scanned the front page of my baby book because it was just so cute. I have to commend my Mom, she did a great job of keeping up with it for me being number two. Lots of gems of information in there for sure like the day each of my teeth appeared. Way to go Mom!

I made this spread to talk a bit about my childhood. The writing for this project is what's taking me so long. Digging that deep into the memory bank is hard! Remembering to tell all the stories I want to tell is hard, making it sound good is hard. Hopefully it makes sense and hopefully it will tell my story.

The clipboard is a Cameo cut file and I love it, that torn paper edge makes me so happy. The photo collage is all digital. Oh, the seventies, they weren't good to anyone!

I took a few breaks here and there and after I put Simone to bed I started my second layout. As you can see below its a work in progress at a late hour.

 

It still looked the same in the light of day. I sat and stewed a bit unsure and all and took a break and went and dug through my hope chest for some graduation stuff and found a gold mine of things to include. This project may just need two volumes.

 

I made a few changes and this is what I ended up with. I broke the photos down by school so I could get some of that info down. I knew I wanted to journal a lot but didn't really have room so I opted to have the photo blocks flip out so I could hide it there which you can see in the photo below. Too much needed to be blocked out but suffice it to say it took me most of Sunday to write it. I could have written so much more.  On a funny note, Simone asked who the boy was second row on the left. Yeah, nothing like a 5 year old to remind you of how bad that cut was!

 Have a great week!

This is Me, continued

I finally had some time to start working on the content for my This is Me album.  I spent a good week making lists and looking through some old photos to jog my memory of things I might want to include.  I finally came up with a pretty good list and just picked something and started.  Starting is always the hardest, the fear of the blank page at its finest.

Here is the first page I made, about the family car.

I didn't have any really great old personal photos of the car, just lots of memories and oddly the car keys.  Not sure how I ended up with them but I was happy to have them to include.  I found the sales add online and the postcard at the bottom flips up.  The postcard came from an exhibit at the SF MOMA and I'll never forget seeing that painting for the first time.  It's almost identical to our car, just a different model but the same overall and the car is parked in front of a house in the town I grew up in.  The artist is Robert Bechtle and his work is truly amazing.  The detail of this piece is phenomenal, the painted reflection of the windshield onto the garage door, it's beyond realistic.  I wish I owned this painting.

The second spread that I made has been in the works in my mind for years now.  I always thought it would be cool to do a scrapbook layout of all the houses I've ever lived in.  I had made a list a few years ago and that was where I started.  I had a few of the shots, three actually.  The others I did not and since driving down to southern California to snap a few photos wasn't really an option I went to plan B.  I went online and typed in the address and went from there.  It's funny to see the places now with trees grown and covering up a few of the houses, some still look the same though.  The vellum tabs below each photo lists the address, (which I've covered for some security) and the approximate dates I lived in each place.  That's where things got really tricky.  Remembering that stuff was tough but I used a few dated photos and my resume of all things to help map it all out.  I think for the most part I got it pretty close.

The top right became a pocket for my journaling and pulls out with a little tab.

The class came with a little supply kit and one of the pieces in it was the wood veneer 'random facts' piece.  It was fun coming up with a list of random things about myself.  I knew I also wanted to talk a bit about my personality and these two topics seemed to work well together.  I was making a list of things to talk about and it started looking like crossword puzzle clues.  I found a site online that turns your words and clues into a puzzle for you.  I laid both of these pages out digitally and used a chalkboard background. I painted the wood veneer piece to tie the pink in somewhere.

After I came up with my list of what I wanted to include in my album I decided to lay it out in sections.  One of the sections I wanted to focus on was stuff in and around the 80's, there is so much of me that is directly tied to that period of my life it warrants its own section.  I've been so inspired by some things I've found on Pinterest lately, this one being a major one.  I knew this had to be incorporated in my album some how and I decided to give it a try here.

It took a really long time trying to make this work with my Cameo and after a whole lot of cursing and Googling to find answers that proved it wouldn't work, I made it work.  The program is not equipped to leave cuts open ended like I wanted (the designer software might, but I don't have it).  The original inspiration piece was cut by hand and after all the time it took me trying to make this work I could have cut about 5 of them out. 

If your not familiar, the words are song lyrics from a song featured in the move The Breakfast Club and the Silhouette is of one of the characters from the very end of the film.  A monumental piece of 80's pop culture for sure.

This will lead in to a large section of some of my favorite things from the 80's and what I spent my time doing during that period.  Lots more to come in this section for sure.

I still have lots to do and I'm plugging along as inspiration strikes and time allows.  More to follow for sure.

This is Me

Back in March I signed up for what would be Studio Calico's April online class, This is Me.  Its a mini album project all about - Me.  I'm super excited to embark on this class and I've had fun thinking about what I want to include and how I want to go about telling my story.

First things first I knew I wanted to use another handbook album and because I'm on a major, I love anything woodgrain kick, this one was the obvious choice.

Next step, deciding the look and feel for the album.  Was I going to decorate it, if so how and in what colors.  Lately another thing that I've been loving and seeing and using and wanting an awful lot was neon, especially neon pink.  My love of neon pink started oh way back in the 80's when it was cool the first time around.  Fast forward to last summer and I was sporting neon toes for most of sandal season.  This year, oh yes the love is still going strong.  My first big decision, neon pink would be featured.  My next fairly obvious choice if you know me at all is GLITTER!  Gold glitter to be exact. 

If I am remembering correctly, back in 2011 when I first starting playing around with Pinterest I came across an image of a December Daily album that I just fell in love with, this image precisely.  I died and went to glitter heaven when I saw the cover and its stuck with me every since.  Recently while trying to figure out how to achieve a similar look and googling every possible incantation of 'giant glitter splatter', etc. I came across a blog post with and great instructional video.  Finally answers and suggestions for how to achieve the same amazing look. 

I used what materials I had on hand and started making one heck of a mess splattering and glittering my heart out.  Harder than it seems (because of my 'random' issues, not because of the instructions given), but still super fun.

I decided I wanted to make a splatter on my woodgrain album but also wanted something in the middle of it, kind of set inside the splatter.  I played around with a bunch of ideas, words, my name, etc.  Eventually I decided on the very simple, Me.

I wrote the me about 100 times on my ipad until I was happy, using the Paper53 app.  I saved the file, uploaded it to my computer, played with sizing and such and saved it as a .jpg so I could cut it out on my Cameo.

Here is a bit of the process in action.  I did a practice run on a separate piece of brown cardstock and I was so happy I did.  It helped me see how my splatters would look and lead to me know what not to do or what I didn't like and hone in more on the look I wanted. 

One thing I did do when I traced my Me in the Cameo was I also made a fairly large offset of the image so that I would have something to mask off my area that wouldn't get glittered.  I attached the mask to my handbook using a removable adhesive tape runner.  It held it down just fine for the time needed.  It didn't stick at all to the cover when I removed it.  I'm sure adding watered down glue helped there too.

Here is a look at the mask in place with my glue spatters down.  Not going to lie, I'm pretty sure I held my breath the entire time for the glue application.  Talk about panic that I was going to completely ruin this cover.

I laid on a fairly heavy coating of glitter.  I used Recollections brand glitter from Michael's in Champagne.

I let the above layer sit for a few minutes, probably about five, because my patches were so thick.  I wanted to make sure it had a chance to absorb some glitter before I tipped it over to knock off the excess.  I was also worried about runs more than anything.  I didn't want the shapes of my splotches to get altered in any way.

I carefully and quickly tilted the cover just so the majority of the excess fell off.  I let it sit a bit longer and decided to pull up my mask.  I was afraid it would get dried down if I didn't remove it.  It came up really easily, like I mentioned above the water in the glue must have dissolved the adhesive a bit.

It took a good few hours to dry completely and I just left it along and let it do its thing.  Once it was fully dry I was able to go over the areas that were still covered in glitter and brush it off.  A large powder blush type brush ended up being the most effective for removing the excess bits that weren't glued down.

Here it is all finished.

I added the same neon pink paper to the spine and some gold mirror thickers.  This picture most clearly shows the color of the pink neon, this was incredibly hard to photograph and get accurate color.

I new the opening page was going to be a photo of me, I also wanted to incorporate the colors from the cover in some way.  I've never really played around with confetti before so I thought it would be fun to give it a try.  I now know that confetti or anything random goes against my nature completely.  I'm a very linear thinker so asking me to do anything random usually results in an absolute mess.  And if you saw my first attempt at this cover page,  you would completely agree.

This is actually two pages, the top is a thin-ish piece of plastic paper from Bazzil that I bought back in 2009!  Surprisingly and happily its still available.

I did the second page first because I needed to know what and where it was placed before I could proceed with the confetti part.  I made a simple frame from the gold paper and added two pieces of neon pink washi tape below it.  I also wrote @ forty-five on my ipad and traced and cut it was well with my Cameo from the gold paper.  I laid that on top of the washi and a few pieces of the confetti so it wasn't too plain when the top piece was flipped.

 

I found some really amazing papers at a local stamp store and sadly they aren't marked so I'm not sure who makes them but I found a pretty brushed gold paper and a dark brown woodgrain paper that has a subtle gold tint to it.  I added more of my neon pink paper into the mix and set out cutting some confetti with my Cameo.  The photo below picks up the gold tint on the woodgrain paper really well.

 

I cut some circles in small, medium and large sizes, the largest is 1" and also some stars.  I loved the star set because you got two for one with one cut, the outline and the inside full shape.  The pink paper cut just fine, the gold was okay on the first page, a bit harder on the second and the woodgrain, a major pain.  It has a weird back to it that no matter how deep my blade setting (I used a 6) it would not cut thru.  I ended up peeling each circle of the backing sheet.  At this point after already ruining one sheet of paper I was seriously reconsidering my confetti choice. 

 

My first attempt at adhering them to the plastic paper as mentioned above was a complete and total disaster.  Again I don't know how to be random and it totally showed.  There I was peeling each and every circle and star off trying to selvedge as much as possible so I wouldn't have to go thru the cutting phase again. 

Ultimately I decide to just jumble up all the pieces in a giant pile and just sprinkle it on top of the plastic sheet and see how they landed.  I removed some, pushed some out of the way and just went with it.  I then took each and every piece off in small batches while trying to remember how they fell and stuck them back to the plastic sheet with vellum adhesive.  If the adhesive wasn't going to show thru I used my regular dot roller because I'm running low on vellum adhesive.  Some of the adhesive shows thru on the back and I may go back and attach pieces on top where needed, but that's still a maybe. 

I wanted to date the photo so I opted to use a date roller stamp and place it so it wouldn't show when the top sheet was in place.  I really like how simple the second layer is and how the top layer plays on the second layer.  I'm also love the washi with the gold on top.

Here's a few looks at the confetti, not perfectly adhered which I like.  Letting gravity take over clearly was the better choice over myself.

That's the extent of the work so far on the album.  Like I mentioned above I'm taking lots of notes of ideas on what to include and plan to start this week making some pages.

Yesterday I did go thru some photos and picked out some gems to include.

Yep, that's me in my 70's and 80's glory. 

I hope to post some more of this project as I move through it so more to follow for sure.  Any if you made it to the end of this ridiculously long post, thank you!