Friday 8 May 2009

Gift Albums

This 90th birthday album for my grandmother is the 3rd gift album I have done and definately my best. I am not going to tell you how to make your own one, but rather tell you how I made mine and hopefully pass on some handy himnts to you. I am only uploading these now even though I finished it over 3 weeks ago as the album was missing in the post and finally arrived today. I am so relieved and my Grandmother loves it. I won't be uploading the whole LO here, but rather a few of my favourites.

The first page of the album was the very last page I made. It is important to me that all journalling is made from the heart and I thought the best way to start the album was with a letter to her.

I found it quite hard going when you have so many LOs to do and only have a limited amount of time to do it in, but I found a fantastic solution. There are so many wonderful patterned papers around these days that you can make a very beautiful page with very little effort. This is from the papermania olive collection and all I did to this page was add the photo, title, ricrac and from a second identical paper I cut out some of the flowers and then stuck them on foam pads to give them a 3D effect (hard to see in a photo) I used this technique on quite a few of the LOs.
I had quite a few photos which I didn't know when they were taken or exactly where, so instead of leaving no journalling at all I wrote about how the photo made me feel and what I could see in it.
Weaving is a technique that is quite quick but can be really effective. I tried to use flowers here that matched her bouquet and then chose pink to make the page feminine and added a stamped flourish.
I wanted to use a poem about mothers in her album because although she's not my mother it is so much a part of who she is and of course the way she raised my mother led my mother to be the person she is who raised me and taught me to be the mother I am (Well done if you followed that) The poem comes from the wonderful resources on sb.com.
I changed my mind a million time about colours, I first decided to stick with a theme throughout the album, as I have done in previous gift albums, but then I got bored. I decided then that I would stick to dull colours to match the black and white photos, but this one just wasn't dull, it was such a happy family photo, it just had to be bright, so I decided to let the photos talk to me, and I love how this page turned out. The flowers are stamped and then I coloured them in.
These colours were so beautiful that the LO needed little more than the layoured paper. The quote, again from sb.com, for me, said it all.
This was the very first page I did for the album. I spent I huge amount of time doing delicate bead work, but when this page was finished I realised that there was no way i was going to be able to spend this amount of time on 20 pages. I would never have finished.

This Lo was a lift and the lovely quote came from Lou on UKS. I really love the way the doodles turned out and it is such an easy and quick way to fill a space.

I think the best way to finish a gift album is to let the recipient finish it themselves. At her actual birthday party my mom ensured a photo was taken of all the family together and that will be the very last page of her album.
This album took me a lot of time and I was so sad to be so far away and unable to share her 90th with her, but I really hope that this album will show her what a wonderful woman she is and what an outstanding life she's had and more than anything else, i hope she will never doubt how loved she is.
Thanks for looking xx

Saturday 2 May 2009

AND THE WINNER IS!!!!!!

kimmie_35

Thank you to everyone who took part, it has been a lot of fun reading all your comments and some of them really made me laugh.

Kimmie be sure to let me have your postal address :) You can pm me on UKS if that's easiest.

Happy Scrapbooking Day!!!!!

To celebrate national scrapbooking day, I decided I'd give away a little blog candy. All you have to do is leave a comment telling me what you are doing to celebrate NSD and around 8pm this evening UK time, I'll pick a name and send you a little something scrappy.

Here's my latest LO