Cutting and Scrapping!

My first attempt at making a scrapbook was done for the youngest of our five sons. I started it for his 21st birthday but he didn't get it until his 23rd, so it took a while. Now I am doing one for the next son and he is 25 now. I hope he gets it before he's 30! I showed one page in my last post, and I thought I'd now show you a few more pages that illustrate why I like my craftRobo so much.

As you get to know me better you will find that every page in my scrapbooks has a title, and I like to make a feature of it. The first page in this book is a family tree. I printed papers from the Artylicious 'Essence of Nature' CD for the background, and downloaded the free font 'JF Wildwood' from www.dafont.com for the title. After a few false starts I found a paper that enabled even this very intricate design to be cut out on my Robo.

I have made these two complementary pages that face one another in the book and they are called 'Fire and Ice'. The word Fire is made with stickers I picked up in America many years ago, but the flames behind them was a downloaded template from UK Scrappers. It's very effective isn't it? The word Ice uses a font purchased from www.scrapnfonts.com and the snowflakes behind that are an adaptation of a spellbinders brass stencil. Then a couple of snowflakes also cut with Robo, nicely highlight the journalling.

The software for craftRobo enables me to print a title with any font that is on my computer, and I have over 800 to choose from. I can then outline it to cut a mat in a different paper, as I have done here for the Biker Boy page. The bike itself started out as an open source clipart picture which gave me the basic shape so I could make this silhouette, and of course, cut it out with my Robo.

And finally this page was inspired by the Memory Makers book 'Creative Photo Cropping for Scrapbooks'. I am not sufficiently expert at placing items to be cut onto the carrier sheet, to risk cutting photos with craftRobo, so instead I used it to make a stencil of this design which I then drew through onto the photo for each drop, ensuring I got exactly the part of the picture I wanted each time. Of course I then had to cut them out by hand, but the stencil made this, and the placing of them on the page, very straightforward. I then used up the left-over pieces of sea and sky, and some scraps of blue paper, to make the filler drops.

I hope this has given you a few ideas of how you too can use your craftRobo, or similar cutting machine, to enhance your scrapbook pages.