Birthday fun

I took a few days off card-making this week (though I did manage to squeeze a couple of challenges in at the last minute), in order to concentrate on my sons scrapbook. I have promised I will try to have it complete for when I return to UK for a visit in October, but I still have many, many pages to do! Anyway, I did manage to complete four pages this week so I thought I would do a write up about two of them.

This was a double spread to celebrate his childhood birthdays and I think I was a bit ambitious with my plan. The idea of this book is to tell the story of his first 21 years or so, filling in the bits he won't remember, and storing for ever some happy memories that we both share, so each page holds rather more photos than some people put in their modern style scrapbooks. I have so many and it is really hard to decide which ones to leave out. I have already made a plan of the themes for each page, and roughly sorted my photos accordingly. So my first step with a new page is to see what I have to work with, group these for pieces of journalling and think about a title etc. Then I draw a plan of the page on a 12" x 12" sheet of white paper, so I can see just what size I need each picture to be, and how big a text box I can allow for the script. I know that is not the way a lot of folk work, and my scrapbooking friends here think it is just too organised, but it suits me. The photos are quite old (well he's 25 now so not that old!), and they have not been stored too carefully, so I scan them in to my computer and use Corel PSP to tidy them up if necessary. Then I use Publisher to make each one the required size and print them out.

For the title I decided to cut out a row of balloons in bright colours and cut the letters for happy birthday out of them. I did this on craft robo using a template that I made when I made a similar book for his brother. I used a range of pearlescent papers as these cut so well with my machine. I had intended leaving them like that but I knew these would be quite 'busy' pages, so I chose a fairly neutral background paper and it didn't stand out through the cut letters in my balloons. So then I cut some more letters and put a letter of a contrasting colour in each balloon. Then I had the idea for the number train along the lower edge. This was a template that I bought from craftuprint, with a young grandson's birthay in mind. It was an SGV file which normally I would open in inkscape and cut straight to my craftrobo, but this time I could not make the cutter 'see' the file. After many abortive tries, and a wasted afternoon, (even my computer-smart hubby couldn't get it to work!), I had a rethink. I moved the engine and just the carriages that I wanted (there is template for every letter and number) on to a new page and printed them. I scanned this sheet into the computer, converted it to a bitmap and loaded this into craftrobo using the design master software that I bought separately. I then discovered that the carriages were not all the same size so I had to do a bit more adjusting, but eventually, Hey presto! I had my train. Was it worth it? Well I think so.

Once the train and balloons were glued in place, it was relatively straightforward to mount the photos and arrange them on the pages. I am not good with empty spaces so I cut out a few puffs of white smoke to go on the left hand page, and tied a bunch of smaller balloons to the rear carriage.

I had not intended to do this for a challenge, but there is a new challenge blog this week called Crafting for all seasons, and they suggested a scrapbook page as one possibility for their first challenge which is Anything Goes, so I shall be linking this to their blog.