Special Moments

I am supposed to be having a short while off card challenges specifically to complete the scrapbook I am making for my son, before I fly to UK next Thursday, when I hope to give it to him. So I thought I would just share with you the pages I have just completed.

Some of you will know that I have five sons. Two are older from my first marriage, and after a ten year gap I had three more, in fairly quick succession. When you are the middle one of a group of three little boys with only four and a half years between you, you have to fight for your share of attention, so I designed these pages to remind Jonathan of some special moments that we shared with him. (I have done similar pages for each of the boys and I think they are important memories to hold). For Jonathan, who since his teens has a had a preference for 'grungy' colours, I chose some grey paper, but as I find 'grunge' really hard to do, I ended up with red for the highlights! The large circle and it's scalloped frame, the script frame, and the letters for the title were all designed and cut with craftrobo, using the Design master software. The script about a mother was a template that I bought from craftsuprint. It was A4 size so I had to resize it, and then cut it, again with craftrobo. Unfortunately shrinking it down meant some letter strokes were very fine, and all my black paper had too many firbes in them and wouldn't cut cleanly. After three futile attempts I was about to give up when I remembered that I have a pack of mixed printed papers that always cut perfectly. So I chose one that wasn't really to my liking, and I swiped the reverse side with a versafine black onxy ink pad until it was completely black. Once it was dry, I had one more go at my cutting file and it worked! It's not perfect, but it is good enough.

My son is now twenty-six so I was working with really old photos which I scanned in, and then used a photo editor to crop them to squares. I decided to soften them by giving them all rounded corners to go with the scalloped frames.

My final job was to cut the two small scripts in red, using the trimmings from the photo mounts. For these I used my cuttlebug and a QuicKutz skinni-minis alphabet die set called Frankie. These are very fiddly to use, but you can cut just the letters you need. I decided to glue them in place with glue pen, and added a few dots cut with a hole punch. It was very hot this afternoon so picture me trying to pick up these tiny pieces with a ceiling fan going just above me at top speed and an even stronger floor-standing fan across my desk. Added to that I help from Baggins (See my previous post). It was a bit of a paper chase, but I got there in the end.

Now I am going to make some quote clouds to go on the two inside covers, and the summing-up page for the end of the book. If I get that done before I give it to him I will be pleased. I will still have two double spreads to do about his drumming and the groups he has played in, and posters from some of his gigs, but I can post those to him. What sort of music does he play? ... Heavy metal, and in particular 'Grunge' of course!!

I shall link this to Make it Monday 52: Any papercraft project.
And Inspire me Fridays Linky Party.