Monday 17 March 2014

For the Love of Aqua

What is your favourite colour to scrapbook with right now? Mine, without a moment's hesitation, is aqua (or teal, turquoise, blue-green... whatever takes your fancy!). Aqua looks great paired with pink, yellow, white, woodgrain, grey - pretty much everything really. It also looks pretty fabulous all on its own in its various hues and shades, as part of a monochromatic colour palette. So it comes as no surprise that when I put together a kit of supplies to ease me back into 12x12 layouts following my JYC adventures, aqua would feature heavily! Assembling a kit from things in my stash is an idea I got from the ever-inspiring Shimelle, and I find it really works when I haven't scrapped in a while. I'm often far more productive when I can only work with those supplies I have spread across my desk, rather than rifling through everything I own when I want to find the 'perfect' paper or embellishment!
These photos are from last summer, when my lovely friend Jenny came to visit me where I was teaching in the wilds of the west coast of Ireland. It was a lovely couple of days; we both took lots of photos of the stunning scenery, ate some delicious food and stayed up talking almost all night - perfect! This page came together pretty easily. Sometimes I find having two 4x6 photos on a single layout can limit my journalling space (and I like to write... a lot!) but clustering everything together in the middle of the page allowed me to fit everything in, along with a healthy dose of layering and confetti :D You can't really tell from looking at the photo, but I put some of the Thickers partially on pop dots to give some extra texture and dimension to the layout.

This second layout is one for my Paris album. I visited the French capital in July 2012 with my friend, and still haven't scrapped all the photos! I decided to use his sepia shot of the iconic Eiffel Tower to tell the story of how we planned for the trip. Our motivation for visiting Paris was to meet with another friend who was working there as an au pair (nanny) for the summer. However, her job didn't work out and she ended up at home in Ireland while we were seeing the French sights sans tour guide! This layout relied on a simple structure with a block for journalling and lots of layers under a single photo - this is a design I often fall back on because it accommodates everything with lots of white space too.

Hopefully I've have some more of the layouts made from my self-constructed kit to share soon! What have you been scrapbooking recently?

xxx

5 comments:

  1. Oh Sinead I love these layouts!! Your use of aqua is just beautiful and I love the design on each layout with all the journaling. Such a happy, summery feel to them, just fabulous as always! I think your idea of putting together a kit is just fantastic and I'm definitely going to do that the next time I scrapbook...which hopefully will be soon!!
    Hopefully I'll see you at the weekend too, yay!! :) xxx

    ReplyDelete
  2. I love these layouts too! I'm very admiring of the way you have found room for so much of the story and still got plenty of the pretty stuff on there too

    ReplyDelete
  3. These are both stunning - I love the feeling of space and colour, and admiring how you get so much journalling on too. By the way, how do you photograph your pages? What sort of camera do you use, or how do you save them for the web? I ask because your handwriting always comes up so sharp and not at all fuzzy ...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Loving your layouts, aqua is the best <3. It's super lovely how your handwriting becomes part of the embellishing, i always had a hard time with that part!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Wow I love these layouts! :)

    ReplyDelete