Twenty Twenty Scrapbooking: A New One

Hey folks! I hope you all had a bit of a break over the weekend. We had a perfectly egg-cellent time, with a visit to the House of Little E, and we're going out to meet up with friends this afternoon after leaving our boy to the airport. He has four weeks of term to do and then that will be his first year of Law over. It's very hard to believe. 

I haven't had a lot of time for scrapbooking over the weekend, and I'm betting I'm not the only one, so I thought now might be a good time to do another Twenty Twenty page (specially since this one features chocolate. Sort of.) Remember the idea? Twenty minutes to plan, twenty minutes to produce and twenty minutes to add the polish. This is what I finished up with:

Working from this as a sketch, without any of the planning? You might be done in half an hour! 

This is how I worked:

Twenty Minutes to:

- Make it easy for myself with a sepia toned photo: there are no colours to match, so I simply chose something soft. In the back of my mind I'm thinking I want it to look nostalgic, but not old fashioned. It's a modern look for an old photo, and keeping that thought right from the start helps me work quickly to make my other choices.

- Choose a coordinating piece of patterned paper. I looked for clues in the photo, because using what you can see to guide you cuts down on decision making, and I found something with a pattern which echoes the shapes you can see in the window. 

- Use a pre cut Project Life journaling card as a readymade photo mat

- Add a title. Truthfully? These are the only letters I had left in this pack, so I couldn't use a clever, long title even if I had wanted to - the font worked so nicely and the black stops the whole thing from looking washed out, so I'm not sweating it.

This is where I got to:

So, I took another twenty minutes to:

- work on my journaling. I typed it out on strips and after moving them around, I had to concede that the best place for them is where I had already placed the house. So I peeled it back off the page, telling myself the resulting mess would be covered by the strips. The more pages I make, the more I realise the ones I want to go back to are the ones with the story. So if that means upsetting the design to fit in the words, I'm going to do it. Where are we without the words?

- add more black with a Slice cut butterfly. For a fast page I think it can be tempting to grab lots of very themed product because you don't have to think about it. The butterfly is a bit more subtle. It has a nostalgic feel; but as it flutters about, it gives a nod to the idea of going backwards and forwards in time, looking at old photographs

- introduce more dimension with the button, which also echoes the flat smoothness of the aprons. At this point I rejected the idea of a brown seam binding bow because it would cover up those words, so I added twine for a "shop" look instead, to end up with this:

So, a final twenty minutes left, then, in which I:

- decide it was looking a little flat. So I grabbed the patterned paper sheet I cut the butterfly from and used it to make a border. TIP: Although it's always tempting to diecut very close to the edge of a sheet to save paper, if you leave a margin, then you'll have a border of paper left. Like gutting in reverse. With that in mind, I carefully trimmed the layout down slightly so the border would show.

- think I need a little more black. That's the very end of that alphabet, with the full stops acting like enamel dots.

- remember that I'm trying for modern vintage - so I added the pink washi tape to freshen it up and draw the eye to the story. So that I end up with the page I showed you at the beginning:

So that's my page in an hour. And as it's a local photo I'm going to use it as a reminder about my Jot Challenge for issue 5 Be a Tourist in Your Own Town. If you took any good out and about photos this weekend, you could put them to work and join in too.

Jot Magazine Issue Four (and a Challenge)

Happy weekend everyone! It's been a busy week here. I'm going to be looking forward to spending sometime curled up on the sofa peering out at the rain and curled up with a book - but only after I've finished reading the new edition of Jot magazine. Issue Four is out now and, oh, it looks so good! You can read Jot here

This time round I'm revisiting my plan for some quick scrapping. It's what I call Twenty Twenty Scrapbooking: twenty minutes to plan and pick, twenty minutes to push forward and twenty minutes to prettify your page. I have a new sample up on the Jot Blog and you can see the three stages I went through to end up with this page

in an hour. Twenty Twenty Scrapbooking can be found here. And, then, if you like the idea, go on, see if you can carve out three times twenty minutes, make a page and link it up on the Jot Challenge page so the Jot girls can come and see. And if you are interested in submitting, you can check out the guidelines for Issue Five (coming in March) while you are there. Jot Magazine. It's good.

Twenty Twenty Scrapbooking

It can be hard to find the time for scrapbooking at this time of year. If I'm lucky I'll have found some new craft books in my Christmas stocking and their lure will be strong. All the things I want to do! Cutting up paper is only one of them.

So, this week I've been experimenting with something I think I'm going to call Twenty Twenty Scrapbooking. And that means setting my clock, pulling out my paper and seeing how far I can go in only twenty minutes. And then another..and then..

The First Twenty:

So, what can you do in twenty minutes? I managed to

• decide on a colour scheme. I made it easy on myself with a black and white photo; but as soon as I saw that blue in my paper pile I knew I wanted to use it. My dress in the photo was blue. I'm sure of it. I picked one other neutral paper and trimmed the bottom borders of both to use as contrasts. two papers, double sided, no more.
• round the corners on my background and my photo to echo the soft seventies lines in the picture.
• use letter stickers for a fast title.
• add a camera embellishment which adds to the seventies feel with its hint of an old viewfinder toy.
• use a mini clothes peg to pin my photo to my page

and this is what I ended up with:

It looks like a layout; but I'll admit it: it doesn't feel quite like one of my layouts just yet. Twenty minutes has given me a great basis, though. A firm foundation, ready for another layer. So I set my clock again for another twenty.

The Second Twenty:

Twenty more minutes and I was able to build up my page by

• matting my photo onto white card, which echoes the pram handles and helps it to stand out
• adding a couple of tabs
• sewing the blue paper into a big pocket with a line of yellow machine stitching. I then spent the rest of my time finding and printing out the blog post which tells the story of this photo. (It's here). 

and this is what it looked like:

But wait - one more twenty minute block would take me to an hour in total; and that's still quick for me. I set my clock again:

The Third Twenty:
gave me enough time to

• trim some ribbons from scraps of a 6x6 paper pad (all from the same collection - no time for too much deliberating)
• add some pre-made embellishments from a kit. Working again to repeat what is in the photo, I found some "wheel" shapes
• move the clothes peg over to the left hand side of the page to balance it up a bit more
• and finally, brighten up the far right with a little touch of blue washi tape.

So, now it looks like this:

That's what I can do in twenty minutes times three. I could add some more, if I wanted, but I hope it has everything it needs. After forty minutes it had a photo, a story, a title and some pretty paper: I'm pleased with that. I think I'll be trying it again. Instead of laying out everything on my page and then having to pull it apart again to stick it together, I was able to create a base layer and then a second and a third, finishing each before I moved on the next. That's a satisfying way of sticking and now I'm planning a few more base designs I could use. How about you? How far do you get in twenty? or twenty twenty? or more?