Memuaris: Back to the USSR / Work & Love

Hello there! This month, I've been inspired by art shows and one of them went really well to combine with the unusual theme of the Memuaris Challenge: Back to the USSR.



The exhibition was featuring art from the Soviet Union, and this delightful women at work scene that I scrapped is called Weavers by Vladimir Myagkov.



For us in Finland, the Soviet Union was of course our neighbor like Russia is now. I was nearly grown up at the transition time so I have plenty of memories from that time. I also read Russian at school since age 13 through High School. That wasn't something we had to do, but I'm very attracted to the language and have always been.



I used the May Week 4 Sketch by Brenshevia Baker at Lets' Get Sketchy (rotating it to the left) and was also inspired by the challenge at Our Creative Corner: Hit the Books.





I was really happy with the background I made splashing with different paints: tube watercolours, acrylic inks and mists. I meant to keep the layout really simple and in the end, I wish I had left a little more empty space. That said, I'm mostly happy with my layout, anyway! It was really inspiring to work on a very different theme than usually.

I like how I used mainly just the buttons for embellishments, and just a few wood veneer ones. My favourite things in the layout are the long title (from a song lyrics) and how I used the Russian alphabet and dressmaking stencils in a less usual way: tracing with pencil.



Thank you for coming and especially for commenting, as always!

August Light: Layout for Scrap Africa DT

Hello! Here's my layout for the mid-month mood board challenge at Scrap Africa!



And here's what the mood board looks like:



I was inspired by the abundance of flowers and the colours, and also the combination of different typographies in the heart, which suggested using two different sort of alphabet in my title. One word is written by hand and and another with alphabet that I cut from corrugated cardboard.

Another inspiration to my layout was the mood board at Scrap Around the World:



Here I was inspired by the combination of pink and natural colours, the handwriting and the twine. I didn't feel like using dark brown this time, but the dark green handmade paper that I used to mat my photo sort of reminded me of the worn out leather covers of the old book in the mood board.



With this layout, I'm also joining the Archi-Scraps challenge, with the theme of Layers and/or corrugated cardboard!

I had wanted to use corrugated cardboard alphabet since I saw them in a layout by Terhi Koskinen recently. Do check out her work if you haven't already done so, she's one of Finland's best known scrapbookers and for a good reason!









Thanks for your visit! I hope to see you in the Scrap Africa challenge, open for participation until the end of September!

Leaving Los Angeles: A Clean & Simple Layout

Clean and simple is not my typical scrapbooking style. On the contrary! "More is more" describes my usual style better. That said, I feel very drawn to more minimalistic approaches at times, and want to learn to make that style work for me as well.



For this layout, I wanted to use a longish text from a novel, and I wanted to have it handwritten in the background, not necessarily fully visible for reading but as a pattern. Before that, I gessoed the background paper to tone down a strong pattern, and made another layer of patterns taking the gesso off with baby wipes through a stencil. That's the hippyish sunbeam pattern you can see here and there.





The handwritten text is my main decoration this time. I added just a little watercolour and clear Stickles, and very few embellishments. I'm quite happy with how it turned out!

I was inspired by the July challenge at Scrap Around the World, and their gorgeous colourful mood board you can see here! I was particularly inspired by the journey theme, the sunset, the pink and all the other bright colours.



I was also inspired by the colour challenge palette at Tando Creative and the monthly sketch from C'est Magnifique kits.





I'll have to say bye for now to put my little one to bed, but I'm thinking I'll be back tomorrow to add my inspiration text into this post, and a few words about it, in case someone'd like to read it!

Anyway, it's from one of the Weetzie Bat books by Francesca Lia Block. Before travelling to Los Angeles this spring I looked up stories that are set in that city, and the Weetzie Bat series came up in many recommendations. I'm not through with all the books yet, but in my opinion they do seem to capture the spirit and essence of L.A. really well!

Do you like to read books where the story takes place in your travel destination - or where you live?

Edit: Trouble with mobile uploading - the post went up without pictures first but that's fixed now!

I'm in Scrap Africa Design Team!

Hello all! I'm back from my travels and got some good news while I was away: I'm in the Scrap Africa Design Team for 2015/2016. Yay!

When I travel, I always come home with lots of photos and ephemera, but when it comes to making them into actual albums, I haven't been quite so productive. My travel albums have been left unfinished way too many times. Having just come home from a long trip, I decided to try a different take now and start my first pages in Project Life style!



Et voilà, this is also my first DT project for Scrap Africa! The current mood board is themed Planes, Trains and Automobiles, so it was a perfect inspiration for starting my travel album.



Here's the Scrap Africa June mood board, open for participation until June 30!

For those of you who don't know it yet, Scrap Africa a fun and friendly challenge site that I warmly recommend! The challenges run twice a month, one of which is always a sketch challenge and the other has a different theme or mood board each month.

We are a big team of super creative designers, if I may say so myself, and represent lots of different styles. I am very honoured to be a part of this team and look forward to knowing my new teammates, both first-timers like myself and returning designers! And of course I hope to see many of you joining our challenges!


For my travel album, I'm using a kit that I put together myself before our trip, and I hope to share more about it in a separate blog post soon. I can already tell you that designing that kit was a lot of fun, and it's a great way to use leftover stash as long as there are some coordinating elements to keep it together. I can also tell you that my kit is a lot more colourful than you might guess based on these pages!



My spread is titled Planes, Trains and an Automobile, and we used all of these transports when my family and I travelled around the U.S. & Canadian West Coast last month. In the mood board I was particularly inspired by the graphic cross, circle and heart shapes, and also its bright colours, even though I chose to do my double page spread predominantly in black and white.



Making this spread was fun, but not particularly quick or easy, I have to add! I hadn't realized previously that the common digital photo size needs to be cropped to reach the traditional 3x4 inches or 10x15 cm pocket size. Secondly, I found it hard to match together colourwise these photos that were taken in different occasions, each in a different light etc and therefore had too many different colour schemes for my liking. I decided to turn them all into black and white and they became easier to work with.

The finalized pages have very little colour or embellishments compared to my usual style, but then again it probably won't hurt to have a more neutral layout here and there in my album - then I can add colour more freely to the next pages I do and those will pop out nicely, I think.



Here, by the way, is a link to another layout from earlier this year where I also successfully turned an ugly coloured photo into black and white!

I wish you all a lovely Midsummer weekend and hope to see you soon at Scrap Africa!