Memories of Edinburgh

"Who indeed that has once seen Edinburgh, but must see it again in dreams waking or sleeping?"

I have just returned from a wonderful week at the Edinburgh festivals. 5 days, 24 shows and lots of happy wandering through the cobbled streets of the old town and the grandeur of the new town. This is my 4th Edinburgh festival, and this year I took the time to  sit in the gardens, in coffee shops, and just to walk around in the time between the shows.

The sun actually came out this year - I was lucky in my choice of week, as apparently it had been pretty awful for the first couple of weeks! 

This was taken at one of my favourite places, kind of a central hub between a number of fringe venues. A great place to watch the world go by. This is the top of Candlemakers Row, and you might be able to pick out Greyfriars Bobby!

There are a lot of hills and steps in Edinburgh, and it's a lovely size for walking around, it never seems to take longer than 20 mins to get anywhere, and it's definitely good for the thighs!

I go to the festival mainly for the theatre on the Fringe, which is still thriving despite the ever-growing dominance of the comedy side of it. Of my 24 shows, only one was a comic (Laura Solon, who was very good). My favourite shows this year were Daniel Kitson's storytelling at the Traverse (It's always right now until it's later), Little Bulb's delightful Operation Greenfield at Zoo Roxy and a fab 40s take on Ovid's Metamorphoses by a young company called Pants on Fire. If any of these get to be seen anywhere else, I heartily recommend them to you! Lots more good stuff too.

Something strange happens to my sense of time in Edinburgh, it passes so quickly! I can't wait for next year. x

Online cropping, pt 2

Posting twice within a couple of days, very rare for me. Especially given I'm so tired and about to head off on my travels to the Edinburgh Fringe, via my friend's wedding!

I'm not quite there yet, so I thought I'd wrap up my cropping activities this weekend. Shimelle did us proud and kept the inspiration flowing thick and fast.

Yesterday I headed out to see a terrific account of my favourite play. Plays on Sundays - what a great idea! While I was there I took the opportunity to take a picture 'up above'.

I certainly picked the right day of the weekend for it - the weather couldn't quite make up its mind what it was doing the day before, so I went out fully equipped, waterproof poncho in bag! Luckily it wasn't needed and I stayed dry throughout.

When I got home, I stuck down the prototype page I'd put together earlier, involving quadrants.

I used four 6x6 papers from the same range - it's My Mind's Eye's Bloom and Grow. I'm not entirely happy with this - perhaps a sign I really do prefer plain cardstock backgrounds at heart! But it serves a useful purpose, catching up with Document 2010. I'm really loving this project, it's coming to life more and more as the year draws on and it's starting to get more difficult to remember exactly what I was doing in February! This is my collection of bits and pieces from June. I've been finding I'm better at keeping the evidence of my month in a designated place than actually doing something with it, but it's also really good for jogging my memory when doing the pages in hindsight, as I am now.

This page also features a layered embellishment made with the scraps at hand.

Admittedly it's pretty simple - a Sassafras whimsy, a bloom, a sticker, some ribbon scraps, but hey, it matches the rest of the page nicely and is something I made rather than bought, which is always good.

By the time I'd got this far, my scrap space (aka coffee table) was getting pretty messy. Note the essentials - glue, pens, scissors, cup of tea...

I also thought I'd take a picture out of the window, but it was night again before I got round to this one, and I didn't foresee being reflected in the window!

But that covered another one, so I didn't mind too much. :o)

So I tried again. One of the characteristics of my flat is how close I am to next door, which is particularly obvious when we both have our curtains open. I've always liked lighted windows against the dark, and old sash windows, and I can also see both the view and the reflection in this photo, which I am quite pleased with, despite it not being the world's most promising photo. A reflection of the here and now.

I have been so very inspired by this online cropping lark this weekend, and it's been great to see what everyone else is doing too - hurrah for the blogosphere! I also made this next page. It's for the May section of Document 2010, and it doesn't fit any of the remaining challenges, but I thought you might like to see it anyway. :o)

Thanks again, Shimelle!

Shimelle's summer online crop

I swapped my usual lazy Sunday for a lazy Saturday today. The combination of a biblical rainstorm outside and Shimelle's online crop were both excellent excuses to do so.

Shimelle's hosting scrapping and photo challenges all day today and tomorrow, a very inspirational incentive to get going with paper and glue. Especially if like me, you live nowhere near any crops and don't have a car!

So the first page I made was one for this challenge, to include pink somewhere on the page.  Now I am not usually a great fan of pink, but my friend Natalie is, and a couple of weekends ago it was her hen do!

There was a considerable amount of pink in the photos already, so I just went for little flashes of pink with the embellishments and included my badge from the day. It involved going to see Dirty Dancing (hence the watermelon in the photo and the quotes from the film), and a Hawaiian themed night out in the West End and it was so much fun! Mostly I just wanted the page to be as colourful as the photos and the day itself and completely went to town with a spectacularly busy page.

Cosmo's Girl Friday features quite heavily on this page, along with Hambly and a smidge of Sassafras. The Hambly was very useful for disguising that the black ink is running out in my printer, so the combination with the black cardstock worked really well with some of the darker photos.

Next, I chose to make a page with squares. As I mentioned in the last post, I am not usually a very 'graphic' scrapper, as in I don't have the patience for strict measurements and proper straight lines, but I do really like the look so thought this would be a good challenge. I think the result is a bit easier on the eye than the previous page!

This is shamefully going to be the March feature page for my Document 2010 project! The feature pages are always the last to be done. I moved house in March as well so it wasn't like I didn't know what it was going to be about, but those are always the hardest pages to start, I find. 

True to form, the lines are a little off-kilter, but hey, they go with that splendid shelves paper! I love the American Crafts Abode range, so it was great to finally do something with it! The photo also features my lovely Expedit unit which is all squares (it came with the flat, brilliantly), and if you look closely, there is even some pretty rainbow squared coasters, so I couldn't have found a more appropriate photo for this page if I'd tried.

Thanks Shimelle, for the great challenges! And it's still going (until tomorrow) if you fancy joining in. :o)

Holiday scrapping :o)

Hello, wasn't July a busy month! I have printed a ton of photos in the past week and so now I have some scrapbook pages to show you.

You can tell from this that my photography of 12 x12 pages has not improved, but hopefully some of the shots on this page make up for it. They are all from my recent trip to the Eden Project, which is a perfect place to practice and play with a camera, I had a great time seeking out colours and shapes and textures I loved and was just astonished by the scale of the Bio-domes. I made the mosaic using the big huge labs mosaic maker with flickr, this is fantastic.

I used a combination of October Afternoon's 'Fly a Kite' and My Minds Eye's 'Bloom and Grow'. The Fly a Kite is perfect for summer photos, even for holidays like this one where it was pouring with rain for pretty much the whole time! It is very much inspired by a feature in the latest Scrapbook Inspirations Idea Book to do with leaving some white space. I am very sad these Idea Books are no more, I'm really going to miss them.

This next one is from the same holiday, it is about a lovely place in Devon that time forgot, in effect it's a whole fishing village that is like a living museum. People do live there, but most of it is traffic-less, it's on a very steep hill down to the sea, and the paths are cobbled. Donkeys used to be used to get things in and out, but now there is a proper road alongside it so they only have to carry children and tourists!

This is about as graphic as my pages ever get, I did add some curves and ribbon to try to break up the straight lines a bit. I wanted a faded nostalgic feel for this, and once again Fly a Kite was just perfect for it. I think that blue paper looks a bit like the sea.

I've also been sorting through my photos for Document 2010, which I am trying to catch up with. The photo pockets are all up-to-date now, I'm especially loving that part of it as it really encourages me to print out at least 10 photos each month. I've been finding I've been printing many more than that though, so have started an overflow basic photo album, which is very random (in a good way). It is a basic kraft binder with loads of pockets and it will be given a pretty makeover at some point. It is good to have photos somewhere other than on my computer and in my scrapbooks again, since I have not had a general photo album on the go for a couple of years now.

I'll try not to leave it so long next time!