LittleBirdyScraps

More! (NB, this is an emergency title...:D)

Some more layouts today, and a look at what turned up in the post earlier!

The first LO uses a photo of my two youngest children which I love.  It's not very sharp because it's been scanned from an old photo and gets a bit less clear every time I use/open it!  They're on a beach in Cornwall called Trebarwith Strand, where we used to go as children with my parents.  I have a couple of LOs of those times,too.

 

Youngest is wearing a multi-coloured tshirt.  Years ago, when his brothers were born, we lived in an attic flat in a street in Lambeth - we didn't move out until just after Daughter was born, at which point there were five of us in a two-roomed flat.  Nice.

I had a neighbour called Nikki who owned a big rottweiler and a German Shepherd cross, and she didn't like me very much because I was always having huge rows with my man - remember, this was years ago, lol - and once threw a pudding basin full of dripping out the window at him as he was storming off down the street.  Don't ask why we had a pudding basin full of dripping.  It made damn good ammunition, though.  (Un)fortunately it missed him, but only by about a foot, and smashed on the wall beside him.

I remember Nikki was also out in the street, and she yelled up at me 'What's the matter with you?  You've got a child in there!'  (Not in the pudding basin - in the back room, asleep.)  She was quite right, of course, and I'm pleased to say that our relationship became a bit less tempestuous after that.  We were very young, though.

Anyway.  A few years later, when Nikki and I were actually good friends, she gave the boys a couple of tshirts for Christmas.  They were quite large at the time - the tshirts - but proved to be ideal beach wear, as they were instantly spottable on a crowded beach and provided a good cover-up.

After Visible and Invisible Teenager had grown out of them, they were passed on to Daughter and Youngest.  This picture is from the first holiday we all took together after their father had gone, and I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was keeping an eye on all four of them at the same time on this lovely beach.

The next LO is a recent one - I quite like this mixture of old/new!  Recently I went on the school trip to feed everyone, which involved staying in the kitchen all day.  There were 45 people, so it was a bit easier than last year when we had 66, but still it was very tiring.  This layout uses the group photo that was taken on the last day, and doubtless someone will want me strung up if I don't make sure they all have blurry faces...

Here's a close-up of the flowers, which I was quite pleased with:

I had a couple of Tattered Floral big flowers left over from one of the previous LOs, so I swiped them with some modelling paste and stamped a swirl into them, before inking over the lot with Spiced Marmalade.  Then I cut out and inked a couple of circles to go underneath those nice vintage buttons - but there was still a layer missing, I thought.  The lace flowers were meant to be smaller, because of course you can't really see the die cuts clearly underneath, but you can certainly see them as a layer.  So whilst I wouldn't have chosen to cover them up quite as much, I think in the end it's worked well.  (I do have issues around covering things up, lol, and I think I should be a bit less prissy about it!)

Oh, and those circles:

I came across these on Cathe Holden's blog - go to the 'freebies' section (menu bar at top) and scroll down to find them.  This will take you to a post which contains a link to 'World Labels' - and there you can download these labels, as a pdf, in six different colours.  Fantastic!  And while you're there have a look at the other freebies, and all the lovely stuff this lady makes.  I'd love to go shopping with her, she finds wonderful vintage goodies all over the place!

I printed these out in black and red - and I have a circle punch exactly the right size for them - bliss!

Now for the treat that the postman brought yesterday.

Isn't that yummy?!  I hope you can see it properly - just click on the pic to enlarge it.

This is the contents of my grab box from Handmade Hannah.  It cost me a tenner, and if you spend more than that - which I didn't do, duh - the postage is free.  Look at that gorgeous Echo Park paper, and there are four sheets of coordinating cardstock, too.  The Prima alphas have reusable packaging, which actually I can't wait to use, and then I got the beautiful flowers, the K&Co dimensional stickers AND that scrummy embellished ribbon border.  These are going to be used, any minute now, to scrap these photos of Daughter at her prom:

It's taken me a while to upload these because my external hard drive is telling me it doesn't have them any more, even though they're showing up as thumbnails.  It's also doing one or two other weird things which has got me worrying about it conking out - so I'll be frantically copying everything to various flashdrives later, just in case!

 

 

 

 

 

More Layouts

I'm doing some catching up here, since I decided that photographing my LOs instead of scanning them probably wouldn't result in some sort of lightning bolt coming to get me.

This is for Pencillines Sketch 243 which you can see here.  I've used an old photo of my cousin and my uncle, who weren't very far apart in age, taken in the back garden of the house I used to live in.  This house had a rich family history, having been let to my father's parents many years before I was born.  They moved there from Pimlico, and by the time I was born, living in the house were my mother and father, my father's sister and her husband, their three children and my father's mother.

My grandmother died when I was young, by which time my little brother had been born.  Eventually my aunt and uncle moved out with their three children when they were given a council house, and for a while another aunt and uncle, who had lived there before with their two daughters - one of whom is in the photo - moved back in.

In the end we had the house all to ourselves.  It was a very nice house, with four bedrooms including a master bedroom with its own balcony, and we had a playroom in one of the three reception rooms.  One day the owner decided to sell it as she was getting old, and offered it to my parents for £16,000.  (I should mention here that the house was in Fulham, which if you live in London will mean something to you.  If you don't live in London, it's next to Chelsea, lol.)

My father was a gambling man, as the song goes, and was unable to get a mortgage from any bank because of his appalling lack of savings/money generally.  So my mother spent weeks trailing round all the banks pleading for help, as she had always dreamed of owning her own house.  In the end she was forced to give up, and the owner said that instead of buying the house themselves, if my parents dealt with the selling of it, she would give them half the proceeds.  The estate agent who came to see the house immediately bought it himself, and our half of the money was enough to buy a three-bedroomed house in Wimbledon.

Looking at the price of houses in that area now, they're around three quarters of a million.  No wonder my mum wasn't very impressed with my dad.......:(

Now, I was going to find another LO with old photos on it but I haven't done one recently so here are some very new ones!  I took these last night, as it was Midsummers Day and when we were driving home I saw that the trees were casting very nice shadows on the grass over the road!

I saw a layout by Jessica which included some lovely flowers made from Lily Bee papers, and as I had some in my stash I thought I'd have a go too.  Hope you can see the LO from that link, by the way, as I can't make that particular post come up by itself!  It's in the June section, anyway.