My first pages for our round-Australia trip

Albany, Western Australlia - Christmas 2009

Since this is a blog about scrapbooking, I have been hunting in my workroom and finally found a double page to show you :) Most of my pages are out of reach at the moment so I was happy to find these pages.

In 2009-2010 we went on a trip around Australia. It was 7 months and we barely skimmed the highlights around the edges! It made us realise just how huge Aus is. If you want to read a bit about it, you can see more on my travel blog http://SandrafromSydney.blogspot.com I have done it up to December 2009, but need to finish it off for the final month. But yes, Marlene - I haven't forgotten and will do so lol!

When we packed I took heaps and heaps of scrapbooking materials and equipment. The grand plan was to do pages as I went. Good plan. The first and only pages I did were these! Mainly because any time I had was taken up writing my travel journals (they filled 5 spiral bound books), writing letters to our then 5 grandchildren, my mother and brother with a selection of photos in them for their photo albums (Mum and Terry) or scrapbooks I had made (the grandchildren) and doing a set for Nathan as well and helping him make a scrapbook of our trip.

I will show you the scrapbooks I made for the children another time, though they are on the Sandra from Sydney blog.

So - here are the pages. We spent Christmas at Albany, Western Australia (pronounced Al like albatross). I love red and gold for Christmas, and you will see that I've also used my favourite poinsettia embellishments. Here's the left page:

Now for a word on how I did it, for those who are starting off. The red is Bazzil textured cardstock, which along with the gold ribbon was bought from a scrapbooking store. The ribbon is just attached at the back with some photo tabs (they are pieces of double-sided tape cut to size).

The photo is matted (in other words stuck with the photo tabs) with red cardstock, then again on gold cardstock.

I then adhered it to the red background cardstock. Once it was positioned I knew where to attach the ribbon. The poinsettias are stuck on with some more double-sided tape. Here's a close-up of the corner, showing the details of the matting around the photo as well as the corner of the page.

The word 'Christmas' is a gold sticker, and so are the little gold embellishments. It's all quite simple but also quite effective.

And here's the right page:

Again, it is using the gold ribbon, and a single poinsettia on the top corner.

I printed the journalling (that's the writing) on white vellum (from the scrapbooking store). To make sure the writing would show up I put white paper behind the vellum, then attached it to some gold cardstock with two brads - I must have run out of the dark red ones or I would have used four of them.

To add a bit of interest to the vellum I tore the edges. This is a technique I use a lot: on paper, cardstock,vellum and even photos. But not on photos that are studio or heritage ones unless I am using scanned copies!

I know you can't read the words properly but at least this close-up shows a bit more detail of the journalling. Sorry the photos didn't come out as well as I had hoped.

Next time I will show you one of the miniatures pages I scrapped while at Kylie's in September-October this year.

Hope you like this one.