Friday 29 January 2010

Pretty things...

I've just come back from a short break to Rome with my lovely boyfriend. It's the first time I've been so I had my nose in my guide book for pretty much the whole three days we were there!

In the 'Shopping' section of the book there was a listing for a sationary shop called Fabriano, with the description:
"Since 1782, Fabriano has been making professional-quality paper and beautiful paper products for artists and writers. Buy sketchpads and hand-pressed stationary."

I was, of course, immediately drawn to visit. After a morning walking around the Vatican, Colin wanted a rest, so I left him at the B&B, hopped on the metro and visited Fabriano. There were some beautiful things, including jewellery made from paper.

My limited budget restricted most items but I came away with these lovely tags. They're about 4.5inches by 2.5inches, quality card and have sections on the back to fill in "Name" and "Message or Destination". Not sure exactly what I'll use them for yet, but I'm sure I'll find something to do with them! :-)



Decisions made...

I've been thinking for a while now of starting a blog. A scrapbooking blog to be precise.

I knew very little about scrapbooking a couple of years ago when I bought a goody box from a paper store and made my first tentative steps into the world of 12x12 cardstock, patterned paper and brads. Pretty much all I knew was that I loved the look of the patterned papers, and I love photos too, so it seemed the perfect combination.

Nowadays I have a scrapbook filled with layouts, more patterned paper than most non-scrappers would ever know what to do with, and a long suffering boyfriend who simply rolls his eyes when I pull out my camera again or he finds me clicking through an online scrap store.

And I have to say that most of what I've learned about scrapbooking has come through the wonderful online community and spending a LOT of time looking at other scrappers blogs.

So here goes... it's a new year and I've just had a birthday, so I'm feeling it's the perfect time to try new things. I'm going to begin my blog!

The first thing I'm going to share is a layout I've created for the sketch challenge on a favourite blog of mine, http://sarahscardsltd.blogspot.com/. I love this blog and this is the first time I've attempted their sketch challenge. The photo isn't great... I need to work on getting the lighting etc right for photographing my layouts. I hope you like it though.... :-)