3 more summer layouts finished

These were a bit different from the last group, in that my portable printer died 2 weeks before we came home and I couldn't buy the right ink cartridge in France. I wanted to scrap so I made these 2 layouts with all the papers and embellishments, but without having the photos printed. Although I knew what the themes were, it was quite different working without the pictures. I like the results
though.

I've been wanting to use this delicious kraft trees paper from the Girls Paperie for ages, but it is quite busy so I layered it with a couple of more lightly pattered scraps. The Sun tag is from a travel-themed pack by K&Co. I bought the chocolate card from a French car boot sale and cut it in half to use both sides. I added the photos when I got home, wrote my journalling at the side and added the title and bling. Writing the title in French has the added advantage of using different letters, although it's still heavy on Es and Rs. The game (Find the Carrots) involved searching for carrots hidden in a pile of straw - very messy, but lots of fun as you can see. I was picking straw out of M's clothes for days!

Having already made a very pink and sparkly layout about my daughter's birthday, I decided to pick out the colours of her dress in this one (which was bought for the dual purpose of birthday and Jubilee celebrations) The papers are Papermania Portobello Road, but I didn't want to use the specific Union Jack designs so went with the blue polka dots and red florals. To create the background I drew around different-sized plates and hand-cut the circles, then overlapped them and let them hang off the edge. To tie all the circles together and fill the white space I then drew more interlinking circles over everything with a white gel pen, but I don't know if you can see that. The birdcage embellishment was free with a French scrapbooking magazine. The denim phrases and epoxy letters have been in my stash for ages and I just added a little ribbon and a title when I came home.

My final layout was also made in its entirity in France without the photos, even down to stitching the banner. This was probabaly ot sensible as it overlaps the picture a bit too much, but I had the time and inclination to scrap on holiday, and knew i would have much less time in September. The whole colour scheme was based on a scrap of tortoise-themed paper I had. When am I going to get another chance to use that? I cut it into sections to use in 2 areas of the layout and cut out just the tortoises as a border at the bottom. The journalling box was another freebie from a French magazine, but the wording wasn't right so I stuck the last scraps of tortoise paper over them.

I've just remembered that I meant to add some more stitching when I had the photos in place - I'll do that soon.