The reason for not many posts on my blog in the last 3-4 months

We went on a holiday last October and I wanted to do a scrapbook.  Unfortunately we took my son's camera and good majority of the pictures came out blurred.  I was devastated.  Thankfully we met a lovely couple from Havant on our coach tour and they copied all their photos for us which was so nice of them.  We are going away in a week's time and we are hoping to visit the couple that kindly copied their photos for us so they can see what I did with them.

It took weeks to merge their photos with ours and sort them out into the different places that we saw.  

Then I took the images into Craft Artist and picked which ones to use for each pages.  I did buy some sets of plastic sheets that could hold 12 6x4 inch photos in them.  I wasn't overly pleased with these as even if you put photos in them with quite a tight squeeze somehow as you turned the pages some would move/fall out.  Think I'd just stick the photos on scrapbook paper in future.

After printing out all the photos it was a case of cutting out all the photos to be used.  I do laugh when I see Phill Martin on Create and Craft as he has to ink the edges of his layers.  I personally hate seeing white left around images and also hate white edges on paper/card when used on cards/mixed media/scrapbooks so each edge had to be gone round with a black marker.  I don't think I dare count up how many edges I did.  All I know is that I wore out two Graph'it black marker pens!!!

Then came the decisions on how the pages would be laid out.  That was the hard bit at times as I've only ever done one proper scrapbook before.  To do that I watched shows that Mel Heaton did on Create and Craft and followed her ideas.  That scrapbook was of a holiday with my mother just weeks before she suddenly died in June 2011 but I was happy with how that turned out.  I remembered Mel's advice about doodling around the edge of the page to draw your attention into the page so I did this.  I also did her tip of not typing all the journalling but handwriting instead.  Yes my writing isn't the best but hey ho I did it.

So after many, many, many months of very hard work the scrapbook is completed.  I went a bit over-board and it is 98 pages long and therefore I've had to split it into two albums.

Scrapbooking certainly isn't cheap but if anyone has short term memory problems like me it is so important to do as with time things are easily forgotten.  I struggled with some bits of the scrapbook as I hadn't remembered some things but thankfully my husband did a day-to-day account on his tablet to refer to.

I shan't bore you with all 98 pages but I thought I'd share some of my favourite pages:

  

We flew from Heathrow to JFK New York Airport and had 2 nights in New York.

   

   

        
From New York we travelled to the border into Canada for our magical trip to Niagara Falls and the Skylon Tower.

  
From Niagara Falls we travelled to Lewisburg and then Washington DC.

   

          
From Washington DC we travelled to Philadelphia.

   

   

 

   
From Philadelphia we had another night in New York before we flew back to the UK.

   

 

I am entering this scrapbook pages into the following challenges:

613 Avenue Create - Anything goes with the optional twist to use a pearl and/or rose
The Pink Elephant - Anything goes
Through the Craft Room Door - Anything goes
Inspiration Destination - Anything goes
Crafting by Designs - Anything goes
Creative Inspirations - Anything goes
Word Art Wednesday - Anything goes
Create and Inspire - Anything goes
Creative Fingers - Anything goes
Crafty Catz - Anything goes