Corrie Kinkel

Thank you Cristina and I'm glad you have the same feeling as well. I am going to use the same printservice I always use and I measured another of my albums. It is 29 x 21 cm (landscape format) and I had to calculate how much that would be for a scrap layout to fill a whole page of the album. I figured it will be 5140 x 3720 pix/inch and that let me use all of my supplies, but this is only for the 4 intropages. For the rest of the album I use and adapt the printservice's templates so I have at least an idea how to fill my album with my photos and text.

Nice card and a very nice charity to make cards for!

Card # 1 I used the extra template for 2024 and I changed the landscape format to portrait format to accommodate the photo I wanted to use. I'm very happy with the new extra templates for diamond members, because I have used the ones from the first workshop over and over again. That's not a problem as such but new templates give new ideas! As soon as I had taken this photo, I thought of a friend who loves purple very much and her birthday is coming up next month. I used a ribbon that I have made earlier and recolored it with hue, saturation, lightness. the flowers at the bottom are a sticker and the font is itsadzoke S01 and I think it came from a lab. The name of the flower is Echium candidans - Snakeweed

I'm on a roll! This is the last one of the intros and it is again a simple layout using a photo with a reduced opacity, except for the Mariposa Grove sign that I kept at 100%. There were information boards and I extracted them from the photos and put them here as info before the next photo pages in the album. I couldn't resist to make an admission ticket with my own script 😉. I will make another intro but that one is with the family photos and I will not show those here because my family doesn't want me to do so. Which I of course will respect.

This is my second intro and it is a much simpler layout because it is all about Yosemite national park. It has a photo with reduced opacity as a background and I used cass-Multi frames collage freebie (as many of you have done) with another photo. Made a datestamp with cass-Datestamp 9 and an engraved rock (also a cass script). The flower is extracted from a photo; it is a California Dogwood and they were in flower throughout the valley in the park. I think I will use it on some of the photos in the album as well. The font of the title is Algerian and the rest is Bahnschrift. The idea for the title comes from a poster about the park which I bought when we were in San Luis Obispo. By chance we happened to come by an art gallery where they had posters of all the national parks. The old posters were, many years ago, made by an artist who gave before his death a young artist, named Thomas, the rights to design new poster. The only condition was that he had to do them in the same style and they are now printed and available in a limited and numbered edition. I don't have the font that he used on the poster but something similar that kept the idea. My son-in-law bought another one of a different park. The gallery packed mine rolled up in a tube and it came home with me where it has been laying under some books to get it straight again. We will frame it next week.

Sue thank you and I have to quote you in stating that this compliment coming from you means a lot to me! If and when I have time I will give this DIY a go, because it is a challenge I love.

Sue a lovely page and you were quick in making it! As usual you have set the bar pretty high. I like how you used the curly line and I'm glad with your remark about the the dashed lines. Stitching was what came into my mind as well, so I will happily discard that idea!

I'm working on the intropages for a photo album of my recent trip. I have 3 "chapters" for my album and each one has a scrapbook page introducing the topic of that part. Here is the 1st one about the road trip we took. The dimensions of the layout are specific for the kind of printed album I choose. For this page I used the cass-Photo circle template script that I bought recently and I choose squares and how many I needed. This is a great script I will write a review in the store! Then I used the cass-label1 script with different colors to write the places where we went and the photos were taken. I have a US highway sign as a template that I can adapt. I had already made a californian numberplate with the screws , so I just had to write the date on it. The tire tracks are done with cass-Tire Track 1 -brush; I used a color with a texture and later a grungy brush on them as well. The background is made of a google map with some overlays and blendmodes. The blue sky is an overlay I have in my stash and the car and road sign are by DiHiller (blogtrain june 2023) and the little wooden cabin is by Marissa Lerin. I'm happy to get slowly back into scrapping!

A small pot of pansies that we bought just before I traveled to California has erupted in a big bunch of flowers! I have to deadhead them almost every day to keep it flowering! It is a joy to look at and I needed that because this week was all about rearranging a rack in our storeroom. Just before my trip we had to buy a new tumbler and everything was waiting until I was back to start altering things and deciding what we could do without and bring it to the recycle unit where we live.

Doska, most of the time Google translate adequately and for me German is no problem because my daughter has lived in Switzerland for more as 20 years. She married there and her husband and my grandkids are Swiss. Just before the start of the pandemic the family moved to the USA.

Hi Doska, I just see this now and it is an interesting subject. In the Netherlands you can make an appendix to your will with all your digital accounts. Your heirs, or a trustee that will execute your will, can deregister from all your accounts. However I don't know yet what I will do with all my accumulated supplies. Maybe one of my granddaughters will become interested, she has artistic potential and is following art classes but at this point is still to young. Hopefully I will live long enough that I can pass it to her one day. Otherwise I have no idea.

Well I can better answer this question before I forget to do so. Again I have no pictures of layouts about this topic, but I can write a short story. I have told before that I grew up in the postwar years in Rotterdam. That period was, certainly in the first years of my life, still a period of sparseness and hard working families. I luckily wasn't very picky about food, but disliked (or I should say hated) rice. Every time that came on the table I flatly refused to eat it and that always provoked a speech from my parents about the hunger they endured in the last year of the war where they had to eat tulip bulbs to stay alive! It has taken me more than 50 years to overcome my dislike of rice, nowadays I will eat it but it never will be a favorite of mine! The best memories about food I have of my dad baking pancakes or apple pie. He had learned backing from his older sister and liked to bake, which my mam didn't. My mam was born in the wrong era, had she lived now she probably would have made a nice career for herself and it wouldn't be that of a housewife! I think she was unhappy in that role, however she loved my dad.

When I was in California with my family I unintentionally happened to have a little card of Markus with me. I have a little backpack that I often use for a small trip or just for a walk to store a couple of things like my phone and sunglasses. I thought it was empty but Markus was in there and when I checked what the theme of the month May was, I decided to take a picture of the pool and a picture of Markus. I made a sort of holiday card out of it all with a couple of elements I have in my stash. Like Markus: enjoy!

Thank you Ann! The trick is to water very sparsely, the most common fault in watering a cactus is: you give them to much water. When in a pot or container you should let the soil dry out completely before giving them a drop. To this rule are some exemptions for certain species but that is normally on the label when you buy them. It is so funny to see her with her plants because my son, her uncle is also a great fan of cacti and he started with them when he was the same age as she is now. At 50 he still grows cacti but I'm not sure his wife loves those too.

I promised my granddaughter that I would make here a layout when I had overcome the jetlag and this is what I made for her. She loves plants, especially cacti and succulents, and she has quite a collection of them as mini plants. Besides that, green is her favorite color. I used the mask from Jessica Dunn for the May mask challenge on digital scrapbook and the papers (with blendmodes) and elements from cpjess Meadow bundle which I recently bought and some plant tubes. In the mean time I have transferred and ordered all my recent photos, so now I can start making a couple of layouts as intro pages for the photo album I'm going to make. Slowly I'm getting back into scrapping, it always takes some time to readjust to my normal routine at home.

N = Number of laps that you want to do

Well I am in too, hopefully I will have time enough to follow along. I want to make a photo album about my visit to California too but if I don’t take on other things at the same time it will be doable. It will be nice to get into scrapping again which I missed during my “holiday“ .

E = Enjoy pool life

Thank you Ann, but I visited Yosemite, which is doable from the San Francisco Bay area for a weekend. Yellowstone is on my wishlist, maybe some other time in the future; who knows.

This weekend we went to San Luis Obispo and highway 120 that we had to follow is the historic El Camino Royal. In the hills above San Luis Obispo we stayed in a cabin on a camping and because there is no light pollution, the night sky was so clear with the stars much more visible then at hone. I stood a long time outside looking at the sky! The next day we took a scenic route and came by Soda Lake an alkali wetland with a salt crust that was already used in earlier times by the indigenous people of the area. We followed a winding road along part of the San Andreas Vault and you can see the difference in the landscape where the vault runs through. Our next stop was at Daou vineyard where we had a tasting of their wines, that is my son in law and I, my daughter was driving and the girls are to young. The story of the vineyard and the explanation of their wines was very interesting and they served nice food to go with the wines as well.

Week 16 and I have arrived safely in California and of course it was fantastic to see them all standing at the airport to welcome me! At home there were 2 exited dogs to greet me as well. In the first weekend we got to see some of the flowers in bloom on the meadows. It wasn't quite the superbloom of last year, but nevertheless still pretty impressive to me. I took a lot of photos and I have no doubt that those will come to good use in the months to come.

Week 19 marks the end of my stay with my family. I have enjoyed being there and taking part in their daily lives as well as going on some weekendtrips together. I spend some quality time alone with each of my granddaughters, which we both cherished. I even did some volunteer work in the class of my youngest granddaughter where they could use some help with the bookinterviews! The children had to tell about a book that they had read and they had to answer some questions about it. I got a list of questions to ask depending on the kind of book and I was very impressed how eloquent most of them were! Now I'm slowly adjusting back at home where my husband is glad that I came back in one piece😉.

My week 18 is about Yosemite National Park where we stayed for the weekend. It is very imposing with the granite rocks and the waterfalls. It was still early in the season, so there were no crowds, but we have had all kinds of weather, including snow! At first it started to rain in the afternoon and when we were having diner the rain became snow. The temperatures dropped below zero and the snow blanketed the roads, which were closed to all traffic. Only one road stayed open and we had to use that one to drive to the camping where we had a cabin. It meant we had to take a detour of over an hour to get there in the dark on winding roads; luckily my daughter had rented a 4-wheel drive because of the weather predictions! The next morning there was a layer of approximate 5 cm of snow but is was sunny and the park rangers had cleared the roads with snow ploughs. When driving along a road we could see some cars that were stuck there and the people in them had been evacuated by the rangers; they had a busy night! It was quite an adventure in conditions that doesn't exists in the Netherlands.

Oops Michele I hope there will be a solution to your problem. Because I am away and don’t have my laptop with me I hope it will restart when I got home in a couple of days. I like this new font and although I probably don’t will participate in this challenge I shall certainly use later on. When coming home I have so much to do, after sleeping off the jetlag I have to install all the goodies of the birthday sale. I have downloaded the zip files on my iPad and have to transfer them to my pc where I can open them finally! The next step will be making the missing layouts for the P52 project, watch the last masterclass, go through all my photos and select which of them I want to use for making a photo album! When all that is done I will resume making layouts for all the different challenges. I admit I am starting to miss you all. Hopefully I see you at the Q&A coming Sunday if I can stay awake that is.

S = Swim