A belated Happy New Year to everyone!

2023 was an incredible year for us. I could sum the whole year up in one simple word – TRAVEL! With my daughter and her family currently living in Austria, we can come and go as we please, and we get to travel all over Europe. It’s the sweetest deal going! We couldn’t be thankful enough for Lindsay and Jeff’s hospitality and generosity! We spent 20 weeks in Europe last year and visited eight countries. The memories we’ve made are precious, and we loved everywhere we travelled.

The gorgeous patterned paper for this layout belongs to the Artsy Print collection from Paper Rose Studio. The Top 3 for 2023 cut file from Peartree Cutfiles was an excellent choice to summarise our past year.

Two of my three top choices centred around family trips. In June, we travelled to Venice, Italy together. Taking a ride in a gondola was at the top of my bucket list in Venice, so you can imagine my excitement at bringing my daughter and grandchildren on the ride! They all loved it as much as I did, and I’d have to say, it was one of my BEST memories for 2023. In late October, we travelled as a family to London, UK. Our focus was a visit to Warner Bros Studios to see the Making of Harry Potter. I read each of the Harry Potter books to my two oldest grandchildren before they moved overseas. Having the opportunity to tour this remarkable location with them was MAGICAL! My final highlight was the five-and-a-half-hour hike my husband and I made in Switzerland. It was a gorgeous fall day with incredible views of the Matterhorn throughout the hike. It was breathtaking every step of the way!

The creation of the title was quite simple for this project. After resizing it to fit my layout, I cut it in black textured cardstock. To back the numbers in the title, I used smooth white cardstock. Each number was ink blended using three Altenew dye inks (Rouge, Velvet and Ruby Red) and adhered to the back of the main cut file. Once completed, I set it aside to work on the journalling for the layout.

I turned to my computer and printer to add the journalling to this page. To ensure the correct placement and to protect the beautiful background paper, I placed a 12″ x 12″ piece of vellum over the patterned paper and traced out the area I wanted the journalling in. Next, I typed out my story on the computer, positioning it as close to the coordinates as possible. I then printed the text on the vellum sheet to see how close I came to my coordinates. With a few little tweaks and a second test run with the vellum, I was ready to print directly on my patterned paper. As you can see from the finished project, the text placement went beautifully!

The next stage involved adhering the title and the pictures to the layout. I then moved to stamping some travel words and images onto the page. I used travel stamps from Jennifer Edwardson Creative Inc. and Recollections.

The final step to completing my layout was adding the laser-cut leaves from 49 & Market’s Spectrum Sherbert collection. I used coorinating leaves from both the Tidal Wave and Strawberry Lemonade packages. To create dimension with these leaves, I glued the centre stems down and popped up some of the leaves with 3D foam squares to create some dimension for the final product.

Thanks for taking the time to be with me today. I hope I’ve provided some inspiration to document your favourite memories of the past year. May the coming year be good for you and yours! Until next time, stay safe, stay well, and Happy Scrapping!