More from the scrapbook

Not so much going on right now though there may be a fun meeting and day out one of these days soon, I hope!   In the meantime I’m going to show you a few more of my scrapbook pages.  For some reason it has been the accepted thing to do square pages, so most of mine are in fact square, but at least one scrapping website is promoting A4, which I do quite like!  It’s then a choice of portrait or landscape orientation, and each has its benefits. 

However these are a few of my older pages, including this very early one of  Edinburgh’s answer to Peter, Paul and Mary!!!   Yes, that’s me!  I used to sing with Chris on the left and Ian, in a folk group.  We called ourselves “Contrast”!  This photo was taken in 1970, when we were just young things!  Trouble is, it doesn’t seem all that long ago!  Actually we were quite “with it” at the time, singing things by Joni Mitchell and even Hot Chocolate, as well as  the traditional Scottish stuff that Ian and I liked, but Chris didn’t particularly – which was why we also sang things by Joni Mitchell and Hot Chocolate!

This page is a much more recent one, with a photo taken in October in the Outer Hebrides.   I had just been looking at the famous standing stones of Callanish  on the west side of Lewis when I was aware of some rabbits playing down by the side of the pathway I was on.  I stopped and stood as quietly as I could to watch, and was rewarded with this picture.

I love this photo of my grandfather, taken while relaxing in the Welsh mountains about 1937 when he was in his 70s.  I never got to meet him as he died just a couple of years later, 10 years before I was born.

 These are my maternal grandparents and my mother as a child. Crumbs!  I do look like her! I just adore granny’s bathing costume but would love to know what sort of swimwear Grampa was sporting under that robe!

These are the same grandparents on their wedding day in 1919.  The page boy was granny’s nephew, who ended up in South Africa.  What about the style of granny’s dress!  My sister still has the veil and the circlet of wax flowers she wore round her head.  I must get a photo of them!

 

I have quite an illustrious family connection!  David Octavius Hill, who was a Scottish artist, joined forces in 1843 with an early photographer, Robert Adamson, to take photographs that would enable Hill to complete his famous painting of the Disruption of the Church of Scotland.  He and Adamson went on working together and a couple of years later they took a series of pictures of the fishermen and women of the village of Newhaven on the river Forth.  The picture above right is one, and it features – just by chance - one of my great great great grandfathers, James Gall (standing on the right).  Sixty years later, the great grandson of  JG, married the great grand daughter of Hill’s sister Mary – my grandparents – so Hill is my great great grand-uncle! 

This page shows a picture of great great great grandfather Gall at the age of about 88, with his family round about him.  The little boy standing with his mother on the right of the photo is grandfather, the one who would marry Hill’s great-grandniece, and the one who is relaxing in the Welsh hills above.  Just realised I put this in my last posting!  Oh well, now you know the story!

These two pages were made with photos taken on holiday on the Scottish west coast  a few years ago.  The white cottage is where we were staying; the bluebells were growing in the garden.  The lower photo was the view to the right of the cottage.  Nearby were the wonderful Inverewe gardens, created by Sir Osgood Mackenzie .  It was a wet day when we visited, and the midges were out, but it still was a day to remember.

I first met Ruth in 1966.  We were both in our teens, and on holiday with our parents  Like me, she is a “catophile”!  All around the house from the front door mat in, there are pussycats – which I photographed and used along with the photo of Ruth and the real cat, Coco, to make this page.

 

I also use my scrapping kits to make greetings cards, that I can send in an email.  The kits consist of “papers” that you can use to make backgrounds, and “elements” which are objects with no background, so you can move then round the page and add other element to create the look you want.   You can add two or three background papers, reducing them in size slightly, layering them, and angling them to make something interesting, but the reason for a page is to show off the photos, so the pages do not need to be too cluttered.  Some designers add alphabets matching the colours or style of the kit, but you can also use fonts you have or download new ones.  I like to use elements I have made myself on occasions, like the bluebells from the Poolewe garden and Ruth’s cat ornaments.  I in effect “cut them out” from photographs with the software program I use – nothing as complicated as Photoshop, though I can see I may have to explore PS Elements one of these days!

So I hope you’ve enjoyed my scrapbook pages.  I really ought to work on some more, as I have hundreds of pictures I could use.  I just don’t have enough time.  Maybe I should set myself a goal of one a day!  At least that would give me 365 pages a year!  Talking about a picture a day…….. no, that’s another story!

Talk again soon.