Visitors BooK

Hello there!

I hope you had a great weekend and you're feeling fine and dandy this Monday.  I'm not actually sure where the morning went, but it's definitely gone and I even forgot to have a mid morning coffee.  It's taking a while to get into any sort of routine again!

Anyway, my crafting project today was actually finished a couple of weeks ago but the photos have been waiting to be blogged since.

One of the things on the inventory of things we needed to leave in the Southwold holiday flat (Alice's, Southwold) was a Visitors Book, and  couldn't bring myself to just leave a ready made one - plus of course, I knew it would be a fun project to get stuck in to!

 I started with one of the lovely Kraft ring-bound books from Paperchase, then gathered a load of seaside themed bits and pieces that I might find a home for on the book.

The papers are from a couple of Studio Light paper pads I bought last year and absolutely adore!To make the 6x6 papers work on the larger area of matted black and white card, I adhered some areas onto card, then tore the edges and overlapped and inked the various pieces to layer up a bit.  The larger base layer was stencilled with my favourite stencil in a rather random and overlapping series of inks, glitter gel and also for some areas I added gilding flakes. 

I threaded some seaside themed charms onto a few strands of silver thread to decorate the left side, and also added some plaster shells and a couple of shell brads.  The 'beach' sign was created in Paint Shop Pro, and raised on a piece of chipboard to keep the silver thread in place.  I used Glossy Accents behind the charms so they stay where I want them to be. 

The letters were cut with a Spellbindrs Alphabet Die Set  - I cut each letter 4 times from plain white card and glued them together so that the stand out.

The little beach hut was hand cut, except for the window die which comes from a Spellbinders set. I scanned a piece of the patterned paper so that I could use exactly the same colours to make some striped digital paper for the walls and trim of the beach hut, and some in the plan cream and aqua for other parts.

I added some aqua and clear dewdrops to finish the cover, then tied little pieces of ribbon, twine, fibre etc around the wires to finish the whole thing off.

I had a load of fun making this!

Before it was taken over by one of the big companies, we loved travelling with Simply Travel - all their properties had simple exercise book style Visitors Books where precious guests left lovely messages about the places they'd found and enjoyed visiting.  The books were always fun to read and a great source of

recommendations for where to visit, good places to eat and other local info.  Often these places were off the beaten track and we'd never have found them on our own - like the amazing restaurant, up a hillside track near Gumusluk in Turkey, where you sat on rugs and big cushions and watched the sun go down as you ate wonderful, home-cookled food!

 Ah, the memories!

That's the sort of thing we'd love people to leave in our Visitors Book too - their  recommendation for interesting and favourite places to go in Southwold and the surrounding area,

Enough of my waffling - I hope you like the book,

Thanks for looking

 

Link to Holiday Flat is here:

Alice's, Southwold