Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween! Are you doing anything fun this year? I'm quite pleased that Halloween has fallen on a Friday this year. It means that we can give out sweets to Trick or Treat-ers and watch 'Halloween' like usual, and then go to a party on Saturday night. Best of both worlds!

On top of that, today is just perfect weather. The last couple of years it has absolutely chucked it down and even if kids are happy to tramp about in the rain, their parents are not!

Onwards.
Check out my pumpkin design for this year:

It's based on one in the film Trick 'r' treat.

Bonus - his and hers:

Have fun out there - whatever you are! bwhahahahhh hahha

Paris scrapbook - in progress

More about Paris today I'm afraid. I've been craving pain au chocolat like mad, but I know they can never live up to the awesomeness of Pierre Herme's! 

I've been working on a Paris mini album. It's not so mini actually. Considering that I made a tiny notebook when we went to Berlin for a similar time period... 

A funny thing happened. I got the colour scheme way wrong. I always put most of my travel journals together before I go (here is a post about the Paris one) and I choose colours and textures to go with what I feel the trip will be like. I chose some really modern colours and styles this time, but it just doesn't work. 
Everything was more beige and brown. I was trying to avoid all the papers and stickers that have the vintage letter/postcard look: turns out they had it right. Ack. 
I had to change it up a bit. 

I ended up using the 6x4 kraft cards as the base for about half the pages and some of the 3x4 cards for interactive sections. But I've not used the other colours. I decided to make this a bound book rather than use book rings so each page is attached to the spine using an accordion fold method like this one from the Graphic 45 blog (scroll down to the bottom of the post).

I've done most of the pages, however I can't finish it completely until I have the perfect fabric for the covers. Where will you find the perfect fabric? I hear you cry! Well, I'm going to work on my Paris street illustration and get it printed up specially for the job. 
When I finally get round to it.
It will be ace.
Watch this space for the finished book. In the mean time here are some more of the spreads from inside:


These pages are about the area we stayed in. I made a pull out section with photos of our lovely apartment.

This one is about the flea market we visited - I used a kind of bunting/washing line effect to hang lots of little bits of photos of things we saw. It's all jumbled up like the stalls.

Je t'aime Paris

A few snaps from le weekend

Paris! 
Do I need to say more? I freaking loved it. We drank wine in cafés and ate steak frites. We went on a boat down the Seine and I saw the Eiffel Tower in real life and we went up the Arc de Triomphe and looked down the champs élysées. 
And the flea market! Not the giant one. Just a fantastic street lined with stalls full of all things French. 
Macarons. Obviously. 

C'est incroyable! 
As I mentioned before this was also my first time using AirBnB. I'm pleased to report that it was a tremendous success. We got to stay in a real Paris apartment with a teeny tiny kitchen like Rachel Khoo has in her cooking programme. The location was spot on, in a nice part of town, close to several metro stops and walking distance to the River. 

Now I'm looking forward to printing some of my photos and getting my travel album together.

In other words - I enjoyed it.