Carnival Time!

Yesterday was the village carnival. It's a small village. A small carnival. But it's a great atmosphere and lovely to see everyone congregating in one place enjoying themselves.

There were lots of little displays, dance teams, band display, kite flying display, kids magician and so on. But the highlight of the day for me (and I guess most people there) were the dancing diggers. J C Balls is an excavation and earth moving company based in the village, not to be confused with the rather more well known manufacturer with the same initials (though JC Balls does use JCB's!). These drivers were fantastic. They don't do shows for a living. They don't get lots of time to practice the routines, but it was totally impressive nonetheless. I didn't take my camera with me so I have snagged these photos from their website.




My kids didn't dress up this year, none of them are too fond of dressing up at all to be honest. Joshua, in particular, was very resistant! I did this page a while ago about the year the Playgroup float theme was Teletubbies. Joshua refused to be a Tubby or a flower or a bunny so we compromised and I did a mask for him to hold up to his face and he wore brown and orange and had a crepe paper tail, to be the lion. Yes, at some point at the beginning of the Tubbies there was a lion featured. But I think the pc brigade got in the way and he was deemed to be too frightening for the kids! They obviously didn't ask Josh, as far as he was concerned, the more fierce the character, the better!



I know ... I have posted this layout before ... but I thought this time I would give a bit of information on how I created it.

On a scrap piece of 12x12 (I keep the plain insert sheets from scrapbook albums for this type of thing) I sketched out the sun and sunrays. I used that as a template to cut the sun from the orange cardstock. I originally left the centre of the sun orange, but decided once I had placed everything else that the black would provide for a greater contrast with the photos and title. So I cut out the centre of the sun and backed that with black cardstock. The cut out sun was then placed on the dotty patterned paper background (which I think is Crate Paper from memory).

I attached the photos at varying angles, leaving the top of the larger photo unstuck as a pocket for the journaling tag. I printed the journaling on blue cardstock, leaving space at the top and bottom for the cut down journaling spot (Making Memories) to be added.

As it was such a busy page, I kept the embellishing fairly simple (well, simple for me!). I created the little windmills (pinwheels) to keep in with the Teletubby imagery and used 7Gypsies word stickers for the 'handles'.


To create the pinwheels:


Take a square piece of double sided patterned paper. Lightly run two pencil lines diagonally point to point. Make a centimetre or so from the centre along each pencil line.

Cut from each of the four corners up to the marks you have made, rub out the pencil lines and then fold over every other section so the pointed corners overlap at the centre. You may want to use a little bit of glue at each point which meets at the centre to hold in place.

Use a paper piercer to put a hole through all layers and fasten it together with a brad.


I added some 'grass' at the bottom by snipping down a strip of unevenly cut patterned paper. For dimension I flicked some of the snipped edge. I stitched it in place with black thread for contrast. This bottom section provides a good 'grounding' for the rest of the page to sit on.

I finished off the page with stickers and gems. The circle stickers are from the bottom of my stash pile, being very old Artic Frog stickers. Placing them at that corner provides a visual triangle and added balance in relation to the positioning of the windmills. For extra definitioan I outlined the sun and windmills with black pen and added Stickles over the top of the sun outline for a bit of shine.

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