12 X 12 Travel layout using Scraptastic kits and a little story :)

Happy Sunday to all!  I hope you are having, or had, an amazing day, or evening!  Hope that cover everyone LOL.  We are still in the deep-freeze in Quebec, Canada.  Our winter started quite late but it has been so so very cold since the first of the year.  We are setting records often and actually had the dubious honour of being the coldest place on earth on Thursday, January 8th!!!  The themometer seems to be stuck in the minus 20's C. I have become a master of layers, but the upside is that it is too cold to snow so we are having a very easy winter from that point of view.

I have gone back to making a few travel pages to try and stay warm LOL, so today we are revisiting Innsbruck, the capital of the Tyrol region in western Austria.  I visited  in the summer mind!  

I originally started this page with the intention of following a sketch for the weekend challenge over on the Victoria Marie Facebook Group.  But in the end, this page took on a life of its own and in no way, shape or form resembles the sketch I had chosen - absolutely nothing except for the double matting of the photo.  So back to the grindstone on that challenge !!!  But I really love how this page turned out; it is one of my favourites this month.

The product:  After finishing all my Christmas presents, I had used bits from the September, October and November Scraptastic kits but still had lots left over.  I made quite an attempt at killing the September one but then the January "This must be the Place" kit arrived and it was love at first sight.  Not wanting to leave October's kit behind (it is so beautiful), I created a mega-kit for this month - it consists of the remainder of the October Heart It races kit and add-on, the October TLN kit and January's kit and add-on)  I hope to get 20 or more layout from this mega kit and am loving it.  Those two months complement each so much that half the time I really don't know  what comes from which. Therefore, I have not really added much from my own stash.  In this case, all the supplies come from my mega kit with the just a couple of exceptions :

• The background paper is from Stampin' Up in Basic Grey with vanilla polka dots
• I used a few brads from my stash, as well as enamel dots and shapes.

I am getting a lot more comfortable using vellum and just love the effect on this page.

The story:  I visited Innsbruck and Igles fairly early on in the one-year sabbatical trip - in August of 2005.  It is so beautiful!  When we arrived, there was big convention in town so hardly a room to be found.  The tourist office eventually found us a lovely pensione, at quite an altitude and  at quite an uphill trek LOL.  This particular pensione was actually closed but the landlady (then in her late seventies, early eighties I think) still lived there with her daughter, grand-children, two dogs and three cats.  Every once in a while they would take in tourists, as long as it was for a week or more, and as long as it was not a group!.  Well, what a gem of a find.  The landlady was just so lovely as well.  She did not speak English, nor French and my German is more than atrocious but we still managed to communicate.  I spent a couple of evenings watching her sew and do the most lovely needle work I have every seen - embroidered table cloths, sheets and pillow cases that were stunning.  My room was amazingly comfortable and breakfast each morning a real treat.  There was also a lovely terrasse - the photo in the picture is the view I had sitting on that terrasse while sipping a glass of wine, or drinking coffee.  As the journaling says : "Priceless".  Unfortunately, that lovely lady would not allow her picture to be taken - she felt she was too old and no longer photo worth --- what a shame, as she was quite lovely.  It was obvious from the photos in the dining room that the pensione had once been THE place to be - there were photos of a much younger her and her husband in the pensione, or on the ski slopes,  with many celebrities, Olympic althletes and politicians.  One of the most beautiful two weeks of my trip (and such a getting into shape two weeks too LOL, lots of hiking which I loved).

So there you have, you have made it to the end of another of my long and winding blog posts - thanks so much !!  I will be back soon to report on how I made out with my goals for January.  Until then stay warm, or cool, as the case may be!  Cheers xo