Friends and Other Starting Points

I have been scrapping this week. My first LO I'll not be sharing because it is for a chinese whispers challenge but the others are fair game.
I recently signed up for another online class from the very talented Shimelle Laine over at Two Peas in a Bucket and certain things have given my scrapping a new lease of life one of those is starting points.
The idea of a starting point is that you stick papers onto a page in a certain arrangement and then take the finished page from there. So no planning everything out in advance etc. I was a bit sceptical as to whether it would work for me but it did and I am converted.

This first starting point came from a Glitter Girl class over on Two Peas a few weeks ago.
I choose to use some papers that I have had in my stash for ages by My Minds Eye. I still liked them but never thought that they went with any photos I wanted to scrap. Using them this way and starting the page before I picked photos and theme meant that they have finally made it into an album (well almost the LO is still on my desk at the moment).
I decided to go with this slightly blurry original photo of me and my oldest friend back when we were at school. It's not the best quality photo but seeing as then as now I was usually the one behind the camera it is quite rare and allowed me to reflect on our friendship.
I diecut shapes from the same papers and added embellishments in line with some of the other lessons I have been learning from Shimelle, repeating elements and colours in different spots around the page for one. This actually took some cunning because I only had two stickers with the green that I wanted to use so by cutting one into two pieces I was still able to get it into three places. And considering I had no idea where this page was going when I began I love how it turned out.

For my second starting point I used the latest one from Shimelle's blog.

And more papers that never got used when I was consciously picking papers to go with photos this time by Prima. I did use these papers once on the clock I decorated for my craft room but since then they had languished in my stash. That was about to change.