Fun & Ice Layout

I don't know what is going on with the pictures in this post so just bare with me please! I am continuing on with my quest to make the most of Studio Calico kit since my next one will be shipping out next week!I wanted to use this cute but not great photo of my girls and I ice skating when we went with their girl scout troop this spring. The girls had never been and I haven't tried to ice skate in many years. But I didn't want another parent to have help my girls get from one side of the rink to the other so I laced up a pair and did my best. The girls and I had a great time and by the end Madison was getting really good and comfortable out there. Most of the girls in the troop were just going around clutching the wall for dear life, it was very cute. 

I was very excited to use this beautiful cloud paper and couldn't bear to cut it up so I decided to use it as a background and even then I didn't want to cover up very much of it. I created a little collage at the bottom and the top to create a nice diagonal form of embellishment. I loved the doilies in the kit too! I have always wanted to play with some but just never picked any up. I did sprinkle some mister huey's on the page. 

 Up top I used several pieces from heyday, take note, memoir, and wood veneer, and I just have to say how much I adore the little pearl dots too! The Thickers are mistable ones that I used Boss Lady mister huey's  to color... that is after my dog ate three letters and I had to re do them! The ampersand is an old piece from making memories that was glittery. I painted it with some mister hueys and a paintbrush. The corrugated butterfly is from jillibean soup and something that I have needed to use up for  awhile now.

Oh, and check out the cute little envelope and tag that I used for some hidden journaling. I really should put the date there though huh?! Silly me! 

July 2012 Layout

Yesterday I showed you how I created the collage of my photo a day instagrams, from there I simply saved it as a single photo and then I printed the whole thing out on an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of photo paper, trimmed down the sides just a little and put the whole sheet on a layout. This is probably the easiest layout that I have ever done!

I added the days of the week stamps from Studio Calico that I used for the first time and I have to say that I love them so much! I can't wait to use them next year for Project Life. I added a strip of paper and  some washi tape from Bella Blvd. Plus some letter and number stickers and a flair button and then topped it off with a wood veneer word. I wanted to include what each picture was supposed to be of so I wrote them around the edges of the photos. Very simple and a great way to document a whole month on a single layout!

A Cookie Birthday

I am slowly but surely working my way down the list of layouts that need to get done. These especially need to get accomplished before my busy picture taking season begins. Between all four of my kids birthdays being in the next three months plus back to school, halloween, pumpkin patch, thanksgiving, and christmas, it seems to pile up and then it takes me until august to get caught up again! It's a never ending cycle for me but at least I am still working within this year I guess. 

Well I decided to use Studio Calico's sketch challenge from last week to get my husband's birthday photos done. Here is what I came up with...

It is really tricky to get paper strips at an angle and yet cover the whole page so I came up with the circle to hold the journaling. I really should type my journaling more often since I hate my writing but it just seems like so much more work! I would have used white card stock as my base but because these instagrams had a white border I wanted them to show up so I brought out the kraft card stock. Most of this is the Memoir collection but a few pieces are from the kit. That grid paper in the corner is actually the background packaging from the Studio Calico die cuts! I love using up great packaging!

My Fave Photos

I have to say that I was still a little scared about receiving a kit every month full of products that I didn't hand pick myself. I have become very good at picking a collection and only buying the papers and embellishments that as soon as I see them I instantly have a million ideas of how use them. My heart sings and my mind races and yes I even hear a choir of angels... ok, not really but pretty close. So to decide to start getting the Studio Calico kits for me was a huge decision. And I heard my husband's voice in my head and in reality say "But what if you don't like what they send you?" I spent months watching their releases and seeing the pages that people were making with the kits and I also came to realize that at this point 80% of my scrapping money goes to Studio Calico, and every day I fell in love with the things that were being created. But there was one thing that I didn't expect...

Not only do I love everything that I got in this first kit (I haven't brought myself to use the amazing white woodgrain card stock yet!) But the member gallery and the blog bring me so much inspiration! The challenges alone are enough to get me going on an afternoon that I can't decide whether to create a page or lay on the couch. So this is one of my first challenges that I am entering. It's the Member Scraplift challenge. I used mostly the kit, plus a couple of things that I had that were also Studio Calico, except for the yellow airmail washi tape which has become my favorite. I love yellow right now and am getting close to painting my pantry door yellow! heehee. 

These are a few of my favorite instagrams that I have taken lately. It's not that often that I get on this side of a camera so I wanted to do something special with them. A couple of papers are from the Abroad and Heyday collections but the rest is all from the Summer of '69 kit. I am in love and can't believe how quickly this page came together. It really helps to have most of it picked out for you already. 

At some point I will also share how I store my kit right in front of me, oh, and I guess I need to do some more posts on my room since I have changed a few things around! Ok, ok, back to work!

Including the Art

As a mom I am really bad about keeping all of the little "treasures" that my daughters make me. I do have a box that the girls know to put all of their school stuff in that fills their backpacks and twice a school year I go through it and pick out a selection of artwork and schoolwork that is a good representation of what and how they are doing in school. I then put that stuff into a file folder labeled with the grade in my filing cabinet. At the end of the year I go back through the folder and see if I can take anything out. I would love to start incorporating more of that stuff into the girls' albums but baby steps!

I have recently kept a small box in my scraproom that is for all of the little notes and cards and drawings that the girls make me, and I finally had a chance to sit down and scrap some of the ones from Madison.
I used the SEI Corrine line and I really love the cheeriness of it. I used a slightly older random picture of Madison that I had in my box that just didn't have a place so it was perfect for this. And I think that the crocheted hat adds to the artist flair!
Madison will write me an "I'm sorry" note when she gets in trouble. I love this sweet side of her that is crushed when she knows that she has disappointed us. I have saved this one in particular and that little square drawing is so cute. At her old school, her teacher asked the class to draw a picture representing their favorite day of the week. Madison drew a picture of herself playing football because Sundays are football days (at least for the good part of the year!) We are big Cowboys fans here so football days are very important!
I used this super cute trim at the bottom of the page to give it some color and texture. The top of the journaling I made with an EK Success border punch that looks like notebook paper ripped out.
Here is the inside of the anniversary card that she made us last year. It is so cute and detailed!
This is the cool part about the We R Memory Keepers 3 ring albums. I was able to take a regular 8 1/2 x 11 page protector and place some of Madison's larger artwork right into her album next to the page that I did. I don't need a second album and I didn't have to find a way to incorporate these larger pieces into a 12x12 page! Here is the other side...
This is the flag that Madison created for the kids' "camp-out" in the living room. The scrapbook page is right there behind it.
For right now this is Madison's album, you can find this one here although I have this one coming to me tomorrow in Strawberry to be her next album. I either order from Amazon and use my swagbucks or I order from Ritz Camera.com these are the two best places to get these albums at great prices.

I am hoping to create several more layouts to fit into this album and maybe even be able to fit up to this next birthday but I'm not quite sure yet so I already have the back up album for her in the brighter color. They didn't have that Strawberry a couple of years ago when I bought this pink.
Each album comes with 10 regular 12x12 page protectors in it and one of these divided 4x6 ones. I am planning to put any extra photos of her that didn't get scrapped into these pockets so that they are all together. At the bottom right there you can see that they also have a variety of configurations of divided protectors. I bought the assortment pack but haven't really played with them yet, I will be this summer though!

Thanks for looking at my daughter's album and hopefully it has inspired you to keep and use some of your kids' artwork in your albums!

One Sketch, Four Ways Part 4

Here is the last installment of my One Sketch, Four Ways week. I'm thinking that by now I don't have to show you the sketch again, (if you do need to see it then scroll down!) This really has been a great way for me to get four Halloween layouts done super quickly so that I can move on and continue to get caught up... I'm about to edit December! Lol My last layout is of my sweet oldest daughter who in my opinion made the perfect Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz.
For this layout I flipped the sketch all different ways to fit the pictures that I had but you can still tell that the basic components are there. I love how the title came out with the different letters. And I definitely used the circles again...
Since Madison was Dorothy, and I used the word rainbow in my title, I grabbed a non-Halloween embellishment that went perfectly and ended up tying in quite nicely...
The rainbow is from Sassafrass and the pumpkin is from AC. I also used some more of those little shapes that I cut out from the AC paper and put rubons on them from Scenic Route to show the date.

All in all, I think that these layouts came out pretty well and you won't even be able to tell that they all came from the same sketch because they all go into different albums! I love it! Hope you all have a great weekend!

One Sketch Four Ways Part 3

I'm back again with another layout that I did using this sketch from Creating Keepsakes October 2010 issue...
For this layout I took the basic components and flipped them upside down. It was about this time that I ran out of white cardstock so I had to step outside my comfort zone and used black as my base. I guess that because my photos have always been so dark that I tend to rely on white cardstock to brighten them up. Like how I matted these photos in white. Now I won't have to worry so much about that since I know how to get bright, perfectly exposed photos from my camera and now I can start using more color! Yay!
I used this striped AC paper to bring lots of color to the pages and I also used two of the AC journaling cards, the blue one and the base for the Halloween Night rub on. I cut part of it off so that it looks like it runs off the page here...

And then I used the rest of it on the other page here...
and put the date there. I cut more circles out and scattered those around along with more of those hand cut little shapes. I love the AC buttons that match perfectly and had to add some of those for dimension. Glue dots work great for this.

One more layout to go! I am also working on something (well my husband is working on something for me) that I think will change the way that you approach big scrapping projects! Can't wait to share it!

One Sketch Four Ways Part 2

Here is part two of the series where I show you how I took one sketch and created four different layouts to get things done faster! This is the layout that I did for Gabriel (a.k.a. Batman), you can see that I took this sketch...
and I flipped it backwards! And using different papers plus not matting the outside, it looks very different from the first one. And this is what I love about sketches, if you find one that you like... re use it!

I used mostly all the Boo! collection from American Crafts although I did try to really use up the rub ons from Scenic Route that I picked up last year. The orange decorative border is from American Crafts and I like it a lot but I had to really glue it down to get it to stop lifting off the paper. The journaling spot is also from AC and I love these things! This time I did incorporate the circles from the sketch, sometimes I just love circles!
One of my most favorite tools is my Sizzix Big Shot and the Tim Holtz die that I used here. I use this thing on everything from pages to cards to gifts! It is just so versatile and can be used on thicker materials too. I also tried to use up some old embellishments that I had in my Halloween box like this Happy Halloween title from MAMBI...
I love to mat one photo to make it the center of attention and this one of Gabriel as Batman is priceless to me.
Hope you enjoyed once again! Come back tomorrow for Part 3!

One Sketch, 4 Ways

I have told you before that I love to work from sketches. Some days my creative mind starts out on a roll and I can sit down and know exactly what I want to create. I can see it and and it all just flows out. But then there are some days that I sit at my desk and stare at pictures and cardstock and I sit, and nothing comes to mind. These are the days that sketches work well. They jump start my creativity and allow me to add my own touches without having to start from scratch. Well, this sketch is from the October 2010 Creating Keepsakes issue...
It is a pretty basic sketch that had all of the components that I needed and about the right amount of pictures that I had for each child. Because I have four children and I want each of them to have a complete record of their childhood (and I have so much product!) that I try to create a layout for each child's album for events such as Halloween. But when you consider 4 two-page layouts plus layouts for pumpkin carving, pumpkin patch photos, Halloween parties and other special fall related events, I start to get a little sick of Halloween stuff. So I try to simplify things when I can. This is one way that I did that, I took one sketch and adapted it to create four different layouts. Here is the first one...
I started off sticking to the sketch very closely. I had the right number and orientation of pictures for Zachary's page and then I started to build my page.
This library card is something that I created with my silhouette a long time ago and never put to use. It is a print and cut and it worked out perfectly for my journaling. I cut out little pieces of one of the American Crafts Boo papers to add all over the pages.
The Boo rub on is from Scenic Route and the chipboard frame I believe is from Fancy Pants and I found it in my stash. I painted it with the new Jenni Bowlin paint dabber in Chicken Feed that I picked up at the Del Mar Scrapbook Expo. (I have to get more of these!) I also inked the edges with black ink. The little Remember This stamp is from 7gypsies.

Come back tomorrow for the layout #2!

Boys' 3rd Birthday

Here is the story: a couple of months ago when I was working on birthday layouts for the kids, the only one that I had left was for the boys. So I got out the pictures and the products that I wanted to use and decided to think about what I wanted to do overnight and tackle it the next day. Well, at some point in that next 24 hours my 3 year old twin boys got into my scrap room and saw pictures of themselves and decided to take them... and hide them! When I discovered that some of them were gone I tried to get them to find the pictures for me. No such luck. I decided to wait for a while to see if they would show up and a couple of them magically appeared on our stairs one day. But most of the pictures of Zach were still gone. I waited and waited and waited... got other projects done just knowing that they would turn up. I cleaned their room and everything. Still nothing, so I decided to just reprint the missing pictures and move on with my life.
All of that drama to say that I finally finished their birthday layout! I think that I have said it before but I will say it again in case anyone who reads this has twins. I create 2 page layouts of big events for my boys and each page has pictures of one child on it. I also include at least one of both of them plus any detail shots and I always try to have journaling specific to each child and some sort of title. This doesn't always work with my design but it is nice to have in case some day they (or their wives) want to split up the pages. They go together for now but can easily be split for each of them. Every once in a while I do a page about the two of them but they will just have to share or fight over those.
Here it is. I used SEI Happy Day and I think that it went very well with the boy theme with just a touch of pink that you can't really notice.
Zach's page has a semi title, I just used this super cute happy birthday tag and the 3 is a grungeboard piece that I colored with SEI chalk ink in ivy. It works so well on the grungeboard and I love the way that it came out. I did my favorite new thing which is drawing lines around the outside of my photos to make them standout without having to mat each one. I used the Sharpie poster paint pen in white.
Gabriel's page has this cute little cupcake on it from SEI and the border punch is from Fiskars. I used my wonderful EK success scalloped circle punch for the journaling blocks.
Here is a closeup of the 3.

I'm just so happy that it is done and now I can move on to Halloween and other Fall stuff and not be worrying about where those pictures are. I'm sure that now that I have finished this page I will find them!

Slice Elite and Zootopia

I have been working on a gift album for a friend lately and have finally finished it! I can't wait to give it to her this Sunday. The album is of her grandson and he is adorable. I can't show you actual pages from the album because it's not mine to share but I did want to share some of the cute little designs that I cut using my Slice Elite and the Zoo-topia design card.
There are even some words included on this design card and I am so in love with the shadow feature! It just adds so much to the designs.

Here is the little frog that I cut and I am loving the layering feature. I normally wouldn't have used the polka dot paper but I was trying to tie in the papers from the album. I adhered him with dimensional adhesive too.
I love clouds on layouts and these clouds are so easy to do because you can quickly change the size and it even has a layering feature for them but I just wanted basic white fluffy clouds. I used dimensional adhesive for the little ones to define them a little more from the big one.

I have to tell you how much I am in love with this tree! It was so easy to do and I even used this wood grain paper from AC. I used the same polka dot paper that I did with the frog to tie it in once again. Please excuse my horrible zig zag stitching here... sometimes my sewing machine does this and I don't know why. The back always looks perfect so it must be something with the tension in the top thread? I have no idea what I'm talking about!
Here is my absolute favorite! This sweet little boy was a lion for Halloween last year so this was perfect for the page. I cut his face out of kraft paper and I some how got a smudge of sharpie on his face from when I colored his nose ( I didn't want to have to cut the face again in black just to get his nose) so I re-cut his face in the kraft and then adhered it with foam adhesive so now he is dimensional and I like it even more! I love how fixing little mistakes can make things even better. As the saying goes...
"There are no mistakes, only the opportunity to embellish!"

You & Me

One day last week when I got about an hour or so in my room I wanted to create something. But I didn't want to jump into Halloween yet and the other two pages that I need to finish I was waiting for pictures to be printed at Costco. What I really wanted was to work with specific products that I hadn't had a chance to work with yet, namely, Echo Park's Little Girl collection. So for this page I started with products and then searched for pictures. What I found in my little power sort box of photos waiting to be used was some random pictures of Kaley & I that have just never found a home.... well, there was my inspiration! Here is my 12x12 layout that I created for her...
Each sheet of Echo Park paper is so cute on both sides and I don't have the extra money to buy two of every pack just so that I have two of every sheet so I have to be creative in how I use their papers and stretch them out as far as possible. Which is where this idea comes from: I took one sheet of patterned paper and cut out a 10 1/2 inch square out of the center using my trimmer, I then adhered an 11x11 inch sheet of white cardstock onto the top of that. Then I stitched around it twice, once pretty straight (as straight as I can stitch!) and then once very wavy.

That 10 1/2 inch square that I cut out of the base paper? I flipped it over and adhered it to the center of the white cardstock! One sheet of paper but used in two different ways and giving me lots of color and layers. Here is a view of the back of my paper.
Once I cropped and lined up my three pictures I knew that I wanted to title to be in that empty square so I cut some paper out just big enough to cover my Tim Holtz Alterations label die and ran it through my Sizzix. But I found that just the label wasn't enough to really fill that space. What did I do? I used the negative space that I just cut out and flipped it over! It looks like two sheets of paper but really it's one. Here is a close-up.
I stitched around it as best I could (it was not easy!) and then added one of their cute little journaling cards that is on one side of their paper and then added some letter stickers that come in the pack and I stamped the ampersand symbol.
This little cluster consists of the i love you sticker from the collection pack and the little heart I got at Michael's in the dollar section. It was attached to little clothespins but it seemed just too bulky so I took it off and just added the heart.

I journaled around the outside and voila! A pretty cute page using very little of my precious Echo Park paper.

Bedroom Corner

There is a corner in our bedroom that is kind of behind the door where I knew I wanted to put this little setup. These 8x8 frames are from Creative Memories and I got them before I stopped selling it years ago. They are magnetic and so they are very easy to change out the layouts and I don't have any glass to deal with. I have two 12x12 versions downstairs also.
Here is a close up of the four frames. Obviously I have one for each child and I try to change out the layouts every season. They then go into 8x8 albums that I have for each of the kids. Instant albums... I love it! The only thing I wish is that the ribbon wasn't there going across them. They come with little black clothespins so that you can clip things onto it but it just seems to be in my way. I haven't yet figured out how to take them off without ruining the frames. The black circles in each corner are the magnets that hold the layout in place.
I always do the layouts with one 4x6 picture and I always put their names on it. These layouts have been up for quite a while but the colors went so well in our room that I have left them up.
This little antique sewing machine table sits under it. It is something that has been in my family for a long time and I love that I own it now. On top is a beautiful doily, a vase that my grandmother gave me (that I finally bought flowers for) it's from Thailand, and the glass lotion bottle that was my great grandmother's complete with her lotion still in it, and a little glass dish that was hers also. It has been almost 10 years since she passed away and I like having these little pieces of her surrounding me.
This is the opposite corner of the entry into the bathroom. The only reason why I show this to you is because that framed picture of my husband and I used to be in between the four magnetic frames at our old house. It didn't fit in this house so I split them up. The picture we took using a tripod and remote and then I did some fancy stuff in Photoshop Elements to it and printed it at Costco. Now it sits here in our little workout corner. I have just recently started back on the elliptical after 2 months off (shame on me!).

I love creating scrapbook layouts but often times they go directly into albums and I don't get to enjoy them much. It is nice to have places like this that I can rotate my creations and get to see them before they get put away. The bigger ones downstairs are more for seasonal pages like at Christmas I put up last year's Christmas morning layout, and St. Patrick's Day I put up the girls' clover artwork. The clipboards that are in my office are for current 12x12 pages that I complete and want to enjoy. You can see that here
I hope to get into my room today and create something, as much as Spring Cleaning makes me feel good creating something for just a little while will make me feel better!

Forever

I have been so busy around here doing the home improvement type stuff and just trying to keep up on housework that I haven't been able to get into my room for quite some time. But last Friday I got a little bit of time and then I got a few more minutes Sunday morning to finish this page up. I had this picture left over from last year sitting in my little photo box and these papers from American Crafts that I hardly even got to touch around Valentine's Day. So I decided to use them and create just a little something.
I am learning to create more clusters on my pages to ground the elements and I have had a lot of fun experimenting with it. I love these label stickers and the pearls are something that I try to stock up on at the expos. I'm also trying to use my stamps a lot more!
This is a stamp that I picked up on clearance at Michael's around Valentine's Day. No one was buying it because someone had stamped it onto a red ink pad and then left it! But it was nothing that a little stamp cleaner couldn't fix. You will notice that I am an idiot and stamped this image not only crooked but upside down as well! I just decided to go with it, I guess it adds to the charm of the page right? I got to use my new tiny stapler and then I added one of my new favorite things this rose brad from AC. A little button and a pearl and it creates another cluster.
I am loving the banner trend right now and decided to use some scraps from the AC papers. The background paper is this amazing pink ledger paper from SEI. I had to pick up a bunch of it when I was working in the booth. The banner I just threw together using different sizes of triangles. They are not perfect and I like the fact that they are not uniform. I then sewed a straight stitch across them. And it's a perfect place for the title (gotta love my Thickers!)
One of my favorite pieces from this line are the details flowers. I am being very selective as to how I use them because I don't want them to ever run out, and there are only four! This was a really simple way to ground the photo to the page using a strip of patterned paper and matting the photo with a solid color, then I added the little strip with a decorative edge and stitched a zig zag on it to tie them together. So easy!