Ticket to Ride

I want to start out by saying one thing... I love Crate Paper. Love the colors, love the patterns, and I love the textures. The papers are so versatile for current photos and older photos too. Which is perfect for me because I love scrapbooking older photos just as much as newer ones. I have been lucky to know and be related to some amazing people. My Grandparents, Great Aunt and Uncle, and my parents are some of my favorite subjects. For the people who have passed away, it gives me a chance to bring back the memories I have of them and save it all in a book where I can look at it anytime I want. It makes it seem like they are still with me, which some days is the best thing in the world. I'm also lucky that I've found some really cool photos. This page has example of a fun older photo of my Aunt Janet... using Crate Paper of course.



The paper is Crate's Emma Shoppe line. The butterflies are from a couple different Martha Stewart punches. I had fun using all the different papers and added some texture with a border punch and also just by tearing the paper. I've found it's easier to tear paper if you keep your hands close to the edge. It gives you more control. The title came out of the book "Inspiration Station" and is a combination of American Crafts' Thickers and October Afternoon alphabet stickers. The page is a pretty simple one, but all of the little details layered together gives it lots of interest.

Here are a few more detail close ups.

A few of my favorite things

Don't get too used to this... but here's a second page of the day. Back in April, a friend and I went on a scrapbooking weekend. I probably prepared 30 pages to work on and only finished a whopping 11. Next month we're trying to go again so I thought finishing some of the others to make room for more would be a good idea. Plenty of paper has been bought and lots of pictures have been taken since then.

This is a page about some of my favorite things. Sometimes, it seems easier to make pages about other people since I'm behind the camera. So this page is an attempt to put a little bit of me into my scrapbook; tell a story and show some of my personality.



The papers are a mix of My Mind's Eye "Abbey Road", "Lush", and a Jillibean Soup paper. The white splatters are October Afternoon's sprinklers. Which I have to admit, I was brave to use again after spilling half a bottle of yellow sprinklers on my scrap table while working on the page before this one. I like the look, though it has taken some getting used to since I never really thought of it being my style since it's more artsy.



The pictures include my parents' old recliner (which I've called dibs on for when I have my own house), peach Faygo (my Grandma always had some in her pantry for me when we went to visit), circus peanuts (absolute favorite candy), orange sherbet (absolute favorite ice cream), and an old American Eagle sweatshirt (I've had this thing at least since high school).



For the title, I used my "Just Chillin" slice cartridge to spell 'orange' and October Afternoon stickers for the rest. These little alphabet stickers are definitely at the top of my favorite scrapbooking supplies list. Baker's twine is also up there, which I wrapped around the "o" and "g". Add in some machine stitching and a couple brads, and the finishing touches are done.

Back Together

Last Sunday, my Mom's side of the family had their 100th annual reunion. I hadn't been to one since I was little. So with it being the 100th, I went and was inspired to do a page about the reunion from 1988. I also had some help from My Mind's Eye sketch challenge. Their sketch was for a 12x12 page, but I managed to stretch it into a two page layout. The papers are from their "Lime Twist" line. The colors are fun and the wood grain pattern made me think of a family tree.



On the first page, I enlarged a picture of the whole Pulver family. The women in the front row are my Grandma Pulver (on the left) and her sister, our Great Aunt Lulu (on the right). Part of the sketch challenge was to incorporate the title, "Back to", so I expanded it to "Back Together".



On the second page, I found some more group pictures and ones of my cousins and I.



I think after doing this two page layout, I'm going to try and do more. Especially since anytime our family gets together I always end up taking a ton of pictures. That's what happens when my cousins' kids are so cute.

Happy Go Lucky

I haven't been doing very well with posting lately (understatement, I know) so I'm gonna try to get back on track. It seems with everything my attention span comes and goes in waves. Not much scrapbooking has been going on lately, but with CHA going on and knowing TONS of new lines will be coming out; my hope is that if I make more pages I won't feel so bad buying more paper. The lines I'm looking forward to most are from Crate Paper (two I really like) and October Afternoon (they have three new lines coming and I'll probably buy bits from each). Earlier today I made a Crate page with paper from a year ago, but first I'm going to show an October Afternoon page I also did today. It's with their '5 and Dime' line which was a more recent release.



As a disclaimer, no scrapbookers were harmed in the making of this page. We were goofing around on the stairs and it started with me practicing dancing like Baby in 'Dirty Dancing' and turned into me pretending to fall. Silly pictures can sometimes be the best kind. Plus they always end up being fun pages to do.

I wasn't sure what the title was going to be until I saw the little card that said, "lucky" and the banner stickers spelling out "happy". After that, "Happy Go Lucky" seemed perfect. Plus, it gave me a chance to mix and match different fonts and embellishments. It really turned into a fun page to do.

The Best Farkle Counter

When the Cosmo Cricket line "Boyfriend" came out, I loved all the patterns and colors. It's actually a school line with pencils and test worksheets, but I wanted to do something different since I'd already used it for a page about my Dad teaching. I had printed some pictures about my cousin's oldest son playing farkle and thought this paper would be fun. I figured it would still work since the pencils would go along with filling out score sheets.

At this point in the weekend, I was still friends with my Revolution so I used two different fonts and some of my favorite October Afternoon sticker letters. I absolutely love the look of cork on scrapbook pages. A few little Basic Grey brads added some more color and depth.

Here's another close up. I punched out a few circles from different patterns and tucked them under the edge. Adds a nice little detail and layer.

Life is Better When it's Fun

This is the second page I did over the weekend. Last summer, I went to the State Fair with Erica and her kids. While we were walking by all the food vendors (aka Heart Attack Alley) we saw this Twinkie the Kid cutout and couldn't resist the fun photo op. The background paper is My Mind's Eye and the rest is October Afternoon's 'Seaside.' I've wanted to challenge myself by using the beach/ocean themed line for something non-oceany and the colors ended up matching the photos great. The banner is cut out from one of the patterned papers. I was trying to use it on another layout earlier, but it didn't quite work. So after all the work of cutting it out, I was happy it worked for this one.

The title (taken from my handy dandy 'Inspiration Station' book) is a combination of October Afternoon stickers with a line of stitching run through it. I really love stitching. Anytime I work on a page, nothing looks quite finished till it's stitched.

I also had the kids sign their names for a personal touch. Sarah wrote her name then drew a star next to it. So when it was AJ's turn, he writes his name and asked if he could draw a star. Next was my turn and Erica told me I had to draw one too. I think it turned out cute. Plus, now there's a fun story about the pictures and even one about putting the page together.

Rockets Red Glare

Here's the first page I did over the scrapbooking weekend. It always amazes me how long it can take to put such a simple page together. One thing that makes me feel better is something my Uncle said once, he said "Each page is like a small work of art." Which I completely agree with. The tricky part about this layout was deciding on the size of circles to use and how to overlap them. I do really like how it all came together.

Since the pictures were taken in the evening; I kept the background light and added red, white, and blue for a patriotic theme.

The circles were a mixture of papers from October Afternoon and Girl's Paperie. Another little detail is two straight stitch lines down the circles. Plus, they're distressed and inked. The stars are wood veneers from Studio Calico which I inked to tone down the light wood color. The title was fun too because I used three different Quickutz fonts. It's a mixture of Blossom, Rollerskate, and I think Chocolate. For more texture and interest, the "th" and "July" are cut from cork.

I have to admit, the more I look at this page, the more I like it. I'm proud of how the pictures turned out and the layering. My practice at layering is starting to pay off... I'm still gonna keep trying new things, but I do see an improvement.

Let the marathon begin...

It's been awhile, but I'm back on track with scrapbooking. The planning is over, the scrapbook weekend is over, and I have eleven new pages. I had planned for about 30, so hopefully I'll just keep working on more and posting more. I thought I would get more done, but scrapbooking is a bit of a process with me. Everything gets sanded or distressed, inked, and sewn down. Plus, there was A LOT of die-cutting. It's worth it though when I can get a font out of whatever paper I want (and not have to worry about running out of "e's" or "a's"). So here's the first page of the scrapbooking marathon... it's a page I did about my Great Uncle.

The papers are from My Mind's Eye 'Alphabet Soup' boy line. I love the colors and the patterns were really fun to mix. The sticker letters are new from October Afternoon. (At this point, I got a little tired of die-cutting so having some cute stickers came in handy.)

The story behind the photo is my family was at my Grandma's house and our Great Uncle Bernie let my sister and I tie him to the chair with yarn, put barrettes in his hair, and cover him with dolls. You have to be a great person to let two little girls torture you and still love them.

Oldie, but a goodie

I haven't scrapbooked anything the past couple days because I get to go on a scrapbooking weekend in a few weeks (at Quaker Haven Camp!), so I've been trying to get organized. Right now I've got 17 sketches drawn up and I'm going through my pictures to figure out which ones I want to use so I can get them edited and printed. Next I'll go through my papers and get a folder ready for each page. Each folder will have paper, pictures, and embellishments so it'll be easier to get my layouts put together. For me, organization is the key to getting pages scrapbooked when I'm cropping somewhere other than my own house.

Here's a picture of my scrapbooking table. It's an older picture so there's more stuff on it right now. It's one of the best investments I've made. Absolutely love this table!

And here's how I store my paper. Sometimes I'll just stand there and spin it until I get motivated by a pattern I see. Most of it's sorted by manufacturer, some is in themes. (You can see a painting my sister made me in the left corner of the picture too. On top of the painting are some felted animals we've made. The birds to the left we made together. I made the weird looking big one and she made the smaller. She also made me the owl, R2D2, and Yoda. They're my favorite things she's made me.)

And just for more fun, here's an older page I did with Cosmo Cricket's 'Garden Variety' line... an oldie, but a goodie. That's my Grandpa and Dad in the picture.

Getaway Car

True to my word, here's a page about my Mom when she was little. I've had this picture for awhile, but I've been waiting to get my hands on Crate Paper's 'Toy Box' line. I almost had a heart attack waiting for it to be shipped, but I survived and managed to make my page. I love all the colors and mix of patterns.

This is one of mine and my Mom's favorite pictures. It's just so funny how my uncle's in his car and she's in her crib. Almost like they're planning a breakout... which is why I choose the title "Getaway Car". This page came together pretty quickly for me because I started with a sketch I made the night before. Sketches have been really helpful lately (whether they're originals I've come up with or ones from other places) and are part of the reason I've been able to finish so many pages this month. Here are some close ups of the sticker letters and punch out shapes.

I can't wait to make even more pages with the new Crate lines. I have all of 'Portrait' and 'Emma's Shoppe' to play with too.

Celebrate Today

My favorite place in the world is my family's lake cottage. My grandparents starting building it themselves in 1950 and for me, that's what makes it so special. It's not a house they just bought, they put themselves into it and did all the hard work. You can see my Grandpa's shovel marks in the basement wall, there's a story behind why the ceiling panel with the most knots is above the stairwell, and I know that every nail is equally spaced and put there by my Grandpa. The cottage is my best connection to my Grandparents. My second favorite place is being on the lake. Every memory I've made on the lake is a good one. I remember being pulled behind the boat with my Dad when I was three, my Dad teaching me to ski, and the summer I refused to touch the bottom of the lake because I was scared of fish. The lake is where I get to spend quality time with my Dad.

So when My Mind's Eye had a sketch challenge with the theme of "Celebrate Today", I knew I wanted to make the page about the lake. How a perfect day up there is me driving the boat, my Mom as the spotter, and my Dad still discing and doing 360's.

Here's a detail of the stitched sun. I've put a sun on a scrapbook page before and my favorite part is the little buttons. It's funny to think how a year ago I didn't know how to use buttons and now they're on 80% of my pages. You can also see a close up of my Dad discing. It's even the same disc my Grandpa cut and varnished at least 40 years ago, maybe longer.

The "celebrate" I cut from cork using the QuicKutz font 'Winter Wishes' and the circle letters are from the 'Fine and Dandy' line by My Mind's Eye. Mixing fonts is one of my favorite things to do.

Boo Yah!

This isn't the clearest picture, but for a little while today my birthday layout was the third most bookmarked page on 'Two Peas In A Bucket'! Luckily, my cool friend Amanda saw it and called me at work so I could take a screen capture of it. I was even thinking the other day how cool it would be to be posted on their main gallery page. And yep, I feel pretty cool right about now... in a dorky kind of way. :)

Happy Birthday Uncle Ed

Most of the pages I've done lately have been ones about my Dad when he was little (partially because my Grandma took so many). So now I'm trying to make more of an effort to do pages about my Mom. I had remembered seeing a birthday picture of her and my Uncle Ed recently and when Basic Grey's 'Life of the Party' came out, I knew they would be perfect together. Plus, I had a sketch in mind that would look good too. The nice part is it turned out pretty close to how I pictured it in my head.



I've also developed an appreciation for spray mists, either Tattered Angels or Studio Calico's Mr. Huey sprays. The 'happy birthday' letters are the same ones I used on the "Boys of Summer" page (sprayed brown) and the same from the "Panama City" page (left their original white). I never really understood all the hype till now.

Here's a detail of the pennants I cut out from the different patterns. Pretty sure this is the third page in a row I've done that uses a banner of some sort. I jumped aboard the banner train awhile ago and never looked back.



Here's another little detail of the chipboard and folded ribbon made from patterned paper. I even put five little stars around the candle since it was my uncle's fifth birthday. (That's him in the picture.) You can also see a good close up of the machine stitching. The zig-zag stitch is the easiest to do since it doesn't matter as much if you're not going in a perfectly straight line. (Great for around circles.)



On a side note... I'm kinda proud of myself for two days in a row of posting. Maybe I can go for a three-peat.

Cosmo Cricket Challenge

When Cosmo Cricket posted a challenge where the winner gets published, I was all ears. For this page I used their new line 'Social Club'. The colors in the papers are a lot of fun and the blues and greens felt right for a page about the lake. Their sketch used one 5"x7", but I changed mine to use three photos which still measure out to 5"x7" together.

Here's a detail of the title. I used white Thickers and sprayed them with my coffee shop glimmer mist to turn them brown. They were the right size, but wrong color. (Which was easy enough to fix with the right tools).

On Cosmo's sketch, they had clusters of circles going along the top edge of the page. So for my layout, I punched circles from one of their patterned sheets and turned them into a banner. I stitched two lines first to place my circles on and then stitched one more time over the top to hold them in place. For more dimension, I folded some circles in half and added twine bows.

One of my goals is to eventually get published. I know tons of people submit, so even if it doesn't happen this time, I know I'm trying and still end up with a really cute page I'm proud of.

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

When my friends and I get together for a scrapbook night, there's a lot more to it than just scrapbooking. There's always dinner, a table full of candy, loud music, and silly dancing. One night in particular; Marnie, Erica, and I took over 100 pictures. It just goes to show you a simple night with friends can make a great photographic moment.



One cool thing about this page is that it only took two sheets of patterned paper. The grey is one sheet and the title, all of the cut outs above the photos, and the yellow polka dot pattern are from another. The banner is a stamp I embossed with brown embossing powder. The "celebration" piece was my jumping off point and what helped me decide which photos to use. All I had to add was a little writing and it gave me a fun title.

One of the cutest kids I know

Since neither myself or my sister have kids, I'm lucky that my friends have cute, amazing kids. It also works out that since my friends are scrapbookers, their kids are used to having their pictures taken and don't mind one more camera. The smiles are typically cheesy, but sometimes those are the best kind. Here's a page I did of my friend's son when I took him to baseball practice. (It ended up getting cancelled, but while we were there he did some running around.) He even helped out by giving me a title for a scrapbook page without even knowing it. "Look how fast these shoes make me!" Thanks, AJ. He was so fast, he was a blur. :)

Panama City circa 1990

Since winter is almost over (hopefully) and my parents have Spring Break just around the corner (Dad teaches high school and Mom works in a middle school media center); I've been nostalgic about the old family vacations we used to take. The kind of vacations where we all piled in a car, left early in the morning while it was still dark, and started driving till Dad couldn't handle it anymore. There are probably as many memories of being in the car as there are of the actual vacation destination. Tara getting car sick, Mom needing a pit stop every few hours, not being able to find a motel at 1 in the morning, and Tara using me as a pillow and drooling on me. Ah... family memories. Several years in the 1990's we'd go to Panama City Beach for Spring Break. We'd stay in the same place every year and visit the same putt putt place. I also remember Bumper Boats, playing shuffle board, burying each other in the sand, and one trip feeding dolphins. So with the nostalgia close at hand, I made a page about Panama City 1990.

It's another page using October Afternoon's 'Seaside'. I think the colors are what I love most about October Afternoon. I was a little nervous about the grid and it being to much pattern, but I really love how it turned out. It helped using only three patterns and mixing in the white. I couldn't resist using the striped pattern though, so I just snuck in a little. Here's a close up of the grid.

Everything is distressed, inked, and stitched. It looks unfinished to me otherwise. I also pop-dotted little words in three of the squares. It's subtle, but I like the descriptive words of "explore", "sailboat", and "ocean". On a side note... isn't my Minnie Mouse shirt awesome? There's even an actual bow on the front where Minnie wears hers. I probably wore this shirt till there were holes in it. And I must say, Tara looks equally awesome. :)

And in other news... my current scrapbook is so full I had to buy a new one. I'm excited about it. It means I have another entire book of memories that can be looked at anytime I want. This is gonna be my picture of the day for yesterday too... that's how excited I am.

For the love of kiddie pools

Most of the pages I've done lately have been old pictures I've found in boxes. It's interesting to see the differences between when my parents were little and when I was little. Even more interesting though, are the similarities. Awhile back I did a page about me playing in a kiddie pool when I was little and recently found pictures of my Dad playing in a kiddie pool. There were four different pictures, but I just used the three that were the funniest/silliest.



The papers are from My Mind's Eye 'Stella and Rose' line. Black and white photos are fun to work with because you can use whatever colored paper you want and not have to worry about it clashing. For this page, I though the yellows and blues seemed boyish and fun together. The postage edged paper started out as a 12" x 12" paper. I trimmed it down and patched it back together to be a mat for the photos. I even went wild by tilting AND overlapping the photos. The "summer fun" came from the Slice cartridge 'Vintage Findings'. I'm trying to remember to use my Slice more often since I can get different sizes of letters from it. So using it on this page seems like a small victory.



And just for fun, here's the page of me in the kiddie pool. It uses Fancy Pants papers from last summer. I also have a picture from this past summer of me hanging out in a kiddie pool that needs to make its way onto a page. Weekends I couldn't make it up to the lake; I'd fill the pool, add a beach chair, and read a book while eating some crackers and easy cheese. Just another day of keepin' it classy.

They call him "Race Bannon"

One thing that makes me happy is knowing my grandpa, Dad, and myself all ran track in high school. (Plus, Dad was my hurdle coach.) I've also always been very proud of the fact that my dad was a good enough runner to get a scholarship to Butler all four years. So track stories have always been important to me. That's why when I found this picture mixed in with my Grandma's box of photos, I knew it had to be made into a page.



I got a bit of help with the layout from a Crate Paper sketch on their blog and the papers came from their 'Restoration', 'Snow Day', and 'School Spirit' lines. The picture of Dad is from 1965. He got a good chuckle when I showed it to him. Followed by, "Where did you find this picture?". It's fun when he even likes the pages I do.

Here's a detail of the banners I cut out from a 12x12 sheet of the 'School Spirit' line. You can also see the star cut outs. For extra embellishment, I added buttons to the center of the stars and stitched them down with embroidery thread. It's the little touches that really add a lot.