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.