Fun with Echo Park

I love scrapping vintage pictures. It's fun seeing photos of my parents and my grandparents when they were younger, especially my grandpa because I never met him. So finding pictures of him is always a treasure. It gives me a good reason to ask my dad questions about him and it makes me feel like I know him a little. One thing I've learned is that he'd stop whatever he was doing if my dad asked him to do something. If they were at the lake and dad wanted to go skiing, Grandpa would take a break from his project and they'd head for the boat. (My dad will do the same thing for us too.) 

Here's a page about my grandpa using Echo Park's "Note to Self" line. It's nice and masculine, plus looks good with the black and white photos.

 



 

 

This is another page using Echo Park paper (their "All About a Boy" line) more recently. While we were in Universal Studios we went to "Harry Potter World" (that's not it's actual name, but that's what we kept calling it) and my sister bought an awesome Sorting Hat. We had fun when we got back to the condo and took pictures of everyone in the family wearing it. Tara and I had extra fun doing our own little photo shoot while drinking the pumpkin juice she also bought at Harry Potter World. She got a little carried away using my fancy camera for the first time. "This is fun! It just keeps clicking." So I ended up with enough pictures of me for my own page and I'll do another page with Mom, Dad, and Tara in the sorting hat. 

 

 

 



 

And here's a Christmas page using "Season's Greetings". We always make sure to take pictures with our stockings Christmas morning. It's my favorite part of the day.

 



Cut. It. Out. *Insert Joey Gladstone hand gesture*

Last spring, I splurged and bought a Silhouette Cameo. (This was pre-house so there were more opportunities for splurging... now my goals are set on landscaping and a new garage door. ) The selling point for me was being able to cut any font on my computer or any I could download. So that's mostly what I've done on it. Lately though, I've been learning a lot more on how to use it and have been able to make some of my own designs. Granted, they are very simple designs composed of circles, squares, and welded words; but they are custom for my projects and that makes me very happy. Right now I'm working on cutting some things for my February Project 12 layout. I even made a fun title card that will make it onto a Project 12 page. I'm thinking it'd be good for the title page.

 

 

Another project I used the cameo on is a framed quote for the wall in my scrapbooking room. I'd bought the frame from Hobby Lobby awhile ago and knew I wanted to make some kind of paper piece for inside it, but kept putting it off. Finally I decided to cut the quote from different patterns and two weeks ago when new Studio Calico paper came in, I knew exactly what to do. The paper makes me so stinkin' happy, it's ridiculous.

 

The next project I'm thinking about is cutting each of the states from different patterned papers and mounting them in a large poster frame. Silhouette had a free United States download a while back so it wouldn't be too bad of a project. Picking and choosing which papers to use for each state will be the hardest. Plus, I also had the bright idea of cutting some states from photos if it's a place we've been to before. We'll see how it turns out. It'll either be awesome or another unfinished project in the back of my closet.

Project 12: Hello 2013

January already feels like forever ago. These days it's mostly all work and fixing up my house, but I try to make sure a little bit of play gets mixed in too. Highlights were a visit from my seester and brother in law, quality time playing cards and scrapbooking, and my first house party.

 

I was really proud of myself when working on the left hand page because I did all of it with scraps leftover from other pages.  I didn't have to cut up a single 12x12 page. It's good to know it was finally worth holding onto the little pieces I never had the heart to throw away. The line used is Crate Paper's "Storyteller". I like the mix of red, blue, and yellow. It's a different change of pace.

This month, I tried switching up the page protector's layout.  I have a multi pack of We R Memory Keeper protectors with different styles so my challenge to myself is to use a different one each month.  The protector for the right side has three 4x6 openings and a 6x12 opening. It took a lot of thought and planning, but it worked towards my advantage. (I highly doubt non-scrapbookers realize how much thought we put into the smallest details. Of course, if they did know they'd think we were crazy.) I used the 6x12 space to make a narrow scrapbook page of our delayed Christmas with my sister and brother in law. The Christmas papers are from Crate Paper too. It's last year's "Peppermint" line.

I already picked out the paper line I want to use for next month's layout. As of now, it's going to be Crate's valentine line from last year. I don't have a sweetie, but I still want to use the "love" theme for February to document all the other things in my life that I have fond feelings of. Hints: my favorite four legged friend, my appreciation for paper, and snowcones. :)

Let the Disney Pages Begin...

Back in October my family and I went to Disney World for the sixth time. For us, it really is the happiest place on earth.We also spent a day at Universal Studios so I made sure to take tons of pictures during the trip. Now everytime a new paper line comes out with bright colors, I get so excited to do a Disney page with it. This is the first layout (with many more to follow) with pictures from this trip. It uses My Mind's Eye "Boy Crazy" line. A lot of the fronts had boy images like bicycles, robots, and other toys; but the backsides had more generic patterns so I knew it'd be great for the photos I had. 

 

This page is about one of the rides at Suess Landing in Universal Studios. I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be a kiddie ride, but we had so much fun on it. You sit in a fish and there's a toggle that you can use to go up or down. So you're going around in a circle, flying up and down, and then there are fish spraying out water as you pass by. We ended up riding it twice. We spent most of our time in Suess Landing riding all their rides. My parents don't really do rides well and my sister and I are big kids at heart so we were all content riding silly rides. 

 

I had several pictures so it ended up being a two page layout. Here are closeups of each page.

The title uses two Quickutz fonts and was cut out of cork. I love the texture of it and the color matches whatever paper you're using too. Some of the other details used are stickers and brads from the "Boy Crazy" line and a few October Afternoon stickers.

 

 

 

 

I'm excited to get some other vacation pages started soon. Might even have to do some scrapbook reorganizing so all of our family vacation trips will be in the same album. Stay tuned for more. :)