I've Got the Blues

Happy CHA! It's exciting to see all the new paper lines that'll be coming out... it's also going to be a lesson in self control. Seriously, who needs to purchase three different Christmas lines in one year? Been there, done that. So this year I'm going to do better. *crosses fingers* I already didn't buy any 4th of July papers, I went last year without buying Halloween paper, and the goal is the same for this year. Anyhow, circling back around to CHA; Two Peas in a Bucket has challenges up now to go along with CHA. I saw the posting Wednesday night and I'm proud to say I finished a page last night for the first challenge of "use one color". I'm a sucker for water paper and most things blue so it seemed like a good jumping off point. Plus, we took a trip to the Dunes over 4th of July so I had some nice beach pictures.

The paper is Echo Park's "A Perfect Summer" and a piece from October Afternoon's "Midway". For the challenge you could use neutrals too so I mixed in kraft stickers from Crate's "Pier" line and the little wooden sailboat from Studio Calico.

Usually everything gets inked with my Chestnut Roan chalk ink, but this time I brushed a white paint dauber along all the edges. The paint reminds me of white caps and then the splatters make me think of ocean spray. Isn't it amazing sometimes how much thought goes into our pages?

 

 

Twelve pages down... one million to go. (Maybe not a MILLION, but you know what I mean)

 

 

This is what 12 finished pages after a scrapbook retreat looks like. The weekend at Quaker Haven was probably the best birthday I've had in awhile. I was with one of my best friends, her mom, and my mom. Plus on my birthday I received text messages and phone calls from some of my favorite people. The weekend was cold and rainy most of the time, but the lake really needed the rain so I didn't mind at all. Truthfully, it was like an extra birthday present. Nothings better than being at the lake scrapbooking so I'm already looking forward to the fall retreat.

Here's a quick rundown of the pages I finished over that weekend. Figured I'd show them in one big swoop, otherwise I might never get them all posted.



1990's Spring Break page using Echo Park's "Paradise Beach" line.

 

Page using My Mind's Eye.

Disney page using My Mind's Eye "Boy Crazy" line.

Universal Studios page using Basic Grey's "Bowties".

Another Universal Studios page with "Bowties".

 

Page about my mom when she was little using Echo Park's "Sweet Girl" line.

Simple Stories line from last summer.

October Afternoon's "Cakewalk" line.

October Afternoon's "Midway" line. LOVE these papers!

October Afternoon's "9 to 5" line.

Crate Paper's "Pretty Party" line.

I'm really proud of how this page turned out. It's a mixture of paper lines because I knew I wanted it to be yellow and blue, so I went "shopping" thru my papers. It uses some Crate Paper "Random", Fancy Pants, My Mind's Eye, and vellum from a Dear Lizzy Line. The splatters are from Heidi Swapp (her gold spray) and then more gold embellishments from Dear Lizzy and American crafts were added. It just plain makes me happy. :)

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.

 



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. :)

A Bunch of Characters

I love Disney World. So much that there may have been a bit of panic during our family Christmas when my uncle mentioned they had closed the Tea Cup ride. First response was, "There's no way they can close the Tea Cups! It's a classic!". The next action was going to Google to find out if he was right. Unfortunately he was right... sort of. Turns out, it's closed temporarily while they're expanding Fantasyland. So the good news is that it'll reopen fall of 2012. The reason for panic was because the news sent me into a flashback of when they closed the Figment ride back in the 90's. Yes, I may have cried. It was my favorite ride. Plus, it had a fun song where the only lyric I can remember is repeating "Imaaaginaaaaation. Imaaaginaaation. Imaaaginaaation. " over and over again. The worst part of the Figment story is that once it reopened, I have to say the "improvements" were a let down. I still love Figment, but I'm not a fan of the new ride. Luckily, with the tea cups I don't think there's a way to mess it up. You sit in the tea cup, you spin the wheel to see how close you can get your Dad to getting sick, and you stop spinning. Pretty straight forward. So in order to preserve my many Disney memories, I've started scrapbooking them. The long term goal is to have an entire Disney album or for it to fill a large chunk of my "family vacations" album.

Here's a Disney page I finished last night about the trip I took in 2003 with my parents. I really like the look of a subtle Disney page. It doesn't use the traditional black, red, and yellow papers with mouse ears all over. I went for bright, colorful patterns and stitched my own set of Mickey ears to help frame the photos.



It was a bit of a challenge getting the ears right. They're not perfect circles so I couldn't use my circle templates. I just sketched, erased, and re-sketched till it looked right.



The title is with my Quickutz font "Lemondrop". It's a fun one. I really like the little Mickey buttons too. Still says "Disney" without being all in your face about it. You can also see the picture of my Dad and I with Woody and Buzz a little better. If I remember right, there was a bit of a line to have our pictures taken with them. Definitely worth it though, of course.

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.