Hello Retirement (Dad's, not mine)

Last year after 41 years of teaching at the same high school, my dad retired. When he started he was just a few years older than his students and ended up teaching a lot of their kids (that's two generations). So when he retired, it was a big deal. I'm not going to scrapbook all the photos from his party (most of the pictures will end up going in divided page protectors), but a few special pages will be made. Here's the first special page I've done. This bull is famous in the township. We knew we HAD to have it outside for Dad's party. I even had my picture taken with it, which has been a dream of mine since I was in elementary school. It's a Wanamaker thing.

 

Here's a few detail pictures. The paper is Echo Park's "Note to Self" line.

Circa 1923

The upside to being sick is lots of sofa time for plotting. I'd like to say my plotting involves discovering the next great ice cream flavor, but in reality it revolves around paper. I was planted on the sofa flipping through photos, sketches in my notebook, and looking through a paper line I knew I wanted to use. The nice thing about planning is that the page ended up being finished in the same amount of time it took to watch "The Wedding Date". Which is pretty fast for me. (There's still a page on the corner of the desk I started two weeks ago and haven't finished.)

 

This page uses Echo Park's "This and That" girl line and a photo of my Grandma when she was younger. It's been a little while since I've done a vintage page about her.

 

 

Here's a close up. I love using cork on pages.

 

 

Next on my "To Scrap" list are some vintage pictures from the lake. Definitely ready for spring, so hopefully some fun lake pages will cure these winter blues.

Project 12: February

I was so excited to do February's layout, I may have started working on it before February was even over. There was only one photo that needed to be added in from the last week, so my plan pretty much stayed the same from how I wanted it. The papers for this month are from Crate Paper's Valentine line from last year. I don't normally use a lot of pink, so I took the opportunity to make a very frilly layout and talk about all the things I love right now. That's exactly what the 6x12 panel is on the left. Sometimes in 12x12 layouts I don't leave space to say everything I want to, so I'm trying to do more storytelling throughout my Project 12 layouts. 

 

 

 

Here's a detail of the left hand page. I mixed in lots of October Afternoon mini market stickers (my favorite!) for captions and titles.

 

 

Title card: detail picture of candy hearts with a Crate border sticker and October Afternoon letter stickers from their "Midway" line. Plus stitching, or course.

 

 

I made these little numbers with my Cameo. Wanted to use something other than stickers or just writing them.

 

 

Here's the right hand page. The "love this" frame was made on my Cameo too. It was a very scrappy month so I wanted to highlight that on this page. Two trips to scrap mania with my mom, an afternoon scrapping with friends, plus an employee crop. Not to mention all the new papers coming in from CHA. It's like a paper heaven right now and I love it!

 

 

Two fun family events happened this month too and I was worried I'd either have to cram too much in or have too much empty space so I used a 6X12 insert that holds 4x6 photos. The convenient part about 3 ring binder albums is the hole placement is standard on the page protectors so you can mix and match. I use We R Memory Keepers pages for the 12x12 divided sections, but this 6x12 insert is American Crafts and it still fits in my album. If I ever need to do an 8 1/2X11 page, it'll still fit too. So one side of the insert is for the hockey game we went to and the other side is for when my dad and I went to the PBR event. 

 

We've been going to hockey games for a long time, but I've never really scrapbooked them before so I used this insert to talk about my favorite parts of hockey games. This means three 4x6 sections wasn't going to be quite enough room, so I cut a panel from another divider and stitched it on top of this one for extra space. This gave me five sections to work with for this event without having to add a whole other page.
 

I'm really excited with how it turned out. It gave me the perfect amount of space to include everything I wanted to. Might have to think of more ways to do this in the future.

 

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. :)

Challenge Accepted

New Year...New Challenge.

Three different times I've tried to do Project Life and take a picture a day. One time I got really close to keeping up with the pictures, but I never kept up with the journaling and scraping. So when I found out about Gossamer Blue's Project 12 from a friend, it sounded like something that was more do-able for me. Instead of a layout a week, you make a layout a month.

Even though a two page layout a month sounds easy, there's still a creative challenge to it. I'm using different styles of pocket pages to complete it instead of the traditional layout. It makes you rethink the process a little bit, but I think it'll be fun. So here's my first layout for the project...

 

For these pages I mostly used Echo Park's Christmas line from last year plus a little bit of Crate Paper and October Afternoon (three of my favorites.) It's going to be fun keeping up with this project. I've even already started planning what photos to use for January.

Happy Being Me

This month on the Crate Paper blog, they've had their color challenge up again. This time the colors were champagne peach, emerald green, and charcoal. The fun thing about this challenge is that the color combination is one I wouldn't have come up with on my own. So I dug into my Crate Paper stash and came out with the colors I needed. I used an assortment of different lines including Peppermint (the white background), Portrait (the charcoal colors), Random (the emerald green), and Emma's Shoppe (all the pink colors). The photos are from a trip to Brown County with my friend and I hadn't yet used them on a page, so this seemed like a great opportunity.



I love these Polaroid punch outs from the Portrait line. I wanted them to be the focus of the page. The labels at the bottom also gave me some room for journaling.



I had a hard time getting this page to look how I pictured it in my head. I knew I wanted the strips of paper, but the colors and layers weren't as dynamic as I planned. So I started adding embellishments and it started coming together. I love this chipboard flower from the line, Emma's Shoppe. A few brads also made it on the page too. Can't make a page without buttons and brads.

Here's a close up of the title. It started as "being me", but I wanted it a little longer so I added the "happy" alphabet stickers. I also really liked how it brought in more color. This was the first time I had stitched through chipboard. Wasn't sure how well it would do, but I went slow and now I don't have to worry about the letters falling off. Plus, I just love the look of the stitching.

So Much Silliness

Scrapbooking everyday events are fun. It's where you can see the most personality come out. This page is about dinner at Steak and Shake a couple weeks ago. I carry my small camera with me everywhere I go so it's nice being able to capture random moments. It also opens up a whole world of paper possibilities. Since there's no real theme to the pictures, I can use whichever paper inspires me. This layout uses Crate Paper's Valentines line "Paper Heart". I chose to use the blue and yellow papers instead of the pink ones.



The title is a mix of October Afternoon letters and American Crafts Thickers. I love how the Thickers already have the stitch lines on them. I also had fun making the paper flowers with my Martha Stewart starburst punch. It's made up of six punched circles where two of the sides are folded up and arranged in a circle. Then I stitched them down to a flat circle to keep it all together. To finish it off, I got into my button stash and stitched it to the center with white embroidery floss.



Here's a close up of the paper flowers. I first saw them on a page by Amy Heller for October Afternoon. You can see the original page where I learned how to make these flowers here.