32 weeks

I can't even believe I haven't shared this layout yet!!!
  This one I made at my November scrap retreat with the 'goodie bag' of products we received as part of the crop. I entered it in the layout contest...but didn't win. Oh well, I still loooove it! I used pictures of me taken during my last pregnancy (with Little Brother). I was 32 weeks along and we had just had our 3D ultrasound done so we were taking belly pics accessorized with the ultrasound pics - showing off our pre-birth peek at our son's sweet face!

 One of the embellishments included in our goodie bag was a package of two lace doilies. I used one on the left side of the layout and added stickles (it actually worked!)... and the other one I put under the fold-out element. The swirly on the right side of the page was a design in the paper that I cut out and embellished with mocha opaques (adhesive brown pearls). The hand cutting was a bit of work but it was worth it - I really like the effect!

 Here's a fold-out interactive element that I put on the page so that I could fit in all the photos of the mini-book I made as a little brag book to carry around with me before Little Brother was born. I wrote a separate post here on that book in case you're interested.

Such a fulfilling layout - fun to make and pretty to look at! I love it when things come together right for those extra-special pictures.

Tractor Attraction

I'm getting ready for a scrapping retreat next weekend and was looking through my blogging and layout folders and realized that I have a couple layouts from the last retreat that I haven't even shared yet! Goodness - I'd better get crackin' before I have several more to share from next weekend! Plus, I need to make sure my 52 layout goal from last year is up to date before I dig into this year's.

Here's a layout all about fun! What little boy wouldn't love playing around on an old tractor? This tractor was left out by the barn (presumably for the express purpose of siren-calling small boys) at the blueberry farm where we went to pick-your-own blueberries.

 I really think that they may have enjoyed the tractor just as much as picking (well...eating!) blueberries...

Here's a bonus cutie-pie picture for you...a boy with his basket of berries!

Snow Days

Hi there!

 Well, we have a big adventure planned tomorrow to celebrate Big Brother's birthday. We're going snow tubing! To say that there is some excitement in the house would be a rather massive understatement...

In view of the fact that tomorrow will be a long and eventful day, and also that I have had a week full of contractions, I had rather strict instructions (from more than one person in my life) to spend today resting. Lucky you - that means I actually get to blog!

Since it's freezing cold here today and we're going to play in the snow tomorrow, I am feeling rather snowy. Here's a fun layout I did before the holidays. I used some more pictures from the Blizzard of 2010. See another layout here. I had a number of small photos left and I've been wanting to try a photo-waterfall layout in Magic (Close To My Heart's book of layouts with interactive elements) ever since I cracked open the book for the first time 18 months ago!

 

  

 The line of small photos on the right page are all attached together and if you pull the tab to the right, it flips through them one by one, showing the embellishments I put on the flip sides.

 Here's the waterfall - as 'in action' as I could get... maybe someday I'll try a video!

 It was super cool and fun to make! And it took me less time than I had anticipated. All good, right? I'm definitely doing this layout again!!

Life is Sweet

I love scrapbooking everyday moments. Here's a layout I did last weekend with pictures from a day out at the park. Such an ordinary thing. We do it all the time and I seldom take my camera... but fun to have pictures of 'normal' days as well as 'special' days. It reminds me that every day we're given is special.

   I really love the browns in this layout; I think they make a great backdrop for the photos. You'd think it was a fall layout with those colors, but it's not! These photos were from a February day...

The photo on the right always makes me laugh - he's kissing me and his hair is standing on end! It's from the static of the slide, of course...I love that the sun was shining at the perfect angle to catch it!

Pretty Paper Party

I'm certainly having fun working my way through the prompts for the Pretty Paper Party! I'm actually considering signing up for 'Journal Your Christmas' as well. Anyone done that class before? How did you like it?
  Here is a page I did for prompt #17 which was about using black cardstock as a page background. I have done it before but not very often. Shimelle pointed out in the prompt that using a black background really puts the focus on the colors so I chose a photos and paper with vibrant colors. I definitely think that the black enhanced the effect of the other colors!

My extra challenge with this layout is that I did it while at my mom's house and I had forgotten my paper trimmer! So, I managed to complete my page without trimming any paper or photos with a straight-edge trimmer. That is definitely out of my comfort zone!!

Tis' the Season...

Tis' the season to get at least some of last year's holiday photos on pages before this year's holiday rolls around. It's November (yeah!) so all those family photos at Thanksgiving and Christmas are quickly approaching.
 So, here is the happy Holaday family last year...

We took these photos at my favorite Christmas gig. I've played every year for almost ten years, and now that I have kids it's really fun to watch them enjoy the show from the other side of the stage. The venue always has super elaborate holiday decor set-up in their extensive lobby area. There are separate areas with unique scenes (like an antique car, a lamppost with fake snow, a fireplace hearth and cozy chair, etc) so it makes it a really fun place to take photos. I'm quite sure that this will become our family photo tradition!
 Oh, and one more thing...I just love this little package in the corner with bling on top!

Dots and Stripes

Here is another page from the Pretty Paper Party. It's my effort for prompt #4, combining dots and stripes. For me, it's not completely successful, but I do still like it enough to go ahead and put it in the album.

Want to know the strange thing that I discovered while doing this challenge? I actually had a hard time finding polka dot paper in my stash; and an even harder time finding dots of different sizes. I love dots! Why don't I have more paper with dots on it? This must call for some shopping!!

Pretty Paper Party

I'm spending some time scrapping this weekend. yay! Hopefully I'll have a couple things to show you from my work on Pretty Paper Party class.
 First, I'm going to share my layout from prompt #10, the stamping challenge. now, Shimelle issued 4 challenges in this prompt...I just tackled the first one. For now.
 The challenge was to use our stamps and pretty paper together to create embellishments. Grab a few scraps, a stamps set, and you're ready to go! Here's my layout:

The picture isn't great - I had to take it with my phone - but I still wanted to share the whole effect of both pages with you. I was disappointed that I couldn't see the stamped embellishments very well though, so I took a couple more photos.

There! Now you can see them better... This was a perfect stampset to use on this layout!

Let it Snow!

Last weekend it snowed...yep, snowed, here in Maryland! Last time it snowed in October around here?? 1979!
In the spirit of this freak snow storm, I thought I would share a layout that I recently competed using photos of Big Brother taken during the Blizzard of 2010. Well, to be completely accurate, these photos are from the first blizzard. We actually had two. In one week. First time in recorded weather history that we got two blizzards in one week, and our area was the bulls-eye both times. It was a wee bit crazy. Everything came to a screeching halt for two weeks!
 We had a great time playing in the snow though - here's proof!

I found the perfect sparkly blue alphabet and added some sparkle of my own to some chipboard embellishments...

I love the way the layout turned out. These are precious photos to me - some of my favorites. And, y'know how sometimes you have photos you love so much that sometimes the layout isn't quite 'good enough' for them? I've had that happen a couple times. Not every layout can be the greatest ever, right? Didn't happen this time though. It turned out exactly right! Hooray!

Quilting with Paper

Yes, I may be crazy... (well, alright, it's already an established fact that I am)
...but what are classes for if not to try out some new things??

The PPP class prompt a couple days ago challenged us to try using quilting patterns on our scrapbook pages. this is definitely a great technique for using up scraps and for combining lots of papers that you love. But, I will say...it's time consuming! I think it took me 3 hours to create this one page. (well, with a lunch break...and maybe a break for Halloween candy too)

I chose the Log Cabin pattern in the Barn Raising variation since I didn't want to figure out how to cut equal sized diamonds. Blue and yellow is one of my favorite color combinations and it works very well with the need to have a light side and a dark side. I chose to go with the traditional red square for the center piece symbolizing the hearth of the home because I thought that it went well with my cozy, family centric theme.
 It was a little hard for me to bring myself to embellish the page after doing all that paper piecing so I took a picture of the page before I put anything else on it.

It really does look like a quilt to me. I think that's cool - totally never would have tried it if it wasn't for this class! Love. this. class. Yes, I do!
 I popped the main picture off the page with foam squares so that when you look at the page in person, you really see the photo first and the quilt pattern second.

And, this may be picture overload, but here are my embellishments... I like 'em so I'm sharing them!

Thanks for visiting. I hope you liked my quilting!

I'm a Convert!

In a recent prompt for the Pretty Paper Party class I'm taking, Shimelle gave a link to a color wheel. Our assignment for the prompt was to make a page with two colors and a neutral (white, cream, grey, or kraft). She suggested we pick one color first and then use the color wheel to get the second color.
 Now, I've used color wheels before and not found them very useful. I have only ever used physical paper ones - I've never tried one online. I really liked the one Shimelle suggested and loved that it would show color swatches of the chosen colors next to each other. It was great to have the ability to preview the mix. It also was sliding scale from color to color so that I could choose exactly the orange I wanted...not an approximation of the orange I wanted. Very useful! I'm sure I will try it again.
 Here is the page I created:

 I started with the orange stripe in Big Brother's suit (yes, that's really him, believe it or not!). The color wheel gave me the green and I must say that I never would have chosen that color on my own. I love it...and it's even better in person. It's so vibrant and alive! As my hubby said, "color wheels are art and science working together". Obviously, I chose white as my neutral.
 For the wire flowers and the twisted wire frame around the photos, I used some old Making Memories craft wire that I have. Hooray for using old supplies! And hooray for making my very own embellishments!

 I made the ribbon flower too! I wanted to use ribbon, but a long strip wasn't working for me. I already had the flower motif going so I decided to try making one with ribbon. It took a couple tries but I managed it to my satisfaction.

So, what do you think? Do you like the green? Do you use color wheels regularly?

Mama at the Beach

I'm slowly making my way through the pile of pages I made at my weekend scrapping retreat a couple of weeks ago. I decided that it seemed natural to go from baby shower layouts from my first pregnancy to a beach trip with the hubby during my second pregnancy. 

I love the bit of stamp and marker artwork I did in the corner. The layout just needed a little more detail and I decided to try this. It worked out exactly like I intended and imagined!

Here's a little bonus layout... I already wrote quite a bit about it in this post when I first made it, but I finally got the extra pictures added to it!

More Pretty Paper

I needed a bit of me-time this evening, so I carved out a little scrappy time to work on my PPP class. For those of you following along in class, I started out with today's prompt (#7) and chose to work from the formula at the end (1a + 1b + 3c). From there, I was trolling through the prompts for a sketch and I had a number of strips of paper, so this layout also fits prompt #1. Here's what I came up with:

 Truthfully, I really fought with this layout. It came out ok, I think, but about halfway through I almost started over. My 1+1+3 was 1 stripe, 1 floral, and 3 small-size, uniform patterns. It wasn't working for me, not sure why, so I added three borders (two at the top, one at the bottom) and I liked it a bit better. Guess I need a bit more practice with combining patterns!
 I do like how the embellishments came out; I used a rub-on sentiment on the metal frame and it worked nicely.

Any thoughts on the total package?

Pretty Paper Party

I signed up and started a new Shimelle class this past week called Pretty Paper Party. I am loving it so far! I have been enjoying reading the daily prompts where I get to see fantastic artwork by Shimelle and many guests artists that she has brought along for the ride. Plus I'm learning oodles of things about using pretty paper!

Now, when I signed up for this class, I knew that I wouldn't get any crafting done the first week because our schedule was very hectic, but I still wanted to be along for the ride. Over the weekend, I managed to squeeze in one page for one of the prompts. So, here's my offering, my page created from prompt #2 about using patterned paper for a background:

This page was definitely out of my comfort zone - I rarely use patterned paper for a full background. In fact, here's the shocker (to me) I used only one measly little piece of cardstock on this entire page! That's right, everything else is patterned. I relied heavily on Shimelle's page example for the placement of embellishments since I am still learning my way around this layering and clustering style. I was a bit insecure about it but I can't learn unless I try it, right?
 Hopefully I'll have a bit more time this week, so I'll be back soon with more Pretty Paper Partying!!

Bye, Bye Summer!

The weather here has certainly made the turn toward fall...it has been a little bit too rainy and wet for the past six weeks (rain, rain, go away!!), but when the wind finally blows the clouds out, we have sunny skies with crisp, cooler air. Our yearly Halloween party is coming up and thoughts of the holiday season are starting to tickle around the edge of my mind.
 Today I thought I'd take one glance back at our summer and show you a layout from my brother's wedding. He got married in NYC at the very end of July. It was a beautiful wedding and we had some wonderful times hanging out with family members we love but don't get to see often enough.
 I haven't done any other layouts of his wedding yet...I will certainly get to the traditional couple and ceremony focused layouts eventually, but my inspiration led me first to create this layout:

For me, this layout shows the treasure of having so many people you love in one place at one time. That's really what a wedding is all about, right? The love of the bride and groom, for sure, but also the love and support of everyone around them.
             I cherish my family...

 So many precious faces - this is why I was inspired to scrap this first. I just think these show the joy that is supposed to surround a wedding! There is nothing quite as wonderful as seeing someone you love absolutely giddy with joy...

Bonus!

We interrupt our regularly scheduled program for...

A Scrapbook Starting Point! It's so very handy that Shimelle posts these on Saturdays and my monthly crop nights are usually on Saturdays. It gives me a jumpstart on the inspiration factor and a project that's easy to complete in one evening.
 For this page, I finally scrapped some of the very last photos from Big Brother's first year that needed to make it into my album. These precious photos add more depth to a special story told elsewhere in my album (the Superman story) but they have been languishing in my photo box for a long time...patiently waiting for me to make up my mind about how to treat them.  My recent nesting craze (ridiculous, I tell you! This did not happen with the last two...) has apparently affected my scrapping habits as well as everything else in my life. (Must clean...must purge...must organize) I am officially on a mission to 'clean out' my box of archived printed photos.

...and now back to our regular program! I still have a few more layouts to share from my getaway weekend      - lucky you!!

Finishing Up!

I am just so excited to be finished with this baby shower album... I did a bunch of work on it right at the beginning, but since then it has sat in my cupboard. now I have another album I can bring out onto the shelves. Hooray! It's about time!
 I'm so glad I made the decision to take this album to my scrapbook retreat weekend. If you haven't tried a retreat weekend, I highly recommend them! Especially as a mom of young kids, it gives me a chance to create with continuity and in a relaxed manner. I don't have a time limit (naptime, bed time, eating time) and I don't have to supervise small crafters.
I used to go to these weekends and work constantly, trying to complete the very most I possibly could. My mentality was "I must get things DONE"...now, my mentality is "I must relax, rest, and have FUN!" It's much nicer this way and I still get plenty done. One of my most favorite recent quotes is from Jeanette Lynton, the founder and CEO of Close To My Heart.
She said, "Having many photos to scrapbook doesn't mean I'm behind, it means I'm ALIVE."
 I just love that! 
Here are my last two layouts for the baby shower album.

 I had two showers before the arrival of my first son, and here I have one layout from each shower. The top layout is a collection of pictures of people who attended one and the bottom layout has a group picture in the upper left and a collection of present opening pictures on the right page. I found it very fun to look back at all the present pictures and see things that have been well used and well loved! that's exactly why I scrapbook! 
 All right, so next time I'm back with you, I promise a change of topic!! 
Until then...

Shower, Shower

So I thought I'd continue sharing my accomplishments from last weekend by showing you a couple more layouts that I did in an effort to complete my baby shower album.
 Here's a quick page...we tried to get pictures of me with each person at the shower and some people wrote words of wisdom, love, and advice on scrapbook pages for me to use. With this layout I included the card that she gave me because her little girl signed her name completely adorably inside!

Here's another layout of my best friend and I with her new baby boy. We were pregnant at the same time and our boys were born 7 weeks apart. We made sure to take photos (and I have another layout somewhere that showcases them) of two bellies, one baby/one belly, and two babies. It was definitely a special time in our lives.
  I cut out the frame and the borders with the Cricut Art Philosophy cartridge from Close To My Heart. I am in love with this border design!

Thanks for visiting...see you again soon!

A Fun & Productive Weekend

I am just back from a fantastically fun scrapping weekend with some fun and fabulous ladies! I really love weekend retreats. It's nice to have the space and time to focus on an extended amount of projects. This time around I:
  *put some finishing touches on a few projects
  *did some digital layouts in Studio J
  * finished my baby shower album (finally!!) that's been sitting around for about 4 years waiting for inspiration
  * made a stack of brand new pages (I almost filled my craft bin I take to protect my pages before I sort them into albums!)
  * organized! yes, I really did take a couple hours to organize and re-organize a couple of my sticker and embellishment binders. It felt awesome.

I thought I would share one of my favorite layouts from the weekend first:

This is one of the layouts that goes into the long overdue (ha!) baby shower album. My sister had just moved to the same town as me about 4 weeks earlier. It was so wonderful to have her in town and around for the arrival of my first son.
 I really like the little pocket on the right page:

 I stitched it on...and it pulls out to show my journaling.

 As I said before, I love this layout!
 I will be back soon with more layouts from my weekend to share! Do you ever go on scrapping retreat weekends...or do you prefer to craft at home?