End of summer pages: Beach pages

My son LOVED Sand Beach at Acadia National Park. I had a lovely picture of him there and used it to scrap his memory.

I don't like using themey papers, so I pulled all the beach colored papers and products from a Studio Calico kit (most were actually office themed--October Afternoon's 9 to 5).

I pulled blues and greens to mat the photo, then add strips along the left. I also used my good old Fiskars Boundary Waters punch to add some theme--just a bit! I added blue and yellow stickers to the top of the mat.

 

Next--more of those darling wood grain birds, walking in the sand with my son.

 

I added some stitching, then put journaling strips inked in blue to the right.
 
So tell me--am I the only one who doesn't use themed products the way I'm supposed to? :-)

End of summer pages: the last of a kit

I've gotten busy with preparing for school--mine and the boys'--while my husband had beenaway on business. Today I post two pages.

I have also been sadly remiss on finishing my kits this summer. I like using my kit (I subscribe to Studio Calico) in the month, breaking it apart, then using my next month's kit. If you've read my blog before, you know that I strive to get at least 6 pages per kit.

This summer...I got behind.

By the end of the summer, I had three months  I had to plow through. I quickly finished off Elmwood Park (I had only bought one kit, the main), then got to work on So Cal, June's kit.

Here were a couple of the last pages from that kit:

This one ended up easier than I thought it would be. I pulled paper and scraps that went with this photo, and lo, the My Mind's Eye scrap had a perfect embellishment cluster on it--granted, it was patterned paper, but OK. I trimmed some of the embellishment cluster with my fingertip exacto knife to tuck the photo under.

I made the background with the orange Pink Paislee, lay the My Mind's Eye and some strips across it, then sought out fitting embellishments.

I didn't have much left, but fortunately, the Prima wood tickets fits the layout theme perfectly. Heck, one of them repeated the title. I also added some Elle's Studios tags, which fit the color scheme well.

To house the embellishment cluster, I also used the hexagon stamp I hadn't yet used. I stamped on a separate piece of paper, used my trimmer to cut them out, overlapped them, then lay embellishments on top.

The next layout really pieced together the paper--literally.

 

I loved the wood paper as the background for this page, but I didn't want to use the whole page, so I trimmed a chunk, then added some strips from scraps to the bottom. This is when I discovered that I hadn't left enough of the wood paper, so I added more on the bottom. 

Lots of blues and green stickers here, along with those wood veneer birds, which I hadn't yet used. They of course fit thematically, dealing with trees and all, so I loved adding them.

  

I framed the photo with stickers, blue and green. The theme was office supply (October Afternoon's 9 to 5), but some word stickers seem to fit--like "Hold Please!"

I take a lot of satisfaction in finishing things--according to the Myers Briggs personality indicator, my strong J means that I'm a finisher, where P's enjoy starting things.

So which are you?

End of Summer Day 5: Black Belt Attitude

Last December we delayed my son's going for his black belt. He needed more time.

This June, he worked hard. (We did too!) He practiced every day, ran several times a week in preparation for his physical test (a 5K), and went to the pretest, which was really the test. Every time he went to the test, he failed. But he never got discouraged. One of the words that is a part of a black belt attitude is perseverance. He had that. I would ask him what he needed to work on, and he would work on it. And eventually, he passed, the youngest in this group to do so.

 

 

This page is about that journey. It's one of the few times I didn't really care about design (I was down to the end of June's Studio Calico kit, so I had to dip into my stash for embellishments); I cared about story, so I took a close up of the journaling. I wrote it in pencil to make sure I had enough room, then wrote over it in pen and erased with my white eraser.

I took the photos with my phone, so I printed them small. I had planned another photo too, but I went with just three because of lack of space. The final quote I took from the wall at the dojang. It's amazing how elements for your page can come from the world around you if you just observe them.

Rowan's black belt is probationary, so he has several degrees to go until a full black belt. I am proud of him, and I know he is proud of what he accomplished.

Have you scrapped something recently that has made you proud, even the little things?

End of Summer, Day 4: Scrapbooking serendipity

Sometimes I select product to use, and it takes me forever. Other times things just fall together like fate.

Case in point: I went to Archiver's recently to get adhesive. I left with adhesive, Basic Grey patterned paper, and My Mind's Eye tags and stickers. I put the products in a pile and left them.

As I looked at them together over the week, I thought, "Man! Those look good toegther." Mind you, I didn't buy them for that reason. But they did look great together.

As a result, I decided to use them together on the same page. Here it is (the extra products come from the Studio Calico August kit Summer of 69):

I scrapped my meeting fellow Club CK peep Alison M, also a fellow Mainer. (Maniac?)  I met her IRL on our vacation to Maine this summer on our way to Acadia. We took photos, being scrapbookers, and I thought my new, look-so-good-together product would work well on the page, since it was sort of about travel and the map worked for that, and it was definitely about girls, and the pink would look good with that.

Sometimes putting together product is a struggle. And sometimes it's not. I like the latter.

So tell me: do you like picking the product to use on your pages? Or is that your least favorite part?

End of Summer, day three: Elle's Studio and Pink Paislee pages

This summer I was blessed to be chosen for the Elle's Studio design team. If you know my style, you know I like to layer embellishments. The tags have been a perfect addition to my pages this summer.

Here's a page I did using an Elle's Studio Thursday sketch this month:

 

  

(My son will someday kill me for recording and publishing this story. Maybe not; I didn't use any names!)

This page made use of a photo taken by my friend Jennifer from Junglefish Photography. We went to St. Anthony Main for the photos and ran into LOTS of photo shoots that day.

This might have been the first page (second?) from the June Studio Calico kit So Cal. I love the orange and aqua combo. Who knew it would be so cute?

Misting tip: spray close and ugly, then cover the ugly with photo and paper, leaving just a light mist showing. Makes it look all purposeful and delicately done. :-)

I also was blessed enough to be able to use Pink Paislee's latest Portfolio and Artisan collections as a Guest Artist! You can see my full pages, projects, and cards, as well as the product and technique details, here. These were the two pages I made:

(I got that "Five Guys" envelope at a Five Guys burger joint when I went there at a crop with some friends.I knew I'd make a page called Larson Family Men and use it on that page!)

 

I mixed some old and new products here, dipping into Pink Paislee wood veneer in particular for titles.

Here's a funny thing: I made the two-pager at a crop with friends. The part they were most impressed with? The yellow polka dot paper I lay across the bottom. Of course, that's part of the paper design. Heh. I added the cross stitches to make it look like I did it myself. :-)

So these are obviously two of my favorite companies right now that have so generously shared their products with me so that I could create with them. What are some of your favorite scrapbooking companies? What do you love putting on your pages?

The page that took me three months to make

This is the second day that I will share the pages that I've made but not posted this summer. Today? The one that I spent all summer making.

First, I got an idea. Wouldn't it be cool to make a page about the places I go to all around town? I got the idea from the class Twelve. I thought it would be cool if I got a panorama shot of the town, so I went to a high spot in town near a bar called The Lookout, took a photo, and enlarged it to 8x12.

The shot wasn't that great, though. Composition-wise, it was a panorama of a bunch of houses with the quarries and Minneapolis in the distance. I thought maybe I could pair it with a cool photo of the carts in front of Target, but that seemed just sort of incomplete. So the page idea stewed for a while.

Then, a brainstorm: Maybe I could take a photo of each sign of the places I go, print them small, and add them to the other two photos? It took me ages to take all the photos (and I doubtless looked like a freak doing so), download them, print them, and trim them.

Once I printed them, the page came together quickly. Here it is:

 

 

I was at the end of my June Studio Calico kit. I wanted to make 4 more pages out of the three kits I'd gotten. I had already made 11 pages, so there was not much left. I used orange cardstock on the left, then orange patterned paper on the right. I also added the cloud vellum to the right, putting it on top of aqua patterned paper.

All the small photos (2.5 inch squares) I sanded the edges of and adhered with Stampin' Up! dimensionals.

I also used a lot of Elle's Studio tags. Here's some around the title:

And here's some at the other corner.

This is a basic page design tip I learned from Stacy Julian: If you put something on one side of the layout, put it on the other side too. Since I like asymmetry, I like to put it on the opposite corner too.

On a two-page spread, I also like to have elements spanning the pages to connect them. I did that with the small photos and the tag:

So this was an almost three-month long layout. What's the longest you've spent on a page? :-)

The 12 final days of summer: page 1

These last few weeks I've been busy with the family. We picked up my mom at the airport, here for a two week visit, went to the beach and the pool, shopped for school, and trained for a 5K, which we'll run as a family this weekend. I also finished a book, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, which was probably my favorite read of the summer.

So now we are left with 12 days until summer is done and school returns. Since I've been stockpiling layouts that I haven't posted, I thought I'd post one a day until summer's end.

Here's the first layout I made but didn't post:

Note: that iris photo on the lower left might be my best flower photo I took this year. I take a lot of pictures in my garden.

I made this as a "Things" page for the Big Picture Classes class Twelve. I don't like scrapping purple in the slightest, but dang, I love purple in my garden.

You'll also see this page on Thinking Through Design on a post about mixing fonts. I did that technique, a favorite of mine, with the title:

Lots of layering with the title. I experimented until I got the look I wanted. Dimensional stickers from Stampin' Up! are my friend. :-)

I used my Studio Calico August kit Summer of 69 for this page, apropos for an end of summer page.

That little flourish I stitched down was a part of a bigger die cut; I trimmed it off and used it alone, keeping the other part for later.

What's your favorite color? Mine is yellow, though I honestly wear purple more than yellow, LOL! What's your least favorite color? And do you scrap with them regardless of how you feel about them?

Giveaway at The Scrap Review!

I had a new review over at The Scrap Review today for the kit club Gossamer Blue. Here were my projects (I always try to get 6 pages for a kit of this price):

If you go to The Scrap Review, read my review, and leave a comment by Wednesday evening, you are in the running for this lovely kit! Head on over, read my review, and comment away! And if you like what you see here, but all means go over to Gossamer Blue and explore and order!

The unpleasant experience of scrapping holidays

I know the title sounds a little gloomy, but I think it's a dirty little secret in scrapbooking, at least for me: scrapping the holidays does not enthuse me in the slightest. Those things that happen every year-- Easter, Christmas, birthdays, etc.--just feel like the same thing every year. The same products, the same photos. Bleh.

Still, I'm trying to break through. For one thing, my boys LOVE the holiday pages. So one solution I tend to do with the holidays is making pages for their albums.

I also have been trying to create pages without the typical themed product. Here's one I just did for Dominic's birthday:

It's not his party--I still haven't scrapped that--but I LOVE these photos. He's just so absolutely delighted that my aunt made him a cupcake and we're singing him Happy Birthday. I used Studio Calico's kit So Cal rather than using birthday papers.

Here's some details:

 

  

 

There's something celebratory and happy about the papers and embellishments, but it doesn't look too much like a birthday cake. Well, maybe a little.

I also did something similar with Easter this year. I took the typical egg and basket photos, but what stood out for me the most was the fact that I had to threaten to eat their chocolate bunny ears to get a good photo. So that's my page.

(Just a quick product note: I found that stamp ink pads and a sponge work better on these Heidi Swapp mistable letters than mist, which runs. Go figure.)

Again, no bunnies or eggs in sight on the product. (I have issues with Easter or spring lines in general. Spring in Minnesota looks NOTHING like that. It's actually kind of brown here. Certainly not pastel.) I used Studio Calico's 35MM for this one. (I'm a little behind on using my kits, in case you can't tell, LOL! Hopefully I'll be finished with all but one by the end of the summer. Right now I've got three I'm using.) The camera images seemed especially appropriate.

So thank you for reading about what I loathe to scrap and how I deal and scrap anyway. Now tell me this: how do you feel about scrapping the holidays? :-)

Scrapping the small moments

I've been working hard on some design team pages; next week sees many deadlines, so I will post more when they are up. Right now I wanted to share what may be my favorite page that I've done in a while.

This photo is sort of ordinary. My son is giving me his goofy grin, and I'm not sure why I printed it, but I did. Then I figured out why I wanted to scrap it.

This grin drives me crazy, but I need to let it go, because my son still will pose for photos with me. He still hugs me and tells me he loves me. He's still affectionate without being embarrassed, so I need to treasure the photo, grin and all. Here's the journaling:

 

And here's the details:

 

 

I used Studio Calico's So Cal June kit. This was only the second layout I made with that kit, I think, so I really went to town layering die cuts and stickers. I've also become enamored with stitching little cross stitches as accents around the page.

The background paper is wood grain white. I wasn't sure why people made a big deal with it until I made this page. Now I just love the subtle texture. I'm not sure where all it's sold, but you can find it here, of course, since it came with the kit. To journal, I used Bazzill orange peel, then inked the edges with Stampin' Up! Pool Party to mask the different texture.

This page had much more journaling than I normally do; plus it's a little more personal, I think. I don't do personal on every page, but I think I needed to here. So I encourage you to journal in ways that you might not ordinarily. If you go for just the details, try to get at the emotion behind it for once. See where it leads you.