Reclaimed pages, post-hard drive crash: part 3

Another day of sharing pages I reclaimed through Carbonite, this time pages that are a part of my 100 moments pages. Here's the first:

This one isn't one of my favorites, product-wise, but I had gotten a lot of Valentine's Day stuff in my February scrapbooking kit, so I used it since the topic seemed thematic. And yep, that was me back in upper elementary. Yikes. My dad, however, looks very handsome.

Finally, this page is about my introduction into adult reading--Agatha Christie. I did not have any photos of the event, so I took a photo using the books that were a part of the story--not the actual books, but the ones I've bought since. Man, I would love those original books. The book covers on mass market paperbacks in the 70s were mini-scenes, evocative and awesome.

You'll notice that I used different products with each page, even though they are going in the same album. I created cohesion with similar design--kraft background, though some pages use white, basic color blocked design, and a running stitch around. If you are doing an album all at once but was to switch up the products, this idea of similar design might be a good one to keep in mind.

NSD pages

I've said this before, but I think it's serendipitous that National Scrapbook Day is the same day as Free Comic Day. This year my husband and the boys made it a super day, going to two stores and then seeing Spiderman, which left me to scrap all day, uninterrupted. Here's what I did:

My goal was to kill at least one old kit. I killed two. Even better, I love them all. Usually when I'm working with the dregs at the end, I am dissatisfied, but not this time. I really love these pages, especially the last one, where I pulled out a mask and some mist and added a background paper from my stash to round it out. The journaling idea came from a pin on Pinterest; you can find it if you search "bro." (After I made the page, my son came up with "Bromama," which is awesome and reminds me that I need to consult my boys when I scrap more often.)

I finished everything on NSD with this page except the jouranling and stitching. Here it is:

It's another of my 100 most important moments pages I'm making. I am using color blocking on kraft paper and running stitching with each layout to make the album cohesive. You don't need the same products to make an album cohesive; design will do it.

I'm so happy after this NSD weekend. It was so much fun to scrap the stories, use the product, and be creative. Come back later this week for a chance to win a class at Big Picture Classes!

Re-doing pages

I am a fairly tolerant scrapbooker. When I make a page that doesn't satisfy me artistically, I let it go. Sometimes, though, the execution of the page dissatisfies me to the extent that I have to do the page. This is pretty rare: in 12 years, I've redone maybe 3 pages. Here's the story of one page.

When I went on a scrap retreat in November, I started a page about me and art. I printed three photos of me as a child doing artsy things, put it on a yellow piece of paper, pulled out a kit, and used some final pieces in it. And I hated it.

I'm not sure why. It looked OK but not special. I don't believe every page has to look special, but this story of my childhood in art meant a lot to me, so I wanted the page to look good too. I put the page aside for MONTHS so that I could think about it.

Finally, I determined what needed to happen: I peeled off the pictures* and threw away the page.

Seriously, I almost NEVER do that. But I did. Here's where I made a discovery. EVERY TIME I make a page scrambling to use up final bits of a kit, I hate the page. It just doesn't feel cohesive. I need to give myself permission more to split the kit when I get to the bare bones. In this case, I pulled out the new kit and was amazed at how fresh the page felt. Here's the page I made (and kept):

This is one of the pages I made for my 100 most important moments. I used the design elements I repeat in that album--color blocking, running stitch around the edge--and that combo made me much happier. I also loved using the overlay instead of patterned paper, and using the die-cut starbursts. Made me feel like an artsy star.

Thank you for checking out my page? Tell me: do you ever redo pages?

*When I need to remove photos from a page (which happens more often than I care to admit), I place the layout face down, then peel the backing off the photos so I don't curl the photos. That way I damage the paper instead of the picture.

Detail then reflect

I'm back from the dead! Not the dead really, but the dead time where I do nothing but grade at the end of the term. It's an honor and a privilege to assess student work, but wow, it takes time. I submitted my final grades and look forward to finishing up projects I began and planned last month!

Here's one I finished last night:

I used Studio Calico's February kit for this. When I get a lot of pink in a kit, I make a page about me. I may add some yellow to the strip  below the photo, just because I love yellow.

I began the page last month at a scrap retreat I went to up north (COLD), but I had to finish the journaling at home. This is one of my 100 moments pages. It was REALLY HARD for me to scrap this photo. Not my best moment in history, but it is my history, and it was a story that influenced me, and so I scrap it.

I tried to apply what I am teaching my students now who are writing a reflective essay: detail your story, then reflect on it. Say what happened, then say why it was important and why you want to remember it. When I'm stuck in journaling, this technique helps me a lot.

I also want to honor my dad. We are not too similar--the apple fell far from the tree, and we have to have a common agreement not to mention anything political so as to keep the peace--but I honor the sacrifices and gifts he gave me growing up, so I record them in scrapbooking. I want people to remember my high points, so I try to do the same for others in my life.

Now that I will not be collecting papers to grade for about a month, I look forward to scrapping and sharing more of what I've made and am making lately. I have pictures waiting for me at National Camera Exchange of the Big Melt that's going on right now, and I look forward to playing with paper and embellishments and stories again.

Ready for summer, anyone?

I've been posting a lot of summer pages recently. I love scrapbooking summer photos in the dead of winter. Since we're supposed to get another blizzard today, I thought I'd share some more warmth.

I made this page as one of my 100 moments pages. I don't have a photo from me on the swim team, so I selected a photo of me at the pool when I was in kindergarten, enlarged it, and used it on this page.

I also used Fancy Pants Designs' new line called Nautical. That's a sailing/ beach line, but the aquatic elements were perfect for this page. The flags, for example, reminded me of the flags on the ceiling at the pool. Perfect embellishment. Here's some details:

Thank you for checking out my page! I hope it made you warm as we are getting ready to welcome another bout of winter.

Working with neutral backgrounds

When I worked with the Simple Scrapper sketches and layouts this past month, I pulled out my neutral cardstock. I love patterned paper, but sometimes the neutral background really grounds the colors in the layout, whether the colors exist in the patterned papers on the page or in the photos. I used Studio Calico's Antiquary kit on both layouts. For this first page I used grey for the background:

The beautiful astrological paper was perfect for this page about the Maya exhibit at the Science Museum--remember that calendar that predicted the word's end? Heh. I used star stickers and punched stars out of patterned paper to add to the theme. Here's some details:

I sanded and curled up the edges of the photos (and the banner tips) for some dimension and texture.

A little stitching, just to hold everything down.

And then I used kraft cardstock for the page about my 100 moments:

I've been working on the 100 moments layouts for a few years; this page contains the whole list. I used kraft because the pages in this album needed a few elements to be the same to add cohesion: kraft/neutral background and a running stitch are those elements. Here's some details:

I punched a misted butterfly, then another out of patterned paper and stitched them down on the page. I chose butterflies for their symbolism: these were the moments that transformed me. (English teachers like me love symbolism, LOL!)

Thank you for checking out my pages! Go visit Simple Scrapper and check out some of their free downloads, the membership sampler, and the blog. There's some exciting stuff coming up this next year. And be sure to return to see the entire gallery next month!

Scrapping older photos

I'm on a roll scrapbooking my most influential moments and using my older photos to do so. I've wanted to scrapbook my time in the Azores for a while, so I chose photos that show the house, the landscape, and the activities. I normally do just a quick color correct with PSE 10 on older photos, but in this case I didn't; it seemed to affect the color of the water and made it all less rich in tone, so instead I just used the healing tool to smooth over the imperfections. (My mom wrote on the back of  most of the photos with a Bic ballpoint, which tended to smear onto the photos. Thank goodness for the healing tool!)

I used Scrapbook Generation and Allison Davis' sketch this week to put as many Azores photos on it as I could. Here's what I did:

After I had used Fancy Pants Designs' Collecting Moments on my older photos last week, I decided to use it again; I love how the vintage colors look with my older photos.

As far as the sketch goes, I kept my layout almost identical to the sketch. The only main difference involved the size of my photos: since older photos tend not to be printed in 4x6 size, I shrunk the size of the photos along the top and right. Here's some details:

Because this is one of my 100 moments pages, I kept some of the same design and product choices--kraft background paper, a block of patterned paper and photos, running stitches going around the block--to keep the look cohesive with the other pages in the album.

I love stickers on my layouts, so to keep them down more, especially for the small ones like this, I love to stitch through them.

Thank you for looking at my page! The sketch was a terrific idea starter to jump off of and begin this photo-heavy layout. I hope you find it as inspirational as I did.

Stop by later this week; I'll be hosting a giveaway!

Scrapping early childhood photos

I have been working intermittently on a project called 100 Moments. I started this project so that I could record, not my whole life, but what I found to be the most influential moments. I'm not going in any order, but the recent rediscovery of these photos plus the discovery of the healing tool in PSE led me to print and scrap these pages. Here's the first, moment 2:

 

As you can see, I used Fancy Pants Designs'  Collecting Moments. The vintage colors in this line paired nicely with the vintage colors in the photos. I also added some Artist Edition manilla die cuts to the page, and I found some Ranger manilla cardstock to print the journaling on to match. Here's some details:

And the second page I made to celebrate my 100 moments is moment 3, a page that killed my September Studio Calico kit:

When I get to the end of the kit, I often supplement. I used the tags and stickers to round out the embellishment clusters. I am not really a feather girl, but I did love the feathers on this page. Maybe they remind me of the seagull feathers on the beach. Here's some details:

Thank you for checking out my pages! I made them when I was on a scrap retreat with a girlfriend of mine a weekend ago. I'll share more of what I created there later this week.

Singing in the...snow?

When I went on my scrap weekend a couple weeks back, I made a fatal packing error: I didn't bring any patterned paper. True, I brought some GCD Studios paper to use for a few specified pages, and a couple Studio Calico kits, but that was it.

So when I pulled out my ice skating photos to scrap, I had only the two kits to delve into. The problem? They were appropriately named Into the Woods and Singing in the Rain. The first didn't work, so I pulled out the latter to see what I could make work for snow pictures.

Here's what I did (click on the image to see it closer):


This is one of my 100 moments pages, number 8, as you can see. I'm not sure what year these photos are from, or even when the actual event happened, but it really doesn't matter.

I misted the kraft paper with Studio Calico white mist, just to add a little brrr...

I'm amazed that the back of the striped Webster's Pages paper looks so much like snow! And I loved the die cut fortune that seemed to fit so well with the story. The number 8 is from the same chipboard as the title; I removed the fabric and painted it.


I painted the Pink Paislee metal banner with a Jenni Bowlin paint dauber, Chili Powder, I believe. I scraped a little off the edges to show some silver, then added the letter stickers.

Most important moments

Last August I participated in Big Picture Classes' Big Idea Festival. I loved it, but I was particularly inspired by Jen Mohler's idea to scrap the 100 most important moment of my life. Here was moment 1:

I had just come into these photos, so scrapping moment 1 seemed a perfect beginning.

I had hoped to scrap a moment a month, but a lack of childhood photos made me neglect this goal. (Note to self: Ask my mom for more photos!) I have, however, been staring at some photos of me and my growing-up dogs, which made me think of a later moment, moment 58.

I scanned the older photos, resized them, and repaired them somewhat (they had minor scratches on them). I also printed a photo I loved of my dog Roswell and me, taken the year she died. Following a similar layout design as my first page, I created this one:






I had the felt dog left over from a kit. I remember debating throwing it away; I'm glad I didn't. I also added some of my typical stitching: a running stitch around the layout, as well as some machine stitching through the title and journaling. Broke a needle doing that, gosh darn it. Twice. X%&#!

Some of the papers come from the Basic Grey Max and Whiskers line. I also picked some older Pink Paislee papers that seemed to match.

Most important to me was the journaling. Here it is:

Growing up, my dog was Ben, a yellow lab we bought when I was about 14. He was so good-natured, I loved just to sit on the floor petting him all afternoon. As he grew older, he started to develop bloody noses: he’s sneeze, and the mucus was tinged with red. His vet never found anything wrong, though.

When I came back from college during the summer in 1994, there was a dramatic change. Like a faucet that had been turned on, blood poured out of his nose in a continuous stream. I ran to my mother in a panic, who told me the nosebleeds had been like this for a while. At his next doctor’s appointment, we learned that Ben had a tumor that would ultimately kill him.

At this point we decided that we needed to put Ben down, so we gave him a dog day: we fed him his favorite foods (cheese and strawberries) and took him to the lake to swim. It was a fun romp, but tinged with melancholy, knowing it would be his last.

On the way home, wind now swirling and rain beating down, we stopped at the vet’s, where we had an appointment to put him to sleep. Here’s where I failed Ben: Given the chance to stay with him until he died or leave him with the vet to do it, I left him to the vet. I couldn’t face it. My mother stayed, though, holding him until he died and walking home afterwards in the rain.

My failure to be with Ben in his final minutes haunts me. This dog had been such a good pet, and I had loved him through his life, but not at the end. My failure taught me that when I buy a pet, I need to commit to it through life and death. I swore I would never again leave a pet alone to die, so when Roswell developed liver disease in 2009 and we had to put her down, I stayed with her until she died, fulfilling my promise to Ben.

Reusing photos

I am for the most part caught up with scrapping. (Don't throw anything at me.) I began scrapping when I was pregnant with my first. While pregnant, I scrapped my first years of marriage; everything else was in albums, so I am working on photos from last spring right now, as well as anything current that inspires me. (Note: I am gradually and gently harassing my mother for pictures of my childhood, which I have none of. I do want to scrap those via my 100 moments album, which I've blogged about. Visit Jen Mohler to hear more about that project.)

I mention I'm caught up because I scrapped my Easter 2010 photos already. The photo of my boys in the bunny ears is already on a page. However, I recently came across that photo as I was printing spring photos, and it made me think of my nickname for them: bunny. So I printed it again without shame (why stage a photo shoot for a story when I have a perfectly good photo?), used this week's Sketchy Thursdays sketch, pulled out my Studio Calico kit On the Easel for the first time, and produced this:


I only got one kit this month--I had a lot of the product already--so I only need to make 6-8 to get my money's worth this month. The kit seems kind of soft to me--maybe gentle is a better word--so I guess it's good that I'm working on spring!

As a bonus, here's a card I made yesterday for a birthday Rowan went to:


I'm trying to develop my card-making comfort level, which is nowhere near as strong as my scrapbooking comfort. And BTW, Rowan's favorite part of the card is the monster, of course.

100 Moments: Moment #1

I'm a pretty fast scrapper--I get an idea, I grab product, I grab photos, and go. True, sometimes I need to let things sit so I can think about the design or what I want to say, but most of this time I don't spend a lot of time fretting about my choices.

This next layout, though, took me a week. I knew it was special to me when I thought of it, so I took some time with it.

I got the idea for this page from Jen Mohler's 100 most important moments in your life spark she introduced at Big Picture Scrapbooking's Big Idea Festival. I made my list of moments at my son's tae kwon do class. The hardest thing was getting them in order when I was done with the list! That and figuring out what's been important most recently. Having to put our dog down I saw as significant, of course, but sometimes we need the perspective of time to gauge the true significance of things. That's why I'm glad to go back and scrap older photos sometimes--or scrap the same photos!

Even before making the list I knew this moment was number 1. It's one of my earliest memories, and it was a learning experience, both about the world and about me. And my mother recently sent me photos from my first 3 years of life, and what did I find in there? Pictures from the preschool where it happened, and an Easter shot that may have been from this very event! Priceless. So here's my layout:



The hardest thing for me was picking product. I wanted something vintage-y but not too grunge-y. I have been scrapping with a lot of bright colors lately, so it was hard for me to shift gears. I knew I wanted two pages, I knew I wanted white space, and I knew I didn't want typical Easter colors or product either. October Afternoon's Thrift Shop became the anchor paper for me; the yellow paper took me a while to settle on, but this yellow Basic Grey paper from Nook and Pantry worked great. I also got some good use out of an old Daisy D's piece of blue distressed paper.

This design is an old one for me; I've used it before. It works, though! So no guilt. The greatest find for me came when I went though my red paper scraps and found an old piece of Sassafras paper with frames on it. Some worked thematically with the page, so I cut them out and used them. I set them on pop dots to make them stand out. If you click on the photo, you'll see the right one says "Bunny"!

Here's the journaling, in case you can't read it:

One of my earliest memories is at Sunday school in Niagara, New York, in 1975. (It may have been preschool, and it may have been Grand Island. My memory is fuzzy.) Around Easter the class was given a craft to make: the boys would make bunny ears and the girls would make Easter bonnets. I’ve never been a girly-girl; I wanted to make the ears but was told the girls couldn’t. This may have been my first experience with discrimination based on gender, and I remember I tried to fight against it.'

Unfortunately, I don’t remember how the story turned out, but when I told my mother this story she said she knew—because she still had the ears! Not only my first experience combating unfairness, but an early experience in my being stubborn too.

So that's the 1st most important moment in my life--the year I was told I had to make a bonnet because I was a girl, and I said no.