Boo! Scrapbooking non-Halloween pages with Halloween products

I've mentioned this past week that of all themed products, Halloween is the one I have the most of. My boys are almost outgrowing trick or treating, so I have to seek other uses of the products. Here's a recent page I made that uses those Halloween products:

I hope you can read the journaling. I grew up in an old New English town with some very old cemeteries, and I learned to hold my breath when I passed them (so as not to let the ghosts in, of course). My boys have started doing the same thing. It's not as necessary in Minnesota, where the cemeteries are not as scary-looking, but when we visited New York a few years ago? Whoa. Lots of breath holding. Here's some details:

I tried to choose some vintage-y products, and ones with headstones or about ghosts, since that fit my story. And that flair? Comes from the Globe theater. It seemed to fit.

I sewed down a lot of elements since the stickiness was abating and it was hard to hold down the patterned coffee filters with adhesive alone.

Thank you for checking out my page! Come back tomorrow to see my contribution for November's Write Click Scrapbook.

November pages for Simple Scrapper

Hello! October is amazingly almost finished, so I wanted to share my upcoming pages for Simple Scrapper. Here they are:

This first page uses a new story teller and an old sketch. I recorded a conversation I had with Dominic about his favorite, mac and cheese, and why cavatappi is the superior noodle. I enjoyed digging into my stash for this page.Here's some details:

October Afternoon's Saturday Morning collection had some perfect accents for this theme.

Next is a two-page spread using a new sketch and old story starter recording my boys' trip to the Arboretum to see the Lego exhibit:

Again, I enjoyed digging into stash for this, and using lots of bright colors. The red paper is classic Scenic Route, for those of you that remember that line, RIP. Sigh. I also used October Afternoon's Summertime collection for appropriate reasons. Here's the details:

Thank you for visiting! The inspiration from Simple Scrapper this month is plentiful and varied. Go check out what they have to offer!

A little spooky

Of all the themed products I have--vacation, Christmas, camping, Halloween, and school--the one I have the most product is probably Halloween. That's kind of sad since the boys are getting older and may be soon done with trick-or-treating. Not Dominic--he's going as a Hipster this year.

So I am going back and finishing up last year's Halloween layout with some melancholy. Here's the page:

Every year the boys do a series of poses in front of our evergreen. It was a very warm day, so everything was still green, so I used a bunch of green papers on some woodgrain. (Some of these papers may have been Christmas papers even!) I dipped into the Halloween bucket for the pumpkins and embellishments. Here are the details:

I did the journaling differently, adding strips to the white space on the main photo, not the page.

I still have some Halloween projects--this year's Halloween, of course, plus a mini-album compiling all their costumes. I can only hope that they will grow interested in hosting Halloween parties once they hit high school. Otherwise, I will have to go trick or treating as Buffy the Vampire Slayer every year and make a page about it. We don't want that.

Scrapbooking big photos: go big or go home

When I was printing photos for our trip to South Dakota in 2011, I found a couple photos of my boys that I loved. The boys took up a small part of the landscape in each photo, which left me a lot of white space to scrapbook in. I had a story to tell for each, so I printed them 12x12. Here's the first:

I'm planning on using October Afternoon's Sasparilla line for our vacation album, so I dug into those products for this page showing my son playing with a lasso, I believe. (It might be the jump rope he made. This was the Ingalls homestead in De Smet.) I put some strips at the top, sewed some bandana stickers down off it like a banner, and did a title/journaling cluster in the sky, using stickers and die cuts.

I like to de-sticky the stickers with my embossing buddy and add them with dimensional stickers, overlapping other elements.

I also added a small cluster to draw attention to my son:

Then I had a page of my other son, at the Badlands N.P. I believe, though it might have been Custer State Park.

You'll notice I did the exact same design. No shame. It works! I used bits and pieces I found in my embellishment basket for this, in large part Jillibean Soup and October Afternoon.

Secret detail: The arrow had split in half, so I glued both pieces down together and laid the epoxy heart on top to mask the break.

Thank you for visiting! I print my 12x12 photos locally at National Camera Exchange, but rarely there, because it is expensive. (I print from them several times a month from 4x6 to 8x12, both of which are affordable at the small orders I print often!) More commonly I order from Persnickety Prints when I am also printing a rare size I can't get locally--like the 8.5x11 photos I use in my vacation album. I encourage you to look through your photos the next time you are at your computer, print an evocative one big, and give it a go!

Neat &Tangled stamps and Scrapbook Circle

Hello! I've already shared my pages from this month's Scrapbook Circle kit, but I wanted to write a bit more about the page I did with the Neat & Tangled stamp set. The books stamp inspired me to record my next reads. Here's the page:

I wanted a multi colored bookshelf, but I didn't want to color the image. Instead, I wanted the colors that were the same hue as the background rainbow paper. Here's what I did:

First, I stamped the bookshelf on the page. Then, I stamped again on the different colors on the rainbow paper I used elsewhere on the page:

After I stamped these, I cut out random colors and glued them onto the page. I left some books empty and just left peeks of color here and there.

Thank you for checking out my page! This stamp set will definitely be a set I go back and use again and again. Please go to Scrapbook Circle and check out the other pages by both Scrapbook Circle and Neat & Tangled.

October pages for the Scrapbook Circle kit Mix Tape!

Hello! October has arrived, and with it the new kit from Scrapbook Circle called Mix Tape! I love the bright colors and playful accents. Here's the first page I made:

I've wanted to make this page for a while, and the playful accents and colorful labels were the perfect inspiration. I used a lot from the main and the washi stickers from the Playlist add-on, which was one of my favorite embellishments with the kits. Here's the details:

Next, I wanted to try a Halloween page, so I pulled the orange and grays and added a little blue and gold to make this:

Gold glitter may not seem like a Halloween color for the page, but these letters in the Cassette add-on along with the bronze tags and wood circles from the same kit were a spooky but non-thematic addition.

Next was a page I made using the awesome stamp in the main kit, made by Neat & Tangled. I wanted to make a page of the books I most want to read next, because scrolling through hundreds of books on GoodReads in my To Be Read shelf is a little overwhelming. No photos on the page, just punched tabs from the gorgeous Illustrated Faith paper in the main, which I also cannibalized for the stamped bookshelf.

My husband calls this an OCD dream page. I have no idea what he means by that.

Lots of stitching...

Finally, a black and white photo that highlight's one of Dominic's favorite activities:

Again, I used a lot of the add-ons--the glitter letters, the wood circles, the washi stickers, plus some printables and my favorite embellishments, the Evalicious puffy stickers and the Pretty Little Studios Word Strip from the main.

Thank you for visiting! I hope this gives you ideas for scrapping. Please spend some time over at Scrapbook Circle checking out this and other great kits, and continuing to get inspired!

Write Click Scrapbook October!

At Write Click Scrapbook we took a one month holiday, and now we're back! Today's theme is "Outdoors." Here's my page for the month:

I adore big photos with lots of white space. This photo, which I took at Whitewater S.P., had lots of that, so I journaled in strips about my boys growing up and made a big title embellishment cluster.

How happy was I to make use of that rub-on? Perfect thematically.

Thank you for checking out my page! Please visit Write Click Scrapbook to check out the rest of the gallery. And come back the rest of the month--we're trying a new format with teams and weekly themes!