Busy with teaching, and back with scrapbook pages

Hello! And sigh. This has been a busy year. As a teacher, I've moved from distance learning to hybrid, and now we've moved back to distance learning. I thought distance learning was busy, but hybrid...oof! I am grateful to have had the opportunity to get to know my students face to face, albeit masked.

In the meantime, I visited my parents in Maine, I finished tucking my garden in for the winter, I kept reading, and I kept scrapbooking. Here are some of my pages for Simple Scrapper:

This was a two-page pocket layout about my last-year's trip to Maine. Not gonna lie, looking through the Project Life Cards and pulling a bunch to use gave me joy. 

This next one is a layout celebrating my son's theater experience last year in Ragtime, a magnificent production. He played a few roles, including JP Morgan. He has a knack for getting cast as terrible people. Here are the separate pages:

Photo on the left a professional photo by Any Angle Photography.

Next a couple pages for November. Here is one commemorating the boys' game night with dad. Since the boys both have jobs now, it's a rare night that all of us are home.

Finally, a Thanksgiving layout. Last year was untraditional--I visited my parents in Maine while my husband took my boys to Buca's. I enjoyed reflecting on this special time with the ones I love in new ways, and it's important I remember that this year as well.

And those were some of the (few) pages I've made these past couple months! I am working on a cross-stitch project I will post when done, and I am getting to work on finishing my son's school years album, since he's a senior. *Gulp*

New layout in Scrapbook & Cards Today!

 Every time a submission call for a magazine goes out, I try to submit. So it was a great pleasure for me that one of my favorite scrapbooking resources, Scrapbook & Cards Today, solicited a page from me! 

The layout I made is a PageMap layout, a two-page design. It was tremendous fun to make, and I hope you will check out the entire issue. Bright colors, helpful hints, and bundles of inspiration. You can find the new issue here.

I'm busy creating Bitmoji classrooms for the most part right now and planning to move from digital instruction to hybrid instruction. At night, I'm trying to keep up with my 2019 albums as well as finishing up my eldest son Rowan's school years album. I have an approaching deadline: he graduates this spring. 😲 Holy heck. 

I have a vacation album completed that I need to edit and post. I'll be back soon with my pocket pages album!

Summer pages for Simple Scrapper

Last time I posted some pages I made this past summer, mostly of last year when I went places still. Sigh. Here I wanted to share some pages I made for Simple Scrapper. First, here were some pages for August:

This one is a page about a birthday trip to Penzey's Spices to buy ANY SPICE I WANTED. Best birthday present ever. I like the deep blue background, which is October Afternoon. I don't have much deep blue, mostly aqua, so that is a patterned paper hole I need to fill. Letter stickers are Pinkfresh Studio and ancient Making Memories. Journaling Card is Elle's Studio, as are the wood words. Doilies are Stampin' Up, which has very nice embellishments. And any time I get to dig into the Embellishment Jar of Antiquity, I feel good. Here's looking at you, brads.

I live within a few hours away from most of my cousins, but I don't see them much, so when I do, I take pictures and commemorate. My cousin Janel is a legit artist, so I journaled about her gallery that she hosted and I attended. I took the product inspiration from the painting behind us, which was hers. The paper I used is an older Studio Calico piece that is just this gorgeous and fitting perfectly. I picked some embellishments to go in a circle, mostly from Crate Paper, and stitched around as a frame (I drew circles first as a guide). I tend to stitch stickers down anyway, mostly because they are mainly Ancient and need adhesive help. Added some Stampin' Up sequins because.

Here's a story from last September, again when I was going places. My husband plays with a swing band,  Westwind Swing Band, and they played at a winery/orchard called Parley Lake Winery. This place was obviously created with scrapbookers in mind, for it is filled with gorgeous sculptures and scenery. I started by enlarging the barn shot to 8x12, nice for an exposition shot on a two-page layout, then printed the rest 2x3 to fit in all around. I used some new Echo Park papers and old embellishments. A note on that: I used some old flair and discovered a lot was started to unpeel, which made them unusable. These worked, but I ended up tossing a ton. So if you've been intending to purge old supplies, start with the flair. That should be an easy job.

This last page shares something else that's kept us busy this summer, our new puppy Chewie, named after this character. Since we lost Lola last December, we've had a melancholy stay-at-home. Once summer hit, we started searching for a new dog, and this pup turned up. He looks like a breed, but he's a big mix. A big mix of cute, I might add. I chose an adorable photo of him and made this journaling heavy. Used up an acrylic alpha from Studio Calico for this. NOTE: when stapling, be sure to hit the letter.

Thank you for returning and seeing my Simple Scrapper pages! I'll remind you that this is a tremendous community filled with inspiration: sketches/templates, a monthly magazine, and classes.  If you need something to jump start your memory keeping, start here!

Summer scrapbooking catch-up

Hello! It's been a busy summer for me and my family, despite the stay-at-home order. We have done some home improvement (patio, painting, and deck maintenance), visited family, and remained crafty. In my case I cross stitched several projects, got one framed, read several books, gardened, and scrapbooked. Here's some of what I scrapbooked this summer:

This page records my husband and boys at last year's Gen Con, which sadly was cancelled this year. I used an adventure-like line from Echo Park that I got last year at Pine City Scrapbooking for this, mostly using the paper as embellishments, plus some random Studio Calico label stickers. The journaling card is Elle's Studio, and I love it. 

Another page made with papers I picked up at Pine City Scrapbooking, Simple Scrapper Great Escape, I believe, this time to commemorate our trip to the Vikings exhibit at the Swedish Institute in Minneapolis, a legit castle. I made a mistake with the letters: those are meant to be dipped in glitter, so they have a protective coating on them covering super super adhesive. *crossed fingers the protective coating stays put*

This was a layout that came about when I cleaned. I found the social story and a note from my son's preschool case manager, and I decided to make a page with them. I had one--ONE!--KI Memories big office pocket eft, so I dug through my saved preschool photos to put on the page and embellished and journaled on the pocket. 

Here's a two page layout of one of our last trips to the Science Museum to a stellar exhibit on the history of gaming. Strongly recommend. I took my favorite photos from the visit and made a s t r e t c h e d page with them. I couldn't remember many details, but that's why the Internet exists; like I did with the Vikings page, I went and researched the exhibit and included the most memorable or favorite details. NOTE: The background paper is one I love from Bella Blvd about football, I think, but the quotes are all about games and winning, so it worked!

This is a page I made for my 100 moments album, one I got the idea for and started working on years ago because of Big Picture Classes. Again I used papers from a trip to Pine City Scrapbooking, this time Authentique. I dug into my Iris container with school-themed products--it's getting light, and when my boys leave the house in a few years, I'll probably get rid of the rest of them. I use a similar color-blocking type design for each layout in this album.

That's all I want to share today! I'll come back sharing some additional pages I made for Simple Scrapper and for my own family later this month. Take care!

July Pages for Simple Scrapper

Hello! As I started scrapbooking again after school let out, I worked on my pages for next month's Simple Scrapper. I'm working on 2019 pages right now, so here's what I did:

Since quarantine, I have been doing a lot of pages about going out to new places. In this point, my husband and I visited a picturesque taproom near the park we sometimes ski at (Theodore Wirth park) called Utepils. This page is built off a busy piece of patterned paper from October Afternoon. I trimmed the plain paper out of the top to back it with wood grain; after I was done, I regretted not doing that on the bottom too! Too late. Instead, I added a strip of the wood grain to ground it.

This page made heavy use of the die cuts I'd taken out and not used on my last page, plus a few other things I had on the table. I call this technique "One whatever is left on the table." Here it worked!

Note: I did stitch down the title (I almost always stitch down small letter stickers), including the Thickers. It's possible--just use the side wheel (my name for it) instead of the foot pedal. Even so, go slow: I bent my needle on the T and had to take a break to get more needles. Sigh.

I don't often use memorabilia on my pages, but this layout responded to a prompt that said to make the memorabilia a dominant embellishment. Challenge accepted! This was an outing at the end of the year to see an Agatha Christie play, so I used the program and the tickets as the main focus. (This is the second photo I took of the layout; in the first, I didn't notice that the tickets were crooked. I had the photo edited and ready to go. Drat.)

I selected cozy products, from the background paper to the embellishments, to match the coziness of Agatha Christie books. And since it was a mystery, I used file folders all over.

Thank you for visiting! Please check out Simple Scrapper--there are many scrapbooking and storytelling resources, which can be so helpful in these times when we spend so much time at home. This visual community is valuable.

Re-using old designs

It has been a busy month for me! I collected student papers virtually, commented online, then finished  assessing the papers and submitting my grades. To make it more exciting, my district required me to go in for 4 of the last 9 days of school (while I was in the height of grading, of course!) to clean up EVERYTHING in my room and pack it away to make room for a deep scrub this summer and to help collect student materials. All this after I broke my toe. Gah.

I did some reading, some gardening, and some cross-stitching here and there, but I mostly graded. Now that school is out for the summer, I will have more time. Here's my inaugural summer page:

It is a traditional page I make every year that comes as the last page of my album. I pick my favorite 9 photos from the year and put them in a digital template.

The general design is always the same; the decorations differ. Here I started with an OLD piece of My Mind's Eye paper that was an ombre green/blue design; then I selected the Studio Calico muted cloud paper from my craps to serve as the title block. I used some new better stickers I got from Elle's Studio plus my standard chipboard letters from Jillibean Soup. (I ran out of O's, so thank you, button Stash! That's the best letter to run out of.)

At this point I took out my die cuts, which I organize by color in an office hanging-file folder case, pulled bunches in a few colors that seemed to fit the same muted tones, then played around fitting them in. I borrowed heavily from old My Mind's Eye and Elle's Studio dies.

Since I was doing a color challenge with my CKMB friends online this week, I challenged myself to add color in different mediums too: I stamped the numbers in orange on the right, I used orange thread in my machine instead of white, and I broke out my misting templates and added some painted flourishes.

So that's how I manage re-using old designs: Same structure, selecting basic papers, and then playing with product and techniques to make it fresh.

June pages for Simple Scrapper

Hello! I've spent the last weeks painting our flood-damaged downstairs and commenting on student papers. Now that I've finished, I've been scrapping. Here's some of my pages for Simple Scrapper:

This page was my representation of this month's sketch. I made this page as a rainbow promise for what we look forward to after Quarantine. My husband said "Sports" and my boys said "School" (!) and "Theater."

Creater comment: I fussy cut old Sassafrass paper for the background, then stitched it, and stamped two-tone stamping on the tag with an old Studio Calico stamp to enhance the theme.

This page celebrates my son'd performance at the State Theater on Hennepin Avenue because the school's production of Tuck Everlasting was honored by the Hennepin Theatre Trust. I used lush colors and ornate embellishments to reflect the theater.

Thank you for visiting! I'm almost done with my final overdue vacation album. I'll post pages of that when I finish! Take Care!