Scrapbooking the youngest

And here's the final pages from my scrap retreat last spring, this time my youngest. Here they are:

Because I was in the market for a new car, we went to the Mpls. Auto Show. While there, Dominic enjoyed a race car simulation. I had to scrap it!

 

Next us a page showing Dominic reading. He goes through phases where he gets obsessed with reading. This time his teacher, whom he loved, loved Harry Potter, so he went back and finished the series.

And another birthday page, this time for my 14-year-old. I had a lot of fun using products and cards from my Kelly Purkey kits, which I started subscribing to this year. These products worked well for the theme.

Thank you for visiting and seeing the belated pages from last spring's retreat! I look forward to sharing the pages I scrapped from my fall retreat (at a much faster rate than last spring!).

Scrapbooking my life (and my husband's)

I am trying to spend more time scrapbooking my husband. I tend to scrapbook the family and myself more than him, so I wanted to share a page I made about his work space recently.

His desk is so uniquely him, I took pictures and scrapped it. I dug into my Ali edwards' kits and Project Life cards in particular to scrapbook this.

This page is a brief recap of a big injury I sustained Nordic skiing last winter: the day after a thaw (everything had frozen again), I kept falling while I skied, ending up spraining my back, among other injuries. The memories of skiing were still good, so I tried to use upbeat colors and pleasant patterns.

Finally, when I visited my home last winter and attended church, I took pictures of images within the church that had stuck with me growing up. I recorded my memories of these images from my formative faith years.

I hope this gives you ideas in scrapbooking stories of yourself and those significant to you!

Ombre stitching on a scrapbook layout

The September sketches at Simple Scrapper are truly inspiring. After I made my pages for the magazine this month, I made another one based off another sketch, a page about my older boy's favorites from Hawaii. The sketch had a repeated title, and since this was about Hawaii, I decided to make the title ALOHA. And since rainbows were so frequent and symbolize Hawaii, I decided to make a rainbow stitched title.

For more interest, I decided to make the stitched title ombre, with the most intense colors at the top and the least intense at the bottom, sort of like the background patterned paper. I started by selecting rainbow DMC in three intensities:

 

Next, I cut the title in a blocky font on my Cameo and used the negative space to trace the title across the page.

 

After this, I used my paper piercer and foam pad to punch holes for stitching. I eyeballed it, but the holes are about 1/4 inch apart. When the letter went under a photo, I made the hole be at the edge of the photo.

To stitch, I did some estimates first: I figured that I would have about 3/4 of a letter for each color. I stitched the brightest first, and that served as a template for the rest of the stitching. Where I shifted into a new color in my first title, I did the same with the same colors on the rest of the page. Here's the final:

I used some Kelly Purkey label stamps in bright colors around the page along with some leftover Primas I have to embellish. Not too much was needed after the titles.

I never used the medium purple since the final A was always covered up!

Thank you for visiting! This was somewhat labor intensive, but it was fun to do while I watched TV, so I hope it inspired you to do some stitching on your pages.