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.

Back again! Pages from October scrap retreat

Hello! Once again I went to a scrap retreat and scrapped a bunch of pages. Once again I was overwhelmed by life and haven'tposted them. Sigh. I'll get it together. Here are some pages about me:

I don't like scrapbooking Mother's Day as a stand-alone page, but I do like scrapping it as an event. Here we are playing the card game Marrying Mr. Darcy. I used an old Studio Calico kit for this.

I told one of my boys' favorite family stories, about the time my hair caught fire while camping. I used some October afternoon, American Crafts, and Pebbles camping products.

This page I love. For the past two months our family has been clearing out the entire living space for our family to put in hardwood floors. (And then we put it back, which has basically been the last two months for me. No scrapbooking for me!) I found a few preschool love notes from the boys, so I put them together on this page with a recent photo. I used a KI Memories envelope on the back for the projects and included some of their bon mots in the journaling.

A page I started then stopped because I wasn't sure what to say. I decided to focus on what made it typical and to take some gusses.

Finally, a page about my husband and me and some of our dates in the past year. I like compilation pages like this. Mostly Ali Edwards on this page.

And Those are some pages about me! I'll be back to share some family pages, then a page that shares something tough from the last two months.

Scrapbooking the art of film

Hello! The month of February came and went pretty fast. I did a lot of scrapbooking, so I wanted to start sharing what I did.

This next layout I wanted to share since its inspiration, Guillermo del Toro won the Oscar last night. We've seen some of his films, and last year an exhibit of his personal art and inspiration went on exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The boys and I got tickets and went, and it was worth every penny. Here's the page:

The walls in the exhibit were bright, bloody red, and the ceiling was black, so I chose that for my page. I dug into my Halloween stash for nondescript creepy and somewhat amusing products--since so much of his work is comic inspired, the whimsical items seemed appropriate.

A lot of the things in the exhibit were things you did not want to turn your back on. For example, those eyeballs in the entrance gateway blinked. The boys didn't want to stand in front of them because they could hear them closing and opening. The H.P. Lovecraft statue looked real, which was really unsettling too.

Another uncomfortable turning-our-backs moment: that hologram in the lower right. Yikes.

Here's some close-ups of the embellishment clusters in particular:

Those flair buttons my husband got me when he traveled to London and visited the Globe theater; they mostly reference the Scottish play, which starts with witches, so I loved using them on this page.

This photo might be my favorite. I'm glad I captured the boys underneath the arm of the Pale Man. It just looks cool.

I used a lot of Pebbles (the chalk speech bubble), October Afternoon (labels and brads), 7Gypsies (vintage stickers), and Bella Blvd (most words and cute images).

To create the design, I added the strips on the bottom, then created the photo collage on the right. I had many fewer photos on the left, so I arranged them the best way I could, leaving space for title and journaling.

And that is my creepy page of creepy photos from a fun time at the art museum. And congratulations to Guillermo del Toro for his Oscars win!

November page for Simple Scrapper: Scrapbooking photos across time

I'm here with my second layout for this month's Simple Scrapper, this time using a sketch and an old story starter. 

I had started taking photos of the boys next to the big movie displays when we went to the theater. I never tagged them, and I unfortunately deleted at least one from Muppets Most Wanted (argghhh!), but I got a good representation of these posers across the years and put them together onto a page to celebrate this family tradition.

I took color inspiration from the photos, using yellow, teal, and purpley-pink.

What a gift it was to find the viewfinder in my die cuts! Most of the other embellishments I dug out of stash, either die cuts or puffy stickers or enamel. (Note: I've been able to use my die cuts more since I rearranged my storage system. I'll share that this month.)

The vinyl title letters were losing some stick, so I sewed them down.

Thank you for visiting! I'll come by later this week to share more pages I made on my retreat. Please visit Simple Scrapper to check out the other inspirational content available, and consider a membership!

October pages for Simple Scrapper: GenCon and a piano player

October is almost upon us, so I thought I'd post the pages I completed for October Simple Scrapper. The first is about my son the piano player.

We didn't foist an instrument upon either son, although we think instrument playing is important. In elementary school Rowan, our tinkerer, decided he wanted to learn piano. He switched teachers this past year due to his former teacher taking on a full-time music job and closing her studio, so this age celebrates his new teacher, who has encouraged him to practice composing as well as playing.

Confession: I made this page as a 12x12 page, but it occupied too much space, so I trimmed it down.

I made the scallop border by punching circles and cutting them in half.

Next is a page I made about my sons' first trip to GenCon with Dad. Derick has gone several times before, and I've never scrapped it; this time I did, using some ancient Night Light die cuts from October Afternoon.

I got the pictures from my husband and my eldest son.

Thank you for visiting! Please visit Simple Scrapper to see all they have to offer, including story starters, sketches/digital templates, and a monthly magazine!

Scrapbooking your hobbies: a Pokemon Go mini-album

Confessions: Last summer my family, like many others, started playing Pokemon Go. We played as a family for almost a year, and my husband and I still play. Every time we went to different places to walk around and catch 'em all, I'd take a picture, usually a family selfie. Even though my boys don't play anymore, I wanted to make a mini album to record this hobby from the past year. Here's what I did:

Since Pokeballs are a big part of the game, and they are round, I wanted a round album. I had no mini-albums that were plain circles, but I thought this scalloped mini-album from October Afternoon would suffice.

I knew circles and Pokeballs would be a part of my design, but I didn't want to be too literal, so I found some patterned paper and paint that could suggest Pokeballs and their colors and shapes. If you know the game, you can see the red that is the ball, plus the line and dot in the middle, plus the black, all of which suggests the ball.

To complete this project, I went through my buttons, die cuts, and stickers, pulling the red ones that I thought I could use. on this project. I then used circle punches on the patterned paper to make the inside pages. Here's the album:

This was sort of the cover page. Remember the red balls in front of Target? During the Pokemon craze, they painted the balls to look like Pokeballs. I took a picture of the boys last year and used it here.

This design would be the template for each page: a couple circles of patterned paper behind the photo, then some hand journaling. Here's the rest of the pages:

Each of these is a two-page spread. The title and journaling would be on one page and the photo on the other. After I adhered everything, I went back and embellished. I chose a small, simple lettering stamp set to stamp the title on each page, which I did right after I'd adhered everything.

NOTE: I messed up this first title. I knew it was Lake Harriet but for some reason I stamped Calhoun, which is the next photo. And this is why I added the blue strip and the tag.

When the title had the circles to the right like on this spread, I stamped from right to left to make sure there was enough space.

For longer titles, I had to be flexible and creative. Abbreviations and hyphenation ensued.

I only did two places twice, very practically to fill the whole album, so I used my two favorite Pokemon locations.

That embellishment cluster on the photo exists because I dropped ANOTHER photo backed with adhesive on it. I convered the adhesive with the cluster. Gah.

And to finish the album, I wrote about what we do with Pokemon today.

Thank you for letting me share this geeky passion and how I commemorated it! Tell me, do you scrapbook your hobbies? And do you play Pokemon?

Going back in time: Scrapbooking photos across years

Hello! The school year is over. Aside from preparing for the next school year, I am filling my time with gardening, reading, and scrapbooking.

One thing I have done this past month involves scrapbooking photos of my boys across the years. First: I had printed some photos of my boys recently posing next to the statues of Harmon Killebrew and Kirby Puckett outside Target Field. It dawned on my that the boys' heads are now OVER Killebrew's bat where they used to be BELOW them. At that point I realized that, since Target Field opened in 2010, the statues have been our growth charts. And so I made this page:

I used a sketch and story starter from Simple Scrapper to help me with this page. I picked bright primary colors because they make me think of baseball. Here's some closer shots:

The two die cuts--the magic is real and the journaling spots--are from the June Simple Scrapper downloads.

Next is a page that I made for Simple Scrapper for July. I had printed these photos of my boys in trees at the Minneapolis Peace Garden, but I didn't know what to do with them. The story starter for July gave me the idea to pair them with older photos of them in trees. Just like trees, these two grow, but not out of this favorite hobby.

The photos were a little dark, especially of Rowan, so the Jellybean Soup frames helped draw attention to them. The basic chipboard pieces from Ali Edwards were the perfect embellishments for this layout.

And then a page about my son and his years of playing violin from kindergarten to today. The recitals at first were in a lounge at an apartment, then for years they were at his teacher's home. Recently they returned to the teacher's apartment, where we can see his growth by the phone on the wall behind him. I printed photos from the past and now to highlight the growth.

Again, I chose bright colors, and I dug into my October Afternoon die cuts to create some bright clusters. The title is from old American Crafts foam letters--and yes, I had run out of an S, so I cut apart an 8.

Thank you for visiting! I have another post to share soon about the boys in my life, including my husband, particularly as we approach Father's Day.