Scrap retreat: Two-page layouts

I'm back to share the two page layouts I made at my scrap retreat last month. One I can't share: it will be published in the Spring issue of Scrapbook and Cards Today. Woot! Here's the other pages:

I think this might be my favorite. We went to an orchard when my mom was here this past fall, so I put together wallet-sized photos with my favorite in a 4x6 photo. I used some newer products by Jen Hadfield and some Cathy Zielske stamps and chalks for the title (I'm trying to use some long-neglected products). Bonus: I had forgotten to put two photos on the page, so I managed to put them on the right side and still not make it look busy.

Next is a page about my last spring break:

We visited two places: Chicago, which is the page that is published, and Holland. I loved picking traditionally springlike colors for this page, paired with some vacation embellishments. Plus: I love the stained glass photo in the middle. The circle is nice in the middle.

Next is a summer visit to the Science Museum:

This was a surprise when we visited: we got the opportunity to visit the storage stacks, where they showed all that they had in the vaults. I tried to keep the book Relic out of my mind while we were there, and it mostly worked. The boys had a blast, and I recorded our favorite parts. Highly recommended if your Science Museum offers a visit behind the stacks.

Finally, another old haunt, the Arboretum:

I mentioned before that I've been trying to use some Project Life products and kits. On this page I used some of my Ali Edwards story kits. I think it worked. I used as background some beloved Fancy Pants old paper. I had to retool the background paper to make the flourishes match more.

Thank you for checking out my pages! I love doing two-page layouts, and I hope this gives you ideas for how to make them work.

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.

June gallery for Write Click Scrapbook

This month's gallery for Write Click Scrapbook celebrates our inspiration from the past year. I was inspired by this page from Amy Sorensen:

I love the mix of font styles and sizes on the left. Here's what I did:

I didn't use a computer or stickers. Instead, I pulled out my neglected letter stamps and stitched a couple words to boot. LOTS of mistaken stampings on this page. Embrace the oops! Here's some details, mistakes and all:

I forgot to put a date on my page, so I think I'll put it in these two blank tags under the title.

I was going to stitch in orange, but I thought pink would enrich the color scheme. It's really easy to stitch something handwritten; just handwrite the word, punch holes about 1/4 inch apart, erase the pencil lines, and stitch! I prefer 3 strands of DMC on paper.

See the big oops here? :-)

Thank you for checking out my inspiration and my page! I hope you can check out Write Click Scrapbook and get inspired some more!

Pantone Radiant Orchid meets winter 2014

When I woke up this morning, it was -20 degrees F, with -32 windchill. And let me tell you, cold as it was, I was relieved that school wasn't cancelled. Again. It would have made the 7th day school was cancelled this year due to winter. At this rate, we would be attending school until July.

Though this winter has been the bane of teachers and parents, according to my boys it has been the best winter EVER. And so I needed to scrap it. Here's my page:

I used a sketch from Simple Scrapper. The background I cut from about 8 different pieces of Kraft-toned patterned paper, mostly strips, but one punched and one fussy cut. I then die cut snowflakes in two shades of purple, one the Pantone Color of the Year:

I picked this color not just because it matches my winter jacket, but also because of the winter weather maps:

Guess who's in the Radiant Purple region? Yup, that includes Minnesota.

Here's some details from my page:

I used some label stamps from October Afternoon for this page, plus some orchid brads, gems, and buttons from Stampin' Up!

Thank you for checking out my page! Stop by Simple Scrapper at the start of the month for more great pages made from templates and story starters, and stop by someplace warm just to remember that spring and summer WILL happen.

Final touches: stitching

I was working on a page about my son recently and noticed that sometimes, when I think I'm done, I need to step back and figure out a final touch. Case in point:

I really like the page; I used Studio Calico's Project Life and Scrapbook kit Copper Mountain, and for the title, I stamped it, then added Zig glue pen and sprinkled some glitter on it. Still, there's a little...emptiness, I thought about adding embellishments, but I didn't think I needed stuff, but texture. So I decided to stitch. Here's the final page:

I hand drew some sparkles, punched holes, and stitched. I also added a brown woodgrain star sticker I had (literally) lying on my scrap table. I'm not sure about it; I might add another to the lower right to balance it.

Other final stitches I tend to add are cross-stitches and sometimes backstitched photo corners.

Thank you for checking out my page! I hope it gives you ideas for adding just a few stitched as a final touch on a page.

Scrapping tough subjects

When I scrapbook, I try to scrap my whole life. Still, I'm a generally optimistic person, so how do I record the tougher moments? Here's a look into one tough story I'm working through now.

My younger son has high-functioning autism, called PDD-NOS. Ever since he's been in school, he's had struggles, but it's been intermittent. First grade was terribly hard, and this year, fourth grade is also difficult.

I wanted to record some of what he was going through so he could see the progression of his development, and also for him to know my love of him, no matter what. Here's a page I made recently about his struggle:

I actually started with the circles. The high school I work at has an autism center, and one teacher told me progress for children with autism goes in circles. That insight has given me patience and faith, so I decided to use circles to represent the progress my son makes in learning to work within society's norms: a little forward, then a little back. I then stitched circles around the wood circles to connect them, then added the title and stamping along the edge. Here's some details:

Like I mentioned earlier, I'm an optimist, so my journaling tends to look to the future with hope. That' what I must do to scrap these tougher subjects.

Thank you for looking at my page! I hope this gave you ideas for how to deal with scrapping difficult subjects in your scrapbooking.

Using the white space on your photos

I am not a professional photographer. I do not have a DSLR. I use my point and shoot and my phone. I don't think I take bad photos, but they are not always beautifully composed and lit (for the latter, I'm blaming my near-windowless house and the fact I live so far north).

I have found, though, that when my photo is not terrifically composed--specifically, when I have a lot of white space in it--that I can use that as a design element on my page.

Case in point:

I took this photo of my son coming out of the library. He'd finally checked out a book I'd been pushing him to read, Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. He read it from the library to the car and much of the rest of the day, and he's almost done. I sneaked out my phone and took the photo, then he noticed me taking his picture with the next few. This first one, of him reading unaware, is my favorite, even though he's barely in the shot, so I decided to scrap it.

What entranced me was the white space. I love designing on top of white space: overlapping a title or journaling, embellishing in it, and so on. I decided to print this photo 12x12 through Persnickety Prints and use it as the canvas for the whole page. Here's what I did (pardon the color, which differs from the one above; it was a little dark when I took the photo, and hey, almost no windows in my house!):

I pulled some embellishments from the August Studio Calico scrapbooking kit and started playing with layers: I overlapped a couple frames, put the pocket over it to house the journaling tag, then added the die cut and cork title on top. I finished this embellishment clustering with stickers, chipboard banner, and a button. I also cross-stitched down the pocket to make sure it stayed down. Since the pocket was vellum and the journaling on the tag interfered with the pocket's design, I turned the tag backward.

I next used the stitching template the came with the kit to embellish above the journaling. This follows my embellishment rules, to layer in three parts, not always in this order:

1) Something flat (die cuts, stickers, etc.)
2) Something dimensional (buttons, chipboard, dimensional stickers, etc.) and
3) Something textured (stitching, mist, paint, stamps, etc.). 

 The stitching template had wide stitches, so I added holes to make the stitches shorter, which I prefer.

The next time you are editing photos to print, don't crop out extra white space on poorly composed photos. Instead, think about how you can use the white space as a design element.

The layout I screwed up and how I fixed it

If you want to know my scrapbooking motto, here it is:

There are no mistakes, only unplanned opportunities for additional creativity.

I seem to do this a lot, which is OK. Very rarely do I completely mess the page up. I just have to figure out how to cover the torn stitching holes, or eliminate the accidental stamping, or replace the wet paper (I blogged about that before).

This time, I was scrapping about going to the Twins. We've been three times this season, but I decided to scrap about these two games because they were good games--they won!--and I had forgotten to print photos from the third (oops). I scrapped most of this at my scrap retreat a couple weeks ago.

I first picked papers. Next, I decided I would put the two focal point photos, one from each game, on top, then put a string of smaller photos underneath. Here's where I got a cool idea: I had a ton of the Maggie Holmes photo overlays, so I thought I could use those as a sort of photo mat for the smaller photos. I assembled the page, then thought about stamping. In white.

The best way to do that is by heat embossing, so I stamped and embossed the white circle in the title, then I stamped a phrase to the right of the blue mat, directly above the overlay. That is sort of plastic. Then I HEAT embossed it. Right about now I wondered where my brain went. I had melted the edge of the overlay. and to cap it off, I had already stitched it down onto the page. (Any mistake I make seems to be compounded by my having stitched something down. *sigh*) I then had to do some fixin.'

First, I tore out the stitches on the damage overlay, removed it, then added another, stitching it down by hand cranking the wheel. (Remember, I had a TON of these overlays.) I first laid some stickers over the stamped phrase (it looked bad), but later I realized I'd forgotten to add the game tickets. I always put them on the page. Here's where I got really creative:

I used my exacto to cut a hole in the page, I added a pocket to the back of the page, and I slid the tickets in from the front to the back, holding them in by inserting them in the pockets. And thereby covering the messed up stamping! Awesome. And inspired by screw up.

Here's the final page:

If you click on the second page and look between me and my husband, you can see that we were sort of photo bombed by the jumbo tron. Oh, well.

If I hadn't told you about my trials making it, I'm not sure you could have figured out how badly I'd mangled it.

The detail shots:

Here's where I added tickets on the left side.

You can see here that embossing the circle in the title also melted the overlay above it. I left it and used my embossing gun to melt the overlay on the left side a bit to balance it out. You can see it it detail shot two. If you can't cover it, make it look like you did it on purpose!

 And this is where I added the tickets to cover my embossing mistake! Can't even tell.

Thanks for sharing in my lengthy discourse on my screw up and how I fixed it. So tell me: what are some ways you mask any of your crafting mistakes? Not that we do them often. :-)

Inspired by Write Click Scrapbook: Using up stash

Today is the new month for Write Click Scrapbook. We were to look at the past 6 months of WCS and take inspiration from a past post. I took from Amy Coose's Use Your Stash post and decided to use some stamps as a background page. Here's what I did:

I used one of my favorite stamps, my Studio Calico Polaroid stamp, to serve as a photo frame for my layout. I used my paper trimmer to fill in the stamp. Here's the details:

I punched some circles from the patterned paper and added some wood veneer stars to the background. I also stitched around the main photo to add some texture.

The title I added to one of the frames, which I added on dimensional stickers.

The journaling I printed on the same paper as the background, spaced, 1.5, then trimmed it out and inked it with yellow to make it stand out.

Thank you for stopping by my page! Here's the rest of the Write Click Scrapbook people to visit today to get some inspiration:

Aliza Deutsch
Amy Coose
Christine Newman
Diane Payne
Jenny Larson (me!)
Katie Ehmann
Marnie Flores
Valerie O'Neall

Enjoy the start of June! May it be warmer and sunnier than it is here in Minnesota.

Geek girl scrapbooking

This past year I decided to just own up to how much of a geek I am. I love space movies, comic book heroes, and supernatural thrillers. I love Star Wars, Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Avengers, and Supernatural, among others. My license plate says DETH STR. My avatar is Buffy fan or Buffyfanlarson. I am a geek, and with that I'm OK.

Here's two pages I made recently celebrating the geekiness in our house:

 

 

This two page layout I thought of when I got new plates for my car. They still say DETH STR, but we have kept all the old plates from our past spaceships automobiles. Seeing them lined up made me think to take photos of all other Star Wars gear in our house and make a page. (Well, not ALL the Star Wars stuff, but some.)

Here's some details:

 

On the details above you can see how I stamped and embossed a line of triangles, then painted inside some, just for a little color.

  

More paint, this time with old chipboard letters.

 

I also made this page recently:

 

I got the idea for this page from a pin on Pinterest. I could never find the sign to buy--it always linked back to Tumblr--so I used the sign as the journaling for this page.

  

I had a lot of fun mixing patterns and colors from the Studio Calico kit I used--February, maybe?--and loved how perfect the background paper looked with this theme. And the Pantone color of the year--emerald green--is perfect for the page, especially matched with the orange and red.

More details:

  

  

 

I made the title with my Cameo, as I did with the last page. I liked layering two different colors for a little more depth in the title.

Thank you for sharing my geekiness with me. Tell me: are you as much of a geek as I am? :-)