When it Rains

So I'm still rocking the Mother LOAD.  I can't believe I've kept up with a layout a day for all of September so far.  Every day Lain gives us a challenge that we can choose to use or not.  One of the challenges was to use a less than your best photo.  My cell phone has not been "smart" and I only recently figured out how to get photos off it without internet access on the phone.  (although those of you following me on facebook know I'm now totally in love with my new iPhone and instagram)  I knew these photos accompanied a story that needed to be told.

This page focuses on a day that was full of struggles but finishes with how friends and family bring sunlight into your gray rainy days.

Notice the photo collage on the bottom 4x6?  Wanna know how I did it?  Check out the tutorial here!

Design Inspiration: I always get so many ideas from the Write.Click.Scrapbook monthly galleries.  I pinned this layout awhile ago and while scrolling through my Pinterest board I knew that this design would leave plenty of room for the LONG story I wanted to tell.


Color Inspiration:  My story set the tones for my page.  Gray background for the gray skies and yellow for the sunshine.

I cut these little clouds out of a piece of pattern paper.  Just to make them stand out a bit I inked the edges with blue and popped up one with pop dots.

I debated making my own sunshine but in the end decided to use this FREE digi one by Crystal Wilkerson.  To top it off I added a little yellow brad.  And added a little cloud.  Love this part of the page!

I gotta say, this is quite a story.  Hope you can read it, cause it's much too long to retype.  :)  Just to add some interest in the long text I altered the color of certain lines to make them stand out.

I am so glad this crazy story is documented!  And I truly love how the page turned out.





























How do you use your iPhone pics?  Have you ever scrapped about a gray skies kinda day in your life?  Or do you have a story about a day that just seemed like a comedy of errors?  Leave me a comment, I'd love to hear all about it!

I Feel Pretty

I'm still on the Mother LOAD wagon.  ;)  One week in and I've made a layout every day.  Some more intricate than others but I'm ok with that!  And the layout I'm sharing today I actually made, from start to finish, in less than 30 min!  How awesome is that?!?!

In Basic Training (the first 9 weeks of the Mother LOAD class) Lain had us take a photo a week.  One week the challenge was to take a photo of ourselves.  For this layout we were challenged to scrap that photo.

Color Inspiration: I LOVE this paper but wasn't sure when I'd get the chance to use it.  A photo of me seemed like the perfect opportunity!

Design Inspiration: I wish I could show it to you!  The sketch came from a 15 min layout challenge over at ScrapHappy.  It's password protected so I can't show you, but you could join and get the inspiration for yourself all year long!

I've been trying to figure out what to do with these pins for a long time  I love them but didn't know how to use them.  Truth is...I still don't.  :)  But this was a start.  I used Glossy Accents to glue them down and hid the point of the pin behind the photo. I also added a little sparkle to the butterfly with some Diamond Stickles.  So pretty!

Sing it with me, "I feel pretty....oh so pretty..."  It doesn't happen all that often.  But this day I felt pretty AND managed to capture it with a camera. Doubly amazing!  ;)  So I just had to honor that with my title.

Check out my tips for taking a self portrait and snap a shot of yourself on a day you feel pretty.  It's worth it, I promise!

My husband is right.  How I feel about my looks does have an impact on how my day goes.  As a stay at home mom I am realizing more and more how important it is to still get up and do myself up for the day.  Even if...maybe especially if...I'm not going anywhere.









What is it that makes you feel pretty?  When was the last time you scrapped a picture of yourself?  Heck, when was the last time you TOOK a picture of yourself?  Leave me a comment, I'd love to hear all about it!

Like Father Like Son

You've heard the phrase, "I shall call him mini me" right?  Well that is my husband and our youngest son.

I saw a challenge over at Practical Scrappers to make a layout with woodgrain paper.  An then the assignment for The Mother Load this week was to make a layout using old supplies.  I knew I could do both in one layout.

And the woodgrain made me think of the word ingrained.  I then started thinking about all the similarities between my husband and my youngest.  I knew I had a layout in the making.







Just so you know, no matter what you see in the photos the background paper is gray.  :)  Sometimes pics don't do a layout justice!

 

No resemblance at all right?  HA!  Same haircut, same ears, same smile, same, same, same!  If it weren't for the 70s sweater on my husband you'd swear it was the same person.

When looking for layout design I went into my Pinterest board and looked for inspiration.  I came across this one by Moon Ko over at Write.Click.Scrapbook.  I loved the look.  So I started to scrap!

As I was digging through my supplies I found this sticker.  PERFECT!  I cut some green paper to back it, and rounded two of the corners.  I wanted to give it some dimension so I popped it up with pop dots.

The left side needed a little something extra so I added this orange tab and a couple of green hearts.  I'm not 100% sure that the photo of my husband was at the age of 3 but he looks so much like my youngest at 3 that I made that assumption.  So I put the dates 1980 vs 2010.

The paper I used to back the pictures is actually digi!  So you know it came from Crystal.  :)  I just printed it out on white cardstock.  LOVE how it turned out!

For the journaling I went into Photoshop Elements and made text strips.  I used more woodgrain paper behind the text.  The journaling is essentially a list of some of the ways my son and husband are alike.

I needed something between the journaling and the title.  So I started digging through by color bins.  I found this piece of Starbucks cup holder and cut it into a square.  Then I got out my bracket punch and punched the edges.  Which made it look like a tree to me.  To make it stand out I used white chalk/ink to edge it.  Then I cut an orange heart for a bit of color.

For the title I started with another text strip.  I didn't have any stickers that would work for the word ingrained so I went back to an old standby, my Cricut.  To finish the title off I grabbed a white pen.










Who resembles who in your family?  Are there any funny characteristics you share with someone you are related to?  Have you ever scrapped those similarities?  I'd love to hear your stories and/or see your pages!

The Making of a Mini Album

As I hinted here I recently took Ali Edward's "Scrapbook on the Road" class.  Since my husband and I were traveling to New York City to celebrate our 10 year anniversary I thought it would be the perfect time to try to scrapbook while traveling.  If you are interested in this class and have a trip planned this summer I highly recommend that you download the class more than 1 1/2 days before your trip!  :)  Even with the time restraints I was able to put together my mini book before we left for New York.

I started by cutting two pieces of raw chipboard to 5.5x7 and punching my holes.  I looked for some chipboard elements to use on the cover but couldn't find anything I liked.  So I turned to my trusty Cricut and SCAL. I found this image online and cut it out of grunge board.  I simply glued them onto the chipboard.

The next step was to paint the covers.  I knew I wanted my color scheme to use gray, white, and black as my neutrals.  Dove gray was my choice for this album.  And I must say I love how it turned out!

I painted each cover with two coats of paint.  I liked it, but felt like it might be a bit too plain.

Note: in the end the album does have this lovely gray color even though the later photos make it look a bit blue.

Inside the front cover I placed some chipboard stickers indicating our destination.  Then I found some small letter stickers for the year.  I only had glitter stickers.  I probably wouldn't use glitter stickers again, but it worked ok.  It doesn't matter that they don't match because you are just going to paint over them.

Since New York is often called "the big apple" I thought it would be fun to use apple colors as my accent.  But I didn't really want a black white and red album.  So I chose apple green as my main accent with only a few bits of red throughout.  I again gave the inside of the covers two coats of paint.

Once I had the green paint out I decided to paint the heart green.  I loved the little bit of color it added.  I also painted the edges of the album green.  It turned out so pretty!

I coated the outside covers with Mod Podge to help them hold up a bit.  As you can see, as the paint and Mod Podge dried the figures bubbled up a bit.  I believe that if I had used a brayer when gluing them down it would have helped this problem.

After the Mod Podge dried I added a bit of glossy accents to the heart.  It makes the heart shine just a bit.  I absolutely LOVE how the covers for this album turned out!  I just can't stop looking at it.  :)

Have you ever made your own mini album cover?  What's your favorite mini album topic?  Scared to try out mini albums?  I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Come back Wednesday to see the inside of this album!

Basketball Fun

Did you think I'd forgotten about you?!?  Even though I haven't been posting I have still been scrapping.  I took Stacy Julian's class i.Scrap at Big Picture Classes.  It was awesome!  I now have a nearly completed mini album honoring 2010.  Once I finish up my journaling I'll be sure to post the final product.

 I've been wanting to scrap my son's basketball pics for a few weeks now.  But I have to admit I was a little intimidated.  I've never scrapped sports before.  I started by sketching a layout back when the team photos came in and just hadn't gotten around to scrapping it.  And then I saw this post over at Stacy Julian's I love color blog.  It was all about using orange and gray as a color palette.  And that's when it clicked.  Orange and gray were perfect for my son's basketball layout.

 It helped that their uniforms had gray in them and that basketballs are orange.  :)  And I felt like the burgundy of their uniforms still worked if I kept the color very minimal in the accents.

The jersey and basketball were cut on my cricut using SVGs from the Sport Lovers collection over at SVGcuts.com.  I thought they turned out super cute!

I had fun with buttons on this page.  I wanted to make it look like a basketball bouncing across the page.  The arrow was leftover from the cut outs in my journaling block.

On this side I mimicked the ball angling toward the basket.

Have I mentioned that I love Stacy Julian?  :)  This orange cardstock is from her Happy Colors collection.  So cute!  It was my first attempt at sanding.  I just used a nail file and sanded the words.  So easy!!  In retrospect I probably should have sanded only a few words to highlight them.  But I still like the look.

 Orange is one of my favorite colors so I loved finding lots of places to use orange.  The orange cardstock matting my son's picture has a real nice shimmer to it.  I love how it shines.  And I had fun busting out some new orange ribbon to create some cohesion between the two pages.  I have to say I also like the texture on the gray cardstock.  It reminds me of the texture on a basketball.  :)

Initially I had just a block of white paper for journaling.  It looked so bland.  So I started digging for a punch to dress it up.  I decided on these arrows.  Then I tossed in a few buttons for fun.  I LOVE how they turned out.  That was what inspired me to add the basketball-esque buttons in other areas of the layout.

Who knew scrapping sports could be so fun?!?

Life Right Now

Recently I saw a post on WriteClickScrapbook.com about occasionally doing a layout about your life right now.  I liked that idea, but hadn't gotten around to scrapping it.  Then today At the Big Idea Festival over at BigPictureScrapbooking.com the challenge by Karen Grunberg was to make a layout about life right now.  Hmmmm, seems like maybe this is something I should do.  :)

The inspiration layout was one page and used much smaller pics.  Since I was using 2 pages I decided to do 2x3 pics.  There are a lot of them on this layout...can you tell?  :)

I cut 1 inch strips of patterned paper and punched them with my border punch (I've got to get some more of those).

I made a list about things that have been going on in our lives over the past few months.  I decided to write my journaling on a scrap of vellum.  I put a piece of notebook paper behind the vellum as I was writing my journaling.  I chose to highlight certain words by changing the font color.

I used a butterfly punch and layered two butterflies on top of one another for depth.  I then put a dot of glue to stick them down before stitching them on.

I have never stitched on a page before.  I had a lot of fun using different stitches on the layout.

Rather than using one color of thread for the whole layout I decided to use tone on tone.  Each of the strips of patterned paper has stitching on it.  I really went all out.

It's hard to see the title in this picture, but I love it in person.  Some of the words are in silver, the us is acrylic, and the now is chipboard.

"This is Us Right Now"

I love the idea of scrapping about everyday things.  And the opportunity to use pics that I like, but probably wouldn't scrap otherwise is always fun.

Try making your LRN (Life Right Now) layout.  If you do, link it up for me so I can see!

Snow Fun

This layout started with the sketch from Ella Publishing's Six Weeks of Sketches: Week 5 challenge by Donna Jannuzzi.  I was excited to see a 2 page layout with a lot of pictures.  I had several events in my "needs to be to be scrapped" list, so I went through my iPhoto folders looking for one that I could do with 7 pictures.  Our recent snow play pics seemed to go best with this layout.

I still couldn't do the layout with just 7 pictures.  :)  So I changed the 5x3 1/2 photo on the left page into 2 2x3 photos.  I just had to include pictures of each of the boys with their dad!  I also shifted the 4x6 on the left page up to balance the largely white photos across the spread.  I wanted the 5x7 photo to stand out a bit because the title is based on this photo, so I matted it with white.

I wasn't sure what else to do on the page, so I went searching for color inspiration online at Scrapbooks Etc.  I found this one page layout.  I loved the patterned paper bars that moved the eye across the page and how the colors were pulled from the child's coat and hat.

I found this paper in my stash and felt like the greens went well with my older son's coat, my younger son's coat was navy, but I didn't want to do another navy background with snow pictures (see Snow Rookies post).  So I decided to mat the photos with a navy blue border to tie in his coat.  When trying to decide on a background color I remembered reading somewhere that gray is the new neutral.  Since my older son's coat also had gray in it, I decided to go with it.

You can see that I mimicked the patterned paper bars from the Scrapbooks Etc layout.  Normally this shade of green would make me think of summer and grass, but the circle pattern reminded me of snowflakes and ice crystals.  When paired with the gray and snow pictures it seemed to fit perfectly.  I found the title on scrapbooks.com.  It went so well with my 5x7 photo that I just had to use it.  I decided to change the o in snow into a snowflake.  When the page was finished I still felt like something was missing.  I remembered the navy snowflake punches I had left over from another snow layout I did recently (see post called Snow Rookies).  I decided to embellish on the large white portion of two of my photos.  I then added a gem to the center of each of the snowflakes.  I love how it turned out.  I think it's really fun to use unusual colors for a layout.  Green, gray and blue were a different choice for this snowy winter page.

I'm having tons of fun with these Ella layout challenges.  I especially love looking at all the layouts people create.  It just exemplifies to me why scraplifting is not stealing, but a true form of creative expression.  No one makes a layout exactly like me, or you, even if we start in the same place!  Join me in coming out of anonymity and into the limelight!