Morning Routine

Here's where I get real with you...  I am not a morning person...my boys get up before me...my boys make their own breakfast...yep, I'm that mom!

Our LOAD challenge was to document a favorite routine and I love the way I start my morning!

Design Inspiration: This time the design was all me.  I made a strong block in the center of the page with one supporting line, except that it's across the top.  :)

Color Inspiration: This was another snack bag layout.  When I saw the flowers and buttons I knew exactly what colors to use.

White letters just seemed like the way to go.  But they didn't stand out enough so just like I did here, I outlined them with Sharpie.

For the journaling I made a simple list of my morning routine.  Super fast and easy page!  Love that!

























What does your morning routine look like?  Leave me a comment, I'd love to hear all about it!

Good Eats

Recently our Mother LOAD challenge was to use a product we love.  I've never started a layout with a product before and was excited to try!  And I knew exactly which one I wanted to use...

See the numbered bracket paper?  I've been holding on to this for awhile and decided it was time to use it.  I did however trace it onto a piece of chipboard so that I can create more paper in this shape if I want to.  :)

I searched through one of my newest downloads from Ella Publishing called List It ~ Everyday Edition.  It is full of lists you can make for a layout.  When I came across the prompt for listing your favorite restaurants I knew I had a winner.

But no pictures...

So I went online and searched for logos for our favorite restaurants.  Using Photoshop Elements I made these 2 in circles with the logo and text around the edges listing the food we like from that restaurant.  They remind me a bit of coasters.  I'll post a tutorial on how to do this soon!

For the design I used one of Noell Hyman's flexible templates called the Pinboard Template.  The ribbon looks like it is pinning the discs down.  I added a mat of turquoise with black borders to add some contrast.

I knew I needed to add some color to the far right side of the layout.  So I made this embellishment.  I decided to make a circle embellishment to mirror the circles "photos."  I punched a 1 in circle out of flowered patterned paper and stuck it on a white metal rimmed tag.  Then I placed the tag on top of a blue journal block. Finally I added a black piece of bling to the center of the flower and doodled around the inner circle.  I have the embellishment hanging off the edge of the paper for a bit of added interest.

Found this sticker and thought it was perfect for a title.  Backed it with some more of the turquoise paper and added a couple more black bling.

For the journaling I listed the restaurants on the paper and added a bit of commentary about each one.  I also used a white gel pen and drew a bracket to divide the restaurant name from the commentary.

Totally different from my usual style.  I do love that I have a page documenting not only our favorite restaurants, but the food we eat, and other special info about each place.

In case you are wondering, this layout went in the Places We Go section of my album.
















Where do you love to eat?  Any funny stories about a restaurant?  Ever made a layout with NO pictures?  I'd love to hear your thoughts!

10, 10, 10 Challenge

On National Scrapbook Day I participated in BPC's Creative Crop.  Stacy Julian gave a challenge to create a page with 10 products, 10 techniques, and journal with only 10 words.  I was excited to try it out!  So here's the breakdown...

Products: cardstock, paint, digi stamp, brad/eyelets, flowers, chipboard letters, ribbon, paperclip, tags

Techniques: paint, digi stamp, handwriting, folded ribbon, hybrid embellishments, tags as embellishments, visual triangle, eyelets/brads, doodling

This page just makes me happy.  I've never been able to make a two page spread with only one photo.  If I was ever going to do it this pic seemed the one to try it with.

This is only my second time painting on a layout.  And I so love it!  The dry brush technique made a cool mat for one of my favorite photos!

I love anything by Ali Edwards and this digi stamp is no exception.  I made it orange to match the mat and dropped it on top of the pic.  Love Love LOVE!

 Amazing that I could make a page without a photo and only 10 words of journaling.  And I even like it.  :)

To create a visual triangle I added this little cluster of embellishments.  I love the idea of using a tag as the base of the cluster.  Add the date...pretty.

This cluster is the baseline for my journaling.  It also is where many of my products and techniques come into play.

Big chipboard letters a white pen and some thoughts about my baby boy and the layout is complete.  :)

Try it out!  10 products 10 techniques and 10 words of journaling.  It's a fun challenge and creates an amazing page!

Pumpkin Patch

This was the first year that my boys went to the pumpkin patch separately.  They each had a field trip, my youngest's first one ever, my oldest's first one in kdg.  But I didn't want to do TWO pumpkin patch layouts.  So I found a layout that would accommodate both sets of photos on one spread.

The color combination was one of the challenges on my SCRAP bingo card from my weekend crop.  On this layout I was able to mark off not only the color combo but also using a Cricut (title), using ribbon, handwriting my journaling, and incorporating the date on the page.

My bingo cards used several color combinations from Stacy Julian's I love color tab on her blog.  This one is called summer salad.  Even though the salad speaks of summer, the colors said fall to me and I thought they would work perfectly on this pumpkin patch layout.

The layout inspiration came from Scrapbooks Etc online.  As you can see it is a one page spread and since I always do two I had to adapt from the original.  I essentially flipped this page for the second page.

It is easier for me to see how a layout will work on two pages if I sketch it first.  Helps me figure out the dimensions I need.  So here is what my sketch looked like.

I started on the left page with my youngest son's field trip.  I used journaling strips to tell a little bit of story about him.  Especially the part where he only wanted to hold hands with his teacher and NOT Mama.  :)

I like my title to tie into my journaling.  So this title reflects on the idea that now that I am staying home I finally have time for us to experience these things together.

The right page is dedicated to my older son's field trip.  He also was all about his friends and didn't really want much to do with me.  :)

While the journaling strips next to the pictures tells about each child's field trip the journaling at the top is all about my reflection on this time with my boys.  It reads...
"I started staying home to have more time with my boys.  While there are times, already, that they pull away to be with friends there are many more where their smiles and snuggles are all for me.  I will always remember this as our time!"

I love how this layout turned out.  Things I never would have done (colors, handwriting journaling, etc) if left up to me came together to make a really nice layout.  AND I was scrapping pics from Oct 2010!  Which means I am very close to "caught up."  In fact, after this layout I only had 3 more layouts of my boys to complete before I was able to focus my time on a new scrappy project I have been wanting to start for awhile now.  I'll blog about that soon...after I blog the 3 layouts of my boys.  Want this blog to be "caught up" too.  :)  Tee hee!

Have you tried something new in your scrapping lately?  Comment and link us up!  We want to see!

Scrapbooking Your Christmas Card

My very first blog post ever was this one where I posted about using your Christmas card as your design inspiration for a layout.  I've always really loved how this layout turned out and thought it was a perfect way to end my yearly album.

But this year I decided to create my own Christmas card digitally which you can read about here.

When it came time to scrap this year's card I realized that I didn't want to recreate it with paper.  I'd spent so long on it digitally that it just didn't make sense to start over.  So I chose to use an actual card as the main element in my layout.  Those of you that read this blog much know that I typically scrap double layouts.  But since this is for the last page in my album I could do a one pager.  Which worked perfectly.

I cut a mat for the card and just stuck it right on top, as I would a picture.

For this mat I used a border punch.  I wanted the straight edge left on so I was careful not to punch all the way to the corner.  For more info on how to use a border punch see here.  The red mat on the red background paper didn't have quite the pop I was looking for so I added a white layer underneath the red.

Things still seemed a little too monochromatic for me so I added a thick white ribbon.  This ribbon came off a package that was sent to me.  I loved it so I threw it in my color bin and it was just waiting for me when I pulled out my white tub for this project.  Love that!

I hate dealing with frayed edges of ribbon at the edge of my page so I usually wrap the ribbon around to the back and tape it down.  I use adhesive on the front as well to hold it in place, but the tape on the back seems to work best for me when I'm trying to keep it from snagging the edge of my page protector on the way into the album.

For a little extra something I added this cute gem Christmas tree.  It gave this simple layout just the right amount of sparkle.

So quick and simple!  Gotta love that! And I have a way to remember my Christmas card always.  Perfect!

Christmas Countdown...Again

After posting my last Christmas Countdown Calendar a friend asked me if I'd make her a Countdown Calendar too.  I, of course, agreed!

She decorates with more traditional Christmas colors.  It's hard to see in this photo but the background paper has Christmas words and phrases in very subtle red tones.  So perfect!

I also decided to add a larger patterned paper border behind the title box.  I backed both the text box and the mat with a very tiny amount of dark green.

This cute little elf was the perfect way to bring green into the calendar.  He is from the same Cuddly Christmas Friends collection as my other characters.  All are from my friends over at SVGCuts.com.

I tied some red and green ribbon and then added this adorable white fringe.  Loving it!

I then added a bit more green around the edges of the numbers.

Same process, totally different results! Love how easy these things are!

What Characters!

It's hard to believe that Halloween is coming around again.  My boys are already talking about what they want to be this year.  As I begin to search for costumes I thought that I would post my layout for last year's Halloween.

I found my layout inspiration in Scrapbooks Etc.  I loved the circles and thought it would work perfectly for my Halloween layout.

I was totally enthralled with the idea of backing black cardstock with patterned circles.  Since my layout needed to be two pages and I had a lot of photos I used this page as a base, but sketched it out to make it work for me.

I kept the number of photos even between my two boys. I left spots to feature 3D stickers of each of the characters they portrayed.

As I often do I made one photo larger and matted it to make it stand out.  For the circles I used patterned paper with tone on tone colors so that they wouldn't compete with the colorful photos.

I used pop dots to make the circles stand off the cardstock.  The depth is visible when you look at the layout, but is hard to see in these photos.

I wanted some visual division between the series of photos and the rest of the layout.  I found this sheer ribbon that fades from yellow to orange.  It was the perfect addition to the layout.  So that you wouldn't see any adhesive I ran the ribbon through my Xyron.  It worked perfectly.

Not only did my boys dress as favorite characters, they were quite the characters themselves that evening.  I loved the play on words for my title.  I can't wait to see what characters they will decide to be this year!

Christmas in July

How can we even begin to be talking about Christmas yet?!?  But over at the Fantabulous Cricut Blog they are doing just that.  And since I have not yet scrapped all my Christmas photos, why not play along?

I made this layout of photos from this year's Pre-School Christmas program.  They sang Rudolph.

I drew my inspiration from this layout.  I loved that one photo was bigger while the others were smaller in the series.  I did some re-adjusting to my layout, but created a similar result.

I used ribbon to create strips of pattern beneath the large photo.  I also pulled the colors from my son's shirt.  It is still definitely a Christmas page, but I liked the contrast of the blue with the green.  Gave the page a nice twist to the traditional Christmasy colors.

I cut my title and reindeer with my Cricut.  I then used a hole punch to get the small red nose.  I continued the ribbon onto this page to bring the two pages together.

It's kinda fun thinking about Christmas in July!