I Really Love This Page

and that is not something that I say often about my own pages.  Usually I kind of pick them apart and focus on what I feel I didn't do right or for what didn't match the way I thought it should have.  This page is different.  I truly just love everything about it from the colors to the papers (the ones that were screaming for me to put them back in my stash so that they wouldn't have to be cut up:)) to the embellishments.  It just fell together.  The picture is one my hubby took of my little guy when we visited Universal Studios.  We were trying on wigs and he just looked so adorable!  That hair looks like it could really be his....

 

 

The next lo is of me and my little guy.  My husband snapped it at dinner one night.  My hair was falling forward and he snapped the picture at the perfect moment when it was framing me & Q.  The lo talks about how free he is during this time in his life.  He doesn't mind showing affection, wearing quirky things or delighting in weird stuff. 

 

I put a couple of pictures on the lo that represented just what I meant.  In one he is wearing his Halloween costume and had had it on all day long.  It was a gladiator one and it didn't bother him at all that it was essentially a skirt.  Now, he would not even wear it to bed!  The third picture shows how proud he was of himself for peeling the skin off of an orange in one piece.  So weird to be happy about that but he had been trying to do it for days and was finally able to get it right.  He displayed the peel in the kitchen for days until I finally made him throw it away, lol. 

 

 

 

Anywho, thanks for stopping by and have a great Wednesday!

Creating Scrapbook Layouts With No Photos

I'm not talking about photoless pages but about creating pages than printing & adding your photos later.  I talk about it a lot.  I do it all the time.  In fact, I have a stack of about 7 layouts sitting on my desk that I plan to print photos for today.  For me, the worst part of the process is editing and printing my photos.  My husband is an amazing photographer and I love the photos that he takes of our family and adventures.  Me, not so much.  My photos are often dark, out of focus, to far away or just plain crap.  Our older photos tend to have many of the same issues that the photos that I take have.  But, and this is a big but, these photos definitely represent memories of our life that I want in our family albums.   So I end up editing 90 percent of the pictures that I put on my layouts. 

Friends, I do not like editing photos.  I don't want to take the time to really learn how to do tricks with my software and sometimes my program has a mind of its own and will not print the way it should.  Bottom line, the stuff that makes me happy is the creating.  The rest is grunt work.  This is one of the why's of why I would create scrapbook pages without photos.  Sometimes, I will remember an event and get a page idea for it and I feel the need to get to work on the page right away and I don't want to stop and print pictures.  Or I will have a story that I want to tell and I plan to take photos that represent it.  Crazy right?  Crazy fun and easy:)

So you may be wondering how it works.  It is not hard at all to create this way and it works for mainly 2 good reasons:

Reason #1 - I'll have to edit the vast majority of my photos anyway so why not do it to fit a layout that is already done.  Photo editing programs have made it fairly easy to resize photos so the different photo sizes are easy for me to get. 

Reason #2 - Photos often need to get cropped in this house so this is a step that can easily be customized to make them fit a page I've already finished. 

This is such a great method for me and I have been using it for years.  While I do have a few layouts that don't ever get photos, the vast majority of pages are done and in my albums.  These are going to get photos this week.....

I was able to create a couple of layouts this weekend that I did have photos for and I have about 4 pages done that I created with my kit.   It did get easier to get some pages done once I relaxed about using only the kit products.  Trying to make myself only use the kit was a major pain! 

This is one of my youngest a few years back when we had this epic snow storm.....

 

 

This one is the September page for my calendar.........

 

 

And this is a layout about when my youngest was little.  We could not keep him out of our bed!  He loved his room and would happily nap in his own bed.  When we tucked him in at night, it was always in his own bed and he didn't fuss about it at all but it never failed, he would wake up in the middle of the night, climb a flight of stairs to get to our room and crawl in bed with us.  It took years to break him out of this habit!

On the home front, my husband has finally gotten around to installing the backsplash in our kitchen.  I LOVE it!  Seriously, I am in love, love, love....

 

Thanks so much for stopping by!  I hope that you will give scrapping without photos printed a try.  If you do, I would love to hear your thoughts (love it, hate it, or indifferent:))

Happy Monday y'all!!

Including Everyone In My Scrapbooks

I don't seem to be doing a very good job of that.  In fact, when I look back through my pages, there are some people that I love very much or who have had a profound impact on my life that I don't have layouts of at all.  Like my brother.  Or my grandmother, who practically raised me.  Most of my layouts seem to be of my oldest daughter, youngest son, 2 of my nieces and 1 of my nephews.  With my husband and oldest son thrown in every now and than for good measure. 

Why I don't know.  I have wonderful stories about all of these people.  Some photos too but for whatever reason, I don't tell them in my albums.  That must change.  I feel as if my scrapbooks tell a story about our family and as of now, the story is not 100% accurate.  I am sure that I don't have more than 1 or 2 photos of my grandparents.  Not sure why as we spent a lot of time with them.  Both sets.  My fathers parents lived on a farm and we were there most weekends and my mothers parents babysat me, my sister and my brother until I was about 10 years old maybe. 

Even after they stopped sitting for us, they would always get us for road trips, crafting, fishing and visiting (as my grandmother called it).  She loved to take us to visit her friends because she said that we were always well behaved.  I can remember many afternoons spent in her friends parlor sitting and having a tea.  Not touching anything or talking much bc kids in those days did not speak unless spoken to and they certainly did not touch.  All of her friends seemed to have hundreds of delicate little things! 

Anywho, I am making really good progress on getting my boxed photos sorted and should be done tomorrow.  Next phase is weeding out the duplicates and putting them in a rough order by time period and place.  I hope to be done with that by the end of May.  My duplicates will be farmed out to the kids so that they can start their own family albums.  Wish me luck!

I do have a layout to share.  It is of my oldest and my best friends oldest.  They were born 4 days apart and were as thick as thieves the first part of their lives.  Like twins.  They loved each other and could calm one another down just by being close together.  This is one of my favorite photos of the two of them. 

 

 

 

Well that's all for me today.  Thanks for stopping by and have a great Tuesday!

 

Creating With A Kit

does not seem to be in my lane.  I love the kit that I put together but I am not enjoying the process of creating with it.  I think I need to relax and just go with the flow and not impose so many rules on myself.  If I'm being honest, I had the same problem when I was part of a kit club.  I would get them and feel as if I had to use the stuff in the box and nothing but the box in order to be doing it right.  I'll give it another go, without the limitations, and see if it makes me any happier.  

I was able to start 3 new layouts, but none have more than just the general laying out of the pieces done.  Hopefully since they are mostly done, I will be able to finish them today. 

This layout I created about a road trip me, my husband and the little guy took to Baltimore, MD a couple of years ago.  Probably my favorite picture of the entire trip was the one of my son making the fish face at the sculpture.  It really shows the lighter side of his personality.  As he gets older, he gets more and more serious so it is nice to see him having fun and being silly.  Of course, he is much to old for stuff like that now that he is a semi adult:).

 

Alrighty then.  Off to see if I can create something decent with my fantastic kit.  Wish me luck and thanks for stopping by!  If you created a kit, I would love to hear how you are getting through it.

Putting Together a Stash Kit

is exciting!  It really made me look at the stuff that I have with fresh new perspective and I can't wait to dig in to this.  Here is a look at my kit.

 My papers are all from the We R Memory Keepers Farmhouse line with the exception of one.  That is a green iridescent vellum that I have had for so very long.  The photo makes it look gold, but it is a really pretty yellow-green.  Not sure how I am going to use it but happy to have it in the mix.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The flair is going to be a serious challenge to use with the other stuff that I picked out.  Just Keeping it interesting y'all.

 

 

 

 

Sorry that some of the pictures are so dark.  Don't quite know why my camera was being difficult.  Not a bad kit if I say so myself.  Since we are not planning anything this weekend, I'm hoping to get all 6 of my layouts done. 

The layout that I chose for inspiration is pinned here and here is my sketch.  Thinking that maybe I should have chosen a less challenging design but I love this lo from Leslie Ashe.

My plan is to set my thickers aside and to use only my cameo to create the letters that I need.  When I need thick letters, I will just cut multiples of each letter and stick them together.  This is really going to work out well for me.  No wasted letters that I have to figure out something to do with and no missing vowels that force me to change the perfect alphas for something else.  That kinda turned into a mini rant but I won't be breaking up with thickers any time soon.  Love them too much. 

Of course, I will still probably have to pull in more cardstock for matting and maybe some washi and splatter inks but that's okay bc I group those supplies in the same category as adhesive.  My intention is to hold myself 100% accountable to the challenge I made me:)  No cheating.  At least not a lot of cheating:)

I do have a completed layout share.  Two to be exact.  Numero Uno is a page featuring my oldest son and my feelings about him leaving home.  Specifically how much I want to see him happy in his life.

 

 

Numero Dos is my October calendar page.  I just skipped right over September lol.  I will get back to that in the next couple of weeks or so.  This is a crucial time for the calendar project, 3 months to go.  Can she do it?  I hope she can bc it would suck to have a whole year except for 3 months!

 

 

 

 

 

 I am so excited to get photos for this page! 

 Anywho, that's all for me today and thanks so much for stopping by!

I Love A Challenge.

Don't you?  I really miss some of the challenge blogs that have gone away.  They stretched me and helped me use my ever increasing stash.  Since I don't have anything better to do ;), I decided to create a scrappy challenge for myself.  If you want to play along, I'd be happy to scrap along with you.  I am going to be very ambitious here and give myself to the end of the month to finish.  So here's the challenge:

1. Create your own kit using:

• 12 - 3X4 Journaling or Embellishment Cards
• 1 Stamp Set
• Electronic Die-Cut Machine for Alphas
• 2 Flair Badges
• 20 Assorted Brads and Eyelets
• 1 Pack of Flat Stickers (The newest you can find in your stash)
• 1 Pack of Layered Stickers (The oldest you can find in your stash)
• 1 Pack of Chipboard Stickers (Crafters choice:))
• 6 Sheets of Patterned Paper
• 6 Sheets of Cardstock
• 1 - 6X6 Paper Pad
• 1 Roll of Ribbon or Twine

2.  Find a layout that you really love and make a sketch based off of it. 

3.  Use the sketch in 6 different ways to create 6 different layouts. 

The challenge is to use only the kit to produce the 6 layouts based on your sketch.  I am so excited to get started.  I will come back tomorrow with my kit.  Yay. 

This weekend I spent some time going through my photo albums and completed layouts.  I am putting aside the pages that don't have journaling or ones that still need photos and making it a priority to get that done this month.  I don't know if I mentioned this or not but I spent a few years dealing with a serious creative slump.  We have had so much going on and our life (& home) has just been a chaotic mess.  Nothing bad or tragic, just the way life is sometimes.  But I was left too exhausted to do anything outside of the absolute necessary.  Thankfully I seem to be through the slump and am back to creating everyday. 

This weekend, we went to check out a campsite and fell absolutely in love with it.  There will be no real roughing it, but we will get to enjoy sitting around a fire talking, roasted marshmallows and time spent together under the stars. 

We also took a trip to the Tidal Basin to get a look at the cherry trees in full bloom.  They were stunning!  They never cease to stop me in my tracks with their beauty.  But man oh man were there a lot of people there.  You could not even take 2 steps without running into someone. 

I do have a couple of layouts to share.  The first one is of my niece when she was itty bitty.  She is a complete character all of the time but this time she was outrageous.  Don't ask me what she was thinking, I could not tell you.  She had sand everywhere!  My sister is one of those super patient moms that does not get upset about little things so all was good at the end of the day.  I probably would have freaked out just a little because there was So. Much. Sand. lol

 

 

This layout was actually created for Studio Calico's Sunday Sketch but I never got around to submitting.  Love the page though. 

 

 

 

Thanks so much for stopping by!  If you decide to do the challenge with me, I would love to see what you come up with. 

 

Not Feeling Very Creative

We are still in geometry hell, it's raining out and we have a weekend full of plans.  So even though I have some time, today anyway, to scrap, I have zero interest.  I sat and stared at the page I was working on for about 20 minutes before I just gave up the goal last night.  Sigh.  Today is not shaping up to be much better.

So since I have no creative motivation, I am going to do manual labor instead:).  Stuff like prepping paper for some ideas that I have, stenciling some book pages to use as backgrounds and embellishments, sorting my cardstock, cutting leaves with my cameo.  All of the stuff that needs to get done but takes me away from creating pages to do it.  I figure that once I start touching all of the pretty paper and messy paints, I will be inspired to make some actual projects.  Who knows, I may even break out my long neglected cross stitch project.  I started it in 2012 and only seem to work on it when we take road trips:).

I really can't make up stuff like what I'm about to tell you.  I purchased some really pretty, plasticky alphabet paper a few months ago.  It was on clearance for some crazy price like 20 cents.  It's so nice that I really should have gotten 50 sheets of this stuff but that is a comment for another day.  Last month PageMaps had this sketch

 

Very soon after that I found my nieces very first school portrait and the idea for this page just fell together.  It practically made itself.  It only took me about 20 minutes to put it together too.  That NEVER happens to me.  Ever.  And I just love this layout.  The colors, the simplicity, everything is just on point for me. 

 

 

 Her chubby cheeks are just so kissable!  I did a journaling card to slip in a pocket behind the photo but forgot about it and glued the mats all the way down.  Crap.  But I was able to fix it by trimming off the top (the heart love tab) and taping the rest of the card to the back of the layout.  I think I will go back and add a few more things to this before it goes into the album but not a whole lot.  The first photo of the lo was taken with the flash so you can get an idea of how the paper is made.  It really reminds me of jelly shoes.  Love it.  Hate that I only had one piece. 

 

Alright, back to geometry.  I hear a big brain cramping.  i.e. grunting, sighing, erasing....

 

Thanks for stopping by and have a happy, happy Friday and a fantastic weekend!  It is supposed to be just beautiful in the DC area and we are going to get out of the house.  Cherry blossoms are in full bloom so we're going to brave the crowd and my allergies to go check them out.  We also plan to scout some camping sites while we're at it.  Fun times, folks, fun times.