What's Your Trend?

 I recently realized that I have certain techniques that have become trends. I am not necessarily talking about industry trends. I am talking about the trends you may see in the way that you work. I have tried a lot of new things over the past year. Some of those things have become staples in the making of my scrapbook pages. Misting and paint are one of those. I hardly make a page on which one or both are not present. So much so, that many of my friends now identify a page as truly me when they see the mist and paint. Last year, I really felt the need to hand stitch on quite a lot of the pages I produced. I now find that I am not hand stitching quite so much these days. My latest love is to use pen to outline the letters on my titles. I saw it done during a Masterful Scrapbook Design Seminar. Now I hardly feel a page is complete without it.

Let's Scrap sketch 1-4-12 ribbon-jillibean soup, glimmer mist-fairway,sapphire and tiger lily,SEI ink blue ink, Fancy pants to the moon papers,Amer. Crafts thickers-orange alphas,My little Shoebox tiny type alphas, Sassafrass green alphas, K and co. star chipboard sticker. superhero bands- from our egg dying kit, tags made with toilet paper which was embossed, inked and cut to fit the tag.

Who knows which techniques will become a regular part of your design style or which ones may become your scrapbook trends. The important thing is to observe your process. As you do so, you will learn more about who you are and the things that work for you. This will be a big help in developing your confidence and in making your scrapbook budget go farther. You will know which supplies to buy, because you will know the supplies you use most. So now, take a look at your work and ask yourself what your scrapbook trends are.

A Journey into the Past

  If you are Looking for the Sketches For All blog hop, hop to this link...or scroll down, if you are feeling in the mood to read along.

  Almost 20 years ago, a tornado destroyed my Great grandmother's home. She survived and came to live with us. She brought with her a few things she had managed to salvage including some very beaten up photos. As you may have guessed, this was one of them. The photo matte was beaten and bruised with part of the photo missing. I had no idea how, or even if, I should scrap these until a recent NSD challenge at Let's Scrap inspired me to do just that. The challenge asked for us to scrap photos cut on the diagonal. Mother nature had already done the job of cutting the photo. So I scanned it, then set about to scrap the original. I matched the papers to the original scroll work on the matte. It's a wonderful black embossed leaf print over the chipboard style base.

Let's Scrap Sketch NSD#1 from 4-30-10
papers-Jenni Bowlin, Creative Memories, Basic Grey
Acrylic paint-buttermilk
walnut stain, alos used as a spritz
prima flower
making memories tag witj Jillibean Soup twine
DMC floss
7 Gypsies brads
Lace- unkown
Crate Paper banner
Basic Grey Stamp in paint-leaves
submitted to Let's Scrap, Punky Sprouts, and Sketches for All

The wonderful thing about my paper selection today is that each one was a paper I was not sure when I would ever use. The base is a piece called feed store by Jenni Bowlin which I received with a scrap kit. I liked the vintage look and so I chose to use acrylic paint to cover the feed store name, date and location. The red paper has been in my stash for at least 3-4 years. It's by Creative Memories. I liked the way it and the brown tones of the Basic grey paper made the photo pop out.  I am very happy to have made another page for my son to see in our family heritage album. I hope someday, he is able to share it with his kids. I invite you to scrap your old photos, no matter what their shape.
 Now, on a less serious note, I am off to submit this to a banner challenge over at Sketches for All and to Punky Scraps. I absolutely LOVE their cat button!

Chances Are...

only what we make them. Some people look at life and see the negative. Others, find the positive. I think perspective gives us the ability to make our own happiness and luck. I try to see the good and have a positive outlook. I feel very lucky to have my husband and my son. Our life isn't always easy...but we are happy together. My husband often says we live a charmed life. I think that is true
    The song for this week at Scrapping to the music was perfect for this page. The lyrics brought to life some of the journaling I used to talk about the wonderful chance my husband had in his job.

SEI mimosa papers and stickers inked with SEI lime ink
Basic Grey brads
October Afternoon mini market alphas
Making memories greenhouse alphas
glossy accents
Let's Scrap Sketch 3-2-11

The photo is of the hotel in which my husband works. The number was the number of his office at the time of the photo. I chose SEI's mimosa line. It's usually hard for me to work with pink, because I am the only female in the house(other than my cat). I loved how the Mimosa papers matched the tropical feel of the hotel.

Be grateful for everyday and for what you have. Don't forget to make the most of your chances and to share those in your scrapbooks.

Happy New Year

So many people celebrate so many different ways. At sketches 4 All, We thought we'd celebrate by adding some bling to our pages. Thus the phrase "Bling on 2011" was coined! If you love fun challenges and adding bling to your pages, then this fun event is for you! The prechallenge has posted. The rest of the event will soon be in full swing. I hope to see you there!

Let's Scrap Sketch 6-2-10

Halloween Bonanza

  If you don't know by now, I love Halloween. I love the costumes, the trick or treating, carving pumpkins...well everything! Sadly, I am WAY behind in documenting the photos that go along with this holiday. So, with many recent challenges focusing on this spooky holiday, I took the opportunity to use some of my new BG Eerie paper to get those photos onto paper.

Let's Scrap sketch 10-13-10

Pumpkin carving is a favorite family pastime, so I wanted a fun, pumpkin theme page. Add to that the fun of incorporating your senses into the page...for carving pumpkins is a very touch based experience. Orange Cardstock set the mood and I loved the textured feel of the embossed felt pumpkin trim from Recollections Autumn collection. To add to the sense of touch, I used Chatterbox corduroy brads to hold twine and handmade felt banners. I found the poem on-line,printed and stamped a tree onto the background, then used colorbox inks in chestnut roan, olive and creamy brown to mimic the tones in the BG paper. I did the same with the title. Hand stitching added a warm cozy feel while i-rock jewels and orange peel stickles added a little glitz to the pumpkin stamp.

To scrap the trick or treat fun, I used Eerie papers over a DCWV purple Cardstock base. This is a hybrid page. I used a printed title from CLUB CK which I fussy cut and distressed with colorbox inks. I also distressed a prima flower with black ink, then added an Eerie brad for the center. This was the first page I had made with my new I-rock. I love how easy it is to put on jewels. The trim is from my local fabric store. I have been finding some great deals on trims and lace there.

completed for Sketches for All Sketch-a-thon

I love how the many challenges out there get me in the mood to scrap. There's a ton of Halloween challenges right now from the Halloween party at Sketches for All, Workout #30 at Scrap fit, to the Halloween/Fall challenge at Frosted.  Also, don't forget to submit to Scrap and Stamp Saturday if you use a stamp on your page. So go on out there...find challenges, make pages!

Love all Serve All

That's the slogan for the Hard Rock cafe. Since one of my photos already had a hard rock sign on it, I felt it would be redundant to use that as a title. The slogan seemed like a great fit. I also had these great stir sticks with hard rock guitars. Alone, though, they seemed to lack dimension. So I added a little more with some fancy pants felt shapes. I also made some shakers boxes by cutting some musical notes on my cricut. I used some leftover packaging, added some star sequins and a little diamond stickles...and there you have it. It earned me the First Aid badge over on CLUB CK.

This is the 3-24-10 sketch from Let's Scrap. It was completed for Let's Scrap Challenge 58 and for frosted designs felt challenge.

Getting a Little More organized

 For awhile now, I have been working on better ways to organize my scrap area. I work so much better when things are in their right places. I also have been wanting a better way to organize my sketches and notes for on-line challenges. So when I saw the June Challenge Sketch at Let's Scrap,I figured it was the perfect time to make one of those pretty notebooks. After all...if the notebook is all decked out the creativity will flow better, right? At least I hope so.
  I used Making memories 5th avenue collection. It contains some of my favorite colors. Making this notebook also afforded me the perfect opportunity to use some of those K and company transparency and die cut butterflies. They had called to me in the store. Ever since then,I've been trying to find homes for them on my LO's....which is hard when you have a boy.

Pinch me...cuz I might be dreaming

It's been a few days since I found out...but I still can't quite believe it. I was asked to be a guest designer for July over on Scrap Our Stash Challenge. http://scrapourstash.blogspot.com/
WOW...I am so excited!!! this is my first guest design spot ever!!! Here is the LO that started it all...

It's my son's hand on mine. I completed it for the "get out of your box" challenge over at Scap Our Stash and for the Color room's Palette#7 challenge. My box...well, I tend to only use color photos. so I decided to experiment with black and white. Fussy cutting is something I never did before, b/c it looked like so much work and time was involved. Boy was I wrong! Now I really love fussycutting. In this case, I fussycut some Sassafrass PP and then used 3-d foam at intervals to add dimension to the page. the fussycutting was just what the page needed.

So...now I am off to work on some more challenges. I'd love to get that sketch challenge and June stitch challenge done. I have had some ideas floating around in my head. And i just need to get them down on paper...

If you need some ideas, stop by Scrap Our Stash  http://scrapourstash.blogspot.com/
or one of my other favorite challenge sites:
The Color Room: http://thecolorroom.ning.com/
Let's Scrap: http://letsscrap.ning.com/rapbook
Scrapbook Challenges: http://scrapbookchallenges.ning.com/
Just to name a few.

Danger! Sharks!!!

A few years ago, we had the wonderful opportunity to go on a deep sea fishing excursion near Nassau,Bahamas. it also happened to be my son's first ever fishing trip. I ended up with a lot of great photos! So many, that I ended up with two 2-page Layouts!

  I created this first LO  using a sketch from Let's scrap.
http://letsscrap.ning.com/photo/ls128-november-25?context=album&albumId=2186252%3AAlbum%3A94293

I have been wanting to scrap these photos for a long time. I had even bought a specialty paper from Wubie papers for this LO. However, for the longest time, I never knew how I wanted to work with that paper. Now that I am doing more fussycutting, I felt a little more confident about cutting the paper. I cut a slit along the fishing rod which allowed me to slide in a photo of my son and, at the same time, hide someone's arm that had gotten into the shot. I had so many oddly sized photos that I wanted to use. So, on the right hand page, I tore a strip of DCWV white core cardstock. This allowed me to group like photos together while distracting from the various sizes.

The 2nd LO utilized a Sketchy Thursday's 5-27-10 sketch:
http://sketchythursdays.blogspot.com/2010/05/527-sketch-challenge.html

 I loved the way that the words wrapped around the borders on the sketch...but every time I tried to type a word border or write one, I was unhappy with the results. I have seen a lot of color on color punches used lately and have wanted to experiment with the look. So I used my cricut and cut arrows and "Danger Shark" with the Cry Kitty font in white cardstock. I then created a border around the edges. The red "danger" signs are fussy cut from a sheet of Creative imaginations transparency. I cut the sharks using an SVG file on my cricut and then sprayed them with Sapphire glimmer mist. For the background, I framed the white 12x12 cardstock so i would leave a white border...and then spritzed the center with Patina Glimmer mist. I journaled on leftover paper strips, then inked the edges with Colorbox Prussian blue. Overall I like the results...it's just hard to keep the page flat as the glimmer mist made it buckle a little.

On a side note...I have just found another great challenge site: http://www.practicalscrappers.com/

and I hope to submit this page there for the vellum and transparency challenge.