Agghhh....

Okay - I spent at least an hour or so working on this layout of Sophia when she first started walking. For the most part, I thought it turned out well. I went to re-size it to post it on my blog.... and.... can you believe it, I made the original a 4x4 inch layout instead of a 12x12 inch. AND I CAN'T ENLARGE IT.... AGHHHH. No wonder the elements were so huge when I first put them on the page.

So here it is, I will be doing it again in the next several days.

Kit by Lindsay Jane - Baby girl.

Photo mask3 by Bitney from her blog at: http://bintysscrapbooks.blogspot.com/

My parents wedding

Hello - a simple picture of my parents when they married.

My first QP freebie

Whoo Hoo.... I made my first QP freebie.

I got to talking (e-mailing) to a very nice lady today. This turned to that and I used her kit from the Stuff to Scrap contest to make a quick page. You can find at it her blog:

http://mommymetimescrapper.blogspot.com/

Here's the QP with my adorable daughter this past summer. Head on over to her web site and pick it up.

I have a follower !!!

A big thank you to my first follower.

After some thought and a bunch of postings done yesterday. I decided not to apply to the CT team I was aiming for. It just didn't seem like a good fit for me at this time. I'm still on the hunt for one though.

So today, another of my favorite designers released a new kit called Jr. Aviator.

My husband likes to build AV controlled airplanes. He doesn't do it too much and he hasn't flown one in years, but he and the little guy talk about getting out there and flying one together. In addition, my son has been building this plane out of scrap pieces of wood from the basement for months now. Everytime he finds a bottle cap, the kids call them guppies, he glues it to the plane. It has an old hockey puck for one of the wheels. The other day he took some scrap pieces of wood molding from the basement and painted them to add to the plane at a later day. One day I'll have to get a picture of it.

I regress, anyway, Lliella offered a gift certificate to her store for anybody who submitted a cool layout with her latest kit. I search through my photos and came across some cool pictures of the kids play at our friends house. Wish me luck.

http://scrapgoo.lliella.com/

my latest layout

This is the layout I have been working on the past couple of days. It's of my son's first trip to the zoo. As I've said before, I'm a template junkie, and this one was from Yin designs. She's awesome. The kit is "Gone Wild" by Cinzia Loosemore.

I have to say, I'm a collect of kits with cute little zoo animals in them.

http://simplyyin.blogspot.com/

Trying something new out

I made this layout a few weeks back, these are my kids last year. I wanted to try something a little different and use a clipping mask on the paper. I love how this turned out. Kit by Kimberly Stewart.

Simple and clean layout

If a designer gives you a cluster - use it (I certainly did). No easier way to make a layout sparkle. I love the simplicity of this. Maybe using a pre-made cluster will give new scrappers the confidence about their layouts and even allow them to focus a little more on the journal writing.

Telling a story

As you can see from my last post, my scrapbooking is really about documenting my children's life. I want to tell them a story, so when I'm gone they can look back and see how much they are loved. I hope that if it's something I would use to tell my own story, that somebody else could use it to tell their story too.

P.S. - I totally love wrapping ribbons around frames now! I'm also into staples.

creating memories, not just for them, but for me

My son's room is decorated in Zoo animals. He's approaching 6 and I know one of these days he's going to want to paint over the picture of the zoo animals in his room and put up a race car or a train. I might cry that day, but my husband fully supports letting our little guy change his decorations when he so chooses. For now, he's still my baby, but when he's older, I want him to see the cool mural that we had in his room, not just for him, but for me also.

The whole top half of the layout is the picture from his room.

White space challenge winner

This layout was choosen as one of the top 3 in the White Space challenge that was held over at SBE for their birthday celebration. I won a gift certificate to their store. I have to admit, I struggled with this, but I loved the way it turned out.

Jumpa jumpa

I've been going back and doing some of my son's early scrapbooking pictures. May as well take advantage of the creative juices while they are running.

My son loved his Exersaucer. We called it jumpa jumpa because everytime he go into it, he jumped. I love the expressions on his face.

Everything but the staples and tape are from the kit "New Beginnings" from Scrap that Idea. Now I know I'm going to try to get on a CT from a different store, but I wanted to showcase my latest stuff anyway.

Boys are a little harder, in some ways.

I have to say that doing layouts for my son is much more difficult then for my daughter. For girls, you can always throw in some cute ribbons, flowers, or little animals. Boys, on the other hand, well you know, they like mud....

So here is a simple layout I did of my son from this past spring with a template by MAH designs from her blog at: mahdigitaldesigns.blogspot.com

Simple, yet effective. I think this is actually the 3rd attempt I made to so this layout! My son loves it, I'm okay with it.

Finding the right place to fit in

I have to admit, since I started posting my layouts more, it has been with the intention of showing off what I can do. I'm not an expect, I've only been at this since November/2008, but I think I've gotten much better. I have about 6 galleries out there, I have to admit there are only a few layouts in each place as I wanted to get a feeling for the site. Some sites are more active then others. Some offer much more praise then others. I think we need to encourage each other along. Nothing is greater then when I have a seasoned scrapper tell me they like something I've done!!!!

In addition, I'm starting to get hooked on some of these challenges they offer. Currently I'm in a progressive scrap and I frequently do the multiple photo challenges to get the free templates. I'm totally a template junky.

So here's the layout I did for the January's collab through GoDigital called Shimmer. I wanted to see if I could do a cool cluster. Thanks for looking.

a non-scrapbook layout, a letter from Santa

I was inspired by Kristin's creative team when they were offering daily downloads from Kristin's kit called "Merry and Bright" were they offered gift tags. I actually used them for our kids presents this year. Not that they would recognize our hand writing, they are only 4 and 6, but I wanted to live a little bit in the past. Christmas as a child was one in which somebody in the family was selected to be "Santa" and hand out the presents. I wanted to do the same with our kids this year. Normally we just piled their stuff up in groups and directed them, but with my son being able to recognize names we gave it a try - it worked out great - and Santa even left them a note on the milk and cookie plate that matched the gift tags.

ready for another

Here's one more I made using designer K. Aagard's stuff. Most of the elements is from the kit "Pond Play". Unfortunately, I did add a couple small elements from other kits, but at this time I don't remember which ones.

This was before I trying to showcase myself for a creative team and limit my layout to just the kit at hand.

What do you think, isn't he a cutie.

lots of pictures

I love adding lots of pictures to my personal layout. I love to show the whole story (though a single picture can say it all at times). Here is a double layout I made using Kristin Aagard's kit called Mom To Be (a collaboration with P. Boardman). I did change the names to protect the innocent :)

I'm still trying to get the hang of blogger. The bottom picture is the left side and the top picture is on the right side.

I believe the flower doodle is from Lindsay Jane Designs.

scattered thoughts

Okay - I know I said in the last post that I wanted to show off some of my designs by Kristin Aagard, but I ran across this layout that I was going to post the other day and thought I'd sneak it in. My daughter and I went to the Disney on Ice show that was all about the Princesses. I wasn't sure how I was going to scrap the night. Although I love taking pictures I've found that sometimes I'm more focused on the pictures then enjoying the show.

Yeah.... for digital scrapbooking. I was looking at the Disney on Ice web site and they had this free down load to use as a screen saver. Idea.... Why don't I use it as the background for my page. So instead of taking pictures at the show I spent the $15 and got a program and sat back and smiled with my daughter.

The other elements are Disney inspired things I've collected along the way. The balloons and ribbons are from Kellybell designs store and the little Tinkerbell was a download from her blog. The lower pink paper was a free download offer by Mouse House Digi Scrapping. She does a daily Disney inspired offering.

The frames, tag, and staples were from the January DSO color challenge.

http://kellybelldesigns.blogspot.com

http://mousehousedigiscrapping.blogspot.com

another favorite designer

Kristin Aagard is one of my all time favorite designers. I buy most of her stuff. I'm going to try to apply to the Shabby Pickle's CT team, so I think the next couple posts will be with her designs.

This is my kids this past Halloween using "Trick or Treat" by K. Aagard.

change of my layout

I changed my daughter's snow angel layout after I got the posting bonus from Kimberly Stewart. I did the layout based on the font challenge and then decided I wasn't totally in love with the font. I love digital scrapbooking and being able to change it up prior to printing :)

One girl, two types of layouts

Here's my daughter making snow angels in the yard. Two types of layouts, two different feels, kits by two different designers. The single picture is with Lindsay Jane's Winter Frost kit.

The multiphoto collage is by Kimberly Stewart from SBE (I love her stuff!!!) - I used this layout for the February font challenge. I used a template by 3s - enough from her blog at: http://midnightscrapping.blogspot.com/

Why I digi scrap.

Long ago, I was walking with my husband through a home improvement show. I woman I used to work with was at a both selling products to scrapbook your pictures. Now, most of the people who know me know that I love to take pictures. I also have to say that I'm fairly crafty. But, after I said my hello's I left and didn't turn back. I vaguely remember my husband saying something about that (paper scrapbooking) would be something he thought I'd be interested in. I said something about someday I'd start something for the kids.

I have several friends that paper scrapbook. A good friend who moved about 4 hours away from me and 2 from work. The ones from work get together and work on their albums together. It would be nice to join along, but lugging around the laptop and my external hard drive would be somewhat of a pain.

So, it got me thinking about why I scrapbook. The girls at work would talk about their projects and it was something I wanted to do for my kids (my son was starting 4K that fall). Being both of my parents are gone, I would have loved to have something to look back upon for myself, but I still didn't want to get into all that paper, glue, and scissors. I already have a room devoted to my quilting stuff, surely I didn't need to claim any more space for scrapbooking.

I bought one of those digital scrapbooking page programs from the electronics store, played around, but it just didn't have the luster I was looking for. I started looking on line and was impressed by what was out there. That was about 16 months ago. Today, I love digital scrapbooking. I love that it's all in one organized space and when the day has been hectic and the kids are finally off in bed, I can spend some time cruising through the web sites looking for all the cute freebies out there.

I still can't convince my 2 work friends to change over to digi, they have too much invested in their paper products. That's okay, we're all in this for the same reason, to document the events that happen around us. I mainly scrap my children, I want them to have something to look back on some day and know just how much I loved them. I try to journal and capture the feelings of the important moments, but also the little things each day that make me smile.

Today I post something very unusual for me. A layout that does not involve my children. Recently SBB celebrated it's 7 th birthday. This site was the one I started off with and I visit regularly. I took part in several of the challenges, one of which was a template challenge. Here's the template and here's my layout. I used a collection called "Weather Watch" by Lindsay Jane, another of my favorite designers who used to sell at SBB, but is now at Pickleberry Pop. I love her stuff.

The photo, actually it was taken by my husband. I usually print out the layouts I make for the kids and put them in their albums. My daughter loves looking through her album, my son could care less. Will I print this LO out, who knows, but it's on the hard drive with the rest of my memories.