Mix Kits Pocket Your Year 2016 challenge

I was playing with the pictures we took yesterday on our 25th wedding anniversary and the create layout option in the Project Life app. I used 3 different kits for the three cards. The one on the left side is from the Confetti Edition cards, the one in the middle was from the Desktop Edition, and the journaling card on the right is from the Lovely Mini Kit cards.

I woke up with a sore throat, so we celebrated at home. I forgot to take pictures of the Thai food we got take out for dinner.

Divide a photo across pockets Pocket Your Year 2016 challenge

I've been playing with the Project Life app digital scrapbook page making ability to create pages with lots of photos with the same type of theme but taken at different times. In this page with photos of nature, mostly taken on walks during lunch and breaks at work, there are at least 2 pictures that go across two pockets, because I found that the whole picture didn't show in the 2x2 square but I wanted to show everything in the pictures. Since it's a digital page, there's some overlap in the pictures that wouldn't happen with a physical page, but I hope it still counts.

The first two photos on the left side of the bottom row are the same picture, just with the red flower the focus in the first one and the purple flowers the focus in the second one.

The other repeated pictures are the flowering trees in the second to bottom row. They are the third and second squares from the right side. The trees were close enough to photograph together but not close enough to fit in a 2x2 square together, so in one square I focused on the tree on the left side of the picture and in the other I focused on the tree in the right side of the picture.

There may be more photos put in two boxes but it was fairly late last night when I was playing with the app, so these are the only two I remember for sure.

Capture your excitement, make a DIY card, and document a hobby challenges from Pocket Your Year 2016

I did 3 challenge items on this two page spread. The first challenge, capture your excitement was completed with the pictures about my Awesome Ladies Project scrapbook sleepover crop layouts. I just got these pictures and the pictures to put on the ALP pages last week. Putting the finishing touches on the ALP pages made me excited to document the process of making the pages, which inspired doing the pages for these two weeks. Since they are pictures of scrapbooking, I am also capturing a hobby. Two hobbies, if you count buying scrapbook supplies as its own hobby ;-).

None of the cards on these two pages are premade. I used RUKRISTIN's new Awesome Ladies Project line, cutting the paper to the sizes I wanted and using the scraps and white cardstock to make the last few cards (I could have used white cardstock and the stamps from the line to make the last few cards also, but I wanted to use the scraps). I used some of her title stickers on the main journaling card and label stickers on some of the other cards to journal on. I like the way these turned out and I'm glad I finally used the page protectors with 4x4 slots that I bought a while back.

Layouts for The Nerd Nest 500 layouts posted challenge

I got most of the pictures for my gratitude journal printed a few weeks ago and put them on the layouts (there's a couple more pictures I need to print). Since I put the pictures on the layouts two weeks ago and today, I hope they will count towards the challenge to post 500 layouts made in August and September. Sorry about the blurry first layout. These are an additional 3 layouts made in September, which brings the total I've shared up to 6 layouts. 

Nerd Nest Challenge 13 - Make It Fit

Another layout for Megan Anderson's Pocket Your Year 31 days of Challenges. This challenge is called Making It Fit and even though Megan focuses on making your pictures and embellishment cards fit on the backside of a page protector you used for a previous layout, so you're kind of stuck with it for the left page of the next layout, I focused on a different aspect of the idea of making it fit.

I'm finishing up the album I've made for our Walt Disney World trip in December 2014. All I have left is to make layouts with the journaling cards I wrote, talking about the items I liked of the trip (which I wrote 1 1/2 months ago) and talking my husband into finally writing his impressions and making his layout. My boys did this months ago for me so their layouts are done. I made this fit in two ways: I have ten cards to mount on 3 pages, with 12 openings in the pages and I want to do one 4x6 card per opening. So on this first page I didn't use a journaling card for the first opening, I used a title that I hadn't used elsewhere in the book (and since I don't know if we'll go to Disney World again, this page made it so the title didn't go to waste) and the last of the twelve openings has a Mickey Mouse that is part of the patterned paper instead of a journaling card. So I made the number of openings I had verses the number of journaling cards work for me, instead of trying to somehow put two journaling cards in two of the pockets.

The other way I made this work was for the background paper I used on this page. I thought it would look cool to have alternating squares of two patterned papers for this page. The problem? These were both 8 1/2 x 11 paper that I only had one of and the pockets are 6 x 6. I cut each paper into 5 1/2 x 6 pieces. The 5 1/2 side is the vertical measurement, which worked for my idea to make it fit. I cut each of the 5 1/2 x 6 pieces at a point that a 1/2 inch gap would either be covered by the line of washi tape I used to anchor the title or the 4 x 6 journaling card. I then cut a white piece of card stock into 6 x 6 squares to mount the patterned pieces on. For the title card, I used some of the leftover scraps of paper to cover the 1/2 inch gap since washi tape isn't completely opaque and I didn't want a white line showing behind the washi tape where it's not covered by the title. The seams in these scraps are covered by the title so it worked. On the other 3 cards I made sure the 1/2 inch gap of white was covered completely by the journaling card. I made sure the washi tape was in about the same place on the bottom of each segment so that it would go well together. I used washi with dots on it because it reminds me of other Disney patterned paper I've used in this album.

I think this layout shows off the idea of making what you have work with a little imagination really well!

Another Fun Mail Day

I bought some other papercrafting related stuff the other day and it came today.

First was this paper holder. I bought a bunch of paper over the holidays when Joann's had their Die Cuts With A View paper stacks on sale. I now need to go through my old paper and decide what I'll actually use and what I should either sale or give away. I bought the paper holder because I have a feeling I'm still going to need room, regardless of getting rid of some stuff.

Next was this Provo Craft Cricut tool kit. I don't have a Cricut, but I do have a Craft Robo, which is close, except instead of cartridges, you can cut anything that you load into the Craft Robo program. This tool kit came with a bunch of stuff I'd been wanting to get for a while: a bone folder, a few tools to get stuff off the cutting pad that is sticky, a scraper to clean scraps off the cutting pad. I also like the scissors and the fact it comes in a cool little carrying kit. Makes it easier to keep track of. And Amazon had it for $10, which was nice. I also got some Cuttlebug embossing folders. I love both of the ones that have ornaments and both of the snowflake ones. The bird one and plaid one are pretty good too. The name of this set is "Winter Wonderland." When I was looking for the names of the folders I already had, the one with the hanging ornaments was one I really wanted to get. (a better picture at Joanns.com)

These are Cricut pads that will fit in my Craft Robo, since the cutting pad I have is pretty much hashed. I'm hoping that if I have new mats and the tools that I'll start using my Craft Robo again.

Lastly, I bought a 50 pack of page protectors for my 12 x 12 scrapbooks, since I'm out of them besides the few in different scrapbooks holding places.

All in all, a very fun papercraft mail day. I look forward to playing with all my new toys and not having my paper organized in stacks on my window seat.

Birthday Scrapbook Page

I really wanted to get something creative accomplished today, so I sorted through some photos until I found a group that called to me. They were pictures of my opening a present from some good friends of ours for my birthday this year. I used a tag title that I got from Kathy M at Scrapbook Addict for winning a prize at her cyber crop that she held in April. I mounted the tag on some ribbon. I then stamped some candles on a piece of paper (that matched the journaling block). The candle stamps are from the Studio G $1 stamp sets at Micheal's. I also stamped and colored a cupcake stamp. This stamp was originally mounted on wood, but I've unmounted most of my wood mount stamps since I find unmounted stamps easier to store and position. I think I got this cupcake stamp from a dollar store near us. I used the stripe paper because the horizontal stripes mimic what I'm wearing. I included the note that our friend wrote me and the card that they gave me. The big "Danielle" is from the envelope that the card came in. I loved how our friend wrote my name, so I wanted to include it on the layout.

My Wedding Album, Take 3

I've worked on my wedding album several times. The first time I hadn't discovered scrapbooking yet, so I mounted the pictures on white paper, printed out captions, and called it good. The second time was about a year after I started scrapbooking. Thankfully I decided to leave the pictures uncut (instead of cutting them into wedding related shapes, like I did many theme pages, Easter shapes for Easter, baby shapes for baby pages, etc). For embellishments, I used whatever embellishments I could find for relatively cheap, such as wedding embellishments from the dollar store or huge pages of stickers for $1 at the craft store. Needless to say, none of them matched and the pages weren't very put together. When the new Stampin' Up catalog came out in January, they actually had a wedding stamp set I liked. Not too cutesy, not too religious, just right for what I wanted. I bought it the beginning of February and have been trying to find motivation to use it since then.

On April 29, I started taking the pictures out of the old wedding album and did one page. I only did one page that night because our wedding colors were blue and pink and I'm going to alternate the background cardstock between blue and pink. I discovered I didn't have any light pink cardstock I liked to match the blue cardstock I had picked out of my stash. So on the 30th I stopped by Micheal's and picked up 30 pieces of pink paper in two different hues, one is kind of pearly and the other more a matte finish. The paper was the same price as the single sheet cardstock they carried, so I figured I'd buy the paper since I liked it better than the cardstock. Friday, May 2, I did two more pages. So at least I've started the album : ). I also still have all our cards we were given that are just in a file folder so I figure I'll also include some pocket pages to actually include the cards in the wedding album. I finished taking all the pictures out of the old album on the 29th also.

A page from my second attempt at a wedding album. Two little stickers and a die cut, that totally don't match each other, except for the fact that they all happen to be wedding themed.

Another page from the old album. Again, two little stickers and a die cut. At least I understood that odd number of embellishments work better than even numbers of them to balance the eye. : )

The new album page I did on April 29th. I bought the pink paper in the lower right hand corner in a package of 72 pieces of hand made paper at Costco. It was originally white, so I used a q-tip and an ink pad I have that is called "Satin Rose" and covered it with the pink ink so it'd go better with the colors in the layout. All of the stamped images are from the Wedding set I bought from Stampin' Up. The pink piece of paper on the right will have journalling on it. I am waiting until I have several pages to do so that I can print them all out on one sheet of cardstock.

Why haven't I been scrapbooking?

I've been thinking a lot about why I haven't been scrapbooking much, or paper crafting in general either. A few years ago I was averaging several hundred pages a year. Then life got really, really busy - selling our condo, moving into my sister's basement while we built our new house, working on the new house, moving into the new house, unpacking, having a friend live in my craft room for a few months, babysitting my nephew last year. The list goes on, even leaving off just the normal day to day stuff of homeschooling our boys and running a household. Yet, I used to scrapbook all the time. I like it enough that we set aside a whole room in our new house for me, painting it the color I wanted, setting up the closet so it was more usable for storage and everything. So why am I usually lucky if I get in there once a week to work on anything? For crying out loud, I have stamps I bought a month ago that I haven't even done anything with, not even adding the picture to my stamp index. Let's be really realistic here. I don't know that I've done anything in my scrapbook room since I finished the layout a day challenge at the end of January. I did a few pages the beginning of February, but that was in the living room at the birthday crop I threw myself.

As I read over an organizing article on Two Peas in a bucket (this one), it gave me an idea of why I'm not scrapbooking. The first reason is really, truly simple. I haven't printed pictures since around June 2006, except the pictures of us building our house. The pictures I have left are the ones that I wasn't really inspired to scrapbook in the first place, ones that are left over from when I was scrapping the other groups I got printed at the same time and I picked the other groups first because I didn't know what to do with these ones. I've decided I'm going to pick a sketch for each group and just follow the sketch, using ribbon or buttons or some generic embellishment instead of trying to perfectly match the theme of the pictures with the embellishments. And I set aside $50 to get new pictures printed. It'll probably just barely put a dent in what I have to print, but it'll get me new pictures, up-to-date pictures, and hopefully that will help me be motivated to scrap also.

The second reason, the main reason, is that I haven't found a way to organize my stuff that makes sense to how I scrapbook now. That's the insight I got from reading the Two Peas article. I have 3 paper sticker binders that I have a bunch of stuff in. I used to love them, I used them all the time and they were so great. Now though, I don't even remember to look in them half the time. I was really drawn to the rooms in the article that had stuff organized in bins and boxes, jars and baskets. I don't know why that is so appealing to me, but I think, over the years, my style has changed and with it, my organizing needs have evolved too. I think I'm beginning to be more visually oriented than I used to be. I'm also moving more from stickers and diecuts to stamps and textiles. I think I need to do another purge of my scrapbook stuff, and find new ways to organize what I have left. I think doing that will draw me to my scrapbook room more often. And it'll make it so my desk is hopefully cleaner : ). My desk, right now, has so much stuff piled all over it that it's hard to get motivated to even start because I have to move stuff to even make room for two pieces of paper.

Anyway, just my thoughts for today. I'm going to go exercise and then play around in my scrapbook room, seeing if I can organize it a bit better, get things to the point I can play a little today.

Danielle

Baby book for a gift

One of the reasons I took a break of a month from my blog was that I was trying very hard to finish a baby book for my little sister's new baby. She had the baby (a girl) on August 17th (I think, I can't remember the exact date, oops!), when her official due date was September 11th. I was frantic trying to get it done, since I thought I had almost another month to work on it. The other reason was that we started our homeschool again. It's taken me a few weeks to get used to the schedule again. Hopefully now that I'm more used to it, I'll be able to juggle everything a little better. We'll see!

I used a basic formula on all of the pages. I alternated purple and pink for the background pages. I put the embellishments on tags that were the opposite color of the background paper. I also added eyelets and fibers to the tags. There was a border somewhere on the page, usually made with pink or purple ribbon, but sometimes made with patterned paper. I added photo mats to the pages so she'd know where to put the pictures. She loved it when I gave it to her. I used an 8 x 8 album from a Creating Keepsakes album kit I bought at Joanne's a while ago.

This is the title page. It has a place for a 5x7 photo so she can put the hospital photo here. Along the side it says "It's a girl!" and has a place to put the name, date and time born, weight and length. Sorry about the pictures being in the page protector, I just didn't want to chance messing things up by taking it out.

This is the first page of the "At the hospital" spread. I used The Angel Company "Baby things" stamp set on the tags and then colored them with colored pencils.

This is the second page of the "At the hospital" spread.

This is the outside page of the "My family" spread. There are two pages on the outside and I used panoramic page protectors, so they open up to another 4 page spread that has a page for each family member with the baby. I think it worked out well. The stamps are from the $1 Micheal's acrylic stamp sets.

The other outside page of the "My family" spread.

The first page of the inside family spread. Since it's a four page spread, I tried to make them flow as much as possible. These inside pages use layered Prima flowers for embellishments on the tags.

The second page of the inside family spread. This one only has the ribbon on top and bottom to make it flow with the next page instead of separating itself into a separate page, which I felt putting the ribbon down the sides would do.

The third page of the inside family spread. This one only has the ribbon on top and bottom to make it flow with the next page instead of separating itself into a separate page, which I felt putting the ribbon down the sides would do.

The final page of the inside family spread. The ribbon on the far side helps to end the spread.

This is the first page of a spread about food. I thought the baby face was cute for it. The stamp is from the $1 Micheal's acrylic stamp sets.

Second page of the "Yummy" spread.

Close up of the "Yummy" from the food page. I used my craft robo to cut out the titles so that they could all be from the same font.

Cute little feet page. I just love pictures of baby's feet. I bought this stamp a long time ago at Walmart. I think it's by stampcraft.

Cute little feet page. I just love pictures of baby's feet. I bought this stamp a long time ago at Walmart. I think it's by stampcraft. She can put a foot print on these pages if she wants.

Cute little hands page. I just love pictures of baby's hands. I bought this stamp a long time ago at Walmart. I think it's by stampcraft. She can put hand prints on these pages if she wants to.

Cute little hands page. I just love pictures of baby's hands. I bought this stamp a long time ago at Walmart. I think it's by stampcraft.

A two page spread about baths. One of the stamps is from the $1 Micheal's acrylic stamps, the other from The Angel Company "Baby things" set. I colored them with my prismacolor pencils, making highlights using a darker color in some areas. I used wave letter stickers I had to give it the feel of water.

A two page spread about baths. One of the stamps is from the $1 Micheal's acrylic stamps, the other from The Angel Company "Baby things" set. I colored them with my prismacolor pencils, making highlights using a darker color in some areas.

"Sweet Dreams" spread. I always loved to take pictures of my boys when they are asleep, so I decided to include this in the baby book. The border patterned paper has stars on it. The stamps are $1 Micheal's acrylic ones.

The second page of the "Sweet Dreams" spread.

A first haircut spread. I included a clear memoribilia pocket so they could save a piece of her hair. I only had patterned scissors stickers from scrapbook supply stickers, so I cut the patterned part off so I could use them as regular scissors on this spread. I thought the baby face from the $1 Micheal's stamp set worked perfectly for this theme.

Page 2 of the "First Haircut" page.

A first Halloween spread. The title came from the clipart images that Creating Keepsakes used to include in their magazines for people to copy and use. The stamps are a Pooh Bear, Piglet and Tigger set I got a long time ago. They are dressed up in costumes and are "trick or treating". My boys think it's funny that Pooh's costume is a Tigger costume.

Page 2 of the Halloween spread. The mats are candy corn paper that I bought in probably 1999 or 2000 for my boys' 8 1/2 x 11 scrapbooks that I hadn't used yet.

A first Thanksgiving spread. The title is made with some dot alphabet stamps I got from Walmart. The images are from the "fall sketches" set from The Angel Company.

Page 2 of the first Thanksgiving spread. I love this ribbon. It is organza ribbon that goes from a light orange to a dark orange horizontally on the ribbon. The bottom is lighter than the top.

A baby's first Christmas spread. One of the ribbons says "Merry Christmas" so I let that be the title. The stamps are from The Angel Company "Winter Sketches" set.

Page 2 of the first Christmas spread.

A first Easter spread. I didn't have any Easter stamps or stickers that I liked, so I cut these jelly beans from a piece of patterned paper that I've had a long time. The dot alphabet stamp set from Walmart was used again. I saw this ribbon in the $1 ribbon bin at Micheal's one day while I was working on this album and just new it'd be perfect for the First Easter spread I was planning on doing.

Page 2 of the first Easter spread.

First birthday spread. I used The Angel Company "birthday sketches" stamp set for the images. I love these 2 step stamping sets from this company. You stamp the part that is solid and then there is a seperate stamp that contains the lines that you stamp next. It allows you to get a detailed stamp without hand coloring the stamp with markers.

Page 2 of the first birthday spread. The "it's your day" stamp is from the $1 Micheal's acrylic stamp sets.

I included calendar pages so my sister could keep track of the important developments in her daughter's life. This is the August 2008 spread. One page had a 7 x 7 inch calendar and the facing page has a photo mat. There is a place to write her height and weight. I used the dot alphabet from Walmart for the words "height" and "weight".

Page 2 of the August 2007 spread. I used The Angel Company "Baby things" stamp set on these tags.

September 2007 spread. I alternated putting the calendar on the left page when the background was pink and on the right page when the background was purple, just to give it a little variety. I used $1 Micheal's acrylic stamp sets for this spread.

Page 2 of the September 2007 spread.

October 2007 spread. I used The Angel Company "Trick or Treat" set for the images on this page. I colored them with colored pencils.

Page 2 of the October 2007 spread.

November 2007 2 page spread. I used The Angel Company "Fall sketches" stamp set for this page.

Page 2 of the November 2007 spread.

December 2007 spread. I used the Stampin' Up Christmas minis stamp set I have for the images on this page.

December 2007 page 2.

January 2008 double page spread. I used a called "let it snow" from the Simply Chic stamp line by Provo Craft for the images on this spread.

Page 2 of the January 2008 spread.

February 2008 spread. I used images from the $1 Micheal's acrylic stamp sets.

Page 2 of February 2008 spread.

March 2008 2 page spread. I used stamps from the "Baby Things" set by The Angel Company for this spread.

March 2008 spread page 2.

April 2008 spread. I used the duck from The Angel Company's "baby things" set and a duck from one of the Micheal's $1 acrylic stamp sets for this spread.

Page 2 of April 2008 spread.

May 2008 2 page spread. I used layered Prima flowers for this spread since Mother's Day is in May and all moms love flowers : ).

May 2008 page 2.

June 2008 2 page spread. I used a stamp from the $1 Micheal's acrylic stamp sets for this spread.

Page 2 of June 2008 spread.

July 2008 2 page spread. These images are also from a Micheal's $1 acrylic stamp set.

Page 2 of July 2008 spread.

August 2008 2 page spread. I used stamps from The Angel Company's "baby things" set for this spread also.

Page 2 of August 2008 spread. This is the last calendar spread. The calendar covers 13 months, from the month she was born (August 2007) to the month of her first birthday (August 2008).

This page is a pocket made from some baby patterned 8 1/2 x 11 paper I've had for several years. I included it so my sister would have a place to store all the cards they get for the baby.

I hope you enjoyed looking at this baby book I made. I know this post is kind of long, so thanks for being patient with me.