Gingerbread Houses

Happy weekend! So far I've spent my weekend cleaning up my house (which was really overdue), taking care of a sick doggie, watching a cute family of ducks that live on the lake by my house, and reading this book:

Okay, I know I've read it about 50 times already, but it's just too good. Probably my favorite of the HP books. I got hooked on it again this morning and couldn't do anything else until I finished it. Now I'm tempted to start book 4, but not too tempted since it's one of my least favorites in the series (after #2). 

Here's my layout for today. It's from back in December when we decorated gingerbread houses. I finally overcame my fear of my sewing machine, and did some zigzag stitching. It took a few tries, and I'm still not good at figuring out the right tension, but it worked here! I've always wanted to do that. It's such a fun way to add subtle embellishing. I found a lot of good tips on how to stitch on paper here and here.

The paper is from a fun Paper Studio pack from Hobby Lobby. I really liked the patterns because they didn't scream Christmas, but they still give a Christmas-y feel. The title was done using my Cricut and free fonts I found in various places. 

Friends

Happy Tuesday!

I've got another oldie layout to share today. (Life keeps getting in the way and preventing any new creations! Hopefully that will change tonight.)

Before we moved down to FL, Dave and I were living up in Georgia and were neighbors/co-workers with our best friends Aaron and Megan. We were so sad to leave them when we moved. I had a lot of random photos of us together that didn't really need a page of their own, but I wanted to scrapbook them nonetheless. So I ended up grouping together all the odd pictures into a page of their own.

Megan and I used to watch a lot of Friends episodes while we scrapbooked together, so I found a free font online to use as the title. My usual trick is to print out my title on normal printer paper, then rub the entire back side with a blunt pencil. Then I lay the paper (right side up) over wherever I want to letters to go, and carefully outline the lettering with a sharp pencil (or pen, or whatever). It helps to lightly tape the paper to your layout, to prevent any movement that could mess up the design. When I'm done and I've removed the printer paper, there's a light transfer left on the layout, which I outline and fill in however I want. This time I filled in the letters with a white pen. I use this trick all the time when I don't feel like printing something straight onto my layout, but still want to use a computer font.

Enjoy all these goofy pics!

Fenway Park

I don't have a new layout to show you today (kick boxing wiped me out yesterday, and all I wanted to do last night was sit on the couch and watch tv), but instead I'm putting up one of my favorites pages that I've done.

Not sure if it's a favorite because of the actual layout, or because I really like how the pictures turned out, or because we had such a wonderful time that day. (Or maybe just because it's Fenway Park? I think that makes it automatically awesome.)

Anyway, a couple of summers ago, as Dave and I were driving back from Maine, we split up the trip by stopping in Boston to see Lianne. One night we spent seeing the Red Sox beat the Indians, and the next day we spent exploring Boston and the Freedom Trail. We had such a blast.

As for the layout, it's nothing fancy. My real focus here was to emphasis the pictures, and to try and fit as many of them as possible on the two pages. I really like the sparkly baseball stickers. It's surprising how difficult it is to find sports-related stickers that aren't designed for pages about Little League!

For the title, I downloaded a free Red Sox font. I couldn't find a font specifically for the Cleveland Indians, but I tried to get something as close to it as possible. The "Fenway Park" I colored in with a white paint-like marker.

I say that all I did last night was sit on the couch. Well, I did get up for long enough to take this super cute picture of my pooch, Suzie. Is this adorable or what??