Michigan Christmas 2011

I hope no one reads this blog hoping to keep up with what's going on with me and Dave, because if so, you will be getting all our news about 6-12 months late!  That is my average for about how long it takes me to get around to scrapping big events, and since it is June that of course means it's time to talk about last Christmas!

Here is the page I just finished of our trip to Michigan last December to spend Christmas with Dave's family. This was a matter of having lots of pictures I wanted to include, yet I really wanted to keep it to a 2-page layout. So I squished them all in. I also had one random 12x12 sheet of really cute paper covered in penguins. I decided to cut out the penguins and assign each one to a member of the family in a border along the bottom. There weren't 12 different penguins, so some people have duplicates, but I did my best to match according to personality :-) 

Besides that, this is a really simple page and it cost me almost nothing besides a little bit of paper and some stickers along the bottom. Easy! 

Using a Layout Sketch

Hello again! Sorry it's been so long.

Got a little bit of scrapbooking done this weekend, including this single page layout for Allison and Stephen's wedding album. I wanted to try going from a pre-designed sketch (never done that before; usually I just make it up myself as I go along). So I did some Google searching, and found the My Little Sketch Blook website, where Liz has created dozens of layout ideas to give some inspiration.

I had two horizontal 4x6's to work with, so that narrowed down my choices of sketches. In the end I chose this one for my inspirational starting point.

And here is what I came up with (sorry about the weird glare above Allison's head)

I left out some of the frills (including the butterflies. Wasn't a fan of those), but I did want to do some kind of flower in the bottom left corner. I used a Martha Stewart flower punch for that, and whatever yellow and beige paper scraps I had lying around. I added ribbon to the top, because it matched the paper perfectly so I couldn't resist. For the journaling circle, I punched out holes using a nail (I know, super scrapbook-y equipment, right?) and then used embroidery floss for the stitching (I have pretty much every color of the rainbow, from my old cross stitching days). For the title, once again I used my Cricut and Sure Cuts a Lot software. I'm just now figuring out all the cool things I can do with that program. 

I really enjoyed having a sketch to start from, so I'll be looking for some more sketch inspiration for other pages. Usually I try to fit so much more than 2 pictures to a page, and most sketches don't do that. But for Allison and Stephen's album I have plenty of room for pages so I'm not worried about squeezing all of them in. 

Later this week I'll show some of the cards I've made using Target brand washi tape! 

Orlando City vs Philadelphia Union

Happy National Scrapbooking Day!! (No, I'm not making that up.) I was so excited to bring you this layout that I woke up at 6:30 on a Saturday morning to finish it up! (Okay, that is definitely not true. What is true is that once I woke up, I couldn't go back to sleep. So might as well scrapbook.)

Last February, the six of us went to see Orlando City play the MLS team Philadelphia Union play at the Citrus Bowl. I'm not a huge soccer fan myself, but even I thought this was an exciting game. They tied 1-1, but Orlando didn't score until the 92nd minute, and the way the crowd went wild made it feel pretty much like we did win. I even got a picture of the tying goal!

Instead of including any personal journaling in this layout, I saved the Orlando Sentinel write-up about the game. I also wanted to challenge myself to fit everything on to a single page layout, which was a bit tricky! I ended up having to toss some extraneous pictures, and cropping things really close. In the end, I like how compact everything looks.

I'm usually bad about doing this, but I'm trying to be better about labeling the names of people on the page. Not that I think I'm going to forget Matt and Melinda's (or my siblings') names, but I figure that down the road my kids/grandkids will probably appreciate knowing who everyone is!

Have a great Saturday! I'm off to the beach!