Easter Trip to Lookout Mountain 2012

This weekend I discovered that I am almost at the end of my pile of photos to scrapbook! That almost never happens! I guess that means it's time to get out and do some stuff worth taking pictures of!

Here is the second part of our trip to Chattanooga last April. The first part was here. I'm not sure where the super cute cars and buildings paper came from (it was a gift), but I love the colors and it just seemed to go with these pictures. The polka dot paper on the sides is actually the reverse side of the patterned paper, which makes for easy color coordination!

We had the greatest visit with Aaron, Megan and their family. I love scrapbooking events with them, mostly because their kids are outrageously cute. You pretty much can't go wrong with scrapbook layouts of kids, in my opinion.

Here is my layout in my new We R Memory Keepers 3-ring scrapbook album. I wasn't sure how I would like the 3 ring look, as opposed to all my other post-bound scrapbooks. I have just gotten so fed up with how difficult it is to add pages to post-bound albums, so I'm giving this a try. So far I really like it, AND these huge albums will last me years!

Chattanooga Lookouts

I've got a new layout nearly complete--just have to finish up the journaling (my least favorite part). So for today, I'm showing an oldie back from 2008--Dave's and my first summer together (married, that is). 

I miss a few things from when we lived in Chattanooga/Lookout Mountain: seasonal changes, tulips and hydrangeas, the mountains, and minor league baseball, to name a few. (But a friend just posted a picture on Facebook of a copperhead snake that he killed, right where we used to live! That is something I do not miss. At all. I pretend that we don't have dangerous snakes in Florida.)

Anyway, we went to two Chattanooga Lookouts baseball games in 2008. We love the cheesy, laid-back atmosphere at minor league games, and you can't beat the price! If only Red Sox tickets sold for $4.... 

So here's the layout of two of our ventures into minor league world. At the first game we got free t-shirts (always a plus to get free stuff!), and the second game we went to with Aaron and Megan (where Dave caught me a foul ball--more free stuff!). At both of these game (about 1 month apart), the stadium lights randomly went out during the middle of play. There was a short delay each time. The second time this happened, Dave got a little bored and decided to take a quick nap on the comfy bench seats. 

As for the layout, it's very simple. Some red, blue and white paper, and stickers (Creative Memories, I think) pretty much make up all of it. As usual, pictures are my main focus, so I included as many as possible, as well as a ticket from one of the games.  

Cloudland Canyon

Here is a look at some of the scrapbooking I accomplished this weekend. I got quite a number of small projects done, and it felt good! 

I have been very excited to scrapbook these pictures ever since I got them printed. They are from our mini-vacation up to Chattanooga during Easter. We spent an afternoon at Cloudland Canyon State Park, and it was so much fun. 

Usually when I scrapbook outdoors-y pictures, I tend to go with blue/green/brownish paper, but as I was sorting through my paper stash I found this background paper that I bought for super cheap at Tuesday Morning. Definitely not the sort of thing I normally use, but somehow I thought it worked perfectly. Then of course, since it's Cloudland Canyon after all, I had to add some cloud embellishments. Overall a super simple layout, but it's the pictures and colors that make it fun.

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! 

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. 

Maine Roadtrip 2009

In only a few weeks my family will be in Maine for our summer vacation, and I can't wait! It's been 2 years since Dave and I have gone, so I'm especially looking forward to it. We haven't decided whether we are flying or driving yet. Flying would obviously be nice, and roughly a million times faster than driving, but I think driving has its advantages too. For one thing, you don't have to be as picky about what luggage you bring. Also, we could bring our dog. And it's possible to make the drive fun.

Back in 2009 when we drove up from Georgia, my sister Annie came along to keep us company. Her job wasn't to help me and Dave with the driving, but mostly to keep us awake and entertained during the drive. :-) We had a van back then so it was super comfortable and there was lots of room to spread out.

For this layout, I wasn't so much focused on the pictures, as on the story behind them. I didn't take many pictures during the actual drive up, yet I wanted to document the long trip. I liked the idea of having a map that showed how many states we drove through, and our actual route. Making that map was time intensive! First I had to find a map online that fit what I was looking for, and was big enough to fill up a 12x12 space, then I had to print it, cut it out, trace it onto my paper, and cut that out. Then I filled in the state lines, which aren't quite exact, but thankfully I'm not a perfectionist (or I was just to sick of it at that point to care).

The yellow letters were cut out using a Cricut machine. The stickers were whatever random ones I had in my very-random collection of stickers.

Maybe if we fly to Maine this year I'll do a parallel page that emphasizes how much quicker that is. :-)

Spring Layout

I am THIS close to finishing a super cool new layout, but sadly I didn't have it done in time for this post. It will be cool though, and I tried a new technique (successfully!) that I've been wanting to do for ages.

So instead of posting that one, I'm posting an old one from two (or three?) years ago. This one shows how easy scrapbooking can be, even if you don't have a lot of supplies. It's another one of those layouts that includes random photos that didn't warrant their own page. So I just put them all together under the heading "Spring Fun." I used colorful background paper, some coordinating solid green and yellow paper, stickers for the title, and some brads and ribbon scraps. The yellow paper under the words "Spring Fun" I stamped with green ink to give it an interesting background (I like that it looks like patterned paper, but nope it's just a stamp!).

One thing I really miss about living in Georgia is the spring bulbs--crocuses and tulips especially!

Oh! I must share a wonderful new tool I discovered the other day. You may have noticed how I like to pack (as much as possible) my pages with lots and lots of pictures (to me, the pictures are the point of the scrapbook). Well, I usually run into a problem since the majority of my pictures are 4x6, and you can only crop 4x6 pictures so much (and since I zoom so much in my pictures, cropping is usually very minor). I've always wanted to be able to print some of my pictures at a 2x3 or 3x4 size, which I know I can manage with photoshop, but wow is that a pain.

Photosheet solves that! It lets you put multiple pictures in a 4x6 sheet, then you can print it at any photo place for the normal price of a regular 4x6. Genius! (This would also be great way to save money on wallet prints, if you are needing those). This way I can print out tons more photos, some in smaller sizes, and still fit them all in my album. Plus it breaks up the 4x6 monotony! So if you have tons of adorable baby pictures, or maybe a million vacation pictures, this would be a great way to include them all without sacrificing too much space (or money).

I've got one to two super crummy layouts that I want to re-do. I think I'm going to use Photosheet reprint the pictures and include even more in the new layout.

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!

Snow Day Flashback

As we are already roasting in the 90s here, I thought I would look back on some colder days. (I am working on some new projects, but I can't share them with the world because they are still secrets!)

This layout is from 2010 when we had a quick but heavy snow on Lookout Mountain. It ended up being only a few inches, but on the Mountain that's enough to shut everything down. Then the snow melted a little, and froze overnight, and we woke up to a crazy winter wonderland. We couldn't get down the mountain for church, so we spent the day with Aaron and Megan, and had some students over for lunch.

What's great about scrapbooking, is even though this wasn't necessarily a huge event in our lives (not a vacation, or a graduation, or a holiday), it is still a wonderful memory and now that I have these pictures and the page that tells the story, I'll always remember it.

The trickiest part of this layout was that I attempted to print on vellum paper. My printer did NOT like that. The ink wouldn't dry and stick, and it was frustrating. I eventually got it to work (if I remember right, the trick was to set the printer to the transparency setting and letting it dry for hours). I also tore up some plain white cardstock to resemble snow at the bottom of the page. Add some coordinating paper and some shimmery snowflake stickers, and you have a layout.

On a warmer note, my mom, sister, and I had a great time at the beach. Only a tad bit burned in a few places, but it was worth it!

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!

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?? 

While You Were Sleeping

While we were in Chicago with Aaron and Megan, we tried to find as many filming locations as we could from the movie While You Were Sleeping. It is one of my family's all-time favorite movies. We always have to watch it around Christmas (usually Christmas Eve). It's become such a tradition for us, that it actually feels weird to watch the movie when it's not Christmas time. I think together my sister and I could quote/act out the entire movie.

Since we had a day to spend in Chicago, I wanted to see as many While You Were Sleeping-sights as possible. Unfortunately I didn't get any shots of the train stations, since you had to pay for a ticket to get into that area (and I'm too cheap for that). We were able to see a few places though--my favorite was the river walk along the Chicago River (if you've seen the movie, it's where Bill Pullman and Sandra Bullock are walking back to Lucy's apartment after delivering the loveseat to Peter's apartment).

I always seem to have a hard time filling the last odd page in a scrapbook album. This one, however, was a perfect end to my 2010-2011 album. I used up some beautiful double-sided paper from October Afternoon (I just discovered their website and all their stuff is so fun!), and I added a little hand-stitching along the bottom, just for fun.

Thank you to Dave, Aaron, and Megan for being really good sports in dealing with my movie nerdiness. 

"Christmas Adam"

Sharing another layout that I did a few weeks ago. These were pictures of our Christmas celebration with my family. Since we were spending the actual Christmas day with Dave's family, my fam was nice and let us open gifts on December 23, or what we've always called Christmas Adam. (If you can't figure out why, it's the day before Christmas Eve.)

For a little explanation of the family traditions going on here: for Christmas lunch we always have appetizer-like food (everyone gets to pick their favorites, and it's always delicious). I try to take a picture of the food every year, and it's fun comparing what changes over the years. The paper my dad is reading is our "family journal" that my sister and I write at least once a year (we try to do it more often... so maybe twice a year). It's mostly full of inside family jokes, but it's always hilarious. Dad's smiling because he hasn't yet gotten to the article we wrote about him. :-)

And now about the scrapbook layout: I had a really fun pack of Christmas-themed paper, and I chose the red and turquoise for a little non-traditional Christmas color. Turns out I happened to have perfect ribbon to match too! The letters are cut out from my Cricut, and the journaling is stamped with brown ink. 

Chicago

I took a quick break from the wedding scrapbook to do some of my own pictures. (I was getting behind and the picture stack kept growing!)

I decided to work on my pictures from when we took a day trip to Chicago back in December with our besties, Aaron and Megan. I thought it'd be fun to do a silhouette of the city skyline. There probably was an easier way of doing this, but what I did was googled photos of the Chicago skyline, made a rough stencil of how I wanted it to look, cut that out, stenciled it onto black paper, and then cut THAT out. It definitely took some time, but I loved the way it turned out. 

Those are supposed to be glittery stars on the blue background, in case you are wondering. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to photograph my layouts. 

Hello!

Hello! I am finally starting this blog. I've been meaning to for ages, but never got around to pushing the publish button.

I wanted somewhere to document the different scrapbooking/crafty projects I am working on, and of course to share them with all you on the internet. (My family is probably tired of being forced to gush about my crafty projects, so I need a fresh audience.)

I am so, so excited about my latest scrapbooking endeavor. My lovely friend, Allison, got married in January and I am working on her wedding album. Their wedding pictures were gorgeous. Nothing makes scrapbooking fun like beautiful pictures.

I can't wait to hand Allison and Stephen their (very belated) wedding gift. But for now, I am having fun with the process of making it :-)