I can still work a glue runner.

Seems like it has been ages since I scrapbooked. I know I had all the stuff our sometimes this winter, and maybe even for a week this spring, but I'm still scrapping pictures from 2010 if that tell you anything.

With Army borrowing my husband for a bit, I decided to completely cover the dining room table in paper scraps and glitter. It has been very rewarding thus far- there are few things I love more than telling my kids' and husbands' stories through scrapbooking.

The theme here is using my stash- I have too many sticker sheets with one or two stickers left; too many pieces of paper in the scrap basket; too many old unused products that need thinning.

Here's a little Ben lego layout love. Notice how none of the papers match at all? I think the black background and quirky colletion of stickers, paired with the colorful picture pull it all together. I hand cut the heart.

Pictures of Theo as the coach of the t-ball team! Using these sunshine yellow journaling cards and some old baseball papers.

The first rodeo the boys ever saw, using old rodeo papers and scraps:

I have had these cheesey red star brads forever, and I took a nail file to them to create a distressed look. Love how it turned out.

Perhaps my favorite layout of the week so far is this one with a single photo of my Theo and me. I used mostly scraps and some pastel paisley paper I was one step away from throwing out. I used an incredible layout from GlueStickGirl as inspiration for this scraplift. Again, none of the papers really match at all, but they are so random together it just works for me.

Happy scrapping!

I decoupaged my weight watcher's journal.

I've been using this ugly plain canvas journal for tracking my weight watcher's points for the year- on /off of course. It was getting ugly; a little spilled coffee, pen smudges... Yesterday I decided to make it pretty. I'm still only have way through it, afterall. And I like pretty things.

I'm determined to stay as motivated as possible. I've been in this visious 2 weeks on track, 4 weeks off track cycle all year resulting in the gaining and losing the same 12 or so pounds over and over. Feeling like a hamster on a wheel, and I'm tired of it. So, I grabbed an inspirational quotation from an old stack of rub ons, some feminine paper, and some appropriate stickers and revitalized my tracking journal. I am so happy with how it turned out! Here is the front and back, laid flat:

This is the front. The sticker in top left hand corner says, "Worth it."

Here is the back:

I'm 15-point-something pounds down, and on track again. Now hopefully I'll have some great weight loss news to report soon.

A little decoupage.

Every year I keep a garden journal. I start it in the winter, and sketch everything from seed lists to garden art ideas. I make lists of things that need to be divided, transplanted, and purchased. I draw pictures, plan the veggie bed, make dramtic wish lists. It is all very wonderful. One of my favorite things to have at arms length.

In the middle of working yesterday I jumped up, walked over to my scrap space and threw this together. I modge podged it onto the over of my journal. The vintage label is a sticker I found a thrift store. The odd sheen is actually a thin coating of glitter.


I haven't modge podges anything in a while... and now I want to decoupage everything in sight.

So, I made the cover...

Every year I try and do a Daily December album- a mini book documenting everyday family and holiday related things. Traditionally, I make the album before December arrives, pre-making the pages and slapping in commentary and pictures later. This year has been such an insane whirlwind that I made the album cover quickly December 4th- and have yet to write single thing in it, or even make a page. Nevertheless, I know I will get it done. I cherish these albums, and the hobby of scrapbooking so much, and with my mom coming soon I know there will be TONS of great things to document!
Here's the cover... wish me luck to working on the rest!


Merry Christmas!

Scrap-tack-u-lous-ness

All this rain has me going crazy! I love rain, and as a gardener, it makes my life easier. Just so happens that I'm trying to transplant a good portion of my garden, and I'd like to get everything potted up while it is just breaking dormancy- and mother nature will just not stop dumping rain on us. I've been living in muddy boots and clothes- even grocery shopping in them, because the second the rain stops, I run out and get a little work done. Last night, I even had mud in my hair before I showered. So silly.

But yesterday, the rain was just too much- lasting too long. I did my household chores, and found myself standing here with nothing to do. Scrap!

I found these two layouts from my last scrap-time, and thought I'd share it. I love the colorful boyish papers on the market right now, and my mom bought me some Ali Edwards stamps I am LOVING playing with.

I made this lengthy layout yesterday. This is one of my favorite kinds- stream of consciousness journaling about one of the kids to capture his essence at the time. I'm certain in 20 years I will cherish these layouts.

And this fun one of for the 2011 family album, documenting something the boys do all the time now- play legos together, build something, and come together to share the story.

Happy spring everyone!

Longing for Fall? Scrapbook!

Round about this time of each season, about 2/3 of the way through, I begin longing for the next season. I enjoy the craving, the anticipation of the change. During our camping trip to Northern Wisconsin I spotted several trees that had already shown signs of fall colors. My heart does a little pitter patter... for fall may be my most favorite time, but there is nothing I can do to make it arrive any quicker. Enter: scrapbooking.
I can easily satify this craving with a dip into some old photo boxes and my trusty scrapbook supplies. I tend to buy everything on clearance, so the next time I go to pull out a certain type of supply there is something new-to-me in the box.
Last week I squeezed in a little bit of scrapbooking Fall 2008.
This two-pager goes in the family album.

This layout about Hunter goes in his personal album.

Same with this other layout about Hunter.

I want to share this layout here, but because it features a member of our family who does not like to have her image online, I blocked her face with a piece of chipboard. :) Love the patchwork I did in the background here, using all scraps from my scrap basket.

Happy scrapping!

Thou shall not covet.

But it's sooooo hard not to!
October Afternoon's Seaside paper line would be perfect for those California vacation beach photos!

Scrapping 8.5 x 11

When Theo and I were first together, and also when Ben was young I spent the money on huge 12 x 12 scrapbooks and refill pages. I like to keep an album for each child's age year and one yearly family album. You can see, the cost would be pretty high with these goals. By the time Hunter was born I'd grown so frustrated with the cost of albums! Who has $40 for a nice albu that comes with only 10 pages in it, and then another $6-7 bucks for 10 more page refills that barely fit in the album anyway? Not me.
I had my eye on a few 8.5 x 11 layouts popping up in magazines more frequently. I did some searching, and found 2-ring binders and 8.5 x 11 page covers (by the office company Avery) were far more feasable, and I never looked back. I love that I don't have to fiddle with the binding apparatus on the old 12 x 12 scrapbooks, and the amount of the pages I can squeeze in each 2 inch 3 ring binder album is seemingly limitless. If they do fill up, I can easily buy another 3-ring binder for $3 max.
Most of Hunter's pages are 8.5 x 11, and I love them! Here are a few recent favs of Hunter, all photos from 2008 when my munchkin was still only 2

Happy scrapping!

How to Scrap Lift

One of my favorite things to do to jump start my scrapbooking is challenge myself to a scraplift. In many of the other fields I have been a part of, lifting someone else's idea is frowned upon. In poetry, you would not steal someone else's words and claim them as your own, but in scrapbooking, looking to someone else's layout as a template for yours, right down to using some of the same papers, words, or embellishments, is an encouraged art!
I can say nothing gets my creative juices flowing like looking through scrapblogs, or magazines and finding a layout I know I can accomplish with the supplies I have. Bliss.
I found myself thumbing through some autumn 2008 pictures that have not yet been scrapped. I immediately reached for a fall 2009 Creating Keepsakes magazine I had one file. I fell in love with this layout:

I love the colors, the circle, the patterns, the placements. And more...
I recalled some die cut leaves I had that would work well to accomplish this look, and the picture of Ben jumped right of the stack I had been looking at. Next, when I realized I still had some old metal photo turns I hadn't played with in awhile, things were really coming together. Finally, some paper in my Autumn file, as well as my scrap basket came together. The die cut phrases were in a box of embellishments on the desk in front of me; I pulled out 5-6 that would work, and decided to settle on them when I had the rest figured out. Gathering supplies took me less than 5 minutes.

I made the circle by tracing a jumbo coffee mug I have holding scrap stuff right there on my desk. I outlined it with a sharpie. The journaling accent came from a punch, and I made the lines as I wrote.
This is my favorite layout I have made in a long time!

Happy Scrapping!

Yosemite Album

For some time now I have been working on an album from our 2008 trip to Yosemite.
It's filled with random nature shots, the kids galavanting in a meadow, deer encounters, and my first time facing a real live bear! Some of my favorite scrapbook pages in the album follow:

I love the color scheme here. This was my first time in Yosemite in autumn.

One of my all-time favorite photographs. I have it framed in our house.

I mix horizontal pages in throughout.

I included an enevelope with holes punched and reinforced. I put the Yosemite newspaper in there. In another one, I placed the map of where our cabin was, and the papers from our reservation.

On of my favorite elements of this album is the transparency page. In between two "slicks" I put one transparency with hole punched in it to act as a semi-page. the 4 x 6 pictures are back to back, and the two sided tree die-cut gets twice the use.

Here's the back side.

Right now, this is last page of the album. I have a few more pages to do from our stop at the Sequoia's and Ben's getting carsick, and then I will done.

Happy scrapping!

Still Creative

I am no stranger to me-time. Daily, in between taking the kids to things like t-ball, swim lessons, and the library, grocery shopping, cleaning the house, preparing meals, showers and sleep, I try and find time to get creative. I knit, I read to stir up ideas, I bake, I garden, paint junk finds like furniture, and I scrapbook. All of these things keep me sane, keep me a functioning adult, rather than a mad-minded mom on a screaming spree.

I also find arting and crafting as a necessary part of my ideology of a woman. My grandma used her sewing machine, garden, and kitchen to create things like pillows, beautifully braided bread and fresh lemon used for cleaning or artfully displaying on the kitchen counter; my mom crafted from the time she was a pre-teen, even making her own snazzy short dresses in high school. She often wielded a hot glue gun for various reasons, and would take over my elementary school art projects with a dominating zeal. Her macrame was incredible. She made the candle-based centerpiece for our wedding, and still had a vibrant, colorful, garden.

I don't long for a career to measure my successes. I don't miss clocking in. I don't feel like any less of a woman for choosing not to work, and to raise my kids myself. I feel dauntingly proud, and satisfied with my life. If things never changed, and I never made a pretty penny, I wouldn't think any differently. Ideally, someday I'd make good money off my crafting or gardening genius, but for now, I'm honing my skills. And doing a million other important things like raising my kids and kindling my marriage, which is stronger than ever.

I have been disappointed with myself for not sharing more of artwork on the blog. In fact, while I maintain a very colorful garden blog, and even contribute a little to a blog about style and being pretty, I often feel like I could run a whole other blog about scrapbooking, another about knitting, and even another about diet and food. Alas, there is only so much time in the day. Despite the lack of New Year, or birthday as reason to make some all-important pledge to change, I'm commiting to share more of my art here, more often.

At some point when I started scrapbooking I got briefly jaded. I submited what I thought were my best pages to some magazines and never heard anything back. I thought that meant I didn't know what I was doing, and got very frustrated. I had completely lost sight of the reason I set out to make the pages in the first place, and just a few weeks later recommited to scrapping with a purpose, to share my stories with my kids and family in years to come. I came to find archiving my family life as part of my job as a mother, and my own personal contribution to history on a very small scale. For that reason, I never submitted anything again. I even stopped posting on sharing websites. But posting here, for my friends to see, is a whole different ballgame: one I want to play!

Here are some of my most recent layouts. I've been concentrating on simple pages with simple themes. Focusing on telling a story. As usual, you can click on the layout to enlarge it. Sadly, the pictures in the layouts are all from 2008, and I still can't afford to print any pictures. I have nearly $350 worth of pictures sitting on Walmart's website ready to printed when we get our taxes back next February. lol.

Happy crafting to you!

Vacation Mini Album

I finished this mini album celebrating a two day vacation Theo and I took in the fall of 2008. I had the album started, and sitting on a shelf for a year. Felt fabulous to finish it, and I wanted to share some of my favorite pages with you.