Zoo Day

It's Friday again! What are you looking forward to this weekend? I'm looking forward to an uneventful, quiet, boring weekend. I might even get some messy fun in if things go well!

In the meantime it's time for "sketch week" at Scrap Your Story, hopefully you'll have time to play along:

Edited: It seems there's some problems with some of the posts right now. It seems this week's challenge is being postponed, watch the SYS blog for updates! Some of you might just have a head start on the sketch. ;) Thanks. Jess

For this layout I used Fancy Pants Designs Park Bench, and some of their brads (but don't ask me which line those are from!). The yellow mesh ribbon is Bo Bunny and the alphas are from American Crafts.

Space Birthday

Are you glad it's Friday again or what?! I sure am! This is a big week in our household - our wedding anniversary, Rylan's birthday (turned 3!), FIL's birthday, and my store is in the middle of some much needed renovations. Gotta love the chaos.

But Friday does mean that it's time for some fun, and not only just because it's the weekend but because it's time for this week's SYS challenge. For this week's Scrap Your Story theme we're asking you to do a layout that's birthday related.  

These photos are from Vance's birthday party in December. We'd done a Pizza Planet/Buzz Lightyear theme so I paired up the photos with October Afternoon's Rocket Age. 

The background paper was way to textual and balanced for me so I took some watercolors and darkened out one whole quadrant and then faded out toward the center and bottom.

The sketch I based my layout on was Scrapbooksteals MWM Aquamarine 2.

Going Together

Yay! It's Friday people! That means many fabulous things, including a new challenge at Scrap Your Story. This week we're talking arrows - the cupid kind, the trendy circle ones, whatever it just needs to have an arrow somewhere.

This is my first try at what I consider to be the "SC look." I don't know that Studio Calico invented the look but it sure is as trendy as their kits are!

For my first attempt I used MME Follow Your Heart as the base and as most of the rectangles. The other paper is MME Quite Contrary. Brads are MME Indie Chic. Alphas are from Authentique and American Crafts.

Spell - SYS sketch week!

"How do you spell?" "What does that spell?" "What rhymes with ___" and any sort of similar variation on the theme fills our conversations with Vance. Which is totally cool and doesn't really phase us anymore, we guide him to sound it out himself typically and then go back to our own devices. But when he brought me a can of soup and the letters 'd' and 'y' and told me he'd spelled candy I knew that it had to be a page - that's a new level of word building right there kids! 

Needless to say, the two Instagram photos I had of him playing around with magnet letters fit perfectly into this week's sketch at Scrap Your Story.  We want to see your take on the sketch - feel free to flip it, rotate, use it as an inspiration point - just make sure if you deviate to far that you tell us!

For mine, I started by pulling out some old My Mind's Eye Quite Contrary, I don't even know when it was released but it was some of the swag I picked up at last year's Scrapbooksteals Retreat. I paired it up with some of the chipboard embellies from Kraft Funday and a journaling card from Lush 2 Orange. 

Now I pretty much stink at drawing so I pulled out my handy Silhouette Cameo and had it cut a series of tiny circles two form the two circles. I hand stitched them with WRMK embroidery floss. 

The title banner was designed to say "party" but I inked it up and then covered it with pieces of a used coffee sleeve and glued the Thickers onto them. 

After I got it all in place, I felt like the circle was really crowded for my journaling and that the opposite corner was to bare so I closed in the page by writing my journaling around the outside - honestly a favorite technique. I loved the white pen journaling so much that I did a little doodling with it to help tie the bright white into the rest of the layout. 

Scrap Your Story - something from childhood

At Scrap Your Story this week we're asking you to bust out those photos that are from childhood - yours, the children/grandchildren, favorite toys, or something that reminds you of childhood in some way.

I went a little away from my personal trend of scrapping the boys' lives and pulled out a photo of my own childhood (and lots of pink papers!). This one is from Christmas when I was three, hugging my little sister.

Such a simple moment in a box full of highlights - Christmas presents, birthday presents, graduations. I loved it! Plus it seems like a good reminder that my boys really do love each other and just because a hug around here turns to rough housing doesn't mean I need to get involved. At least not right away. ;)

I'm linking this up with the Paper Girls Challenge Blog - sketch challenge.

Papers are from MME Follow Your Heart
Flowers and Thickers are American Crafts
Ranger Distress Worn Lipstick ink
Stickles

Scrap Your Story - Polaroids

I just have to come out and say it, I love the look of polaroids but always forget to use them in my scrappy arsenal. When Christy said we'd be using them for this week's challenge at Scrap Your Story, well I got pretty excited!

For your polaroid, it can come from anywhere you like, be it an actual nostalgic polaroid, one you hand cut, an embellishment, or like mine that I used my die cutting machine to cut and frame my photo.

My page today has some fun stuff going on, including the oldest paper in my stash. Check out that faux crocodile, wowzers! I don't know why I bought it because it's spent the last four years hanging around in my stash, I've nearly thrown it away half a dozen times. I think it was waiting for this moment.

There's also a few reclaimed items - the washer type thing around one of the brads, two bottle caps, and a penny that the boys wanted to run through one of those souvenir penny machines. 

As for other products:

Papers are from BasicGrey PB&J, MME Lost and Found, and Authentique Loyal

Brads are Paper Studios and Teresa Collins On the Edge

Washi is Love My Tapes

Stickers are 3Bugs Blast off!

Ink is Colorbox Black Pigment

Playing Games Embossing folder from Tim Holtz 

Flocking, tags, tab are stash

I'm entering this one in a couple of challenges as well:

Scrapbooksteals MWM Peridot 5 sketch

Scrapbooksteals MCM Life: celebrate an everyday event (playing with siblings)

SWAT Drill #9 Cool Colors

Scrap Our Stash #4 All About Our Guys + use 5 or more brads

Scrap Your Story - sun burst

When Christy announced that this week's technique was going to be sunburst I inwardly groaned. Love the way they look, but not such a fan of making them. I was looking through my papers for an upcoming project and found this MME Ooh La La paper that had a burst printed into it. Scoooore! 

I had two pieces so I cut one set of the pattern and popped it up to give a touch of dimension - don't worry I used the yellow part of the second sheet on that other project I mentioned. 

Then I just layered up a bunch of scraps from the line/similar colored lines. I just love how it turned out  AND I didn't have to give blood sweat and tears to make that burst perfect. 

Now, go check out what the rest of the design team did over at Scrap Your Story. 

Scrap Your Story - mixed alphas

Why is it that when someone wants you to use a technique suddenly coming up with it is rough? I use mixed alphas is titles on a regular basis, but when I sat down to work on this week's Scrap Your Story challenge all I could come up with was one word titles? Yeah, I'm a mess. But I made it work after checking out a friend's challenge blog - more on that in a minute. 

So for Scrap Your Story this week we want to see at least two fonts used on your layout - titles, journaling, random words as embellishments, it doesn't matter as long as they're there. 

Remember I said I got outside inspiration? I went to the Scrappy Friends challenge and Rochelle had posted some word art to use on a page somehow. I picked one tiny section of the text but I think it sort of sums up the point of the word art!

For the other Scrappy Friends:

Kerys: recipe using stars, layering and stamping (the doily/flourishy thing on the star)

Brenda: sketch

Kristi B.: use logo from packaging (didn't manage to include that one but thought I'd include it in case you wanted to play!)

And here's a close up of that title. Isn't it fun? I just love how the boys are holding hands - Vance wanted to help Rylan on our walk home from the park. So cute. 

Most of the papers are BasicGrey PB&J, but there's also AC Amy Tangerine, Carta Bella Beautiful Moments, Cosmo Cricket Joy Ride, and EP This & That yellow cardstock. 

Sticky alphas come from American Crafts Thickers, BasicGrey PB&J, MME Lime Twist, and Jenni Bowlin. 

The word banners are Glitz Designs, then there are WRMK eyelets, MME washi, Ranger Distress Faded Jeans, MME twine with a WRMK Sew Easy sewing head, and 7Gypsies brads. 

I also used black thread for machine stitching. 

The arrow and heart are from the Kiwi Lane Sweetheart mini design templates, the flower, bracket, star, and tags are templates too. 

Scrap Your Story - sketch

Sketch week is probably my favorite week at Scrap Your Story! Actually, I really like them all, but if I had to pick one it'd be sketch. Anywho, Christy drew up this fab sketch:

 

And here's what I did with it:

The base of the card is AC cardstock. The larger banners are made from WRMK washi sheets/paper. There's two colors of thread with the machine stitching, lots of Ranger Distress Stickles, and papers, blackboard and die cuts from Cosmo Cricket Joy Ride, plus buttons from stash, a piece of Bo Bunny "leather" ribbon, alphas from AC Thickers, and brads from Girl's Paperie. Red and yellow thread for machine stitching.

Now don't forget to go link up those pages, can't wait to see what you do with the sketch!

I'm linking this up to S.W.A.T. Basic Training #7 - Tic-Tac-Toe challenge. I chose the vertical row on the left - 3 buttons, stitching, and 3 different manufacturers. One of my buttons is one of those tinted clear ones but you can see the floss holding it in place as the third but the others are obvious from my products list.  

Scrap Your Story - favorites

We all have them. Favorites. And at Scrap Your Story this week we want to hear a little about YOUR favorites.

In case you've forgotten, our challenge schedule is:

Week 1: Use it (you will be given an item you must incporporate).

Week 2: Theme (your layout and/or photos needs to show this theme).

Week 3: Sketch (flip it, rotate it, tweak it...as long as we can see the basics there).

Week 4: Technique (we will describe/show a technique you must include somewhere).

And you'll have until Thursday, 11:59 p.m. CDT to get it linked up!

I know that I just emphasized the "your" in "your favorites" but I couldn't help doing another page about my older kiddo and his favorites. I'd compiled some of the questions from those "ask your kids this list of favorites every year on their birthday" from Pinterest and I *really* wanted to scrap them!

There's two tags in the pocket, one lists just favorite toys and the one with the twine has the complete list.

For those who like product listings I'm not gonna be much help here! This page is a page of scraps, but here's what I know:

American Crafts Chap

Amy Tangerine

3Bugs Blast Off!

Echo Park For the Record

Fancy Pants Rough and Tough

BasicGrey Origins

Kiwi Lane Templates Adventure and Tags

WRMK eyelet

MME All is Bright twine

Color Box Yellow Citrus chalk ink, Black pigment ink

Teresa Collins On the Edge griffin stamp

machine stitching, black thread

Stickles Turquoise

Studio G red glitter glue

Scrap Your Story - Journaling

From day one of scrapping I've tried to at least include a caption with my pages - largely because I remember going through my parents' old photos and there's little to no context included with the stories pictures.

When Christy said that this week's challenge at Scrap Your Story was to include at least two sentences of journaling I sort of jumped up and down. So easy peasy. I was able to find quite a bit of additional inspiration for my page from the challenges I'm linking to below.

Don't forget that our challenges run for a week, following this order:

Week 1: Use it (you will be given an item you must incporporate).

Week 2: Theme (your layout and/or photos needs to show this theme).

Week 3: Sketch (flip it, rotate it, tweak it...as long as we can see the basics there).

Week 4: Technique (we will describe/show a technique you must include somewhere).

This week I pulled out some total eyerollers. There's the parent joke that kids only want to play with the box? Well, this Christmas my kids opened all the presents and ignored them in favor of the Buzz Lightyear's that we acquired this summer. Really?! Thanks kids.

Or maybe it's because mom was lame about put finger paint in their stockings... anyway.

To get my misting to show up nicely I had to darken the page a bit, making the images dark but you certainly get the idea. ;)

Scrap Our Stash
Use 1 polka dot and 1 stripe paper. Use 1 bird/bee/butterfly (I stamped it on the blue banner, but there's lots of rockets and those fly!)

Scrappy Friends
Kerys - use hand stitching, a punch, mixed alphas
Kristi B. - use something that flies
Rochelle - color scheme
Brenda - sketch

Products used:

Bazzill textured cardstock, yellow

AC Kraft and Classics collection (aqua)

Fancy Pants Rough and Tough (black dots and stripes)

Echo Park For the Record (red dots)

Amy Tangerine Sketchbook (blue banner)

MME All is Bright (tags)

Martha Stewart Rocket punch

Color Box pigment black ink

WRMK random stitch sew head

Ranger Enamel Accents, white and black

Ranger Glossy Accents

Jenni Bowlin mini alphas

October Afternoon mini market alphas

AC Thickers

Paper Studios circle paper clips

Unity Stamp Co. butterfly stamp

Studio Calico graph mask

October Afternoon Sprinklers Wheatfield

brown embroidery floss

Scrap Your Story - Stitching

It's another Friday! You know what that means right?! Other than being hubby's birthday weekend, it means that it's a Scrap Your Story reveal day! YAY for a technique challenge that is sure to please. We're talking stitching this week - faux, hand, machine doesn't matter as long as it's got the "look."

Don't forget that our challenge schedule is:

 Week 1: Use it (you will be given an item you must incporporate).

Week 2: Theme (your layout and/or photos needs to show this theme).

Week 3: Sketch (flip it, rotate it, tweak it...as long as we can see the basics there).

Week 4: Technique (we will describe/show a technique you must include somewhere)

I do a lot of machine stitching so I switched up my routine by switching my thread colors. Why do I get in such a rut and always leave neutrals at the ready? The red is just so much fun!

This page had been started as a Let's Get Sketchy March entry and wasn't finished in time, but since I'd already planned to do machine stitching I switched it over for our reveal today. So here's the sketch that inspired the look:

Papers are MME Kraft Funday.
Other materials that I used include Ranger Enamel and Glossy Accents, Distress Stickles and Ink in Peeled Paint;  AC Knock Outs Christmas Punch, Jenni Bowlin mini alphas, AC Thickers, Kiwi Lane Templates Adventure 1 and 5, Washi by Love My Tapes, MME, and WRMK; and machine stitching.

And now to go celebrate with the hubby while you all cook up some fabulous pages!

Scrap Your Story - sketch

You know how I love a good sketch, so let me tell you how excited I was when the rotation at Scrap Your Story brought us back to "sketch." Sweet. 

Remember our challenge schedule is: 

Week 1: Use it

Week 2: Theme

Week 3: Sketch (yay!)

Week 4: Technique

Here's our sketch this week:

And my interpretation:

The boys call rolling up in blankets "being a burrito" hence the title. 

The background was created with a few techniques. First I painted on watered-down gesso, when it was almost dry I flicked on some October Afternoon Sprinklers which bled nicely with just a little help. Once it was dry I adhered the scalloped trim that I'd had left in my scraps (from a 12x12 WRMK die cut paper). I'd glued it at 12x12, so I crumbled up the edge of the painted cardstock to show the scallops in the back. 

The circles and banners were also made from WRMK Hall Pass. I used my Silhouette Cameo to cut the circles in a variety of sizes. Behind the smaller photo is a piece of Amy Tangerine paper. The brads are 7Gypsies. Alphas are October Afternoon and Jenni Bowlin. All stitching was done on my sewing machine. The dream bubble was done with Ranger Enamel Accents in white and black. 

So now that you're nice and inspired, I hope you take the weekend and play along with us! And don't forget to link up. I can't wait to see what you all make. 

Scrap Your Story - Spring

At Scrap Your Story this week we're challenging you to embrace spring. We want to see your flowers, spring color, spring pics, Easter, whatever makes you think "spring."

I pulled out some photos from March 2012 - we went on a road trip with friends the weekend before Spring Break and their college-aged daughter took these photos while we were enjoying unseasonably warm weather.

When I started playing around with the page it sort of morphed from my original idea and I realized I'd scraplifted myself. But as much as I liked that layout, I LOVE the way this one turned out.  

I created a mask using a shape from the Silhouette Studio software.

I used October Afternoon Sprinklers and American Crafts Mister Huey's. 

Patterned papers are Pink Paislee's Prairie Hill, plus a few Glitz Designs and Echo ParkScraps.

Grey Cardstock is American Crafts.

Embossing folder from Lifestyle Crafts.

Embellishments include: Prima flowers, Girl's Paperie brads, Glitz Designs dimensional stickers, My Mind's Eye stickers and twine, WRMK eyelets and twine.

Machine stitching and lots of inking with Distress Ink in Walnut Stain.

Scrap Your Story - cork

For a good two days all I could think about was what I was going to make out of cork for this week's Scrap Your Story challenge - very intimidating since I didn't have any. I also kept thinking about all the cork projects I'd seen. All. Over. Pinterest. 

Common theme there? Wine Corks. That's a whole-lotta dimension on the page until I realized that I could just cut them. 

Let's start with how I did that - using my bread knife I shaved off the curved sides to make the whole cork flat. Then I halved the cork pieces length-wise. Easy enough, right? In theory it is but it does take a little bit of sawing effort to get through the material. If you have access to a saw it might be better to use one. ;)

I really like how they turned out sort of brick like - it complements the background of the photo. 

Then I added brads to them, hoping to give them just a bit more of that brick effect. The cork is so thick still that the brads barely poke through the back. I was fresh out of my Scotch Quick Dry adhesive but had decent success with my Zig pen, we'll see how it holds up in the end and if I have to touch it up. 

I decided to go with flowers because I felt that they contrasted nicely with the roughness of the cork. I know, I know they're pink but I'm okay with that. My Sew Stamper just sort of finished off the page.

Scrap Your Story - embossing

Heat embossing, dry embossing either way you see them a lot on cards and at Scrap Your Story we wanted to see how well we could implement those techniques in our layouts.

I ended up using both processes. The dry embossing was done using two different Lifestyle Crafts embossing folders. A doily folder that I inked blue before running through my Big Shot, which gave just a bit of depth and texture and sort of cooled off the white white of the paper. Then the other was a small flower pattern that I ran the paper through in two positions to fill up the banner, I was going for a snowfall look there and a different folder may have done better but I still like the texture it gave.

My heat embossing comes in on the top of the page and then on the photos. I used white Martha Stewart pigment ink and white Zing! embossing powder for both the Martha Stewart snowflakes and the Unity Stamp Co. lace border.


I'm also linking this up with a couple of challenges:
S.W.A.T. - use 4+ pictures on a single page layout
About a Boy - use hoarded (1 year or more) product. My hoarded items are the brads, white ink and embossing powder, and the Echo Park for the Record paper

Scrap Your Story - sketch challenge

I love a good sketch challenge and boy did Christy cook up a good one for us this week at Scrap Your Story. 

Here's our sketch:

And my interpretation:

I used My Mind's Eye Kraft Funday - I like how the muted colors really make Rylan's shirt pop! There's also some Kiwi Lane Design templates, a bunch of WRMK wide sparkle eyelets, hand stitching with embroidery floss and some machine stitching, Ranger Distress paint, and Target and Love My Tapes Washi. 

I'm still working out the journaling for this, but I left the top of the chevron paper open so that I can tuck in a tabbed journaling card when I'm ready.

Thanks for stopping by, now don't forget to link up those challenges!

Moment Like This - DT post

Our challenge at Scrap Your Story this week is to include an animal somehow in our layouts. Well, we don't have pets, and the boys are into rockets and cars with a superhero or two thrown in by the bigger kid. That means, no favorite animals currently in the picture... current. picture. Duh! All I had to do was dig back to less than current pictures, WTG me! 

At two, Vance adored the Mouse, he still even likes Mickey Mouse Clubhouse when we put it on for them. Pretty much every kid goes through a period of thinking Mickey is pretty much the coolest, and Vance was not one to disappoint so when my brother invited us to visit him at Disney World we knew that this moment was a must. 

I'm not a Kelly Clarkson fan, but for some reason this song popped into my head while I was looking at the pictures of our time with Mickey and I knew it was meant to be. I dug out some sheet music paper, some scraps and set to work using a sketch from Scrapbooksteals.com to put this together in a snap. 

I was working on it while talking to my mom, who went on the trip with us, and I about cried explaining how I was going to use that song as a title. So perfect "for a moment like this."

A-Muse-ing

Today is a big day for me! My first post as a design team member. If you haven't been to Scrap Your Story yet, you should definitely go check them out.

Our challenge this week is to use one (1?!) photo on a layout.

Hmm, those of you who've been around a while know that that doesn't happen much around these parts. Luckily, I had this cute, though slightly out of focus pic of Rylan "helping" me get my craft on during the holidays. And let me tell you, that this child is nothing if not amusing.

 

To make the background, I lined up strips of Target washi and then misted and splattered over and removed them. I like the effect the strips gave and that it left a natural journaling place (because it's just not a page if I didn't journal on it!).

The papers and dimensional stickers are MME Andrea Victoria and Kraft Funday respectively. Mist is from October Afternoon. I used American Crafts Thickers and 7Gypsies brads. Banners are from Jenni Bowlin.