She Rocks.

This was the layout I made for the design team assignment of using markers last week.  That awesome little girl who’s rocking out is a stamp from My Favorite Things.  I stamped it and then gave it to Summer and asked her to color it for me.  I think I’ll give her some more to color for me that I will use on cards!  Anyway, check it out:

Tuesday means…

my latest design team assignment for Practical Scrappers is being shown on the blog over there, so I hope you’ll click over and check it out.

Here’s a sneak peek:

Our job was to use glitter or bling, which I just realized is not even in my sneak peek!  ha ha  Click here to go see my 2-page spread.

It’s heavenly…

My friend Edie and I have put our photos up on the Sunday Shutterbugs blog.  The word this week was HEAVENLY.  Oh, that Edie always picks the hard ones!  Click here to see our photos and show us yours!

The Best Day Ever.

Recently the design team at Practical Scrappers had an assignment to use stamps in some way and I chose this digital stamp from The Stamping Boutique.  I’m not much of a stamper and I’ve never used a digital stamp!  Her name is Rainy Cynthia Fairy, and I knew once again I had the perfect photos to go along with her.  I printed her out on watercolor paper (because she’s RAINY Cynthia, ya know) and colored her in with my watercolor pencils and then spritzed her, but I didn’t do such a great job (too much water) and the colors started running.  I wasn’t about to give up and throw her away after all that coloring work, so I decided to cut her out after using a Kleenex to sop up all the water running down the paper. 

Here’s Cynthia before:

And here’s the after version!

And here’s the entire layout with Cynthia on it.  See why she’s perfect? 

This is just another example of why I love to scrapbook.  And why I love these types of photos more than the fabulous studio photos (don’t get me wrong…i love those too!).  But studio photos don’t tell a STORY.  And I scrapbook to tell the stories that I know I won’t remember later.  And this is one of them.  I don’t think you can read the journaling on here, so I will tell you what it says.

I love how she loves the rain.

She had so much fun in our backyard where it floods and makes a mini pond.

I could watch her for hours jumping in and running through.  June 14, 2003.

Even now, looking at these photos almost 7 years after they were taken, I remember how much joy I felt watching this kid in that huge puddle in the backyard.  I remember how much joy SHE felt while doing it.  She was only 3 years old.  Could it really have been that long ago?  And that same spot in the backyard still floods and fills up whenever it rains really hard, and every time it does I look out the window and see the “mini pond” again and I remember.  And because this page is in my scrapbook now, I will be able to remember even when I don’t anymore.

Sneaky Peeky…

of my latest project for the design team at Practical Scrappers.  This week we had to use markers, which isn’t something I do a lot so it was a nice change of pace.  I actually gave my markers to Summer with this stamped image and asked her to color it for me.  I knew I had the perfect photo to go along with it. 

Go on over to Practical Scrappers here and see what the finished page looks like!

Going green….

Edie and I posted our photos on the Sunday Shutterbugs blog yesterday.  This week is another G word and we’re going GREEN.  I’m pretty happy with my photo for a change! 

Here are a few that didn’t make the cut…

So go on over to the Shutterbugs blog here and check out our green-ness….

Family.

I showed a sneek peak of this recently and then forgot to show you the entire layout.  It’s all my brain’s fault!  This was a design team project for Practical Scrappers.

Okay, so here’s something that happens to me a lot.  I will make a scrapbook page.  I will hang it up in my studio usually, especially if I really love it.  A few days might go by, perhaps a few weeks, and I will look at it with new eyes and decide it’s missing something or an item needs to be removed…..or whatever.  In the case of this one, right from the beginning when I made it I was bugged by these acrylic “ghost” hearts from Heidi Swapp because you couldn’t see them very well.  Yeah, I know that’s sort of the point, but I couldn’t help it. 

So the other day I was pulling down some pages that were hanging to put them into an actual scrapbook, and this one was calling my name.  For one thing, there’s no date and that ALWAYS makes me crazy.  It was always my intention to add a date; I just have to find the other photos taken that day and get the date off the back of one of them.  But the hearts were bugging me still, so I added some red Stickles just around the edges of the heart. 

I’ll show you a before and after.  Here’s before I outlined the hearts:

and here’s after:

(because of my flash, you can also tell that I used that yummy Bazzill Bling cardstock on this one too!)

(yes, you can see the glue dot through that clear heart, but you really can’t see it when the page is inside the page protector!)

I think I like it better now.  Doesn’t matter….I’m calling it DONE and it’s going in the scrapbook!

P.S.  Am I the only person who does this?  Goes back and changes and tweaks pages later?  I mean, I don’t do it YEARS later (although sometimes I WANT TO…. ha ha), just a “bit” later.  Do you?

Happy Anniversary!

Here’s a card I made recently.  It was one of those times where the hubby says “Oh, I saw in the paper Mr. So-and-So are having their 60th anniversary….can you make me a card yesterday?”  ha ha 

You know what’s funny?  That is American Crafts paper and I hated it (and I usually love everything they make), I couldn’t even think of using it on a scrapbook page, but when I used it to make this card I loved it!  And that is why if someone gifts me paper that I don’t like or it comes in a kit that I buy or something like that, I will hang onto it for a while thinking maybe I could use it for a card instead.  Just because I don’t like it doesn’t mean NO ONE will like it, right? 

See how that gorgeous gray paper shimmers?  That’s Bazzill Bling cardstock….oh how I love it!