Are you a princess? Little girl scrapbook page.

This is the first page to the scrapbook I was commissioned to make for a woman’s daughter of her childhood years (the daughter just got married) and it’s one of my favorite pages.  The banner is a stamp from Hero Arts.  You can’t tell but the flowers in the lower right hand corner are all sparkly because I drew over them with Stickles (love!).

(click to see bigger)

The poem reads:

Can you imagine the joy I will bring to you with beautiful dandelions all in my hair?  A song I have just made up for you will move you more than any tune you have ever heard.  I will paint pictures that look just like you, with purple fingers and exagerrated noses.  I will make you cry.  I will make you laugh.  I will make you understand that life can be funny.  You will make me understand the meaning of life.  I will make wishes on shooting stars just like you have, and I will too watch them come true.  I will love you unconditionally, and you me.  Can you imagine the joy I will bring to you and you to me?

I love that poem!  What do you think?

Practical Scrappers features butterflies.

One of my recent layouts featuring butterflies is on the Practical Scrappers blog along with many other inspiring layouts with butterflies.

Here’s mine:  (you can click to see in larger format)

Here’s a closer up look:

These are pages from a book I was commissioned to create recently and I’ve been working really hard to get it finished.  The young lady is getting married and her mom wanted a book of her childhood years to display at her bridal shower.

You can click over to the Practical Scrappers blog here to see more butterfly goodness!

Brave Girls truth book

I’ve been working on the Soul Restoration class with Brave Girls and this is the first page of my Truth book.  Hmmm…did I show you the cover of that book?  I will have to look and see because I don’t remember.  (That disease is called Mommy Brain and I’ve had it for 11 years!)

Click the photo to see the page larger.  I inked up the edges, cut the pretty round design from BoBunny paper and added jewels to bling it up a bit.  I like sparkle.

Any of you readers out there taking the Soul Restoration class?  I just finished it and a new one started again this week.  I have really liked the class and will be taking Soul Restoration 2 one of these days.  It really changes your perspective about yourself (and your self worth) and I would recommend it to anyone.

Enjoy Life.

(click photo to see larger)

This is a recent layout I made for the design team at Practical Scrappers.  I used a digital stamp from one of our sponsors, Robyn’s Fetish Designs.  Isn’t the penguin a cutie?  I made him extra cute by covering his feet and beak with orange Stickles and his body with black Stickles (my favorite thing).  Here’s a closer look at his sparkly-ness:

(click photo to see larger)

I used some Magic Scraps glittery flaky “stuff” for the snow on this page.  Just rubbed my Uhu glue stick onto the paper and then sprinkled my flakes on there.  I’ve never used it before, so I’m not sure how well it’s going to stay on the page.  We are in the middle of winter here, so this page is appropriate to show you today.  But I would rather be on the beach!

Creating with kids.

I was part of a new feature this month over at Practical Scrappers called creating with kids.  We were asked to have a child help us make paper for scrapbooking. 

Well, my kid is the resident “artiste” at our house as I’ve mentioned before, so I gave her a sheet of white cardstock and said make me something.  ha ha!  She had this idea that she was going to paint a rainbow and make leopard print on it to match these crazy socks she loves.  And I thought that was great because I had taken a photo of her wearing those crazy socks and wanted to make a scrapbook page with it!  But then somewhere in the making of the paper she went off course and it looked nothing like her original plan.  (she must be related to ME…)  She was very excited at one point and came into my studio to tell me about her painting and that she had wondered how it would look if she flung paint onto the paper so she tried it and liked it.  When she was done I went in to check it out and I liked it too.  But then I realized she had flung paint everywhere ELSE also.  Splatters of paint were on my dining room table (her work surface), the floor, the chairs, homework on the table, etc.  We’re still scraping it off some places.  So anyway here is what she ended up with:

(pretend the lighting in here doesn’t totally suck and that paper really looks WHITE, ok?)

And this is what I did with Summer’s lovely painted paper:

You can see what the other designers at Practical Scrappers did here.  They’re taking submissions to do this every month, so have your kids help you and submit your projects!

Game Face.

Here’s a layout I did recently that was on the Practical Scrappers blog on Friday.  The challenge was to use the colors orange and black on your page but not for Halloween.  This was easy for me because I had this collage already made with black borders of our time at the U of I football game last year and it was sitting here waiting to be made into a page.  I did throw a bit of blue in here because the U of I colors are orange and blue, but I think the first colors you notice are orange and black.  Here’s a closeup:

(those felt footballs are from Queen & Co and the fabric tab letters are OLD from Scrapworks)

The face painting was Summer’s favorite part of the whole game, of course!

She fought the good fight.

Since October is breast cancer awareness month, I wanted to share with you a page I did recently.  This is my Aunt Teresa.  She fought breast cancer for 2 very long years before it finally overcame her.  At her funeral the minister quoted this passage from the bible, Timothy 4:7 I think.  And it really does describe her.  She died in the hospital a few months ago and right up until her last breath was worrying about everyone ELSE, asking the nurses who would come into her room how THEY were doing.  She was a remarkable woman, full of bravery and kindess.  She is so very dearly missed.

Winter Wonderland.

Oh, I hate the thought that it’s coming near….but we were asked to do projects using an 8×10 photo and I had this one on hand so a winter page was what I made.  This is an 8×10 photo on an 8.5×11 piece of cardstock, so it’s all photo really!  I just put my letters going up the side and added a Mary Engelbreit snowflake bling sticker on the bottom with a bit of journaling and called it done!  I really just wanted the focus to be the photo that I took because I love it.  It’s featured on Practical Scrappers’ (new magazine format) yesterday.  Come check me out over there.

Here’s the page I made:

And on Friday a bunch of my cards made with photos on them were featured with a little “article” Christine asked me to write for Practical Scrappers!  Go check those out here.

This way to Spookytown…

This was a page I did based for Practical Scrappers based on a sketch by one of the sketch designers, Sasya. 

Here’s the sketch:

And here’s my page:

I always have to adjust sketches for my pages because sketches are usually 12×12 and my pages are 8.5×11, but that just adds to the challenge.  It usually means a photo gets eliminated, as was the case with this one. 

This was my first time using Maya Mist, and I love it!  I got a free bottle as part of my “payment” for being published in Scrapbook Trends magazine.  Payment is given as two free copies of the magazine and scrapbooking supplies, and I got a bottle of orange Maya Mist and a package of chipboard letters from Tattered Angels that are made to be used with mists.

First Day of School.

This is my project over at Practical Scrappers today.  Our product to use this week is stamps.  I don’t use stamps very often on my pages, mainly because I forget I have them, which is what I love about being on the design team at Practical Scrappers, because I am forced to use things! 

Those alphabet letters going up the left side are from one big ole loooong stamp in an old Creating Keepsakes kit of the month that I scored CHEAP at a Creating Keepsakes Convention in St. Louis a few years ago.  Yes, that’s an actual ruler.  It was a whopping 19 cents at Walgreen’s during a back to school sale a while back and I got 22 of them for a project and then brought them home and discovered they’re not big enough.  Now, I did not really want to haul 22 rulers back into Walgreen’s…..but what the hell am I supposed to do with these things?  ha ha  Turns out in the Creating Keepsakes September 2010 issue Stacy Cohen did a great page using a ruler on it and that gave me the idea!  I’m not gonna make 20 pages with rulers on them, but it’s a start, right? 

Here’s a closer look:

(you can see here that I also included a strip of paper where she had been practicing writing her name)

So if you’re a scrapbooker and like a challenge, go on over to Practical Scrappers here and enter your page or project using stamps.  You have all week.  And there are prizes!