12x12 Layout Process Video featuring Shimelle from American Crafts

Hey Scrap Fans!  So, instead of cleaning my house and packing for the crop I'm going to this weekend, I decided to spend my afternoon doing a process video.  I used products from the new Shimelle line from American Crafts, as well as some Thickers and enamel dots from MME.  Hope you enjoy!

Click here to watch video if it doesn't appear below. 



Thanks for watching and until next time, Happy Scrappin'!!

Video tour of the new "Shimelle" line from American Crafts

Hey Scrap Fans!  Any of my scrappy friends who know me, know how much I enjoy the scrapbooking of Shimelle Laine.  That's why I had to get my hands on the new collection she designed for American Crafts.  If you're wondering about the unusual name of the pattern paper in her line, Shimelle named them all after notable women in science.

Following is a video of all the products I purchased.




Hope you enjoyed the tour.  Until next time, Happy Scrappin'!!

Making the most out of paper pads

Hey Scrap Fans! It's July 2nd already and summer is in full swing. I'm still plugging away at my 100 layout goal, although I did more photo organizing in June than actual 12x12 layouts. I've also been working to organize my scrap room to better fit the way I work. It's been a process, but I'm gradually getting it the way I want it. 

My latest project was organizing my paper stash. I have vowed to limit myself to keep only the amount of paper that fits in a milk crate sized container. If I start to get too much, I have to weed out what I'm not going to use. This method has worked to keep my paper stash somewhat under control. 

I was storing my paper in a storage ottoman under my desk, but it often became the landing place for other stuff (including my feet) and I found it difficult to pull out and open when I needed paper. I wanted something shallow and on wheels so I could move it around and easily access my paper. I ended up with the open organizer cube by Recollections on the tray with casters. It's the perfect size and mobility for my paper stash. 

In order to keep my paper stash to my limit, I had to go through some of my paper pads and determine what I loved and what I knew I would never use. If a pad had multiples, nine times out of ten I kept one and got rid of one. I separated all the pads and stored the papers in plastic paper keepers by Cropper Hopper and I labeled them by manufacturer. 

When I was all done, I had the pad cover from the Dear Lizzy Daydreamer collection and it was just too cute to throw away. 

I have been taking May Flaum's Camp Scrap class and she was talking about grid designs and the pattern paper samples on this paper pad cover reminded me of a grid design. So rather than discard it, I cut out the parts I knew I could use and went to work. What resulted was this layout:

I cut out the middle 16 grids and put the rest aside for another project. I sprinkled some pink Heidi Swapp Color Shine on a sheet of white Studio Calico Cardstock and adhered my grid to the center. I printed six 2x2 square photos from a trip to the roller rink on my Canon Selphy. At first I was going to mount them directly over the squares of pattern, but it was much too busy, and the pictures got lost. So I cut a 4x6 piece from Amy Tan's Yes, Please collection and mounted the photos. I printed my journaling and mounted it on a piece of 2x4 pink pattern paper. 

I used the top three grids for my title, and used my Silhoutte Cameo to cut and piece a roller skate embellishment in the upper left. I used pink glitter on the skate toe and bow to create a visual triangle of pink with the skate, title and asterisk in the lower left corner. My letter stickers are from Webster's Pages, October Afternoon and American Crafts Thickers. 

I'm pretty happy with how this layout turned out. I still have some blocks of pattern left from the cover, plus all the pattern paper to work with. I hope you enjoyed this layout, and I hope you've been inspired to use some packaging or paper pad covers instead of throwing them out. Until next time, Happy Scrappin'!! 

Lesson Learned

Hey Scrap Fans! I used today's layout for a journaling challenge for a class I'm taking at Big Picture Classes. Libby came home today with a book bag full of stuff from cleaning out her desk for the year. I sat on the bed with her as she pulled out each item and explained to me what it was for or where it came from. She had tons of books from her book box, pens and little toys from kids' birthday celebrations, flash cards, her vocabulary note book and folders. As she sat there reading to me from the art journal full of drawings and stories she had worked on all thoroughout the year, it occurred to me just how much she does during her day that I don't know about and am not a part of. I see that she is reading and writing and we do homework together, but there is so much in the course of her day I miss. As she was reading to me, I snuck out my phone and snapped a pic for this layout. 

I cut down my kraft cardstock to 11x11 and mounted on this paper from Amy Tangerine Cut and Paste. I printed my photo on my Canon Selphy and layered it on top of this gold doily from Studio Calico on top of the glassine bag that it came in. I adhered it to the page with the gold polka dot washi from another Studio Calico kit and the kraft and gold tape from Maggie Holmes. The gold rub on dots and chevrons are from a Dear Lizzy and the stars are Studio Calico.  The title is American Crafts Thickers and October Afternoon letter stickers, black on kraft. 

I have to admit,  I'm not totally crazy about this layout. I think I went a little overboard with the rub on stars. I started out with just stars in two diagonal corners, which was fine, then I added them in the two opposite corners and they were distracting. I added the stars all the way around to try to make it more of a border. I'm not loving it, but I don't hate it as much as the stars in the four corners. Lesson learned.

 I'm kind of surprised with how much gold I used, it's not a color I typically like, but I felt like it was working. Maybe I wanted to use it all up lol. 

Even though I'm not completely happy with this layout, the important part is that I captured the story. 20 years from now, my daughter isn't going to care that there are too many stars on the page, she's going to see what she was doing the last week of first grade. And that's really all that matters. 

I hope you enjoyed this less-than-perfect layout and until next time, Happy Scrappin'!!

Try something new and just have fun with it

Hey Scrap Fans!! Today's layout was born from a desire to play with products. This is one of those instances where the photos and story came after I started, rather than scrapping to suite my photos and story. 

I had just purchased some Heidi Swapp masks and mists and felt like playing around, so I used the hexagon mask and randomly sprayed a sheet of white cardstock with pink and green. The 6x6 mask created a square, so I decided to go with it and sprayed the inside with a different shade of green. Rather than fight the obvious differentiation between the rest of the paper and where the mask was, I decided to go with it. I think I also changed the orientation of the paper as I liked it better after I turned it 90 degrees. I've been doing a lot of doodling lately in my art journal, but I've never really doodled on a scrapbook page, so I thought, why not? I used my white uni-ball pen and doodled scallops around the "frame" and then drew small sloppy flowers all around. 

I wanted a bit more pop so I dotted the inside of the flowers with my white Viva paper pen and after they dried, I decided to color them all in pink. At this point, I trimmed the excess white from around the cardstock I had sprayed, and since I had just fixed my sewing machine, I decided to stitch it to the background paper from Pink Paislee, which I thought really matched my sprayed paper.

At this point, I started looking for photos. I went to my phone first, as I often go to my most recent photos when I create the layout first, and I found a series of pics I had just taken of my daughter at gymnastics attempting her first back handspring. They're not the best quality, so I wanted to keep them small.  I created a collage in my Pic Stitch app and printed them 4x6 on my Canon Selphy. 

I left a white border and mounted them in the center of my "frame".

 I wanted to make sure the placement of my frame looked intentional, and I wanted to add a bit of color so I stamped another frame border with this arrow stamp using Heidi Swappy pink ink. I used a post it note to mask when I got to the corners. I added a title with Thickers and the date with my Pebbles roller date stamp. I kept my embellishments simple since there was a lot going on already. I created a small cluster with a cut out card from the Amy Tangerine Plus One 6x6 paper pad, some enamel dots and stamped images from the Plus One Stamp set. I stamped them with archival ink on white cardstock, cut them out and used the three mists I used on the background to paint them. I handwrote my journaling with the same pink marker I used on the flowers. 

When it was all said and done, I was pretty happy with the layout.  It really was a process of just adding things and trying things until I was happy with the results. I encourage you to try it. Grab some supplies you've been wanting to try, use a technique you've never done and just have fun. Until next time, Happy Scrappin'!!

If at first you don't succeed......

I made this layout of our recent trip to the zoo for a class I'm taking at Big Picture Classes. The challenge was to create and use a photo collage. Surprisingly, this challenge proved to be much more difficult than I anticipated. The photos weren't a problem, as I frequently use photo collages and almost always print from my iPhone to my selphy.  My problem was with the amount of journaling I wanted to include. I usually prefer to handwrite my journaling, but I'm finding lately I want to tell longer stories, so I have been printing the journaling. For some reason I had a hard time finding a good balance with the length of the journaling, my photo collages and the products I wanted to use. 

I started out using paper from Amy Tan's Yes, Please collection and was trying to find a way to include my journaling that looked balanced. I printed my journaling several different times before I finally decided on printing on a simple sheet of white Stampin' Up card stock and mounted the photos next to the journaling. I wanted a bolder background for contrast so the white card stock didn't look out of place. I used a sheet from Allison Kreft. I added my title with Amy Tan Plus One Thickers and October Afternoon letter stickers, chose a few simple chipboard embellishments from October Afternoon Woodland Park and called it done. 

Even though I ended up with a very different look than what I started with, I'm pretty happy over all with the way it turned out. I like that I got so many pictures and all my journaling on one page, and I'm comfortable with the amount of embellishments I used. If you have a smart phone, there are lots of inexpensive and free collage making apps available. I used Pic Frame, which was $.99 and I also have used and like Pic Stitch.  I hope you enjoyed this layout and until next time, Happy Scrappin'!!

Skinny pic, room shot and an actual Polaroid!

Hey Scrap Fans! So my hubby and daughter bought me the Art + Science of Scrapbooking class at Big Picture Classes for Mother's Day. One of the assignments led to me organizing some of my hard copy photos and I pulled together all the photos I had from my school years. I've been slowly working on an album all about me, so scrapping some of my high school photos was a natural progression.

I identified this photo as one I wanted to scrap when I was visiting Andy in Ohio and I only brought a few Studio Calico kits. I decided I didn't have enough with me to do what I really wanted so I held on to it until I got home. I'm not sure why I wanted to used this paper, maybe because I think that sweater I was wearing in the pic may have had a gold stripe on the sleeve. In any case, it just seemed right. 

I knew I wanted to say a lot in the journaling, so I opted to type it on a 4x6 card from Becky Higgins' Project Life Kraft edition, and I picked the matching 3x4 card to pull in the brown and cream. I grounded it all with a stip of craft and gold washi tape from Maggie Holmes and added some gold accents here and there. I stamped some kraft card stock with Ali Edwards' stamps and sprinkled some gold mist around both areas of embellishment. I used gold Thickers from American Crafts and black on kraft letter stickers from October Afternoon for my title "Blasts from the Past", which introduces the three reasons I wanted to scrap that photo. 

I really liked the look of the gold with the kraft, so I decided to trim a half an inch all around from my pattern paper and mount it on some Kraft card stock from Bazzill. Viola! Another 12x12 page for my race to 100! 

Thanks for stopping by, and Happy Scrappin'!!