Ladies who Lunch

I was so blown away by this month's Elle's Studio kit. The colors in it..."the colors duke, the colors!" were so fun! I've been realizing lately that I don't use much green in my projects. Teal yes, green not so much. So it was fun to play with green on this page! Even if only in small ways.

Inspired by last month, I went for another 9x12 double page spread--one full layout and the other a pocket page. Which I'm rapidly realizing is really fun! The page is about a small shower we threw for my friend Kim who is due in a couple week's time. 

I knew what I wanted to do with the 9x12 layout really early on. I laid out the foundation and then stepped back. It just didn't look complete somehow. So to add more punch, I decided to create a tone on tone pattern with the Everyday stamp set and white embossing powder. It's hard to photograph, but the effect IRL is pretty awesome and it was exactly what this page needed.

To embellish, I created a visual triangle with the stamp set, enamel dots, mist and one of the great exclusive veneers! They might just be some of my favorite ever. I added one to a card for the pocket page and liked that balance. Even though the two layouts are kind of separate, I wanted them to be a cohesive unit.

For journaling, I wrote about the day and the event. And I also journaled about my two besties, Kim & Tara. Like last month, I've given myself permission to write about whatever it is I feel like expressing, regardless if it "goes" with the page or not. It's making me happier about these pages and my process. And that, friends, is what it should be about!

All of these new goodies are available in the Elle's Studio shop now! Buy the monthly kit today for $9.99 and then $11.99 after that. When they're gone they're gone. So if you're interested, jump on them quickly.

Today's also the day for the new Design Team Gallery. I'm so excited to click through and see what my fellow team members have created.

I also made a half dozen cards with the stamp set. You'll be able to see them in the gallery now but I'll blog more about them later this week.

cheers & besos,

Best Gals

Hiya friends! Today I'm excited to share my latest Simple Scrapper page. This month our theme was all about personalities. It's been awhile since I've done a page about my bestie, so I thought now would be a perfect time to make a new page, featuring photos from this year.

Isn't she a cutie? We usually get confused for sisters. I guess I can see the resemblance. Both of us have that Asian look to our 100% hispanic features.

For this page, I used a big mix of products and a few papers from the Fancy Pants Office Suite 6x6 paper pad. LOVE that line! (See also At 30)

The page is based off of a Simple Scrapper sketch (No. 214 for all of the members). I love it whenever I'm able to incorporate journaling cards onto my pages. The & is from Studio Calico and the gold chevron is by Heidi Swapp.

For more info about this page and more layouts using sketches and story starters, check out the Simple Scrapper membership.

Jennifer just released the 2016 planner pages which I'm sooo excited about! I've printed them all out and have started assembling my book...which I'll blog more about later this month. It's probably worth noting that if you're a member you get the planner pages for free!

cheers & besos,

8 1/2 x 11 Love

Bah! The colors in the photos are driving me nuts! They printed too dark and under exposed. I will most definitely be reprinting them here at home. So try not to let them distract you too much =)

I have a deep and abiding love for 8 1/2 x 11 sized layouts. There's just something about their proportions! I can't quite put my finger on it but they are definitely pleasing to my eyes. I wrote a post over on the Scrapbook Circle blog featuring the two 8 1/2 x 11 sized layouts I made with the You are my Favorite main and This was Fun add-on.

There are some master 8 1/2 x 11 scrappers out there. Off the top of my head I can think of Cathy Zielske, Mel Blackburn, Sasha Farina, & Marcy Penner.

Do you scrapbook in this size? Share some links in the comments if you're so inclined!

cheers & besos,

Hand Cut Letters

Hey hello! I have some more Scrapbook Circle pages to share. They're over on the blog. Along with a fun tutorial on creating hand cut letters. 

Don't you just love the fun and whimsy these add to the pages. See, turning 30 doesn't have to be so serious! Nor do baby curls it seems =)

I shared all the good stuff over there. Be sure to click over for the tutorial if you're interested!

cheers & besos,

Scrapbook Circle Blog Hop

**Giveaway is over but comments still open**

Welcome to our Scrapbook Circle Blog Hop! I'm so excited to be part of this year's Scrapbook Circle  creative team! This weekend we're hopping and hoping to introduce you to the new team as well as to the fabulous August kit.

If you've participated in a blog hop before then you should know the drill. If you just left Rebecca's blog, you're in the right place. If not, I hope you'll join us for the entire hop by starting at the Scrapbook Circle blog, here.

Let me start by saying hi! If you're new to my blog, my name is Jamie Leija (said Lay-ha). I’m a native Texan who loves to travel and scrapbook. I’ve lived in London, Thailand and Spain and have been blessed to travel to so many more places. Traveling and scrapbooking go hand in hand for me. I love that one hobby supports the other and that scrapbooking lets me relive and share all of those fabulous memories. I've been scrapbooking (as we know it) for the past 17 years. My first job in high school was for a local scrapbook store. I loved working there! And it helped me learn to love sharing this hobby with others. In college, I worked at Hobby Lobby (can you see the theme here :) and then another local scrapbook store. I've been published in Northridge Publishing's Scrapbook Trends, CARDS and Create publications. When I’m not scrapbooking or on a plane, I’m spending time with my kitten, boyfriend or adorable nephew.

If you're not new to my blog, welcome back! I'm on a design team now guys =)

Now that we've got the introductions in order, let me show you this month's kit! It's called Island Paradise. I had a blast cutting it apart and putting the pieces back together on all of my pages. As you can see, teal was the dominate color. It made its way onto just about all of my pages (ha! with the exception of today's page…). I loved all of the bold (like the Crayola Market set!) color combos that you can make.

Did I mention you could win one of five August kits by commenting as you hop from blog to blog??!! Oh yes you can! Keep reading for more info.

I also procured the Tiki Torch add-on. Those little foxes were just too cute!! And I of course HAD TO HAVE the wood veneer sequins. They combine two of my favorite scrapbook embellishments! Nice one Chic Tags :)

This month, a few of us on the creative team, collaborated with Page Maps for this blog hop. Here's the fabulous sketch Becky sent over for me to play with. Have to love a good circle sketch, right?!

And here's the page I came up with! I loved that blunt-end piece so much, I decided to make all of mine  straight edged like that. Aaaand I wanted to shrink it down just a smudge. 

I really liked the idea of writing my journaling in the "missing" piece but the background paper I chose was a bit too busy for that. Instead, I pulled the journaling out and integrated some fun bits and baubles in between the lines. I think the colors might be my favorite thing about this page (and the kit too!). 

I edited my photo using RadLab to create a funkier color scheme. I'm sharing them here since I printed them so tiny before. ALSO, I should add that that's not me! On the right, in the blue, that's my bestie Tara. We've been told plenty of times that we look like sisters. We aren't but I guess we look similar. Except I'm about 3 inches taller than her! Glad we got that cleared up :)

And now on to the [next] fun bit. A new blog to hop to and a chance to win a kit! Please leave a comment on this blog and all of the other's that you hop to, for a chance to win. The hop ends Monday, August 4th at 9:00 p.m. Pacific and the winner will be announced on the Scrapbook Circle blog shortly after.

Thank you so much for hopping along AND for stopping by! It's been lovely to have you and I hope you'll come back soon. I'll be sharing the rest of my pages throughout the month so be on the look out for them as well.

Next up is the lovely Jenni! Hop over to her blog to see more fun projects using this month's Island Paradise kit!

**Giveaway is over but comments still open**

cheers & besos,

London to LA

As I type, I'm working on an the first assignment from Simple Scrapper Start Fresh class. I'm very excited about it! 

So let me share this page with you, using some other great Simple Scrapper content. This is based off of one of this month's sketches.

Products: Printshop Mini Flair, Fables Storytime patterned paper, Oh Snap Snippets patterned paper, Moon & Back Printshop patterned paper, Printshop Accent stickers

I used a whole mess of Studio Calico products to make this page about me and my friend Keely. You know my OLW for this year? Open. Yeah, that word is pretty much a direct result of this new friend.

It's weird to think about, but it's been awhile since I've made a new friend.

I have my college friends, my grad school friends, my Houston friends. Everyone's kind of formed into groups. 

Keely's part of my work friends group. She was an intern a few summers ago who came back to take on a new role we had open in the office. We weren't very close back then. But from pretty much the second she walked in the door this time around, we instantly bonded. I don't know what it says about me, but her 23 year old humor is pretty much the same as mine. We laugh and giggle a lot. Much to the chagrin of my fellow colleagues I'm sure. But she makes work fun and I definitely appreciate that.

It all goes back to the open thing. I wasn't expecting it, but I'm always open to making new friends. And because of that, I did!

[PHOTO]

We travel a lot for work. All of us do, even us junior employees. Keely and I ended up on three trips together this year, to LA, London and DC. So I had these great photos of us in front of St. Paul's in London and the other is us in the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica. I also had this photo of a club card we got at a happy hour we went to together.

I knew I wanted to use these photos together, as different as they are. And the sketch from this month's Simple Scrapper mag was perfect for it, with just a few amendments.  I decided to tilt the photos on an angle a bit. The sketch also called for a doily at the top left hand corner but instead, I decided to fold the paper back to show the awesome B side of the yellow grid. That was a happy accident really. It wasn't until nearly the end that I realized the aqua on the back was really similar to the aqua on the front. The benefits of working with papers from the same manufacturer! 

I love how the aqua looks with the yellow and just a few pops of gold and green. The paper tucked in the corner was some I knew I wanted to incorporate but didn't quite know how. And once I figured out that I wanted to fold the corner, I knew it could work there.

I like this mix of paper. Some modern. Some traditional. Some quirky. Kind of like me and mah friend.

[PHOTO]

The paper did most of the heavy lifting, so I really didn't do much to embellish this page. I machine stitched the flap down and around a few corners at the bottom. Other than that, it only took a few sentiment stickers, some tape and a badge or two to complete.

Oh! And I almost forgot the best part (and completely forgot to photograph it) but the middle photo flips up to show a few more photos from that same night at happy hour. They were screenshots of the crazy text messages we were sending afterwards. Probably for the best that they're tucked away ;)

And here I am, at the end of this post and finished with Assignment #1 for Start Fresh! I'm excited to think about what I want to accomplish this year-scrapbooking wise. And happy to dive in!

cheers & besos,

Neon Birthday Card

What is with this week? Not one, but two of my best ladies have birthdays this week! Nana's birthday is the 9th and Tara, my bestie, was born on the 13th. 

So today we're in Austin to celebrate. I'm scheduling this beforehand, so I have no idea what we're up to. But I'm sure we're having fun. And by now, she'll have seen The Note mini I made for her. I'm sure we laughed and giggled and smiled as we went through it. 

Here's the birthday card I made to go with her gift:

It's bright! Just like the book. I created this custom "print" by taking some of our silliness and repeating it over and over again. I printed it on vellum and it's the cover page for the mini book, but it's a bit hard to see. So I printed it out on white cardstock to make her card.

I used a lot of the same things I used in the mini book to create the card and decided I like to do things just on the edges of paper. So two strips of washi on both the cover and inside pages worked the best.

I stamped birthday on the chipboard speech bubble and added those great transparent letter stickers over top for the sentiment.

Lastly, I misted with those awesome neon mists from SC. First time using them and I have to say, they're pretty awesome.

Now just to write in the card and wrap up the presents! Can't wait to have a weekend of play in Austin!!

cheers & besos,

The Note Mini

Is it Friday yet?! I'm sooo ready for the weekend. This has been my first full week back in the office in a few weeks, so this weekend is particularly warranted. I'm excited because we're driving over to Austin for it! It's my bestie's birthday and we're going to celebrate that and her new job and spend it as a last hurrrah of sorts, because she's getting ready to move.

So lots going on & I'm stoked!

I should wait until Saturday to post this, but I was just so excited I couldn't wait! Since it is her birthday, I had to make her a gift. I think being my best friend, puts her in the top spot as recipient of Jamie projects. She's had a lot of homemade gifts over the years. [See those here and here and here and here and here. See I wasn't kidding!]  But I think this year's gift is my favorite.

I made her a mini book! It's of all of our inside jokes and silly ramblings. Way back in college, we thought we were sooo cute, or cool, or something crazy like that. So we started a Note on Facebook and kept a running record of all of our inside jokes that year. And beyond really. We still comment on it from time to time. It makes me smile and laugh and giggle and outright snort with laughter at times. I love it so much! 

Since you never know if Facebook is going to update and get rid of the whole thing, I thought it best to make a mini book of some of the stuff in there. This whole project is at least 6 months in the making. I had the idea and bought the stuff for it ages and ages ago. But then never sat down to actually do it. Thanks to Celine's Mini Book class, I made it happen!!

I love it so much. Not only for posterity reasons but also because it's pretty. I'm so proud of it. And the fact that I actually did it. I tried some new things, used nearly an entire row of washi, and reminisced the whole way. Oh, and I'm so beyond happy that I made one for myself! They are very nearly identical, so I'm only showing you hers. But I knew I'd want one for myself and I'm sooooo happy I made sure to do it.

So enough with words. Here are the photos. And I'm warning you THERE'S A  LOT OF PHOTOS!! Tons of little details. But the formula is pretty basic: pretty paper on one side, 6x6 black and white photo stitched on the other side, vellum with quotes in between. Speech bubbles were my main design element and that first pattern you see is from Amy Tangerine's Ready Set Go line and it inspired the color choices. 

cheers & besos,