Radiant Heart

I had a totally different idea for this page, but it turned out way better because I was inspired by the products I used!

I knew I wanted to scrapbook this photo and that I wanted to use the new [Elle's Studio Sunny Days] collection. I also envisioned lots of circles dotted around the page. So I misted up my background and used the sun from the [Sunny Days stamp set] and also the "smile" from that set, to create my own background.

I used my Silhouette to cut out a bunch of circles and I layered them around the page. I got that far and then I decided I would pull out the new [Kelly Purkey] stamp sets I'd just purchased to see if I could use a sentiment or two.

And that's the point I hit on some genius and took this page into a totally different direction. Or maybe not totally different, but definitely enhanced! Kelly's [Megababe stamp set] had so many great phrases, but I knew that I had to use "You have a radiant heart" on this page. Because that totally describes Urijah and his love for the pool!

Because I added the radiant heart sentiment, I decided to add stamped diamonds to the background, using [Something Blue Color Theory dye ink]. The "everyday magic" circles using [Deja Blue Color Theory dye ink] were the last bit I added to the background.

Because of the added stamping, my journaling took on a whole new direction! And also because of it, I decided to hand stitch those gems.

Journaling Reads:
"The pool, swimming, splashing around in the water, it brings U so much joy! U could spend hours and hours there everyday. Your mama even moved y'all to a new apartment with a great pool because she knew she was going to be spending a lot of time there with U. We love that U found something that makes sunbeams radiate out of U! Our sunshine boy!"

This page, it just makes my heart happy! It captures something so important to my nephew. It's bright and cheerful. And the journaling is so much improved by the products I used. Have to love it when that happens =)

cheers & besos,

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Sunny Days Flipbook

You guys, I made a really fun project last week! I've never made a flip book before and I'll be honest, it wasn't easy. But so worth it! Read more about it on the [Elle's Studio blog].

cheers & besos,

Seven

I'm not a parent. Well, not to any humans. But I do have a nephew! His name is [Urijah] and if you've been following me for any bit of time, you've seen him on this blog. I love him to death! He's the only little person I've had the privilege of seeing grow up. On April 20th of this year he turned 7. SEVEN!!! Egads, where has the time gone?! I'm sure every parent...and even aunts and uncles have wondered the same.

I made a very special page to celebrate his birthday, using a sketch from the latest crop of [Simple Scrapper] goodies. And it was really simple and really easy to make! All it took was collecting some ink and a date stamp (used 3 on this page but whatevs) and going to town on some cardstock. 

I pulled colors from the shirt he was wearing in the photo. It had all of these bright little creatures on it. And then using a different ink pad for each year, I date stamped in bands across the page.

I also couldn't not use my [mega date stamp] on this page so I stamped directly onto the photo using white ink. I purchased those fantastic Bella Blvd heart enamels in every color (not joking, spent a tiny fortune on them!) so I dotted them around the page.

Below are close ups of the date stamping, which again, was so simple and fun to do!

cheers & besos,

Battle for the Chair

This was one of the first pages I made with the new Elle's Studio Little Moments collection. Which is rapidly becoming my most favorite ever! It's so perfect for so many stories, big and small. 

The page captures a truly tiny moment, one where my nephew and my puppy are doing battle for their favorite chair in our apartment. It's a tiny silly story that makes me smile :)

You can read more about how the page came together over on the Elle's Studio blog!

Journaling Reads:

I don't know what it is about this chair but beasts and children alike seem to love it. Mac claimed it when she first came to live with us. It's in taters thanks to her claws. Urijah loves to hang out on it whenever he comes to visit. There are orange cheeto stains that can attest to that. And Dixie has now taken a liking to it. I don't know if it is because it's close to the window or just comfy, but there was a puppy nephew battle for chair supremacy when Urijah was last over. Dixie was even more interested in it than she usually is! She'd sneak over to sniff Urijah, then she'd place her paws on a corner until finally making the leap up to try to edge him out. He fell out of it once or twice as they were both struggling to gain control. I'm not sure who won in the end but it was funny to watch them duke it out. February 13, 2016

cheers & besos,

Me & U

Do you get inspiration from mood boards? I definitely do! I blogged about the September Scrapbook Circle mood board over on their blog. Head over there to see what inspired this page!

I LOVE how this turned out and I think a lot of it has to do with the story here. Also, those wee chipboard birdies are rocking my socks today. I don't often use printed chipboard but these two were just too cute to pass up.

I also love any layout where I mix lots of patterns. They seem to pack a bigger punch! And the papers in the Hello Hello kit were just so luscious! Usually my go-to neutrals are black and white. But there was a lot of brown in this kit and I completely embraced it.

Thanks so much for stopping by today! And if you're in the USA, I hope you're having a relaxing Labour Day!

ALSO, I almost forgot to mention that it's the last day to get 30% off of your next Scrapbook Circle order. Use this link and enter  the code TAKE30 at check out. Happy shopping!

cheers & besos,

The Perfect Target

Hiya! I'm back from a long weekend in NYC. It was awesome to spend time with one of my besties. But I have to confess, I took about 10 photos. I'm literally the worst! I didn't even get a photo of the two of us together (seriously?! what is wrong with me???!!!) I think it's because I really wasn't in vacation/tourist mode. I was in relaxed hanging out with friend mode. So I'll give myself a pass just this one time.

While I was away, Diana posted my latest page on the Scrapbook Circle blog. This month I was challenged to lift Wendi, an SBC subscriber. I created a sketch of her page and did a side by side comparison of our pages. Head over there to check it out!

I had fun with the journaling on this one. It was hilarious to see Urijah steal Grandpa's fries! We had a huge laugh about it. And I'm glad I captured the action shots. Really, I was just fortunate to have my camera in hand at the time. I was only trying to get shots of the two of them interacting and Cadie in her skeleton pajamas.

I pulled just bits and pieces from the July You're my Favorite kit: the stickers, the gold label, the gold heart. And you could do about a million and one things with that white ledger paper.  The main focal point was the red target die cut from The Cut Shoppe. The center ended up being right on the carton of fries in my dad's hand when Urijah was making his move to nab it. Unexpectedly perfect! Really I didn't plan or realize that until just this moment.

I had fun lifting the page and playing with this kit. Confession: I'm always surprised by what I come up with every month. Getting ready to tear into the August kit. Can't wait to see what's in store!

cheers & besos,

U & Me

This was the last page I made with my All You Need is Love Scrapbook Circle kit. I just couldn't work with a love themed kit and not make a page about one of my biggest loves, my nephew Urijah.

I pulled just an assortment of photos of the two of us. I'm now realizing we don't take many photos together and we totally need to rectify this! 

I loved the kit stencil and wanted to make sure I used it. I've never added modeling paste on top of Kraft before, so I really liked how this came out. It was a fairly quick and simple base to create.

I cut a bunch of rectangles and then punched hearts out of the middle. Then, cut both the heart and the rectangles in half and pieced them back together over white cardstock. You can see the white cardstock sticking out here and there. Believe it or not I actually was going for that look. It makes it feel a bit looser and more home made.

The title just might be my favorite part. I write all of the journaling on Urijah's pages to him. As always every "you" in the text is changed to "U". I like this touch. It makes me smile. The whole time I was working on this page I was hearing Mike Wozawski singing, over and over again.

cheers & besos,

Made of Stories

Made of Stories, Scrapbook Circle's December kit, is all glittery and Christmas-y. Sooo good and so festive! I made four pages using the main and the Favorite Elf add-on and love how two layouts are more modern and two are more traditional. I didn't plan it that way at all! 

Two are about being warm and cozy and jolly. And two are about a specific Christmas event.

If you're looking for some great Christmas products without having to spend a ton on a huge kit, I'd totally suggest nabbing the Made of Stories kit and/or the Favorite Elf add-on.

AND as a bonus. Lisa is included this fabulous canvas tote in each of the kits. LOVE it!

cheers & besos,

Monogram

Hi there! I'm home!!! I don't think I've been this excited to be done with traveling. It was just too much, in too short a time frame. Lesson learned. But I'm home now and was pretty much over the jet lag as soon as I got back. Huzzah!

I haven't scrapbooked anything all month. But I have such a back log of projects, there's still plenty of blogging to be done. Here's a page I made a few months back, it was for a prompt from the Studio Calico Bright Ideas class, taught by the lovely Nicole Samuels (she has a Creative Live class coming up you might want to check out. Nicole's a great teacher!)

In my Start Fresh workbook, I keep a list of stories I want to tell. Urijah's list has had this idea for awhile now. It's the story of his name and its pronunciation. I realized a few years ago that he has 3 J's in his name, and they're all pronounced differently!

I thought the Monogram prompt from the Bright Ideas class was the perfect prompt for a story about his name. I used a Simple Scrapper sketch for the page design.

I love these photos of him. They were just cute and colorful. He's the snazziest lil dresser. And clothes where I get a lot of my color inspiration when it comes to page design.

The red popped so well and I knew I wanted to use it on the page. I also knew it wold be hard to directly color match the specific shade. When that happens, I tend to use a lot of the same shade of color so inevitably somewhere in there, your eyes will think that it matches. That stripe down the side is washi tape from an old Studio Calico kit.

cheers & besos,

U & Papa

Hiya! At this point, I'm nearly done with my crazy busy work trip. 7 nights in 5 cities, it's a lot of movement! I love it, it makes things interesting. It also means I have a decent amount of quiet time as I'm sitting on a plane or a train. And of course, it means I'm not sitting in the same meeting room for days on end. Hopefully I'm updating my instagram (I made sure all of my hotels had free wifi!) and you're seeing some fun pictures. 

So enough of my chatting at you from the past, let's talk about the present. I'm sharing one of my latest Scrapbook Circle kit pages. This was made with On this Day, a kit chalk full of goodness…and specifically some great oranges. Arguably, orange may be my 2nd favorite color after yellow. It's just so robust! 

The kit had a ton of it, so Tessa challenged me and Valerie to incorporate orange into our pages. Here's Valerie's take on it. I love those leaves!!! And below is my layout using orange.

I paired it with blue. Lots of different shades of blue, teals and baby blue and even some denim. The colors just worked so perfectly with these cute photos of my brother and my nephew. There wasn't any great or meaningful story behind these, just the two of them together. And that was enough for me!

I went with a banner look and adhered everything along an invisible line, 1/3 of the way down the page. It meant grabbing printed die cuts and paper scraps, stickers and chipboard. And of course I couldn't resist the cork piece! This is one of my favorite designs because it means I can incorporate lots of little odds and ends.

Tessa blogged more about this on the Scrapbook Circle blog. Hop on over there to read a bit more.

cheers & besos,

Hi 5!

Look at that cute little face. Yes, he's scowling but it isn't for the reason that you think! He was sooo sick. Like terribly sick. And we didn't realize that until he was already at the house. We hung out for a bit, ate some cupcakes and then took him home, I promise!

But let me chat a minute about this page. It's the last page I made using the Island Paradise kit. I made this for the layering challenge Tessa posted over on the Scrapbook Circle blog. This page features a TON of layering, as you can see.

I also used those cute foxes from the Tiki Torch Add-on. Can you see his fox folding chair in the background there? It's Urijah sized and adorable.

I built up my layers under the photo and on top of the photo and used a formula of layers in three different spots. I love how chunky it ended up being.

I hope you have a lovely weekend! I'm so excited for this three day weekend =)

cheers & besos,