Khao San Road

Another page from Bangkok! I'm well chuffed (quite proud) to have these 3 random Thailand pages scrapped! They weren't about trips or any specific event. They were just pages about what I was like when I lived there.

And that is how my scrapbooking has evolved lately.

"It's not easy being green." Know who said that? Kermit the frog is who. Love me my Kermie!

The Boardwalk kit had a lot of great green papers and I thought they contrasted nicely with the reds in my photo, so I just started playing with some left over strips.

Had to use my favorite neutral gray for the background and I think it made the green, cream and white pop even more!

I liked that the design is a bit busy and chaotic, but not so all over the place that it drives your eyes crazy. I wanted to mimic how packed in all of the signs and stalls were.

And ok, so maybe I added baker's twine, a Thicker or 2 that wasn't a part of the kit. But I think they were the final touches needed for this fairly flat page.

Which, btw is about the famous backpapers area of Thailand. If you ever make it that way, I'd recommend stopping by. Touristy yes, but none the less fun!

Happy Scrapping =)

xxbesos

Sitara Place/Monsoon

Sunshine Broadcast makes my heart go pitter patter. It is one of the most exquisite lines, in my opinion.

When I was throwing photos into that "to print for crop" file that I was talking about yesterday, I didn't even realize what I had stumbled upon. I was just hurriedly nabbing photos that caught my fancy, and for some reasons these monsoon photos did the trick. (Perhaps Hurricane Irene was on the brain.)

Then I hurriedly grabbed some products to take with me to the crop and my latest Studio Calico kit, Boardwalk. Lo and behold, there was the paper, the most perfect paper for these photos of the monsoon and my the view of my balcony from my flat in Bangkok.

Not only are there clouds, but in the buildings in the photo are the peaches and the yellows and even the teals! It's the colors that did me in.

This was the view from the balcony attached to my apartment. I lived in a complex call Sitara Place in the Ratchadaphisek (shortened to Ratchada) part of Bangkok. Good old Sitara place...

As you can see the details in the paper and the coordinating embellishments included in the kit, made for a happy resting place for my photo.

The companion page was all about watching the monsoon roll in from the comfort of my balcony. It was a daily occurrence for that first month or so.

The page has lots of white space with little details, more from Sunshine Broadcast and a little from Basic Grey.

And the journaling was done a la Maggie Holmes =)

And there we have a memory captured. It's a small memory,but one that enhanced my experience in Bkk. I'm happy it's scrapped :)

Thank you so much for checking in. Happy Scrapping!

xxbesos

Converge

Hello lovelies! I have to share what an absolute blast I had yesterday, cropping with 2 sweet girls from the Studio Calico message board.

Actually, I met Meghan at CKC Houston, while we were taking all of the SC classes with KP :) We'd chatted about meeting up for a crop via the SC message board and that's how we snagged Lindsay to jump on our 3 women crop bandwagon =)

So we met up at Archivers and had a nice time scrapping and yappin'.

I got 6 pages done!! Well, how I get them done (i.e. no journaling or nearly complete but waiting for something I know I have at home).

I wasn't as prepared for this crop as I was for my last. I didn't plan my pages or print photos to size or anything. In fact, I didn't even show up with the photos I had intended to crop!

I put a huge 150+ photo order in with Scrapbook Pictures, but didn't get it in time (it was waiting for me when I got home from the crop of course...) so yesterday morning, I was literally just throwing a random hodge podge of photos into a file so that I could get them printed at Wal-mart.

But guess what? I'm soooo soooo sooooooo happy I didn't get those pictures. Instead, I was able to help tackle some of the littler memories from London and Thailand, that I wasn't going to get to anytime soon.

And that, my friends, makes me very happy.

Those two places have so many memories, so many quiet times, so many big moments. And sometimes it just gets so overwhelming to tackle all of that. So as I'm chipping away, photo by photo, memory by memory, I'm happy to add more to my London album and my Thailand album, which in the tally are so far behind all of these smaller trips and place I've had the good fortune to visit.

I still have a long way to go but I'm getting there. And even though I have 1000s of photos yet to scrapbook, there's 10 less that I can now call complete!!!

Whoa, that was long winded =)

And now on to a page....

I am so stoked to have some Amy Tangerine products in my grubby little hands. It's an absolutely fabulous line! The colors are awesome, the details superb and the theme..come on, yall know it's right up my alley :)

This page is not at all about traveling in the US as the background paper suggests, and is all about the journey it took for all seven us, each from a different state, ended up 1000s of miles away from home, but all together in a little bar, on a night out in Phuket, Thailand.

For me, that's just plain cool.

It wasn't at all where I intended to go with this photo, but seeing the lovely papers and looking at all us people, I couldn't pass up the chance to make a page on how, at this particular stage in our life, we all converged on this programme called Mountbatten and ended up a big part of each other's lives for that bit of time.

I just love how perfect Amy's products were for this page. I even did some stitching a la Ms. Tangerine =)

Thank you to everyone who made it through that post! And now sneak peaks for more pages to be shared in the coming week =)

Happy Scrapping!!

xxbesos

Amsterdam Complete!

It's done! One more country to cross off my list. I made 11 pages for Amsterdam!

That's a lot for a 3 day trip!

I have to say, I think this is my favorite layout I've done in awhile.

It's the colors. The colors!

I love the gray/yellow/pink/blue color combo. All of it (bar the blue cardstock and bike paperclip) is from the Boardwalk kit.

I heat embossed, using white embossing powder, with the awesome map Studio Calico/Hero Arts background stamp. I seriously bought the add-on only for that stamp. And it was perfect for this page about the streets of Amsterdam.

And how can you not love this awesome bike paperclip?! I got it from Paper Source. (BTW, it's really dangerous to live within 8 min walking distance of this place...and a Sprinkles cupcake!)

And this next page was so fun and super easy to do. The paper already had the lines and all I had to do was add some tape.

I mixed and matched my letter stickers and a Sassafras border sticker to create the title. I love how it turned out! It so makes me think of the crazy lasers and things that they have going on down at da club :)

Tow more pages for my Europe pages and two more for Shimelle's challenges! And now I get to go play with the bestie as she's coming for a visit.

See yall next week!

xxbesos

Shimelle Challenges

Since I was hauling boxes and painting walls in San Antonio this weekend, I missed out on Shimelle's online crop!

Lucky for me, the challenges are still open for participation (until midnight Sunday GMT). They were just the pushed I needed to finish my Amsterdam photos.

The half page challenge is the inspiration for this page. I've had this lattice die cut paper for at least a year. It vaguely reminded me of the lights in this page.

I used it + my Studio Calico Boardwalk kit to create this and the next page . I loved the teal in this kit and it went perfectly with the sweater I was wearing and the scarf Kori was bundled up in. Did I mention it was cold?!

I just love this big graphic black shape against the Kraft background.

This next page just happened to work out for the red, teal and white challenge. Although I didn't originally plan on doing this one. It just worked out that those colors were in this month's kit!

I used this sketch found via Pinterest as the basis for the design.

I misted the fabric banner with Barnwood Mister Huey and the thickers that came with the kit, as a stencil for my title. The cream color was a bit off on the layout, so this was my solution.

And what I love about these photos is how random and varied they are. Looking at them just made me miss these 2 so much and hence the idea for the page theme!

xxbesos

Pink Doily Cards

I'm telling you I'm addicted to this super simple technique! I used 3 different sized doilies and 3 different shades of mist (Piglet Mister Huey, Orange Maya Mist & Salmon Maya Mist).

This was the 12 x 12 sheet in all of its inky doily glory, before I cut into it.

I made three cards out of 12x6 in of this paper (the other half is being made into a cover for a mini album) using the same "formula" as the bee cards.

Kraft Card + Misted doily paper + Actual Doily (Misted) + Simple Sentiment + Focal point stamp/chipboard + Twine

This was for my Grandma on her birthday. She loves roses and so I stamped and heat embossed (with Rouge Zing!) that lovely flower from a Dear Lizzy stamp set.

This is a birthday card for one of my besties from London. We're going to Hawaii in a few weeks for her birthday and I thought I'd get a jump on her card. I used a Crate Paper chipboard sticker as an accent, it screamed Hawaii to me =) Which btw, I can.not.wait!!

And last but not least, a special card for one of my more "special" friends, hehe! She's living in Japan now, as her husband was just deployed. I just wanted to send her something funny, and this was funny...to us at least.

I made my sentiment, mimicking the Papertrey Ink ones, and printed it onto a transparency.

"Remember that time when we were in Kuala Lumpur and I wanted a lollipop?"

She'll get it =)

xxbesos

Just for You

It seems as thought I'm just a card making machine these days! I started these oh so long ago, handmade all of the little bows and then only today, stamped the sentiment.

But hey, they got done! And that's another unfinished project to check off my to do list =)

The inspiration for these cards came from here. I loved the little bows! It took several hours to make them, but they were worth it.

I'm calling them my circus cards! And no, not everyone of the stamps came out perfect (I was trying to wedge the acrylic block between the two buttons) but today I am embracing imperfection.

xxbesos

Dover Pages Complete!

The Dover section of my England Mini is now complete.

Light applause all around =)

No but seriously, I'm so happy to have this album at least started.

I haven't counted and really don't want to know, how many photos from my year in London, that have yet to be scrapbooked. (I'm guessing around 3-4,000...)

I'll get to them when I can get to them.

But believe me when I say, I sure am happy when I do!

This album is from Making Memories and I thought it was perfect for my random trampings about England. And below are all of the pages I made from just one of several day trips that we made. It's going to be a nice chunky album!

(Click to enlarge photos)

These last are a few of the newest pages.
I took this one and only photo of the reputed white cliffs of Dover. I have no idea where I read that page, but for some reason it stuck with me.

I wanted to play with texture on this page, so I used my border punches and several sheets and shades of white cardstock.

This last page, I played with fun citrus-y colors and some Studio Calico stickers. That green polka dot might be one of my most favorite papers, it's just such a great shade of green!

And just like that, it's done! Well, at least the portion from Dover is, and I'm very happy about that.

xxbesos