Elephant Trek

Thanks Camp Scrap for getting pumped to scrapbook this summer! I went digging through my photo box to see what photos I wanted to use. 

These were two 4x6's that I knew I wanted to scrapbook. 

I loved this sheet from Crate Paper and thought it brought out the best colors in the photos and also added in some great accent colors as well. It's how I pulled in the different colored scraps that I stamped those ellies on.

I dug into a whole slue of new goodies that just arrived with my last (for the next few months!) Two Peas order. Like those great Crate Paper plastic alphas. I also think it's the first time I've ever used that Amy Tangerine stamp set. For shame! 

But seriously, this is one of the biggest reasons why I decide to stop buying new product. It really forces me to use what I have.

I also initially decided that I wanted to write my journaling directly on the photo. But it turned out horrible! Not to worry, re-printing took only a few minutes and my problems were solved. But as I was going back through my files to find this photo in particular, I realized there were so many more photos I wanted to include.

Hence this second page:

I pulled a whole smatter of photos and cropped them into 2x2 in squares, knowing I wanted to create a grid layout. I also pulled out my Acorn Avenue 6x6 paper pad and some scraps of that great kraft Elle's Studio polka dot.

To decorate some of the squares I used my new Travel Girl stamps (LOVE THESE!!!) and that line's die cut pack. I also busted into the Simple Stories brad pack and added one of those fun cork medallions. I opened up a lot of new packages for this page and I love that.

The cardstock background is this amazing-in-person gray orange peel texture. When I saw it in the store I immediately thought, it looks like elephant skin!! So I definitely wanted to use it here. It cools down the whole page & that's ok. I'm just really glad that patterned paper sheet I decided on in the first place included some gray as well.

Since I didn't like how the journaling on my photo looked, I decided I wanted to add an insert page but with a twist!

I've had this idea to print a photo onto a full 12x12 sheet of vellum for awhile now. I'm so glad I did it! It's how I decided to incorporate the journaling and was a fun "technique". The photo wasn't that great of quality and the printing not exactly perfect, but I love the look and feel of it so much!

So here's how my loose double pager looks next to each other. I pulled a lot of the same elements onto both pages and made sure to repeat the patterned paper and tape on both, as well as the little stamped ellies.

And here's the vellum page with the next page peeking under it. I think it looks awesome!!

Wow, that turned into a big share! And I think that's perfectly ok.

But seriously yall, this is why I'm so excited about Camp Scrap! For me, it's been about just working on projects & getting my stories told. I can use any supplies I have and any photos that I want. This doesn't look like anything May has shared and everything goes! I'm quickly realizing, that's my kind of class =) So check it out if you have the chance. Registration closes on the 12th.

cheers & besos,

Ferris Bueller Layouts

It was a cold & rainy Saturday here in Houston. So I left early, headed to the grocery store, stocked up on provisions & came back to hibernate & play with my new Studio Calico kit, Story Hour. I LOVE the colors in this one! I had so much fun playing with the paper & all of the little goodies.

My parents came to visit me in London. I took them out to meet some of my friends & we all hit it off. My friends loved my parents, my parents liked my friends.

Journaling Reads: When I say "out" I mean we were literally out, at a bar with my friends. The parents were having a good old time meeting everyone. But by the time the tequila shots were bought & Mama declared she was staying at the Crowne Royal it was time for them to go. I'm so happy that they got to meet everyone and it seems like they had maybe too good a time.

I love this sheet of Crate Paper patterned paper. The color combo is one of my absolute favorites. I had to tone it down a bit with some white Mister Huey. Then I started layering the ledger papers, tags & stickers from the Illustrated add-on.

I guess I've been in the mood to scrap friends & family. I dug out these random photos from a night out in Bangkok with some of my best girls. There's not much going on in these, other than that we're pretty girls in pretty dresses.

The dresses made for a fun jumping off point. I loved the design of Liz's dressed the black with the khaki polka dots so I tried to mimic it with some paint and various circle "stamps". I ended up using a wine cork, the top of a tube of lipstick & a pencil for the dots.

Then I took my circle punch to a few sheets of the papers from the kit, cut them into 4's and pieces them back together.

Journaling Reads: These photos commemorate one of the few times we went out for a girls night. We decided to hit up the infamous bed bar, a few weeks before graduation. I remember being super tired & not at all the life of the party, but such is the life of a grad student. We needed to blow off a little steam with some dancing, drinks & a few girlfriends; no drugs, weapons or sex obviously. I so miss these lovely ladies and it's crazy to think that 2 of 4 of us are married now, 1 lives in Japan and another in Australia.

It's so crazy to think that these photos were taken nearly 4 years ago. I had to use the Ferris Bueller quote on both layouts.

It's so true. "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it."

cheers & besos,

Project 12: Sept & Oct

I'm back on the Project 12 bandwagon. It's been awhile since I've done one of these pages. I like them so much when they're done but have so much trouble getting them finished!

I think it's because I'm not that good with tiny spaces and little clusters.

I've had the calendars for these months filled out for awhile now, but my second stumbling block is collecting all of the photos. From my point and shoot, my iPhone, my DSLR whose images are saved on my computer and some on MT's computer.

It becomes a chore.

But like I said before, love 'em when they're actually completed and in my album!

September was a fun busy month, with a trip to Hawaii and my 27th birthday.

I'm loving these colors together, the inspiration for which was American Crafts Chap line. I'm also loving the misted wood veneers. Adore that you can still see the grain!

October was a blur with 2 work trips to Denver and Lafayette, LA. Plus 2 road trips to Corpus Christi and to Austin. And 2 weekends with my nephew.

I love my crazy busy life!

I love that I get to travel for work.

I love that I'm too tired to scrapbook everyday, but still get to find time to catch up on it later :)

For these pages I only focused on color, bright and bold.

They're playful, and I like that.

Oh, and button-tastic!

Only a few more pages and Project 12: 2011 is complete!

I love this album.

MT has told me it's his favorite album.

And I think I just might make it again next year.

It's crazy that I decided to do it on a whim, only after having seen these gorgeous KI Memories calendars. But I'm really glad I did.

My entire year scrapbooked in just 24 pages. Even if I don't make another page with any of these photos, I'll at least have this album complete.

xxbesos

2011 Resolutions/2012 Habits

New Year = New Resolutions right?

Considering how well I did on last years, I'm not so sure.

Even having created this adorable mini, I still didn't stick to them.

Basically, the only three I actually did were:

(1) Budget, Save, Tithe...in moderation.

(2) Purge & Donate...not quite quarterly but at least a few times this year.

(3) Reconnect with friends...which was of course my favorite.

All are worthwhile accomplishments, I won't deny that. But I still feel like I could be doing more.

This year, I've resolved to not make resolutions but to focus instead on making habits. Habits that I can take with me throughout the year and even further on. Not pointless goals I set and then have no clue as to how to achieve.

These are the habits I'd like to work on cultivating for January:

• Waking up early enough to get a few things done, then to catch the 8:23 bus (so I won't be in after 9 anymore!)
• Exercising on the weekdays, running in the evenings
• Write daily (journaling, blog posts, Q&A, etc.)

At the moment, I'm just working on the 3. I don't want to get overwhelmed with an entire list of activities. I'll never create a habit doing that.

And come February, I'm determined to have those seemingly small things down, and ready to add 3 more habits to my list.

A little at time is my mantra for the year.

A little to achieve a lot!

With all of that being said, I'd like to share a layout which shows on of my 2011 resolutions at work, reconnecting with old friends :)

I got to see Monica twice this year! A treat, you have no idea. In February, I stayed with her in London and in September we met up in Hawaii for her birthday.

I love this girl. She is such a blast and the one person who can get me to do some of the crazier things I would never have otherwise, like snowboarding (Austria) and white water rafting (Thailand). She's always up for a good time, my Moni. And even though we couldn't be less alike, we still get along really well.

I created this page using my trusty Cheat Sheet (Sketchpad) at that Croppin Bug crop. And it wouldn't have turned out the way it did if it weren't for that crop!

Let me explain.

I wanted a neutral background for these bright photos, so I could incorporate in some way all of these gorgeous patterned papers. In riffling through my stash of paper, I picked out these two Studio Calico patterns from their Classic Calico line. But I couldn't decide which to use!

I turned to Lindsay, one of the awesome ladies I scrap with from time to time, to ask her opinion. She pointed out that she liked the dark paper for the color photo and the light paper for the sepia-esque print.

And that's how I came up with this design! (Thanks Linds :) Since it is so simple, I angled the design to make it more interesting. Then, cut strips and turned them into banners. The banners became my journaling lines and the whole things was finished off with some bakers twine and letter stickers.

It's a plain page but it doesn't really look that way thanks to the gorgeous papers and bright photo.

I hope to next year continue to reconnect and spend time with some of my favorite people. Even if it means flying across the world to do so!

And also, of course, to cultivate those habits.

Are you making resolutions this year? If so please share!

xxbesos

[EDITED TO ADD: I guess I was channeling my Leo brain wave. Check out his blog post on habits posted today]

Cheat Sheet

Confession: I'm a cheater.

There! I've said it!

Well...not a "cheater" per say but a definite cheat sheet user.

I'm talking about these guys, the ones that already have all of the answers to test:

It's the secret to my success!

Well kind of...

(It more or less holds up in a cropping court of law)

You all might know by now that I love me a good sketch and I turn to my repertoire of KP Sketchbook and now Sketchpad pdfs, frequently when I make my cheat sheets.

They're my go to group because 1) they're good and 2) I paid for them. That's more or less enough said.

So let me take just a minute to explain what I do and how I do it.

I bought the Sketchpad class when Kelly released it. Opened it up, poured over the sketches and the inspiration, wiped away some droll and then walked away from it for awhile.

Later, when I was in a scrapping mood I opened it up again and went through it page by page, sketch by sketch alongside of my iPhoto, pulling pictures with the appropriate orientation (landscape vs portrait) and groupings that would work for each sketch.

I jotted a quick mini sketch of just the photo placement, wrote down the appropriate file names and determined right then and there the photo sizes. That is the biggest tip I can give you. I like scrapping with a variety of sizes, but it can be a bit difficult and often time consuming chore.

When I make my cheat sheets, I don't have to think!

It makes the scrapping and the yapping that much easier when you're not thinking so hard!

This is one of the layouts I made from my cheat sheet. They're photos of this amazing local restaurant just off of the Kamehameha Hwy on the North Shore of Oahu.

It was a tiny little hole in the wall, but aren't those the best kind of eateries?! A local guy chatted up the place while we were ordering. Heck, if it's good enough for him it's definitely good enough for me!

For this page, I just started layering patterned paper strips on top of each other on either side of the line of photos. Then I added some 3 dimensional flowers and Thickers for embellishment.

And of course I had to make a cardstock grass skirt! I couldn't not with a restaurant (and page) so aptly named.

I almost forgot!

I have to add that I made the cheat sheet weeks and weeks ago. Printed the photos and let them marinate on my desk for awhile. It was a month later when I pulled it out to actually use. By then (and still now) I can't remember a single layout from the class pdf, but I have the bones to work with and thus was/am able to put my own stamp on the sketches.

I didn't make copies of the layouts featured. I made the sketches my own.

One of these days I'll go back and look at the inspiration. It'll be interesting to see how close to the original sketch my layouts turn out.

Signing off for tonight, but I'll be back later with more completed cheat sheet layouts! If you have any questions about the process, don't hesitate to ask. Cheers!

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