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,

Birthday Brunch

I made layouts! Oh man have I missed making layouts! Like I mentioned before, the whole Project Life thing has been taking up a lot of my creative time. So last weekend I was determined to make some good old fashioned layouts. 

Since it had been awhile, I was a bit stuck, creatively that is. So I turned to my Simple Scrappers monthly mag and just started playing around with the sketches.

I was really influenced by Jennifer's take on the sketch. I added in a doily and that vellum die cut because of her :)

I took my color inspiration from our clothes, choosing papers that coordinated with each of our outfits. It made for a wacky color combo. Both those always end up being my favorites!

I also got to use some of my new Studio Calico goodies. I NEED more of these oh so fabulous gold letter stickers.

The finishing on this was so simple. A few enamel dots, date stamp and just a tiny smattering of gold mist.

It's such a clean page and because of that, the photo really stands out. Love that!

cheers & besos,

Monochromatic Birthday

My birthday was last Friday! Oh my birthday...that whole day went by in a blur. I planned a fun party for my friends and asked if everyone could wear wigs! I thought it'd be fun to celebrate the last birthday of my 20's with something fun and crazy.

We took some great group photos of us in our crazy fun colored wigs. Obviously, I really wanted them to stand out. So I took on Jennifer's left-brained Color Challenge from Art + Science and only worked with neutrals. 

It was soooo hard! All I wanted to do was add in neon pink! But I refrained. And I think, the page came out the better for it. Instead, I used a lot of black and white elements plus gold and a touch of gray.

Us in those wigs definitely became the focal point!

Lately, I'm absolutely loving digital elements. And Two Peas is giving us some completely fabulous options! And of course, since black and white has become such a big part of my scrapbooking, I'm loving all of the October releases!

For this page, I incorporated some fabi printables and a freebie die cut from a few months back. (Snag it now!! They're available again for just a short while)

My Cameo cut the freebie die cut perfectly and I used it as a mask with some Heidi Swapp Gold Lame Color Shine (my favorite!). It didn't mask very well in certain parts, so I drew around the shapes using my black pen--on the white parts--and my white pen for the darker parts at the bottom.

I also finally got to use my new Pebbles Alphabet Stamp.

Oh, and about the background paper, I created this background of black and white photo strips in PSE and printed it out on white orange peel cardstock. All the photos were edited using Rad Lab. Heck all of my photos are edited using Rad Lab!

I had fun making this page. I had fun this night! Be prepared to see this photo and others like it over and over again. It was just so fun =)

cheers & besos,

Life with Besties

Happy Friday all! I'm so excited to relax my bum off, this long weekend. Like sooo excited!! Happily, my apartments all clean, so really I have the whole weekend to play with paper, read, watch videos and movies.

I'm planning a Two Peas video marathon and to catch up on my Hello Story and Toolbox classes. It's gonna be good.

But tonight I wanted to share a summer layout I made weeks ago, but just hadn't sat down to blog about it. It's a page using a Toolbox prompt and some of the new(er) Carta Bella, Hello Again collection (it's on sale at Two Peas for a bit, so snatch some up!).

I tried something a bit different and decided to film a quick 90 second video of me talking about the page. Apologies in advance for the quality. I have no idea what happened! But if you listen to the words and check out the photos, you get the picture.

And I'm super pumped that I get to hang out with this girl this weekend. She's visiting the boyfriend who just relocated here. That means more time with besties for me!

Hope yall have a lovely long weekend if you're in the US. Otherwise, I hope you have some awesome relaxing days!

cheers & besos,

Scrapbooking from the Soul Review

[ETA: Giveaway closed, Winners announced here]

Wow, almost the end of summer. Time never ceases to amaze me, as it flies so quickly on by. 

Matt and I drove out to Austin in July to celebrate Tara's birthday. We floated the river in San Marcos; relaxed, laughed, nearly drowned (at least Tara did) and really just enjoyed the experience. 

I bought an old school water proof disposable camera to document our drifting and only just yesterday picked it up from the developer. (BTW, its so crazy to me that not very long ago, 1 hour film developing was the norm. Now you have to send them away!).  

It was fun to open up the package to see how the prints turned out. That was the awesomeness of film photography, you never actually knew what you were gonna get. Not all of the pictures were great, lots ended up blurry and hazy. But I love them anyway. They still captured that day and these memories.

On the surface, the page and photos are about the day we spent on the river. But the journaling was all about how this is life now, none of us are married or have kids. And how carefree and lacking in responsibility our lives are--which is lovely for now!

It's like that for all of us on this page. But we're each getting older. I'm sure one or all of us will take the plunge into marriage and parenthood eventually. But for now, I'm personally content with the life of a single (marital status) childless person.

The part of my life that includes marriage and babies may or may not be very far away in the future. And one day I imagine I'll look back at these pages and remember what life was like back before the husband and the kiddos.

Journaling Reads:
I love summer for its lazy carefree laid back vibe. I love the long summer nights. What feels like all kinds of time to just breath and relax. It's not going to be like this always. One of these days we'll all get married and start having babies. Not that life will be over then. But gone will be the days of minimal responsibility, of picking up and going wherever/whenever I please. For now, I relish this time. Still not married, no babies. Still carefree.

The journaling is a bit of a departure from my usual style. That's not to say that I've never made connections or done more introspective journaling before. But this was a totally different approach for me. And I have one person to thank for it, the incredible (not so edible) Jill Sprott.

Jill has long been a favorite scrapbooker of mine. Her pages are always gorgeous and full of masterful design. But I think the subjects she chooses and the connections she makes are what have always drawn me to her layouts. She transforms pretty portraits and still photographs, into poignant and meaningful visual stories due largely to her journaling. 

Let's face it, she has a bit of a leg up on all of us in this department, being a high school English teacher and all. So I try not to be too intimidated. But it's so hard to look at her pages not feel a connection to the lady herself. Her voice (she uses her words!) come across so brilliantly in each of her creations.

As if all of this isn't amazing enough, she sat down and created a class to help each of us achieve what she does so beautifully, meaningful journaling on gorgeously designed pages. The class is aptly named Scrapbooking from the Soul and is available at Two Peas for such an insanely low price. I bought it last week and was only able to dive in yesterday afternoon. Let me tell you, the first two lessons have me completely reconsidering the foundation of my entire scrapbooking process. That's how profound the class has been for me already!

Want another example of how awesomely talented Jill is? After watching the class videos and reading through the .pdf's I felt like I'd just had a conversation with her. As if she and I had sat down to chat (over a cup of tea I'd imagine =) about this thing called scrapbooking and how meaningful it can be.

I have to admit, Ms. Sprott has an insanely huge soft spot on my heart. She has been one of the best creative cheerleaders a girl could have asked for. She actually follows this blog! She even looks at my layouts. And if there's a comment on a post here, there's a 50/50 change Jill is the one to have left it. It's the little things, right? It takes her not so much time, but it always means so much to me, to read her sweet comments.

After reading through this post, I think its safe to say that I'm an avid Jill Sprott fan. And I'd love to honor this sweet lady with a giveaway. I believe so much in what she's taught me already, that I'd love to give away to two readers, access to her workshop.

To enter to win, please leave a comment below (with your 2Peas name). I'd love to hear which scrapbookers are super stars to you! I'm leaving this open through Saturday, 31 August at 11:59 CST and then I'll draw and announce two winners! Best of luck to you all! And even if you don't win, really consider taking the class. It will be worth each of those 1,200 pennies!

cheers & besos,

Gordoughs

Hi hi hi!! My first free weekend in forever has been so lovely. We went to a party on Friday but after that, we had nothing planned. And it's been heavenly. I cleaned and scrapbooked and later today have a friend coming over for a cat date. Huzzah!

So I was able to get caught up on classes this weekend and make a few pages. This is layout is inspired by a Toolbox prompt and also the Mama Elephant Photo Inspiration challenge. Here's the inspiration photo, isn't it fab?

I love the white with the pops of color. I only ended up using the pink and substituted white for silver, but you can see where I was going with it =)

This is a mixed media piece inspired by my Toolbox class. As soon as I saw Celine's video, I knew the foil look would be perfect for this page about me and Tara at Gordoughs. We had to take a photo in front of the airstream! Airstream...foil tape, the perfect representation!

Mama Elephant stamps are rapidly becoming some of my favorites! And I LOVE the Bling set. I mean, the set had a $ sign it! How could I not use it, seeing as Tara's nickname is T$ [read T-money]. I heated embossed a few of the sentiments in white on vellum and stapled them to the foil part of the page.

Lastly, I broke in a pack of Elle's Studio die cuts. It was one of their exclusive kits and I'm so happy they made their way onto a page! They were the best shade of pink, a perfect match for Tara's shorts and also for the photo challenge.

I have one layout done and few others prepped and ready to be put together. Loving that I have time to scrapbook again!

cheers & besos,

LBD: Brunch with Lauren

Happy Friday yall!! Oh geez...that was a too much enthusiasm. After last night's escapades I kinda can't believe I had the energy to muster even that!! =)

But I digress....

Today I wanted to share another Little Black Dress Kit layout with yall!

I used a sketch from my old Bright Ideas class for this layout. I had a lot of photos I wanted to share on one page. So lining them all up along the edges was the best way to go.

I left a few of the "boxes" open and added some patterned paper and die cuts for embellishing. The tea cup is in reference to Ms. Lauren's favorite song. She howls with laughter whenever we sing "I'm a little tea pot short and stout..." and move her arms to the words in the song. It's the cutest thing!

I added some of the great fringe for more texture. In pink of course, since we're all girls :)

I created and die cut my title using the Silhouette and added some glittery Thickers atop for dimension.

And with just the littlest bit of stamping, I was done!

cheers & besos,

LBD: 8 1/2 x 11 Layouts

More Little Black Dress kit pages, for your viewing pleasure today. Here are two 8 1/2 x 11 pages I put together. Don't adjust your screens, that second page is meant to be tilted. Loved getting to work with the bright fun colors in the Miss Maggie kit.

cheers & besos,

LBD: GIRLS Mini

I mini booked! It's been so long since I've hand made a mini start to finish. This was a little labor of love.  I worked on it in little bits over about two weeks.

I used my Little Black Dress kit, my Silhouette Cameo, Primrose Color Shine, 1 sheet of white cardstock and a sheet of pink to create this mini! I even designed all of the cuts and made my own mini printables for each of the pages.

My inspiration came from the show GIRLS. It's an HBO show that I really liked Season 1. Season 2? Meh, not so much. Essentially it's about 4 recent grads living in Brooklyn. There's a lot of Sex & the City references but there's really not much there beyond the fact that 4 female friends interact. I'm not sure that I'd recommend it to ya. The content is a bit riske. But maybe you like that, I don't know.

But anyhow, they have a really great show opener. It's literally just the world GIRLS in a great deco font on a plain background. So simple and classic! I found a few articles about it, you can read more here.

I wanted to create a mini about my own GIRLS. This one features my top 5 ladies. After Mama who is clearly numero uno, they really aren't in any particular order. They're all my besties though!

The mini book is a match book. I was directly inspired by Kristina Nicolai-White's video on Two Peas. I'll warn you, this post is very photo heavy. But aren't all mini book posts? I want you to see the details! So I'll stop typing now and let you feast your eyes on my latest and last Little Black Dress kit creation.

cheers & besos,

LBD March Layouts

Hey there! I'm so excited to share my first pages for the Little Black Dress Kit club, using the A Chance for Luck kit. I've just shared all the bits and pieces you get from this kit and now I want to show you my layouts!

I loved the monochromatic look of the papers so I used a bunch on this page about me. I shared 5 things about life right now in March 2013.

1. I am a new member to the Little Black Dress Kit club! (I should probably have added design team member in there. But as I was doing this at 1am I wasn't actually thinking straight!)
2. Wishing I could sleep more. This year has already been a whirlwind. Off to San Antonio for work this week. (Ha! See item one)
3. So loving anything metallic right now & am wearing my latest favorite dress in this pic.
4. Losing weight! Down 10 lbs since the new year & hoping to lose much more.
5. Planning my holidays for the year. I want to make it to Australia but will definitely by visiting the Pacific Northwest with MT this summer.

I used my Silhouette to cut out these tear drop shapes. They're fairly similar to the silver pattern on my dress. But these I backed with all the great grays & neutrals. I dappled some gold Heidi Swapp Color Shine (which btw I absolutely adore. I bought all the colors!!) And added title on top of a piece of wood veneer.

This is for my monthly black cardstock challenge. I don't use this rich hue enough in my scrapbooking. So I'm hoping to share a monthly page using this overlooked neutral.

The next page features one of my favorite families. My friends Susie & Gus welcomed baby Lauren last August and they are the absolute cutest. I love this photo of the three of them. I snapped it at Kim & Eric's wedding last month.

I had fun with the background paper and did some painting with pink mist. Then I outlined the hearts and added in a few of my own. There's so much love in this little family love had to be the theme.

I used that kraft butterfly I was talking about, instead of hoarding it like I wanted to. And I used some wood veneer, a Silhouette cut and a little kraft envelope to anchor the photo and create a title.

This last page is just fun. I loved the Studio Calico patterned paper, with it's neutral gray color and its diagonal stripes. They were just begging to be filled in with pops of color and a bit of texture.

I used some patterned paper strips and a few of the great trims. I like all the color on here since we're all wearing different colored clothes in the photos. I added just a bit more dimension with the gorgeous gold buttons and the red brads that came in the kit.

Next, I'm sharing the two cards I made. Check back in just a few for them =)

cheers & besos,

Farmhouse Fun

Ick Winter! Ours here in Houston are rainy and right now, very cold. I wish I could stay bundled up and warm here at home, but alas to work I must go.

Before I do that, I wanted to share another Block Party/2Ps CHA Challenge/Studio Calico CHA Challenge page. And also point out how crazy busy my Fall was. From a weekend in NYC to a weekend in the Hill Country, I was all over the place. Here's a separate page of our bachelorette weekend of fun.

We stayed at the cutest little farmhouse in Johnson City. (Seriously, if anyone needs a recommendation on a place to stay in the Hill Country, I would totally recommend this place.)

It was cute.

It was quaint.

It was red & turquoise!

And the Block Party kit had the best red & turquoise in it. I loved this patterned background paper and thought it went really well with a farmhouse theme. And of course that pocket was another perfect red & turquoise accent. 

I played around with F's for my 4 word title. It's not really a coherent string but still descriptive =)

There's not any journaling on the page, because honestly I didn't know where to put it. But I'm confident I'll make a coordinating 2nd page to talk about our weekend and all of the craziness and fun we had in this sweet little house.

Until later, I hope you're staying warm & dry!

cheers & besos

Bachelorette Mini

Morning! I'm up bright & early today because someone's phone kept buzzing for unknown reasons. It's somewhat close to the time I usually wake up so here I am, up and blogging at 6am on a Sunday =)

I have the winner of last week's RAK for you all, but first I wanted to share this mini book I put together for Kimberly. 

Did I tell yall I'm going to be a bridesmaid? First time in life! I'm excited but curious to see what this whole experience is going to be like. 

Well, now that I think about it, it's already started. Tara, Susie & I threw Kim a weekend long party in the Hill Country for her bachelorette. Ten girls spending the night in an adorable farmhouse, literally in the middle of nowhere. It was a blast! 

We also did a bit of wine touring in the local area. But for me, the silliness that went down in the evenings, the talking, the laughing, the relaxing and watching movies. That for me was the best part.

I put together this 6x6 mini book with just a few supplies: green and purple cardstocks (Kim's colors are green and purple, and handily fit with the wine tour theme), a package of purple flowers, pearl trim, purple lace trim, washi tapes in purple & green, and a package of Jolee's with a wine theme. 

I tucked into my stamp & Thicker stash, and embellished with a button or two. And of course, turned to my punches more than once for a circle or a bow. 

It took me some time to get it all together. And I remembered why I don't make mini books that much any more -- they take so long & I start to lose interest and zeal for the project. But I always love seeing them all put together. Scroll through for a quick recap of our girls weekend. I had a blast with these lovelies. Can't wait until February 16!

Oh, one more thing. I have to note that I did catch the misspelling in the title page. Working to fix it now!

And of course I didn't forget about the RAK winner! According to random.org it's commenter number 3. That would be you SamSam! I'm e-mailing you know for your address, so I can get these goodies off to you. If you haven't seen the e-mail, then please e-mail me at paperheart[dot]project[at]gmail[dot]com.

cheers & besos,