Baking up Both Pages and Cookies

My kids enjoying the Christmas Cookies I made

I'm still trying to get all caught up on my daughter's album. Although I have been working hard, I'm not sure I'll be caught up to this Fall in her books by the time we leave for vacation. Christmas has pushed it's way up to the front of my thoughts as well. I received a new camera as an early Christmas present and I have a lot to learn about it. I already like that it takes pictures with a flash, as my old camera was not doing too well taking indoor photos this entire year. With my Canon, I could tilt the camera and the photo would change from horizontal to verticle, making it best for reviewing your pictures. But my Panasonic doesn't. :( I'm not used to all the buttons yet, but I'll get there.

I am currently scrapbooking photos of the spring. I did 23 pages on Saturday! I repeat the phrase, "Simple pages, Completed albums" when I find myself dawdling or trying to create something too complicated, as I tend to do.

Tip of the Day: Don't be afraid to use your pictures as embellishments instead of stickers. For example: I took pictures of the eggs my kids dyed and punched the photos with a small square punch. I made a border of yellow paper and stuck the egg squares down the center of the strip. I have also used my daugher's art, her chosen pumpkin, flowers at a park or even animals we saw. It's hard to find the right sticker sometimes, but your pictures will be sure to match. You can always cut something out of paper. While it definately will take longer thatn slappin on a sticker, paper embellishments are unique and you can choose the exact color to match your photos or page design as well.

Scrap Happy!

Tips on Hiding your Imperfections

Just as I hide my son't too long hair under a hat, I find the need to disguise or hide things in my scrapbooking.

Hiding imperfections using black and white /Sepia. On this page, (above) I used Sepia to bring the focus on Snow white and my daughter. There are several people in the background and they could be distracting. I felt that the Sepia gave this a classic feel. I sometimes change the shade to B& W or sepia if I'm trying to hide the fact that there is too much light in a picture. I had a photo of my daughter from a night time parade that was too washed out. When I changed it to Black and white, you couldn't tell.

Cover the flab! I purposely covered my belly with the giant blue hat when I put this page together. There's nothing wrong with that!

Red eyes: I don't use fancy photo correction tools, just the ones that come on my free picture sights such as Snapfish and York. (Both are the same set up) But I don't think that the red eye correction works well, so I don't use it. Instead, I use a red eye pen from CM. You might not feel like it's doing anything, but just dab the eye carefully and gently and you will see a change.


Journalling mistakes: I hate when I make a mistake when journalling! Sometimes I cover up my mistake with a cleverly placed sticker. I also have plain cover up stickers that match my pages from CM. Sometimes, I'll move a photo down a little bit to cover an "oops!" If you are writing on black with one of the pens from CM especially designed to write on black, you are usually able to use an eraser to fix your ill placed mark. It's also OK to leave your mistakes. It shows that you are human, and it shows the kids that you handwrote in the album. In todays age, that is becoming more and more rare.

ScrapHappy!

Easter pics and tips

I mentioned to my friend that I wished I could borrow her new bunny to take to the studio when I get my kids pictures taken. She suggested I just take the pictures myself. So that's just what I did!

I love how this one shows the difference in size between the 2 of them! There isn't much that's green yet in my yard for the background, that's why I stood looking down on them for the picture to get the grass as the background. A sheet on the ground protected their Easter clothes from grass stains.

I knew that for the proper lighting, I should take the pictures while the light was soft in the morning, or in the late afternoon, when the sun is heading down. I took the pictures too late n the day, so some really great ones suffered from too much light and were bleached out.

But I was still able to get several pictures that I love.

Now moving on to dying eggs. My son was only a couple months old last Easter, so this is all new to him. He was positively AMAZED when we dropped an egg into the cup of dye. He stared into it until we lifted it out, now a whole new color!

My daughter liked that this egg came out dyed differently than she expected it to.

We did egg dying on the nook. I like taking pictures here, because my daughter can be on the other side and higher than I am. Plus, there is a light directly above us, so the flash isn't always needed.

Here are her precious dyed hands and our year egg. This year, we bought 36 eggs to dye. We can never eat that many hard boiled eggs, so I only boiled some of them. Leading up to Easter, if we needed to use an egg, I emptied it by poking a dime sized hole in the bottom of it. When we died these hollow eggs, we just had to take extra care to fill it with the dyed water when dying it, so that it wouldn't float. Taking it out was also tricky as we didn't want to dump the dye from the hole outside of the cup. We also used eggs that had been neither emptied nor boiled! We were careful with handling them and didn't break a one! We also made sure to keep them seperate. They worked just fine.

The Easter egg hunt: When concealing eggs, I sometimes hid them in a way that my girl would be walking towards me, finding the eggs in one plant after another so that I can be sure to catch her finding one. Knowing where they are hidden is an advantage, too. It is such a challenge to get good pictures of the kids hunting for eggs because they move so fast!

What a sweetheart! She was so happy to find Razzle candy/gum in her egg.

"OH!" So there's something in these things!"

On Easter Sunday, I let my little man eat his chocolate bunny in his good clothes! Look how serious he is! He ate almost the whole thing in one sitting and freaked out when we cut him off!

And then this is my loving daughter, wanting me to take her picture with her white chocolate cross. How could I refuse?

Fall back into scrapbooking

Once you put scrapbooking at the bottom of your list, it can be so hard to get back into it!

Here is my advice: Don't overwhelm yourself by thinking you need to sit down and start a big project. Start with an achievable goal. Take those envelopes full of pictures out when you are watching TV one night and try to put them into order. The next step is to bring out a tray table and your cutting tools and crop some photos. This could be a different day entirely. Just doing this will get your feet going in the right direction, and you'll be back creating amazing pages in no time!

I like to pull out some of the books I've made and look through them. This often will give me a craving for scrapbooking!

Now, I'm not bragging, but I have been scrapbooking. I am working on my daughter's science and art fair pages from last spring. I'm doing all of my scrapbooking at night, when the kids are asleep. I had laid these pages out months ago and it feels so great to be down to the last few pages I have laid out! WAIT! Before you think that means I'll be caught up........(OH! Sorry, I had to catch my breathe as I was laughing so hard I nearly passed out!) Yeah, I have a long, long way to go until I'm caught up! When I get done with these pages I have laid out, I am going to lay out more pictures on more pages. I'll fill this power layout box up twice more before I am caught up with the pictures I have printed out right now.

That said, I know I take too many pictures, but the other day my 7 year old sat for HOURS and looked through the albums I have made for her. I know that seeing pictures of herself lovingly displayed gives her a sense of how much I love her.

Scrap Happy!

Merry Christmas!

I'm not sure why this picture shows up so dark on the computer. Reviewing it on the camera, you can see the stockings and details. It's the perfect picture. But not here. So sorry!



Christmas preparations have taken over and although I see photos everywhere as my little girl experiences the excitement that Christmas being just around the corner brings, I am trying to hold myself back from photographing it all and just enjoy being with her.



I just completed all of my holiday preparations today, wrapping the last gift. Other than the constant housework that needs done, I find myself at a loss to know what to do for fun! I am so used to scrapbooking always being an option, but now everything is neatly packed away, waiting as I am for our addition to be done so that I will always have a desk of my own to scrap on!



My constantly moving belly lets me know that I need to clear my memory card (Which I will do after saving my favorite photos on a disk.) Since I have most of the photos in albums already, now is the time I do this.



Tip of the Day: I'm always learning, and one thing I recently discovered was a new way to journal in my daughter's album. Some ways I journal are by writing things on my kitchen calendar, or writing a diary-like entry in a notebook after an event. A new technique that recently worked for me was to ask my daughter questions which I jotted on a post it note and kept with my photos until it was time to scrap the pictures it went with. We had been to the circus, and I just asked her things like her favorite part of the show, the funniest thing there, what she would want to be if she were in the circus, and things like that. I quickly jotted down her answers and found them tremendously helpful when it came to journaling the page. Usually, I journal pretty much from my point of view, so this was a completely different perspective, and I loved it.



Scrap Happy!

Belly shots

It's almost time!

I love this picture of my belly and my little girl. The night I took this picture in my bathroom (because the lighting is good there, even at night!) I felt like my belly could not get any bigger or I'd pop. I could see my veins all through my stomach, it's very weird, and I was trying to capture it with my camera. If I stand facing the mirror in the bathroom, I can aim the camera at my belly, and see the screen in the mirror. So, that was what I was doing and my 6 year old just kept hopping into the photo at the last minute! It was funny, actually, because sometimes you couldn't see her face, because she would pop in, yet my belly would be in the way, and the picture only showed her chest down! Anyway, she hugged the baby and it was so much better than the other shots I'd been attempting to take, that I snapped this picture instead. (Well, after a few tries)

I finished journaling my Disneyland pages and the book is complete. I'm currently working on September 2008, and I think I'll be able to catch up on this book before baby comes! I currently have a sore throat and cold, no fun. Yet, other than normal pregnancy quirks, this is the first time I've been sick since I've been pregnant. So, I can't complain. I have felt invincible and was shocked and disappointed to catch a bug at the end of my pregnancy.

Besides putting up my Christmas decorations and baking the first batch of cookies to freeze ( and some were eaten now!), I also worked on an album I continue for my Gramma. It's one of the smaller albums, so I can whip those pages out pretty fast. But it leads me to my Tip of the Day: Something I have reverted back to lately is the use of punches. They are so versatile, and you can use whatever color paper you want to match your page. Several heart punches can be grouped together to make a flower. There really is no end to the possibilities. I have also drawn right onto my page a few times lately. It sure changes the look of the book and can be quite a lifesaver if you can't find just the right sticker. If you don't trust yourself to write on the page, write on a piece of photo safe paper and silhouette it or keep it in a strip. Above all, let your creativity flow and have fun scrapbooking! Be like me....

Scrap Happy!

Water Cameras

I (almost) single-handedly used up 3 water cameras on our cruise! I couldn't help it! We went snorkeling, played with a dolphin, went swimming in the Carribean right beside the Pirate ship we were on, and fed stingrays. So, we were in the ocean a lot! I loved the water camera, except for the fact that you have to wind it. And if you automatically wind it right after you take a shot so that it will be ready for the next one, you might end up with a bunch of wasted pictures if you accidentally hit the lever that takes the picture while you are swimming! Now that I have gotten used to our digital camera, it was hard not being able to look at the pictures I had taken to see if they were any good, since most things happened so fast. We ended up purchasing the package that a professional photographer had taken of us with the dolphin, because I didn't know if the pics had turned out, and this was a once in a lifetime event!!!!

Tip of the Day: Water cameras are great for the beach because you don't have to worry about the sand or sea spray. If you do have your regular camera at the beach, or somewhere you expect it might rain or get wet, keep it in a ziplock bag. I can't tell you how many positive comments we have gotten when we pull our camera out of it's ziplock. "What a great idea!" Hey, it works!

What I'm up to

One of my fellow consultants brought me the gold flecked pages I have been dying to use! I'm so excited because that means tonight at my workshop, I can scrapbook my beach pages at long last! I would be caught up after that, but I sent another roll of film in to Snapfish to be developed, so I will have that to do. I'm trying to catch up so that I can work on the albums I am doing for others.
October is usually a slow month for picture taking for me. The roll of film being developed is mostly of the pumpkin patch. I do plan on taking some this weekend, as Jae is going to her friend's birthday party, where they will be taking a train ride! How awesome is that?!

Tip of the Day: If you want to save the life of the battery in your camera, remove it from your camera when it isn't in use.

Scrap Happy!

Scrapbooking the Steeler's Super Bowl Win!

I'm so happy that we won the super bowl! We have a group of us that watch the game together every week, so it was really special to be with them for the big game! I decided to let my daughter stay up for the whole game. We usually try to have her in bed with the lights out at 8pm, so I tried to get her to take a nap right after lunch. I held her, read her a book without pictures, and even took her on a car ride. But she never closed her eyes!
Her little friends left to go home to bed around her usual bedtime, and that's when she came in with us to watch what was left of the game. I'm so glad I let her stay up! I now have some wonderful memories of her really watching the game! I was able to get some pictures, of course!!! I have a picture of her with her arms up in the air cheering at the end of the game. I didn't get it on film, but tucked away in my mind is a shot of her pointing at the TV and yelling along with everyone when her guy, Polamalu recovered a fumble. She really does understand a lot more than I realized about football and the Steelers. The general consenses is that Jaelyn won't remember the Steelers winning the Super Bowl, but I disagree. I think that with the help of pictures, she will remember and be happy that she was there when the Steelers took the Bus to the Super Bowl!

Tip of the Day: During one of the games, I took all the kids outside and took their pictures next to a bunch of golden mums we have in our yard. I then made a journalling box by punching out squares of the mums from extra pictures, and making a frame of them in a rectangle shape. I journalled inside the rectangle. It gave a girly feel to a sporty page!
To make it even more personal, I also punched squares of the kid's faces out, one kid to a square, and put one in each corner of the rectangle instead of the mum squares. I get a lot of compliments on that page.

Scrap Happy!

Here we go Steelers!

I am so excited that our hometown team is in Super Bowl XL! I'm a Steeler's fan year round, I'm pretty attatched to certain players, and I love seeing the black and gold all over town! Being a scrapbooking freak, I have to document it! I have been taking some pictures of the fans we cheer with weekly during the playoffs, in fact I was blamed for Jerome's fumble! "Who took that picture?" I also was able to get some pictures from the pep rally at Heinz field. My daughter still isn't old enough to understand exactly what is happening. She recognizes some jersey numbers and players, knows that they are in Detroit, and sings an adorable rendition of "Here we go", but I know she can't possibly understand what the super bowl means! Someday, when she is older, she will. Then she can look back at the photos and see how cute she looked in her Polamalu jersey, and remember all the fun she had playing with her friend Zack while the adults all watched the game.

Tip of the day: Over the years, I've done many pages of us being fans.
*One idea for pages are to copy the black and yellow bands that are on most Steeler jerseys and use that either running across the bottom or top of the page, or lengthwise along the outside edge.
*I saved confetti from the last home game at Three Rivers stadium, and included it right on the page. I often save my ticket stubs and include them on the page of us at the game.
*CM has football stickers, as well as metallic paper, which has a true gold I love to use. I also like the metallic pen set's gold used on black pages.
* Freehand draw your team's logo. I also copied the label of a Heinz ketchup bottle for a page title.
* Titles: Sports fan, Tiny Football Fan, The Love of the Game, Defense-Offence-Fans behind the fence, Cheering for the Home Team!, Luv our Black & Gold!
* places to take pictures of your favorite team or fellow fans:
the stadium, they let you bring in a regular camera, but not a video camera!

Training camp

autograph signings, often there will be a sign or someone telling you that you can't get photos of you with the athlete. However, you are allowed to take pictures while they sign their autograph, so do that. You might even be allowed to go around behind the autograph table and have them take a picture of you as the autograph is being signed. The key is to being fast! They are only trying to keep the line moving!

Charity events

Wherever you normally watch the game

Scrap Happy! Let's Go Steelers!

Autumn is here!

I have tried unsuccessfully to write this blog at least 3 times over the last few days! Computer problems! I have been watching the changing leaves, fearing that I'll forget to look for a couple of days and they will have all fallen to the ground! I want to get some pictures when they are at their most brilliant this year!

Tip of the Day: Cm has a new leaf punch, although I did hear a rumor that they have run out! I have one, and let me give you some page ideas I like and have tested! I punch leaves in the various fall colors and pile them in a corner of the page, or I create a huge tree out of brown paper, it can even be a 2 page spread, and attatch the little leaves to it's branches. I made a painter's pallet, and punched out leaves to put on it as if the leaves were the paint puddles normally found on a pallet. I used the page title," The colors of Autumn". Attatch leaves directly to the page and use a pen to make it look like the leaf is falling. Simply use thin dash marks in a light path from the top of the page to the leaf. Don't make a straight line from the top of the page to the leaf, make it look as if the leaf is lazily floating to earth by adding some loops.
Scrap Happy!

Fall in all it's glory

I know that most of the leaves haven't started to change colors yet, and the weather has been perfect for close to a month here in Pennsylvania; but I was thinking about how near Autumn was! It officially starts this week! Pretty soon, the wind will have a bit of a bite to it, and everyone will dig out the sweaters and jeans. I myself will have to give up my flip flops for an agonizing 8 months. But, I do love fall! It is without question a beautiful sight to see the red, orange and yellow leaves. And they make beautiful backgrounds for pictures! (You had to know I was going there!) Pumpkin patches, with their different sized orange pumpkins dotting the field make for great pictures, too. A great color to offset orange leaves or pumpkins is a bright blue! Think of dressing yourself or the kids in that color when having pictures taken with these outdoor beauties. Or use bright blue on the page to bring out the colors.

Tip of the Day: If you don't have trees of your own to use as a fall backdrop, toss the kids in the car and take a drive. There are plenty of trees around, now you just need to find a spot where no one will mind your little photo op! I went up a long driveway of a house that was for sale, and stopped right in the driveway, where no one had cleared the leaves, and took some incredible pictures of my little one. You might see a picturesque spot along side the road, or in a park. Back roads are great! Or take the kids on a hike in the woods, but watch out! They might get a little muddy!
Happy Autumn!
Scrap Happy!