Sandy pages

I did some pajama scrapping last night, laying out pictures for all of the pages I have yet to do. I ran into a slight problem, as always! Creative memories is coming out with gold flecked pages! I saw them and thought that they would look perfect with my beach pictures! My problem? They don't come out until October and I can't order right away because I am waiting until I get a few more orders. Soooo...I laid out the pictures and even planned out 2 pages, which was more time consuming than if I had just put them on the page to begin with! I'm just afraid of getting behind. I'm so close to being caught up with her album, I can taste it! I'm going to see if someone can order a pack of pages for me. Until then, I wait!

Tip of the Day: Did you know that CM is coming out with an album that you can make using pictures you have taken digitally? I have seen one, and it was beautiful! The quality was incredible! It's like a book, a picture book. You can fit more pages into it than you can in a 12x12 album, but it is smaller (8 1/2 x 11) and is so light to carry and show off! I might make myself a Disney album, since I had to stop scrapping for myself a while ago. I can use the photos I sent to Snapfish to make this. It's exciting!

Scrap Happy!

Please respond!

Because I take so many pictures and do so many albums for my only child, I find myself thinking," What am I doing!?" Is there a point where you must realize that you can't save every moment? Am I taking too many photos? What am I going to do with all of these albums? We will need a U-haul just for her albums when she moves out if I continue to create 2 (or 3 like last year) for each year of her life. She will have 24 albums when she is 12! What do you think? I love to take pictures of her, and I admit, I am trying to keep track of everything. I also love to scrapbook them! But when is it too much? Is she going to think the world revolves around her? When is she going to have the time to look through all of these albums? I'm happy with the one album I have that covers my entire childhood, from birth to graduation! Sure, I don't know when I said my first word, took my first step, or funny things I said as a kid. But is all of that really going to matter? I know that having these albums is bound to give her a sense that she is loved. However, I don't want her to forget anything that didn't make it into the album. Meaning, I don't want her only memories to be the ones in the pictures. I hope that she won't ever be embarrassed that I made so many and wrote down everything. I hope that she will know how priceless she is to me. I realize that eventually, the pictures will slow. She will go off with her friends and I will be lucky to get a shot of her on her birthday and Christmas. I know that this time won't last forever. Maybe that's why I'm holding onto it so tightly!

Please let me know what you think!

Scrap Happy!

childhood moments

I couldn't help but take pictures of my daughter playing at the creek with her friends yesterday! They found a frog and everyone got a chance to touch it's slimy, wet skin! The look of delight on my daughter's face as she pet it, was priceless! Then there was the log that everyone walked across one at a time. She did very well in her flip flops! Sometimes I wish that I could go invisible, to take pictures without letting the other person know I was taking them. She tends to either turn away or stop what she is doing to pose for me. I wanted to get that look of pleased concentration that her face showed as she held her arms out and crossed that log, all by herself!

Tip of the Day: I have been toying around with the idea of doing a page with cartoon- like qualities. I'm not sure how to go about that, but it is a novel idea, and one I have never used in my album before!

Scrap Happy!

Red, White and Blue

It was workshop night last night, which means I actually got to scrapbook without feeling guilty that I wasn't washing clothes or dishes or cleaning anything! We had a nice little group of us, and it was business as usual, everyone adding ideas when asked, and small talk getting passed around with the peanutbutter cookies. We are somewhat like a support group of sorts, listening to each other's stories and venting about work. One of us, who spent most of the evening sorting her pictures, got so much joy from them, that she would randomly burst into laughter! We then pass the picture around as she explains the laughter. Those are the things you don't even need to journal, the sunglasses, the pointing at the bum, the weird expressions you see as a sibling looks at your album. Thanks for sharing! :)

I finished the 4th of July, with one minor bump! I skipped a page and didn't want to take the stickers off of the completed page, so I had to do one page out of order. That kind of thing drives me crazy. But it really doesn't matter in the long run, right?

Tip of the day: Patriotic page idea
I quartered a page using dark blue and red and cream checkered squares. I matted my center picture with a complimentary red and used copper to journal. It really seemed to give it a 4th of July BBQ feel to the page. My biggest problem turned out to be the title. I couldn't find letter stickers in a shade that would work, and the copper wasn't really what I wanted either. Oh, well. That's what happens when you are working with two strong colors.

Scrap Happy!

Be a Star!

I'm working on the 4th of July weekend. No, this isn't an old blog you're reading, it's brand new! What I mean is that I'm working on the pages of the fun things we did that weekend! I feel like I'm pretty much out of ideas of patriotic pages. But you never know when something you have seen or read somewhere will pop into your head and you will have your page layout! My inspiration came from the last crop talk I gave at my last workshop! At the time, I really liked this border they showed, made completely out of punched stars. With the 2 makers, there are 4 different sizes of stars to choose from and if you use the green micro maker, that gives you another style of star to choose from. So armed with the makers, I set about punching out stars using several different shades of red and blue, and plain vellum. I used scraps, too, so that was an added bonus. I then layered them in red, white and blue on the borders of 5 pages. Then I laid my pictures out and stuck some of the extra stars in the bare spaces as decoration. I am pleased with the finished result. It is close to an idea I used last 4th of July, but not identicle, so I think I can get away with it.

Tip of the Day: When you are doing something like this, (mixing red, white and blue) don't just pick out your paper based on color name alone. All of your different shades of blue should be in the same family. They should be cohesive, harmonizing, just like you want your family to be! If you use reds that clash with one another, it is taking away from your precious pictures. The thing that took me the longest was picking out several shades of red that would look good together, as well as fit my vision for the page, which was somewhat vintage, darker hues. I wanted my pages to look timeless. If you aren't sure if a shade works well with the others, don't risk using it!

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Power Pallets

Last night, I sat by myself and scrapped alone! It was Friday night, but I didn't have a workshop. That meant I got to scrapbook in my pajamas! Creative Memories has this new system that makes it easy to scrapbook many pages in a short amount of time. It's called the power pallet. The idea is that all of the paper and stickers fit together, so that you don't need to worry about things matching, that's all done for you. It's a great idea, but being a bit of a rebel, and needing my pages to be unique, I ended up just using one of the paper packs. I love how it turned out, very retro! I found the color, maybe it was just the particular paper I chose, to be hard to match up with older paper packs. I know that they have designed the paper and stickers to match everything in their "pallet", but I have to say that they should have done better! I plan on using some of the new stickers when I do some vacation pages from this summer. One thing I do like about the power pallets (there are 2 different ones) is that you can get large sheets of stickers for $2.50. There are so many different themes to choose from, too! However, since the power pallets are sold as a package, you can't see the individual sticker sheets if you look in the new catalog! They aren't shown in price either , instead are lumped together with the power pallet price. However, I'm telling you this now, everything in the power pallet can be purchased individually.

Tip of the Day: If you are disappointed in any way with Creative Memories or a product, let them know! They have a place for you to do this, via e-mail. Simply go to the website and look for the comment section. This is what I'm going to have to do about the power pallets not being marked in the catalogs. If we don't give feedback, they will never know!

Scrap Happy!

Ooops!

Just because I haven't been blogging, that doesn't mean that i'm not scrapping! I have been, lately. I'm working on my daughter's album of this summer. I ran into a little problem with my Disney trip! I didn't plan well enough and this is what happens. I have 19 pages in the album I wanted to add Disney to. Remember that I skipped ahead, because I knew that Disney was going to be time consuming? Well, now I can't possibly fit all of the Disney trip into one album, because I completed 28 pages on Disney! (if you count front and back, I did 56 pages on a week and a half trip!) I'm crazy, I tell you! Add the Disney pages to the album already in progress and you get 47 pages! It's recommended that you only put 35-40 pages in an album. So, what can I do? I can't do anything...but squeeze the pages in! The only other option is to make Disney it's own book, and I can't do that. I'm simply too thrifty! I have thought extensively over my options and can't think of any that will work. (I ended up making a whole album, just for Disney! It's worth it, and I plan on doing the same thing the next trip!April 2007)

Tip of the Day: Please! For the love of scrapbooking! Learn from my mistakes so that you don't have to make your own!

Scrap Happy!

Did I complete my goal !?!

I'm home from the beach! The weather was terrible, thanks to Ernesto. But I am happy to report that I finished journaling my cruise while I was there! Yay! Now, I am putting the last touches on it, checking some words I wasn't sure how to spell ( I forgot my dictionary !) and putting the page protectors on the pages. It is such a good feeling to be done with it! I was starting to forget things, and now I can look back at my album when I start to forget what I had for dinner at Palo, and which day we spent at Cozumel.
If you remember, I was also hoping to complete the journaling of our Disney trip from last November. Truthfully, I didn't even open that side of the bag! I was biting off more than I could chew hoping I could complete both! I am glad that I finished the Disney trip's pages in time to take them to the beach, and I'm very happy with the journaling I was able to complete!

Tips of the Day: Knowing I was going to be journaling the cruise, I wanted to take all of my notes, the pages of our passporter (a book we wrote in daily) and things like the Navigator (which we recieved nightly telling us about the next day's activities) and maps of the islands. These are things I wanted to save and will eventually put in my album in portrait pages. To keep everything orderly, I used a file mate. I simply put them in the file mate to keep them in one place as we traveled. It worked perfectly! I'd recommend it!

Another thing I did, was bring along a pack of post it notes. When I knew I would have to look something up later on, I wrote a short note, " date?", "spelling? (and then the word I was unsure of) " ,"name of Will's horse?"and "how many times?". Just enough to trigger my memory. This way, when I leaf back through, putting page protectors on, I can find the spots I missed easily. Watch that you don't put the sticky part on a photo. Don't leave it on a page for a prolonged period of time, either!
Scrap Happy!