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Baby Goats Layout


I made this layout a couple of weeks ago. The pictures were taken on a beautiful sunny day and they printed in beautiful color! I knew I had to use this patterned paper for my background! I love polka dot patterns :) It made it so easy to coordinate the solid cardstock colors. I also like how the journaling on the bottom half of the half circle turned out. I printed it on scrap paper first, and then used repositionable adhesive to place the cardstock directly over the spot that it had already printed again.
Materials Used:
DCWV Patterned paper & cardstock
Martha Stewart Punch
Cricut goat from Animal Kingdom
Creative Memories Large Oval for Title and Journaling block
Prima Flowers
Flower shaped brad by the Paper Studio
Miscellaneous Stamps & Ink (I think Mindy's Zoo for the vines and assorted stamps from the dollar bin for the other accents.)
Thanks for looking! Let me know what you think!

Best Friends Layout

I have been overwhelmed lately with all of the photos that I have to scrapbook. I am definitely one who likes to feel like I am caught up! And I used to be completely caught up. I used to take pictures just so that I could scrapbook! But that was a year ago, and now I am a whole year behind! It's making me crazy I tell you!


Well, in an effort to condense the amount of scrapbooking that I have to do, and try some new scrapbooking techniques, I have decided to change the way that I scrapbook some events. Like birthday parties for example :)

In 50 years when my kids are looking back through the scrapbooks that I have made for them, I do not care if they remember every single birthday that they attended. I do however want them to remember the relationships that they had at every stage in their lives.


The pictures that I used in this layout are from my daughter's best friends birthday party. I think that Kalyn and Maddie have been best friends since Maddie started going to our church. It was really a cute party, but the "party" is not what I wanted the focus of my layout to be. I wanted my layout to showcase how much fun Kalyn and Maddie have together when they are able to have a playdate - they always dress up! It just so happened that at Maddie's party, all the guests were dressed up as princesses. They had a tea party and each girl also made a "best friend" mini card album. Using the title "Best of Friends" seemed like the perfect title to help describe the relationship between Kalyn and Maddie and it also reminds me of what they did at the party. In my journaling, I highlighted the party details, but at first glance, you would have no idea that this layout was actually for a birthday party.




The next time you are ready to scrap some photos, I challenge you to rethink how you can present your photos to be relevant to your whole life - and accurately represent the memorable relationships in your life, instead of just the random events.


If you have any questions about how I actually created this layout, feel free to leave your question in the comment section! Have a great Wednesday!

Buckaroo Layout with tips on using buttons & making your photos go further


Here's another layout that I worked on earlier this week. My sweet little baby riding the horse :) I love his expression in these photos! I used some earthy colored paper that my friend Mariah gave me along with some solid blue and light brown cardstock. I just love these themed buttons that I got from Michaels a few days ago. Remember that you don't have to always limit yourself to the scrapbooking departments to find embellishments for your layouts! Buttons are one of my favorite types of embellishments because they are so versatile. There are so many ways that you can use them in a layout, and there are so many different ones to choose from! All of the buttons in this package had a shank on them that I just trimmed off with a wire cutter. They attach securely with a glue dot. I resisted the urge to de-masculinize this layout with my primas and instead opted for an inked and plain scalloped edge on my title (which I cut in the Holy Cow font from Cutting Up on my Expression) and a simple star border for an accent.

Another quick photo tip for you -- remember how I said that I love his expression in these pictures? Well truth be told - both top pictures are cropped from the bottom picture. I zoomed in at different ranges with my PSP software and printed them all. It's kind of like a progression, from far out to up close. Having a camera with high mexapixels allows me to crop my photos and not lose their quality. So how does this help you? Well, if you have ONE photo that you love, try to crop it from several angles to make it look like there are more photos. I am so not a one-photo per scrapbook page layout kind of person, so this was a great solution to only having one photo of a particular event.

I hope you can try this soon with your photos! As always, if you have any questions, leave me a comment and I will get back with you! Have a great day!

Pajama Party Musical Scrapbooking Layout



Click on the photo to see it in more detail. Sorry it's so blurry looking up close. I am going to try to take a new pic tomorrow and I will change it then!

I just love this layout! The bright colors, the new techniques I tried, and of course my children make it one of my all time favorites!

Having a large diecut item is quite the scrapbooking trend right now and this is the first time I tried it on one of my layouts. I used a flower (from WIMG) and layed it on my page so that the upper and left sides could be trimmed away. I grouped all of my photos together and placed them inside the flower. Grouping the photos in an arrangement like this is new for me too. Typically, I would print all photos from an event, crop them individually and then arrange them over and over until I was happy with the positioning. Instead of the usual, I picked my photos, arranged them and built the page around them. I have really tried to narrow down what photos I include and print. I have stacks and stacks of pictures that I randomly printed and never used. What do I do with all of those photos? Nothing! What a waste! It can be super hard to cut down on the photos that I scrapbook, but I keep telling myself if I can save on the printing, I will have more to spend on embellishments! Funny how we justify things huh? Anyway, here lately, my favorite size print is 2x3 and I get them at the Kodak machine. It's quick and I am really happy with the quality. Enough about the pictures, right?

Another thing that I commonly do when scrapbooking is limiting myself to only TWO coordinating patterns, and doing everything on my pages from just those two patterns. I usually fill in ALL space with photos and journaling. I have seen layouts with "white/open space" and love how it draws your attention to the photos. In this layout, even though there is a striped pattern everywhere, it still functions as the white space because there's nothing there to visually distract you. I stepped out of my comfort zone by adding in two coordinating solid cardstocks for the flower and title land I also kept the embellishments minimal. Using just a couple of layered primas, a little strip of ribbon, and a border strip from a coordinating patterned paper finished my layout nicely. For my title, I cut it on the cricut and then ran it through the cuttlebug with the swiss dots embossing folder. I inked it to add even more definition. After doing all this, I thought the layout was lacking something, so I decided to add some faux stitching along the flower edges. I am really pleased with how this turned out! I hope that you will let me know what you think about it in the comments section! Have a great night!

Amber

New Valentines Layout

Sorry I haven't posted any this week, but I promise I have been working super hard :) I have designed two hunting scrapbooks (keep your eyes out for this one!) and several scrapbooking layouts. I want to share one of the layouts that I created today. Don't look too close because I actually have to have the pics reprinted. Target's photo machine was not cooperating with me tonight. Anyways...this layout was inspired by my friend Lindelon February Challenge. Check out the challenge here. Remember you can click on the picture to see it in more detail. Let me know what you think! I love using challenges as a starting point to designing a scrapbook page. Keep 'em coming, Lindelon!




Materials Used:
  • DCWV patterned paper from the Spring Stack 2008
  • DCWV Red Cardstock for title (Cuttlebug Fairy Alphabet) and mattes
  • Random buttons and fiber from my collection
  • Cricut Accent Essentials for heart shape
  • Lots of yummy embossed Primas