Mixed Media Hop, 8/21

I’m back with the August ’21 Mixed Media Frenzy YouTube hop. The final Friday of each month the group invites all members to participate in a community hop. If you want to join in the fun, visit their Facebook group for inspiration and interaction. We were scrap lifting the image below, created by the very talented Missy Whidden. If you haven’t seen her videos I highly recommend them. She has so much patience for layering details onto her projects!

I had fun playing with plenty of ink (as paint!), stamps, and die cuts for my own interpretation. You’ll notice the photo is very fuzzy. That isn’t you, or my graphic, it is actually how the picture was taken! I was on my first kayak trip and my phone/camera was in a ziplock to keep it dry. I was too nervous about dropping it in the water to take it out of the ziplock. But do I let a bad photo stop me from scrapbooking? Never!

Check out the entire process over on my YouTube episode. And remember this is a hop! The video description box will lead you to each creator playing along. Check them all out and leave them all some love.

Adult Ballet

I got involved in an adult beginning ballet class through a friend. I do like to dance but ballet was never my thing. I’m not a classical music lover, I’m not dainty and I’m not elegant. Dancing isn’t something I’m good at in general so I usually keep it at home. But the chance to hang with a friend, get some exercise & toning and try something new was interesting so I gave it a try. And liked it enough to stay for a year and a half. Now that class has come to an end due to scheduling issues I’m ready to move on to other things but I’m very glad I gave ballet a go.

When Shimelle posted a “scrapbook a selfie” challenge over on her blog, I knew I had the perfect story to tell. This wasn’t a typical selfie. Instead I propped up my smart phone in a pile of laundry in my bedroom and posed in front of the closet doors. Took a few tries but I got a photo I was satisfied with in the end. Converting it to black and white made it more elegant!

I used mostly Shimelle True Stories collection products. I didn’t have plan for this page at all besides the 6×8 size to fit in my personal album. Then I just started grabbing product that I liked. Having a black and white photo meant that I didn’t have to worry about colors clashing and I just let the collection do the coordination for me. With this just grab-and-go design, my elements turned out to be quite large on this size page and I was left with lack of journaling space, something I usually budget for ahead of time. I looked at the white space in my photo and debated if that was the best place for journaling. But in the end I just did it because as the saying goes, “done is better than perfect.” I love how I found little phrases in this collection that supported my story so well, especially that “give it a whirl” sticker.

Happy to have this page ready for my album. I suggest if you want to tell a story, print a black and white photo and just grab a paper collection and GO. Don’t think, just go. It is freeing and fun. And you get things done.

Contest entry

Just a plain simple contest entry for a recent Scraptastic Club blog post. I wasn’t that trilled with the lucky theme of the May 2014 kit and wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. Best idea? Use up all the specifically lucky themed items in one big embellishment grouping. Since I spent this past weekend feeling very lucky about how our family makes its way in this world, I chose that topic to write about. I left it without a photos to just let the words speak. And that works well for the challenge.

Final LOAD posts

Okay, after a very busy weekend and then the stomach flu, I am finally feeling up to getting the last of my LOAD layouts posted. I’ve got all digital layouts for you this post. Four of the 5 are duplicate layouts in a series and are easily reproducible in paper form. Hope you get some inspiration. Enjoy.

Day 27, 28, 29, 30. A series from our unschooling conference. It was four days of joy, thoughtfulness, activity, exhaustion, connections, energy, learning and so much more. It really is an emotional ride that extends beyond a learning philosophy and into a living philosophy.

Day 31: And at the end of the weekend this was how I felt.

NSD recap

So I had a great time celebrating NSD with a couple of friends. We chatted, listened to music, snacked and learned things from each other. It was a good day. I’m looking forward to working on more projects here in a few minutes. Today I am going to focus on challenges put out by blogs and community sites that I follow. I am also going to work on my layout for LOAD. More about that next post. For now here are the things I completed for NSD.

This one you saw as my last challenge post yesterday. While I completed all the other NSD challenges before hand. This one I did day of. It was also my Day 1 entry for LOAD.

A no photo layout using saved items.

And Pages from the class I am taking at Big Picture Scrapbooking called Everyday Adventures. I posted about this class in an earlier post as well. The first layout was to create a page about things you buy, the second page was to explore type and the final was to think about the things you throw away. My daughter played along with that one and her interpretation is on the right of the photo.

NSD Challenge 2: Scrap You!

Okay, I am a believer in saving your own story. Scrapping about you is just a more visual extension of the diary/journal. Others will want to read it, maybe now, but definitely later. Imagine the things you wish you knew about your mom, dad, grandma, great-grandpa etc. Write about those things. Take pictures of the moments you wish you had from loved ones who have passed on. Those are the things to save about yourself!

Remember to post your project to your favorite online gallery and leave a comment here with a link to your post. I’d love to see your project!

Recipe:

pattern paper: Vintage Plum (out of business), Luxe (cupcakes)
alphabet stickers: Scenic Route
color pencils: Stampin’ Up
journaling tags: from stash

Things I love

I am in love with a bunch of scrapbooking goodness right now. Some of them I discovered in scrap classes at Creating Keepsakes Convention back in February such as the paper below from Cosmo Cricket. (It is just a rainbow of prettiness.) Some of these things grew on me over time such as stitching. Some of them I just decided on day that I really liked such snails and mushrooms. Regardless of where my love came from, they make me happy and I thought I would share!

I used many of my favorite items on a layout just about… my favorite items! It was a good excuse to put everything pretty on one page. I had fun just playing with products. Here is what I made. It is a double page 6×6 spread for my Pieces Of Me Album. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I think it is important to record your own life as well of that of your kids (for the majority of you who scrap kids and grandkids!).

You’ll notice on the left side there is a little tag sticking out. Well that actually is a tag book that I made that is a big list of my favorite things. Take a closer look…

So go make a page about your favorite things!

P.S. I will have my first video tutorial coming up on how I made the cute little mushroom on my page. So keep an eye out for that!

Blog challenge

Do you do blog challenges? I haven’t really done many since my scrap time is so limited and I have so many of my own ideas I want to work on. But every once in a while I find it fun to follow the plan of someone else.

I recently found Write.Click.Scrapbook blog and am loving it. They recently posted a mystery challenge to complete a project. While I didn’t play along with they mystery (I don’t like doing projects that may duplicate things I have done in the past), I followed the blog through the 5 part challenge and patiently waited for the reveal. Once revealed I decided to play along with a few adjustment to fit my needs. The project ended up being an A-Z mini album of “happy things”. I made my A-Z list and thought I would share it here. Once I complete the pages, I’ll upload a few snap shots of my completed work.

If you’d like to play along, please follow the links.

Creative Adventure: Part 1, Creative Adventure: Part 2, Creative Adventure: Part 3, Creative Adventure: Part 4 and Creative Adventure: Part 5.

So here is the list of things from A to Z that make me happy. It’s not polished but I will work on that!

a: animals
b: bathtub!
c: chocolate
d: droid
e: eggs (homegrown ones!)
f: Friday nights
g: gardening
h: husband
i: internet
j: jeans
k: kids
l: laptop
m: myth busters
n: netflix
o: OMSI
p: photography
q: quiet
r: reading
s: scrapbooking
t: tredmill
u: universe (add Neil deGrasse Tyson quote)
v: visions (of my scrappy life)
w: weight(going down!)
x: xanthan gum
y: yesterday (stories & memories) or yard (kids to play, room for animal, lots garden space)
z: zzzz’s(aka sleep)

Scrapbook about YOU!

I am often not in photos because I am too busy being behind the camera. The ones I am usually in are blurry photos of the top of my head that my kids take. Not how I want to remember myself years down the road! And when I am gone I don’t want these to be the only reminders my kids have left of me. Because of that I keep a small scrapbook just about me.

The book is small. It is a 6×6 ring album. It is not added to often but what I do add is about what I am feeling in the moment. While some of the pages in it are far from serious, like the layout about my gall bladder surgery, what matters is that I am keeping track of things in my life that impact me. My kids will be able to look back at these things later and get a perspective on their mom that perhaps wasn’t there for them before.

I encourage you to scrap about yourself. Please post a comment with a link to a page about yourself! I’d love to see what others are doing to preserve their own story.

Here are some samples layouts from my album. These happen to be all digital. Because my album is only 6×6 I can easily print the layouts out on 8.5×11 photo paper and tuck them into my album.