Showing posts with label Heather T kits. Show all posts

Fun News and My Latest Pages

Holy cow! January and February were crazy busy months for our household. Lots of birthdays and more going on around here. I'm back on the blogging bandwagon now and ready to go!

By now, a majority of you who read my blog already know this, but I'm going to share it again anyway. Back in January, I was lucky enough to earn a spot on the Creative Team for Jen Martakis. She is one of the fabulous Garden Girls over at Two Peas, and is also one of their digital designers. Click here to see her digital scrapbooking kits. They rock!

Below are some of the pages (and a card thrown in for good measure) I made using her awesome products:
















The follow layouts are ones I've done recently for Heather T., who has recently taken a designer gig over at The Digi Chick. I used her "Owl Play," "Stitched 4," and "Darling" kits to create these pages.

See that cool, loopy cursive font I used on the title for the "Owl Love You Forever" page? It's one of my faves right now, and if you are a font junkie like me, you can pick it up over at dafont.com. It's called Clementine Sketch and lucky for you, it's a free download...yippee!





These final two layouts are first "Twelve of Twelve" pages for the new year. I'm doing a two-page format this year to see how I like it. While I really enjoyed doing the one-pagers last year, I felt a little limited with the picture size. It's been nice to have a bit more of breathing room for my photos.






Enjoy your day!
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I'm Alive...

...and finally healthy! My hubby and I both got ill, so between that, all the Halloween festivities, and my husband's birthday, I had a lot going on. I'm back in business now and thought it was about time I did a page share:

Here are two pages I did last month for Heather T with her digital goodies she has available at Pixel Canvas.

This first one uses her "Masked 1" and "Country Dream" kits:




This second page was done primarily to showcase her "Paper Pieces 1: Houses" kit. I also grabbed some patterned paper from her "Burnished Papers" kit:



The next two pages are ones that I did when I participated in the Fall Crop at Two Peas (it was held at the beginning of October). Both of these were created for challenges I took part in, and the layout of Izzy and the dragonfly got me entered into a drawing, which I was lucky enough to win! I got a hefty box of uber-cool scrapping goodies for my efforts...woo hoo!





The following three layouts are ones I created as I took part in some of the Digital Weekly Challenges at 2Ps. I don't always have time to participate in these, but when I do, I feel like they help me grow as a scrapbooker. I enjoy the fact that I can hone my skills by the simple act of doing a page for a challenge.


This layout was a real catharsis for me. While the crux of the challenge for this page was to use a black and white color scheme with a color photo, it was great to actually address something through this page that has been bugging me for a long time. And ya'll know how much I like to be honest in my scrapping:




For this next layout, we were challenged to create a shadow for an object on our page, then warp it so that it actually looked like there was light somewhere casting a real shadow. I made a little shadow for my pumpkin and was quite happy with it:



The next challenge I did required creating a digital paper tear somewhere on my page. Can I just tell you how much I've always loved paper tearing? It's not really the "it" technique anymore, but I still try to sneak it into my pages here and there. I could've just grabbed one of the premade paper tears I already have in my stash, but I really wanted to try making my own. It took a bit of experimenting to find the right type of brush to use, but I finally got it right. I added a texture filter and burned the edges a bit, and I thought it turned out pretty darned good for my first ever shot at it:



Over at the 2Ps digi-board, some of the other gals and I finished another round of the digi-morph challenge, where we are sent a layout by another person in the rotation, and we scraplift the page to create our own. Throughout the process, we see only the page right before ours, and none others. When we all finish, then the challenge hosts reveal all the pages so we can see how the layouts have evolved. Here was my page for that challenge:



If you are interested in seeing the change from the first layout to the last, check out them here.

Now that I've reached the end of my post, I suppose you know what's coming! Here is October's Twelve of Twelve" page. Shhh...don't tell anyone I actually took the photos on the 13th, since the 12th was kind of an icky day...:D



Have a super day!
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I'm Baaaack...

Sorry for the hiatus. I hate it when life gets in the way of blogging (just kidding). I took some time out to celebrate my birthday, take a Labor Day weekend trip with the fam, and get my younger two in preschool. It's been a little crazy!

Here the pages I've done recently:

The following two are layouts I made using Heather T's "Tuesday Templates" kits that were released on 8/25 and 9/08:






The next two projects were created with Heather's "Burnished Papers" kit. As you can see, the paper is beautiful works well for both digital and hybrid projects (like the card). When I had my birthday party a few weeks ago, I did up a card kit for each of the gals that came and then they completed it that night. It turned out so pretty!!





Another page I did for Heather was made with her "Ooh, Shiny 1" embellisment kit. There are tons of pretty pearls and gems to work with.



This next page came together for two reasons. First, I've decided to quit putting myself on the bottom of the list behind family, church responsibilities, and all the other stuff that I have to do everyday. Putting my feelings into a scrapbook page about it seemed like a good way to remind myself not to shove "me time" down again. Second, it was a fun page to enter in last week's digital challenge over at 2 Peas, where participants were challenged to use exclusively the free digital kits available there. So cool!



And as always, here is my latest "12 of 12" page. I think this is the first one that fell on a saturday, so we didn't have the hurried schedule we have all the other days of the week. Plus, my hubby and I went to Art in the Park, so we got some fun pictures there:



Thanks for taking time from your busy day to come by!
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Simple School Albums

This time of year is so busy. The children are heading back to school, and those of us who are taking care of them anticipate the workload that will come with that. Getting everyone to and from school each day, making sure they have a decent lunch, keeping their extracurricular activities organized, and ensuring that they are caught up with homework is already adding a lot to our plates.

There is also the pressure document their experiences throughout the school year, take pictures, and hold onto their memorabilia. As a scrapbooker, I want my kids to have more mementos from their school years than I did. However, I'm not up for trying to be "supermom" in this area. I would like to find a balance between creating cute albums for them and still having time for other interests I have, too.

I'm also one who gets overwhelmed with clutter, and while I haven't gotten a handle on going through it all efficiently, I'm not just going to let it accumulate.

Here are a few guidelines I've set up for myself. I find that these keep me sane and prevent me from taking all of it and hucking it out the front door:

1 - I'm not going to keep everything. Since there's more than one kid in this household, we'd be up to our ears in paper if I did. My spouse and I pick and choose what we think is the best, the cutest, shows their growth, or is especially memorable. The rest gets put in with our regular recycling.

2 - The kids can keep one or two bulky projects (such as a volcano created out of papier mache, etc.) they created for school, as long as it fits in their rooms. We will take photos of all of them, created scrapbook pages for them, and then the remaining items will have to go.

3 - We will keep things as easy as we can on the first and last days of school. That means we will rise a little earlier to take photos before school. We will take a few photos when we drop them off (since we walk and they don't take the bus), but we won't drive ourselves crazy.

I'm going to focus today on what things I'm putting in my kid's albums, and in another entry I'll show you how I compile the contents of them.

Great albums always start with nice photos, so a couple of weeks before school starts, I try to list what I want pictures of. That generally includes firsts (such as the first day, the first school lunch, first set of supplies, etc.), the walk to school, a picture of the child near or inside the classroom, and any new clothes or backpacks.

Wherever possible, I take pictures before the first day. The less we have to do on that day, the better. Since my hubby had purchased all of Izzy's school supplies early, I piled them on the table, had her sit by them, and snapped a couple of shots. Boom. One less thing to do and one of her "firsts" is already recorded:



Then, when that busy day finally hits, I try to schedule with my hubby so he can take part of the day off. We both keep a camera handy, that way it's not on one person to take all the pictures AND make sure everyone is ready and cleaned up. It reduces a lot of stress. By doing this, we ensure that we get the adorable and important pictures we want for their scrapbooks:



Here's more on my opinion on children's schoolwork and how much of it to keep. There are some people out there who like to keep everything their kid brings home, and for them, that's great. That just doesn't work for me. So, what I do is to go through all of our kid's papers with my husband. We do this once or twice a week. Some weeks, we may not save anything, and some we save a lot. If the child has done multiple versions of the same drawing/or worksheet, we keep only one. We label their work with the child's name, along with the month and year the worksheet or artwork was done. We keep a manila folder for each child, and their papers or photos of projects go in there.

At the end of each school year, I go through their files, pick a few things to slip into a sheet protector, and place those in their albums. These I will intersperse with layouts I've done and their various school pictures. There are some things that I think are really cute, so I scan and save them in a format I can use in Photoshop Elements. From there, I can incorporate them into a layout. I made the following page at the beginning of Izzy's first grade year because it was just so fun. I scanned one of the first worksheets she brought home and used it to chronicle her growth as a student.



That still leaves a fair amount of items in their folders, so when the folders get full, we are planning on starting a box for each child to hold the rest of their work. Those boxes will stay in the garage and we'll eventually give that to them when they are grown.

For me and my crew, this had made things pretty manageable and kept things fun without overwhelming us all. I have also decided not to give into the guilt that some try to place on me about not saving *every* single scrap they bring home. I think in the long run, my kids would rather see that I kept their "greatest hits" instead of loading them down with boxes and boxes of schoolwork.

If you like the kits I used for my pages, here are the links:

The first two layouts, I used Heather T's Yay, School! kit.

For the third page, I used Katie Pertiet's School Days kit.

Thanks for taking time to visit and have a great day!
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Time For Another Page Share

OK, last week was crazy busy since it was the first week of school for my two oldest kids, so here I finally am with an update.

Here's what I've been working on lately:

These pages I did for Heather T using here "Brad Me 1" and "Softer Side" kits, both available at Pixel Canvas:






Here are layouts I did for Heather over at Gotta Pixel using her "Gotta Grab It" kits from both July and August:





The following layout is one I did for the very cool Digital Morph challenge over at 2Peas. One layout was chosen as the starting point, then the first player scraplifted parts of the design and added their own spin to it. From there, it was emailed to the next person in the group, who saw only the new page that was done, and the process was repeated, until we were finished. None of us saw all of the layouts or the progression that occurred with each page until the very end. It was so fun! When it was my turn, I chose to do a page about Izzy eating her first lunch at school:



And last, but certainly not least, Here is August's 12 of 12 page. The first day of school conveniently fell on the twelveth, so this one is particularly fun for me:



I appreciate you stopping by --- Have a beautiful day!
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My Latest Pages

It's time for some shameless page sharing! I cannot tell you how nice it is to have my scrapbooking activities back to a regular occurance instead of a sporaidic one. Let me show you what I've been working on lately.

Here are the most recent pages I've done for Heather T's creative team. These are pages for kits she has for sale over at Pixel Canvas. I used the "Painted Corners and Dividers," "Country Dream," and "The Softer Side" kits:








Heather also got a designer gig over at Gotta Pixel, another online store with great digital goodies (yea!), so here's some pages I did with paper and embellies from her "How It Works" kit:






I was also pretty excited to see that Heather had posted about her new creative team here and to see that I am part of such a great team. I'm so lucky ---thank you, Heather!

And, last but not least, here is my July 12 of 12 page:



If you've made it this far, thanks for letting me share my work and have a great day!
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