Moving right along

Here's my C-D spread for MeTAV. Some pretty intense journaling on this one...

It's about time...

During the summer of 2009, I committed myself to Cathy Zielske's "Me The Abridged Version" class. Since it took place during September, I knew I was not going to realistically get it done then, as that is the worst month a teacher can commit to anything but starting the school year.

Well, all of my Becky Higgins hubub has made me dig back in to what Cathy lovingly penned "MeTAV." I have been doing the journaling as the months have progressed. I am not finished, but I thought I better get some pages published before these things were no longer true about me.

I absolutely LOVE how this first spread turned out. As you can see, the scrapbook is MOSTLY journaling. The spreads will follow the same layout with a few alterations here and there. This means that, now that #1 is down, the rest should be easy peasy. She gave us quite a few .psd templates, but also some Word templates. I used the Word template for the journaling, as Photoshop and I are not always friendly.

Anyway, the layout and ideas are copyright Cathy Zielske and Big Picture Scrapbooking. The words and photos came from my head, clip art, and the Internet. I am using calibri font in MS Word 2007. The brown I am using is R: 66 G: 33 B: 0. I am using Bazzill white cardstock and some American Crafts page protectors. This is an 8.5 x 11" scrapbook with no embellies, which made scanning a breeze. I guess I could add embellishments, but that's not the point. The point is to document information about me in an encyclopedia fashion so my kids have something to hold on to. Well, and you know I'll go back to it and reminisce. Cathy used SEI Dill Blossom patterned paper, and I decided to do so as well, as I have a stack of it, and, quite frankly, it's awesome paper. As I get closer to the end, I will videotape what the whole book looks like. For now, these posts are about the pages... and maybe some inspiration can come to others.

Karen and JoLynn's Excellent Adventure

Project Life, baby. Karen and I had an afternoon of scrapbooking fun with Becky Higgins' newest product. Look at that craft table! Worker bees!

Today, I focused on my title and end pages and a DPS about carousel rides. The carousel rides did not take place in January, so I decided that my months will be split according to DPS's I do in that month, rather than photos that occur in that month. Less pressure, you know?

Today's DPS was a little challenging in that 1) my photos of Max on a carousel were really blurry, and 2) my photos of both the boys were taken with my iPhone, so the quality was not great. The other thing was that I didn't have the abundance of photos that are typically needed, so I had to decide how much journaling to do vs. how much decorative space to make the page complete.

Enter the journaling cards. The ones that can be folded or left open were ones that I used on both sides. At the end of setting this up, I realized that if you try to put the tabbed journaling card on the left side, you have a bit of a dilemma... the tab shows up on the page before it, but not on the page that it goes with. So, I took out the good ol' Exacto knife and cut through the page protector to solve that problem.

Luckily, I had a date stamp that resembled Becky's that included 2008, as the photos of Ignatius were from December 2008.

One thing I'm finding myself obsessing over seems to be that the decorative cards I use cannot have a totally random nature to them. I must have some unifying themes... color, basic design element, whatever. It's really insane, but I embrace that as my own personal illness with this scrapbook.

Full spread:
Page one:


Page two:

Hurricane Maximilian

Today's installment of Project Life is brought to you by Hurricane Maximilian. There was so much destruction in his path that he gets an entire DPS dedicated to it.

I stayed true to Becky's cards and stickers for this one. Documenting the ravages was more important to me than stressing over the layouts.




Full spread:



Page 1 closer:

Page 2 closer:

Valentine Challenge

On the Cards blog, the next challenge is one where we are called to be inspired by this card. We could use any part of this card as our springboard. I decided it was a good time to make the hubby a valentine. I used the basic layout: an off-center tag with a sentiment, some white space at the top, a panel edged with a scallop. Because I needed to "man" the card up, I changed quite a few things of the original. I still included hearts because, yes, they are appropriate for my husband. Back in the day, when I was 19 and we were just starting to date, hearts were plentiful on my part.

I changed the color scheme a bit and went with cardstock over patterned paper. I used SU! Creamy Caramel and Ruby Red. The tag was a punchout from an SU! '05-'06 catalog. The tag sheets were based on color family, so this one was from the Earth Elements tag sheet. For the Ruby Red panel, I decided to pull out the Cuttlebug and do some embossing with my Textured Script embossing folder. Then, I used my SU! scallop edge punch for the textured Bazzill brown cardstock strip. I also used my SU! tag punch for the "Be Mine" sentiment, which was stamped with SU! Craft White. For the stitching, I paper punched the holes and then hand stitched some twine I got in an SEI kit. I felt the rough stitching was more "guylike." I used my Corner Chomper to round off my corners (similar to the sample card, but I did all four corners).

Size: 3 3/8 x 5 3/8"
Cardstock: SU! Creamy Caramel and Ruby Red, Bazzill textured brown
Punches: SU! scallop and tag
Ink: SU! Ruby Red
Stamps: SU! Party Punch and Weather or Not
Thread: SEI
Tag: SU! Earth Elements Tag Set

Cards Blog

...is da bomb. Thanks, Ann, for directing me to it. They have great ideas and challenges. And, oh, yeah, they posted my thank-you card for last week's challenge. :)

Freedom card

I was tinkering with submissions for publications... the hard part with that is that they typically want you to create, say, a July 4 card when there's 7 inches of snow on the ground. You really have to have some serious inspiration (or a stash that works).

I used some of my new purchases and some older scraps for this card. I really like how it turned out... doesn't necessarily need to be July 4 to get this one...

Size: 5 1/2 x 4 1/4"
Cardstock: SU! Kraft, Basic Black, and Real Red
Cardstock "Coupons:" Rusty Pickle
Accessories: adhesive pop-ups; paper distressor; paper puncher; black embroidery floss