More Photos from Our Trip to Chicago

A couple of weeks ago, we traveled to Chicago because Farzad won the Ray Kroc Award. We were only gone for three days, but McDonald's packed a lot for us into those three days! And they did it in style, from picking us up in a stretch limo to taking us on really cool tours of the city to renting out the House of Blues for us. Here are a couple of layouts I've made of the trip (more to come soon).

Here's a page showing the award ceremony:

And here are a couple from the Shedd Aquarium (see below this post for another one--Funky Frog). This one's a two-pager:

And here are closer views of each page:

And yeah,we saw some fish there, too:

Color Combos Galore!

Anyone who knows me, knows that I love scrapbooking challenges, and for a long time I've been participating on Janet Perafan-Babar's Color Combo challenge. Well, just recently, Janet decided to gather a group of girls to make a color team for the challenges, and set up a challenge blog, called Color Combos Galore. The blog is subtitled "Step Outside Your Box," and these challenges really do encourage me to try new color schemes that I wouldn't have thought of using.

It's really fun seeing all the different ways people use the same color scheme. Here's my latest creation for the challenge:

And here's the color swatch Janet sent us:

Extreme Makeover

Okay, so call me crazy, but I find re-doing old pages fun!

I started scrapping oh, about eight years ago, and boy have times changed! So many more fun scrap goodies available, and my skills have certainly evolved.

The reason I decided to start re-doing my pages is because I now scrap 8 x 8 and I started out 12 x 12, and I find those albums to be so big and heavy. Well, that and the fact that I cringe when I look at my old pages! So I started a challenge called Extreme Makeover a few months ago over at Two Peas, and a few people have joined me along the way. (I think most people think I'm insane to be re-making old pages, though! But that's okay because I'm having fun!)

I'm not necessarily going to re-do ALL my old pages (I have almost 30 albums full of layouts from back when I was pretty new at scrapping). Just every now and then to throw something new into my scrap routine.

So here's my latest re-do. It's the opening page for my scrapbook about a trip Down Under I took back in 1993. The page below is (obviously) the "before" version. I was too lazy to scan it twice and stitch the whole 12 x 12 page, but you can get the idea of what the page looked like before.

Mom Just Made My Day!

She just got Scrapbook Trends Embellish book in the mail, and I'm in it! My first time being published!

I had my doubts because there was a disclaimer in the e-mail I got requesting my layout: "Although we are planning on publishing your layout, sometimes space constraints change, resulting in layouts not being published..." So I've been keeping my fingers crossed but trying not to get my hopes up.

It wasn't my very favorite of the layouts I submitted, but it's the one they wanted, and they actually published it! It's in the chapter about using metals, on page 96.