A Divine Palette {at CCG}

Challenge 205 is live at Color Combos Galore. Isn't this a beautiful Inspiration Board?

Here is the page I created. The picture was taken with my new webcam. I've been chatting with friends on Skype for the past week, and for some reason whenever I'm looking at a light computer screen, my face gets all whited out and my friends have this joke, which is what my hidden journaling is all about. (It's an inside joke, so I won't be sharing the journaling.)

I used an odd assortment of papers for this page. The colors were tricky to get an exact match, but I found several that were pretty close to the palette. The teal paper in the background is by Heidi Grace and it has some pretty embossed dandelions, most of which unfortunately got covered up as I started adding to my page.

Here are some details. That big pink flower came from a K&Co pad of paper (Handmade collection). And the lanterns are from Webster's Pages, of course. Love those!

The floruishy teal paper is by Foofala. An oldie but goodie. Speaking of oldies but goodies, I still love my old Heidi Swapp letters. So classic. I don't think they'll ever go out of style--which is a good thing since I have a million packages of them! The little words are cut out of a Cosmo Cricket Odds & Ends paper. There's some of my mesh under the title for the Designer's Challenge. The silvery dots are Liquid Pearls. They always turn out pointy for me. Gotta experiment with them to figure out how to make them more like pearls and less like microscopic Hershey's kisses.

Thanks to my friend Tracee who suggested adding the rhinestones to these flowers when I was saying my layout needed more bling. The flower branch was cut out of an old Prima paper. I glazed them with Stickles. I also added that photo corner at the last minute. The alphabet paper is also from an Odds & Ends paper, and the "Document" journaling spot and harlequin pattern paper are by Teresa Collins. They were just the right shade of red. I found that the red in Jenni Bowlin's papers are pretty close to the red in the palette.

I added Glossy Accents to the little circles in the centers of these pink flowers. I also outlined the flowers with a fine pen.

Come on over and check out the beautiful work from the rest of the team, and play along with us! You may just become our next featured member!

Thank you so much for visiting my blog and reading about my page!



A Beachy-Keen Palette {at CCG}

Challenge 204 is live at Color Combos Galore!

For the Designer's Challenge we had to use a grid design. I had recently made a layout using a traditional grid, so I wanted to do something a little different, and I remembered a sketch I had seen at Studio Calico that reminded me a little of a grid:

Here is the page I made. I used square blocks of patterned paper, overlapping and staggering, for a sort of modified grid design. That's one of about a thousand pictures of my nephews posing with a toad they found in their back yard. I've written stories before about the toads, but really there was no special story for this page, just a cute picture. I used a bunch of older papers for this page, including Making Memories (the die-cut paper in the background and the blue polka dots), K&Co (the green), DCWV (the blue and white and the brown polka dots), and Chatterbox (plaid).

Here are a few details. The leaves were cut out of an old Scenic Route paper. I scored the center of the leaves and folded them up for a little dimension. The tabs tucked behind the photo are ancient--they're woven ribbony tabs by Scrapworks. I have a ton of them. Don't know why I thought of dusting them off for this page, but I'm glad I did.

There's another tab by scrapworks--has more of a canvas texture. That frog was cut from a birthday card and I put him on a punched circle. The border punch is by Martha Stewart, and the chipboard letters are by BasicGrey. I added the pom-pom trim at the last minute, just before I was going to photograph my page.

That arrow is an old Foofala rub-on, which I put on that same yellow paper (which was trimmed from the edge of a patterned paper, by the way--I thought it was the perfect shade of yellow). I outlined the arrow with bue pen and added the pearls. The word stickers are all by K&Co.

This little 3D flower sticker is by Chatterbox.

The reveal is just gorgeous this week, as always! Go take a peek. And I hope you'll play along with us--the challenges are so fun!

Thank you so much for stopping by my blog and reading about my page.

A Serene, Harmonious Palette {at CCG}

Challenge 203 is up at Color Combos Galore, and what a lovely Inspiration Board we have this week:

And I just happened to have this picture of me looking for seaglass and Farzad patiently indulging me, so this page was born. It's going into my book called "Reasons," where I document all the little reasons I love my husband so much!

I got a little carried away adding stuff to my page. (And believe me, there's a pile of stuff on my scrap desk that I wanted to add but didn't fit). Most of the stuff on my page is pretty old. I was so happy to use some of the probably hundreds of sheets of vellum in my stash.

Here are some details. The vellum clocks came from a sheet of Rebecca Sowers Attic Collection patterned vellum (that shows you how old that is!). That little "Simple Stories" bit was cut form the tear strip of a patterned paper. That brown textured paper is also really old. I bought it at an art store years and years ago. My letter stickers are by BasicGrey and Webster's Pages. The colors matched the palette pretty closely. I did some scribbly pen work on the  BasicGrey letters.

I love those white stem-looking patterns from an old Making Memories paper. I'm going to be sad when I run out of that paper. The seahorse was trimmed from a Webster's Pages paper. The netting tucked in between the layers is from a Webster's Pages bloomers trim. I added that charm to the stamped frame at the last minute, as well as the real starfish and sand dollar. The frame stamp is by Glitz Designs.

Those shell images come from a Creative Imaginations paper. The border stamp is by Kaiser Craft.

The patterned papers I used are from a Die Cuts With a View pad. Here you can see I added some water droplets by using Glossy Accents. I think I might add some more. You can also see that the aqua vellum is patterned--it has a watery pattern on it that was perfect for this challenge.

HEre you can see the silver charm a little better. That "Seaside Avenue" bit is from a Making Memories patterned paper.

Go take a look at the gorgeous work the rest of the team made, and I do hope you'll play along with us! If you've never tried our challenge, you must give it a whirl! It's so fun!

Thank you so much for stopping by my blog and reading about my page!

CCG + HMITM = One Fun Page!

I've had an extremely busy couple of weeks between my scrappy life and my home life. We're buying a house and have been cleaning, cleaning, cleaning to get our house ready to list. So I last week I had to choose between doing a page for Color Combos Galore or doing a page for How Much Is Too Much. In the end, I decided I couldn't decide, so I combined the challenges. Here's the Inspiration Board I had to work with:

Our challenge at HMITM is called Clowning Around (It's International Clown Week), and we had to use:

• 8 buttons
• 1 flower
• 11 different patterned papers
• 1 red circle
• mist or paint

From this prompt, I immediately thought of making a page for my Book of Silly (yes, I have an album of silly family photos--actually several volumes). Debbie had provided a picture of a clown to use as inspiration, and as I was going through my photos, I came upon this picture of my nephew with his hair dyed bright red for school spirit week, and I knew it was the perfect photo for both of my challenges. Here's the page I came up with (for the life of me, I couldn't get a straight photo of this page--sorry!):

I used sketch 166 from Creative Scrappers as inspiration for my page. (Ever since I got on the CS design team, I set a goal to go back and do all of the sketches--which will take me a long time since there are so many!)

Here are a few details. I love Brian Andreas. I have all of his Storypeople books, and I use a lot of his stories for my Book of Silly. I thought this quote would be fun to use with this picture. I made the journaling label by using the RGB codes to get the perfect colors and then printed it out on photo paper.

That electron thingy with the pearl in the center is a BasicGrey rub-on, rubbed onto a transparency.

Eleven patterned papers are a LOT for an 8 x 8 page, so I decided to use bits and pieces cut from papers. The background woodgrain is Hambly. They gray is by American Crafts. The red polka dots and the eye charts are by Jillibean Soup. The periodic elements paper is Reminisce. Those green circles with the off-white bubbles in them are cut from a Crate Paper pattern, and the circle numbers are cut from a My Mind's Eye paper.

Here you can see more patterned papers I used. The red circle with the star is from an old Scenic Route Christmas paper. The leaves are cut from a Luxe Designs Paper. They wre bright lime green, so to tone them down, I added an olive colored chalk. They were still too bright, so I brushed gesso over them, and that gave me almost the perfect shade of green for the palette. I got that electron image from the Internet and printed it on photo paper. The part of the HMITM challenge that was trickiest for me was the flower. I didn't want a girly page, so I hunted through my stash to find something that would meet the flower requirement and found this little brad. I found a bunch of gray buttons in my stash to meet the 8 button requirement.

You'll have to go check out the awesome work the CCG and HMITM teams did with these challenges, and I hope you'll play along. Both challenges are immensely fun!

Thank you so much for visiting my blog and reading about my page!

A Dreamy, Creamy Palette at CCG

Challenge 201 is live at Color Combos Galore and the colors this week are absolutely dreamy! Our Designer's Challenge this week is a new focus--a recipe of sorts. So fun!

As I always do, I pulled the color swatch onto my computer screen and looked for pictures to use, and I came up with these pictures of my gram and sister with Farzad, and immediately, I thought, "Everybody loves Farzad" and I knew I wanted hearts on my page. I instantly thought of the Object of My Affection kit by Noel Mignon, and to my delight, the colors were perfect. The main papers I used were from Pink Paislee's Cupid collection, which had the pink, aqua, and brown. I used an embossed swiss dot paper by Bazill as my backdrop for the white and the polka dot part of the Designer's Challenge. I used Creative Scrappers Sketch 151 as inspiration for my page design.

Here's my page. In case you're wondering why the two blocks of blue hearts are a little different, it's because they came from two different sheets. I had two sheets of this paper, and the first one better matched up with the palette so I used that, and when I went to cut the smaller piece, I accidentally used the different sheet. And then I went and accidentally stitched it on sideways. I wondered why I was having a hard time fitting my title on there when I had planned it all out--and then I realized I had stitched the darn thing on sideways. Oh well, no turning back when you've stitched something down!

This page is going into my book called "Reasons" (reasons I love Farzad so much). I was going to add white journaling strips with pink writing in the white space at the top, but then I decided I didn't want to cover up the pretty embossed Swiss dots, so I went with journaling on the back of the page, which reads: Everybody loves Farzad. It was love at first sight when my family met him, even though they were apprehensive, considering I was 17 and he was 28. But his warm smile, charm, generosity, and sense of humor instantly won them over. Everyone he meets falls in love with him. He just has this way about him that puts people at ease.He's always positive and cheerful, rarely gets mad.  He's outgoing and easy-going and just that all-around nice guy that everyone likes to be around. Yes, everybody loves Farzad. Especially me.

Here are some details. The center of this flower was a greenish-yellow, which didn't go with the palette, so I grabbed some pink paint and brushed over it. Part of the Designer's Challenge was to use fabric, and as luck would have it, there was some pink fabric in the kit I was using. Another ingredient of the Designer's Challenge "recipe" was to use leaves, and again, my luck was running high because one of the papers in the kit had these dark brown leafy shapes.

Here's a closeup of my title. I had to really squeeze it on there because of my dumb mistake of sewing on that piece sideways. I plopped that big pink bling heart over the O and then decided I didn't like it, but the darn thing wouldn't come off, so there it stays! My foam adhesive squares were the perfect size for these tiny letter stickers.

I had used lots of brads for the metal part of the Designer's Challenge, but then I decided that was a cop-out because I always use brads on my layout, so I looked for some "real" metal to use, and I remembered these old Making Memories clips in my stash, and I was delighted to find a pink one with a heart. That striped paper had some bold red stripes in it, and I almost didn't use it because there was no red in the palette, but instead, I trimmed the spots where there was red and pieced the strip back together, overlapping another color on top of the red. Problem solved!

I noticed one of the tear strips said "coordinating pattern on the back" and thought I should use the "on the back" part to indicate my hidden journaling, and this little die-cut tag in the kit was the perfect size to hold that. For the three circle part of the Designer's Challenge, I decided to mount some of the cut-out flowers on a punched brown circle, but I didn't have quite the right size circle to go with the flowers--there was all this extra space, so I added some glitter around the edges. Doesn't show up as pretty in the pictures.

I added some rub-ons to my page. I have TONS of rub-ons, and I always forget to use them, so lately, I've been making a conscious effort to use them more. I love this pink crown that came on a Pink Paislee sheet in the kit. All the rub-ons on this page are from that same sheet.

The reveal this week is especially gorgeous, so you should go check out what the rest of the team made. And I hope you'll play along with us! These challenges are so fun!

Thank you so much for stopping by my blog and reading about my page!

CCG 200th "Anniversary" Blog Hop!

Welcome to the Color Combos Galore 200th "Anniversary" Blog Hop! We hope by visiting the CCG Design Team members' blogs, you will be able to pick up some fun tips and techniques. Many of the team members will be offering prizes, so you will want to visit all of the blogs to increase your chances of winning some fun scrappy stuff. We are also offering a chance at a Guest Designer spot for the month of August if you visit all of the blogs in our Blog Hop and participate in Challenge 200 by uploading your project to the CCG Gallery. It's so fun to get the colors before everyone else! Plus, who doesn't love to see their name in lights! The deadline for the chance to win these prizes is one week from today, Sunday, July 24, EST.

If this is your first stop at our Blog Hop, you'll want to start at Bente Fagerberg's blog, and follow the hop in order so you don't miss anyone. If you've been hopping in order, your next stop is Eva Pizarro.

Once you have visited all the blogs and uploaded a project to the CCG Gallery using Challenge 200, please make sure you check in at the Blog Hop discussion in the Special Announcements Forum at CCG. We will choose our August Guest Designer from that thread. Individual DT members will be choosing winners for the prizes they are offering. Good luck, and we hope you'll enjoy our blog hop!

CCG has a very talented team of designers, and they will be sharing some amazing techniques. I don't consider myself much of a "technique" scrapper but rather a storyteller, so instead, I thought I'd share some of my favorite tips--ones that I use a lot that help me on virtually every page I made, including this page I made for Challenge 200:

Favorite Tip #1 - You may not know that I scrap 8 x 8, which means I have to really plan my layouts carefully so that everything fits. One thing that helps me is wax paper! I use wax paper to see if my title fits where I want it to. I just adhere my title letters on the wax paper, and I can move my title (or other sticky elements) around my page until I get it just where I want it.

Favorite Tip #2 - I just recently figured this one out. I used to photograph my layouts as soon as I was finished with them, but I recently realized that waiting until the next day allows me to see my page through "fresh eyes" and I almost always add something to it that makes it feel more "complete." On this particular layout, what I added were the Ranger Enamel Accents to the letter stickers and the Ranger Perfect Pearls to the scallops on the envelope, and believe it or not, I didn't originally have that doily stamp on the envelope. I sort of knew I needed something there, but it didn't come to me until the next day when I had another look. I can't imagine my page without that detail.

Favorite Tip #3 - Before you toss the edge of the patterned paper away, look closely at it. You know, the part that has the manufacturer’s name, logo, paper line, and bar code? Sometimes, this disposable bit of paper might be just the perfect thing for your layout. That "Haute Cuisine" on the side came from the tear strip on a Teresa Collins paper. Pay attention to the names of the papers or collection names, which might help you tell our story. My very favorite tear strips are on Cosmo Cricket's papers--you know, the ones that say "flip for fun" or "but wait, there's more," and so forth. I use those a lot for when I use hidden journaling (and I have to do that a lot because sometimes there's just not enough room on an 8 x 8 page for my story).

Favorite Tip #4 - Tell a story. It doesn't have to be long and drawn out, though it's nice to write a detailed narrative sometimes. But it's important to get all the little bits and pieces of your life down on paper. Think about it: Some day we're going to look back on all these hundreds--or thousands--of pages we've made, and it's the stories that are going to make us smile more than the beautiful products we used on our pages. As I've evolved over the ten years I've been scrapping, the "artistic" side of scrapping has become more important and interesting and fun to me (not to mention, the array of wonderful products has become so irresistible to use), and sometimes the design I have in mind doesn't allow for the lengthy journaling I enjoy to fit on my small canvas, so in those cases, I'll hide my journaling--in a pocket or on the back of my page. It might seem odd that I scrapped pictures of my mom's ugly meatloaf (she wouldn't let me photograph her holding the pan because she didn't have on makeup), but it's a little piece of my life I wanted to document, and some day when I'm old and maybe my mom won't be around anymore, I can look at this page and remember how she used to make meatloaf for me. And I'll smile.

Okay, so I lied. I do have two little techniques to share, and these are more for newbies:

Technique #1 - About the distressed edges (and I'm almost embarrassed to share this because so many on the CCG team are masters at distressing--and I can't wait to read their blog entries in hopes they'll share their secrets), I used a Zutter Distrezz-It-All. It's a handy little electric contraption that allows you to run your paper across it and it does the distressing for you, easy-peasy!

Technique #2 - Heat embossing. If you're chicken to try it, don't be. I know I was for a long time, and the first time I tried it, it worked perfectly and I was so surprised and so irritated that I hadn't tried it before! All you need is a stamp, an embossing stamp pad, embossing powder, and an embossing gun. Just ink your stamp with the embossing ink and stamp your image--it'll be clear. Then sprinkle the embossing powder over your stamped image and tap off the excess (I do it on a sheet of paper so I can easily dump it back into the container). Then heat it with your embossing gun, and the image magically turns into the wonderful raised, shiny embossed image! Couldn't be easier!

Thank you for hopping onto my blog today. I hope you picked up a little something from reading what I shared. Please leave a comment for a chance to win a little surprise of scrappy goodies from my stash. Your next stop is Eva's blog...

A Cool, Smooth Palette at CCG

Challenge 200 is live at Color Combos Galore. Two hundred color combos--that's quite a milestone, and we're going to be celebrating this week! Here's our Inspiration Board:

I didn't realize when I made the palette how difficult it was to find true blue paper, but after digging through my entire stash I finally found a true blue in a DCWV stack. The orange, which has a bit of a yellow tint to it was a little tricky too, but I found an OLD Scenic Route paper that was perfect, too. Actually, I had immediately thought of BasicGrey Dawson, which does indeed perfectly match the blues and also has some orange, but those papers didn't go with the feel of my page I had in mind...

The drippy-melty Designer's Challenge was a stretch for me. I've tried the drippy thing before because I always admire it on others' pages, but when I try it, it always comes out looking, well...drippy. And messy. And as much as I long break out of my "clean" box and get messy and drippy, I'm always afraid of messing up. So I opted for going melty. Specifically melting embossing powder.

Here are some details. I had originally planned to work off of a sketch and printed out my pictures larger, but once I got going, I decided I wanted to put Mom's recipe on my page, and went with the pretty Maya Road envelope, so I tossed the sketch and made the envelope an integral part of my page. Which is tricky since I scrap 8 x 8 and the envelope took up half of my page. So I reprinted the pictures smaller and designed my page around the envelope. I needed to do lots of overlapping. Once I'd assembled most of the page, I felt the pretty flap was still not pretty enough and felt too much like a blank, open space (and everyone knows I'm white-space challenged, lol), so I added this pretty My Mind's Eye doily stamp.

I had received this BoBunny Kitchen Spice stamp set when I was working for SNR and we were doing a Bo Bunny manufacturer feature, and it was perfect for my page. I had already planned to use this Martha Stewart doily, and to my surprise and delight, it fit perfectly inside theis stamp. Do I get "messy" points for stamping directly on my background paper? I'm always so afraid of messing up with stamps that I usually stamp on cardstock and cut out. That's a Prima flower, and underneath it is an ancient die-cut flower from Urban Lily. I'm such a hoarder, but I'm glad I kept that ugly thing to add another layer here, and it was the perfect shade of orange.

Here are some more stamps from that Bo Bunny set. And yes, I realize I should have a picture of my mom holding the meatloaf instead of just the ugly loaf by itself, but my mom's extremely camera shy, and when we go over for dinner, she's usually not dressed up or made up, so she forbade me to take a picture. I do hope she'll get over this soon. I need to have a serious talk with her about this lack of Mom pictures in my albums.

I used my very favorite chipboard letters--BasicGrey. They're small and cute and perfect for my 8 x 8 pages. I sure wish they'd make more colors! The blue letter stickers are old K&Co. that I dressed up with Ranger Enamel Accents. Love that stuff!

The reveal is fantastic again this week, so you should go take a peek at what the team did, and you'll definitely want to play along this week, as well as participate in our blog hop, which starts this Sunday, because there's going to be lots of prizes from the design team, as well as a culminating prize of a guest designer spot for the month of August! We'll be posting more details about that on Sunday.

Thank you so much for stopping by and reading about my page today!

A Lively, Cheerful Palette at CCG

Challenge 199 is live at Color Combos Galore! Did you know July is National Ice Cream Month? Well, ice cream's our theme this month, and what a yummy, cheerful palette we got to play with this week! But before I share the Inspiration Board, how about a song to go with the colors...

And here's the challenge...

I started out with an Easter photo from my childhood, and then I remembered this picture that was waiting for the perfect combo--and this was just the palette it was waiting for! Talk about luck! If I had passed this up, I would've had to wait for a long, long time for just the right color scheme!

The girls are my students from this past school year. I didn't have permission to post pictures of them, so I covered their eyes to disguise them to protect them from internet crazies. Teaching is such a big part of my life, and it just dawned on me recently when I made a page about something that happened with my beardie in my class (this page), that I really need to start documenting all the interesting little bits taht happen at school, so here's the page I made:

The journaling on the back reads: When I went to school that day, it was a seemingly ordinary school day, only it turned out to be anything but. It happened to be the day of Prince William and Kate Middleton's royal wedding, and a couple of my girls decided they needed a celebration fit for royalty, so they set out to make proper crowns from construction paper. Like all good ideas, this one spread like wildfire up and down our hall, and by lunch time, all the fifth grade girls were sporting their regal headwear! {April 29, 2011}

Here are some details. I dug deep into my stash for this page! I've been reorganizing/cleaning my scrap room, and rediscovered these fun Rhonna Farrer French Twist rub-ons. I had two packages of them that I think I got as a RAK from Jennifer McGuire several years ago. I trimmed the edge off of some *vintage* Narratives paper and added some green pearls. The yellow chipboard letters weren't standing out the way I wanted, so I outlined them in pen, but it wanted to smear, so I sprinkled it with clear embossing powder and heated it.

I dug through my stash to see what else I could find, and came up with these 3D stickers from American Crafts (the flower and the heart). I was happy to use the Heidi Sapp bling crowns. I used two on this page, and now I just have one left. The chipboard piece is by Sassafras Lass, and the brad is My Mind's Eye. I tucked another little French Twist rub-on owl in there, too.

The Designer's Challenge was to use staggered lettering, like on the ice cream bowls in the Inspiration Photo. I found the perfect staggery font called SFBeaverton.

Here's another chipboard piece from the same Sassafrass Lass set. Those green leaves are also French Twist rub-ons. I thought they looked sort of like a royal jester's hat when I put them together. The flowers I used are silk flowers from Michael's that I bought eons ago, and that cute flower brad is also pretty old, by Prima. The other flowers tucked in there are by K&Co.

The white butterfly came about because that ink on the chipboard got on my hand and smeared onto my white paper, so I covered it up. I really didn't want to put anything there, and I tried a bunch of different things, but I figured if I painted it white, it wouldn't be too blantant an addition.

Here's a shot of the border with the French Twist rub-ons. Fortunately I had two packages of them to extend the length of the green paper and also some to use on the top of my page. The colors were a little different in the two packs. Oh, well, I'll never be able to claim any kind of perfection on my pages. Imperfection is okay by me! I was just thrilled to make this page out of mostly really old stuff! I had run out of the green pearls I used on the top border, so I used pink ones on the bottom.

If you haven't seen what the rest of the team made, you'll have to pop over to CCG--really gorgeous reveal this week (I know--I say that every week!). I hope you'll play along. These colors were SO much fun to work with!

Thank you so much for stopping by and reading about my page!