Here are my pages I made for Work in Progress

I just loved the March kits I got to play with as a guest designer for Work in Progress this month. Trish puts together such a fun mix of products in her kits! In my last post, I posted some detail shots.

My biggest scrappy wish is to get on a design team for a kit club, so this was a great beginning to realizing that wish!

So here are my layouts I made with the March Work in Progress kits.

So, ever since the big snowstorm, when I was buried inside my house for a week, I've been obsessed with tea. I discovered this cool site, 52 Teas, which invents a brand-new flavor every week. Really interesting flavors like coconut cream pie (my fave so far) and buttered cinnamon raisin toast. I made this page for our current challenge over at How Much Is Too Much?



It was really fun trying to figure out what stories I would tell using the products from this kit. The Cosmo Cricket Garden Variety from the March Project Kit was a perfect opportunity to scrap about my foray into growing tomatoes on my deck last summer. I just love those Jenni Bowlin banner stickers that came with the kit. I mounted them on brown cardtock and strung them on the baker's twine that came in the kit and added some brads in between the little pennants. I made the scalloped border at the top by punching circles from the "Sunday Picnic" paper and added brads between the circles.
For this page, I used a little bit from the main kit, the project kit, and the add-on. I love the doilies that Trish included in the kit. And how fun that I discovered the sticker that says "A work in progress" on my 7Gypsies "D is for Diet" sticker sheet! The leaves and flowers are from the "Strawberry Fields" paper from the Cosmo Cricket Garden Variety collection. I omitted the strawberries and added some jewels to the flower centers.

This page is a remake of a layout I did a couple of years ago. I love my journaling (even though I later discovered a typo), but I never liked the way that old page looked. The WIP kit had the perfect colors to go with this old photo of me and my sisters from back in the early 1970's. Isn't that Cosmo Cricket chipboard chick the cutest?

Finally, I made this page for Sketch This. I wound up adding a few more details to this page after I sent it to Janelle. I just love the new Birds on a Wire edge punch by Martha Stewart.

We're Back, Too!

We took at holiday break at Sketch This!, too, but we're back. I always love working with Janelle's sketches--they're so versatile. Here's my take on sketch 96. It's for a book I'm making with pictures of my silly husband hamming it up for the camera.


And here's the sketch Janelle sent us:

Poser

I was looking through some photos a couple of weeks ago and started noticing a trend. I have so many pictures of Farzad hamming it up in front of the camera. Just silly poses. Give him a prop, and he's eager to pose.

So I came up with a new album idea. I'm either going to call the album Poser or Gotta Give Him Props.

Here are the first two layouts for that book. I made this page for the How Much Is Too Much? blog. On this particular occasion, I asked him to pose nice for the camera in front of that pretty tree. This is what I got instead. It's about the only time I can get him to eat his vegetables!



We were at a candy store in Ocean City, and there were so many fun colors that I wanted to snap a picture of him in there. As I was readying my camera, he grabbed Grover to pose with him. I made this page for the Sketch This! blog.

Color Combos Galore

A couple of years ago, a girl named Janet started a challenge over at Two Peas called the Pub Color Combo challenge. Janet came up with a color scheme each week and invited scrappers to create a layout using those colors. Anyone who knows me knows that I love a challenge. I didn't play along every week, but it became one of my favorite challenges.

Fast forward to about a year ago. Janet came up with the idea of gathering a team and set up a challenge blog called Color Combos Galore. She invited me to be a part of this color team. Every week, she chose a guest designer with whom she'd create a color combo, and she'd e-mail us a color swatch. It was so fun receiving a new batch of colors every week--almost like getting a package of scrappy goodies on my doorstep! I have to say, some weeks, I'd get the colors and think, "Ugh, what am I going to do with these colors?" But once I got rolling, digging through my paper stash and gathering embellishments, after my layout was all created, I would end up loving the color combo. I don't know how she does it, but Janet is a color genius!

A few months ago, Janet started a whole site, complete with a gallery and forums as our new Color Combos Galore home. Now it's been a year since I've been on the color team, and just last month, Janet put out a call for a new team. I'm happy to say that I'm on the team again, along with a whole bunch of very talented scrappers. Here are the colors we were asked to use:



And here is the page I made:




And I made a companion page, using the same colors, for Sketch This!:



(My [expensive] scanner has not been cooperating with me lately. I'm not sure what's going on. I really don't want to buy another scanner.)
Thank you, Janet, for letting me stay on for another year! I love this challenge!

Burn, Baby, Burn!

So, I'm down 12.8 pounds after being on Weight Watchers for five weeks. A decent start--about 2.5 pounds a week. But I want more! So last weekend Farzad and I went shopping for a recumbent exercise bike. Our first stop at Fitness Resource proved to be a bit much for our pocketbook, so we headed to Sears, where we found a Schwinn model that fit our budget. Farzad assembled it while I was at Weight Watchers last Tuesday, and the very next night I hopped on.

I've decided to start on the low tension since I'm SO out of shape and set it to burn 300 calories each day. It takes me over an hour to meet the 300 calorie goal, and I find that my butt starts getting very numb after about 150 calories, so I take a break and then get back on to do the rest. I'm hoping this give my sluggish metabolism a little boost and speed up my weight loss a bit.

On the scrappy front, here's what Made over the past two weeks...

These were for the Sketch This! blog:

This one's for my book of silly family photos. I love those swirls on the We R Memory Keepers paper. I cut them out and mounted them with pop-dots.

I've been lamenting the fact that all those cool label-shaped papers are made for 12 x 12 pages, so I was delighted when I found an 8 x 8 paper pack by Making Memories that had some of the cool shapes. I scanned one of the sheets and reduced it a little and then printed it on the back of the BasicGrey paper and cut it out. I added some Stickles to that wavy strip at the bottom and mounted it with pop-dots. These pictures are from our trip to Vegas last summer:

Here's one I made for the How Much Is Too Much? blog. My challenge was called "The Whole Kit and Caboodle," and we had to use a kit we hadn't yet used and put as much stuff on it as we could fit on the page. I used the December kit from Scarlet Lime to make this page. It's a little wild and crazy, but I wanted it to be that way! A couple of summers ago, I made a book that I called "Cheesecake" for my Gram's 87th birthday, featuring a whole bunch of sassy photos taken of her over the years. I love those pictures so much, that I decided to make a Cheesecake for Me book. Again, I used that Making Memories 8 x 8 shaped paper as a template, only this time I traced it and then cut it a little smaller. I wish I had figured out the scan thing sooner because the paper is a little crooked.

And here are my pages for the last two challenges at Color Combos Galore.

I was happy to play with the new Porcelain line by BasicGrey. I just adore those birdcages! That's my little sis and me in the bathtub forty-some years ago:

And this page, believe it or not, took me the longest. I'm not happy with how it turned out. I pushed the papers around on the page for what seemed forever. I almost gave up on it and e-mailed Janet, but I hung in there. The scan is horrible. In retrospect, I would've moved the journaling spot to the right, but I had assembled and cut the red border in pieces, so it wouldn't have worked without me reworking the whole page. At the last mintute, I punched those circles and adhered them with pop-dots. This page is going into a little book I'm making about all the little everyday reasons I love Farzad: