A Couple new Scrapbook Layouts

I scrapbooked a little in the last couple of weeks.  It is one of the ways I stay sane in the last couple weeks of the school year.

Little Miss Morrison

Sometimes the baby showers come all at once.  For the last couple of weddings and baby showers I have created wall hangings with the baby's or couples name on them.  This time is no different.  The baby's room is bright yellows, blues, pinks and grey.  Very cute color combination.

So I went to work. I used an idea from Northridge publishing and ran with it to create this sign. Most of the paper is Echo Parks Dots and Stripes and American Crafts Amy Tangerine.  The ribbons are May Arts.  Great project to use all those 6x6 paper pads I have been collecting.  I Modge podged the whole thing (minus the ribbon) when down so it will stay together better and not curl after hanging for a while. 

And of course there must be a matching card.  The sentiment is by Lawn Fawn.  Some of the best quality stamps I have ever used. 

Craft Warehouse Rosette Tutorial

 Check out the the Rosette Bouquet tutorial I made for craft Warehouse.  ;)

 

http://shopcraftwarehouse.blogspot.com/2012/04/paper-spring-bouquet-tutorial.html

Mother's Day 2012

 I procrastinated until today and made these two Mother's Day Cards. Now to make those 25 Graduation Cards. The "Thank" "You" words are from a Lawn Fawn stamp set that I just purchased during our Craft Warehouse crop. I am so excited about these new lines at Craft Warehouse! The quality of these stamps is so nice and easy to work with. The papers are the new My Minds Eye Indie line. I love these colors and patterns.

National Scrapbook Day

I love National Scrapbook Weekend. It is the highlight of May. These are a few of the pages I did that weekend and a few pages from April that I hadn't posted yet. 

Best Easter Eggs Ever

These are possibly the best Easter Eggs we Have ever made. They looked so cute hiding in the yard. I just had to take a photo.

Create Often Crop in Oregon

I just returned from a great retreat in Oregon. The Create Often Crop was so inspiring. These are the pages I completed while I was there. I kept a couple out for the Design Team Entry coming up but here are the rest of the pages I completed. I loved the Authentique and Pink Paislee papers we got at the crop. They are such great papers. I also fell in love with Helmar's 450 Quick Dry Adhesive. In total I scrapbooked 17 pages during the crop. OK so two were already started but I am counting them too.

Getting Ready for a Crop

Getting ready for a crop is something that took me a really long time to wrap my mind around. The first couple of times I brought two rolling suitcases with a bag over my shoulder which was pretty much my entire scrapbooking supply collection just in case I needed something. This drove me crazy not because of the mass amounts of stuff I had to crawl through to find things but because when I got home, I had to reorganize everything put everything away and much like my filing it never got done. Plus I didn't get much done because I spent most my time trying to figure out what I was doing and where to find things.

So after a few of these times not knowing where anything is and spending most my time organizing my stuff at the crops instead of scrapbooking I created a system. This system allows me to scrapbook mass pages during a crop and have to put away very little when I come home.

First of all I pack my basics bag. This bag has the basic pens, cutting board, scissors, adhesive, ribbon, and tons of letter stickers in it.

Then I pack a bag of all my favorite embellishments. My current bag is a Clinique giveaway. (On a long trip I might pack two of these bags.) When finished this bag stays packed on my desk for me to pull from at any time. Pulling embellishments from a small bag saves me tons of time on my layouts.

Then I start on my photos. I take my memory cards in once a month to get pictures printed. Immediately after getting them printed I place each event in a 2.5 gallon resealable bag.

Then I place them in a Ikea storage cube until I am ready to make page kits. Sometimes I will have an idea or a piece of paper that really fits these pages right away and I slip those ideas and products in the bags before I even start making page kits.

Next, when I run out of page kits or before a crop I do a mass taking over of my living room and layout all of the bags with photos in them.

I start in one corner and work my way down the lines filling each bag with an idea from a magazine or printed online.

Then after all the bags have ideas I match the ideas and pictures with patterned paper. Making sure to Look at the idea I have and determining if I could use scraps or if full sheets of paper are needed

Then lastly I add my basic solid paper to all the bags.

There is one more step but I rarely get to it and that is journaling. I try to journal on all my pages and journaling is one of the hardest things to do at the crop. So if I am very organized I will look through all my page kits and write down the subject of each kit in a small notebook. I slip the notebook in my purse and while waiting for appointments or during breaks at work I bring out the notebook and pre-journal for the page. then I bring the notebook with me to the crop and I will have both journaling and titles for the pages ready to go. Like I said rarely does this step get finished but I try and when I have this done, that is when I can complete 10-15 pages in one night.

So in all the only things in my page kits are photos, ideas from magazines or printed online, patterned paper, and solid paper. Now when I am ready to crop I grab a bag, some page kits, and my embellishment bag and I am ready to go. On a short trip I can get away with just bringing my one bag and a cutting board. That is a big difference from the two rolling totes and and shoulder bags.