A Simple Birthday Layout

This layout practically fell together. All of the paper, save the kraft background, was from my scrap bin. There was so little cutting required, it was almost as if the scraps were made for this layout.  Even the title was a quickie design off a Cricut cartridge. Best of all, Scott loves how it turned out!

Good Stuff

This is one of my favourite pictures taken so far this year. Cole was sitting with me while helping Scott with some of his birthday scratch tickets when Scott took it. I changed it to black and white to blur a vein showing on my forehead and to neutralize the bright, busy background. I'm glad I did, the black and white photo allowed me to have some colour fun with the layout.

All of the patterned papers are scraps. The circle is a combination of patterned paper, stamped and embossed black cardstock and some trim I found in my latest bag of thrift store ribbon. The paper ribbons were made from the UPC strips on the bottoms of the patterned paper and outlined in black ink. The colours were just too pretty, and perfectly coordinated, to waste!

Why I Love My 2012 Album.

For Christmas, my mom got me a We R Memory Keepers album, and while my Pebbles Inc albums of the last couple of years were good, these babies are awesome! It's all in the page protectors. WeR took the regular 4x6 sleeves and made them something more interesting:

I love how they mix up sleeve sizes and orientation. It gives me so many more options.

Sometimes, I even use them for their intended time-saving abilities, like this layout where I had more photos I wanted to use than I could fit on my layout:

Mostly though, the time I save is with picture placement, leaving me some extra creative energy for titles and journaling. This Batman inspired page is my favourite so far:

The symbol is clip art I found online. All of the blue on the symbol, I filled in with Glossy Accents. The star and title (which I really think should be spelled 'shazaam' but it wouldn't fit, and seeing it's not a real word, I took artistic licence and made it work) were cut from my Cricut, the journaling tag was made from a Halloween stamp, the ric rac was in a scrap ribbon pack I got thrift store shopping....and is an amazingly perfect match to the blue I used. Also an amazing fluke!

One thing I'm not so fond of: they're all top-loading. I'll have to put some tape on the doggie and Batman pages to keep the titles in place. Otherwise, I'm downright smitten!

Success from Determination (or The Crazed Rantings of an Obsessed Scrapbooker!)

Sometime in January, I became unhappy with my stamp organization, or lack thereof. I had a jam-packed Tim Holtz stamp binder and a plastic bin for all of the overflow. But the bin was starting to overflow too. That is when I became determined (read: obsessed) with finding a better organization method for my stamps.

I liked my Tim Holtz binder well enough, but it was too small for some of my stamp sheets and a little on the pricey side. I lurked on forums, waded through youtube videos, blog posts and scrappy websites galore looking for the answer. In the end, I decided to go with a bigger, homemade version of what I already had. That's when the real headache began.

It was easy enough to get pages for the small little stamps and the full letter-sized stamp sheets. The real problem was the more typically sized sheets of stamps that measure somewhere around 5x8 inches. Many people who posted their binder system online had bought 2-up DVD sleeves with a covering flap at Staples, which I could find neither online or in store. Then, I found the above photo pages online at Black's Photography, with the sleeves measuring 6x8. Perfect! I found them in store after a couple of tries. Perfect! I brought them home, filled them with stamps and put them in my new binder. Not perfect!

You see, at 2-up and 6 inches high each, these pages measure a little better than 12 inches. Standard binders are only 11 inches tall, leaving a little better than 1 inch sticking out of the binder. Too bad my math skills are only that good after the fact, huh? Another problem, the side opening had the stamp sheets falling out whenever I turned a page or moved the binder, as you can see below.

To add insult to injury, mere days after I bought all of this stuff, I get a Staples ad welcoming Martha Stuart organizational products to their Canadian stores. Of particular interest, their binder series, which looked to be perfect for my needs. Needless to say, I had a few choice words for Martha and her poor timing!

So, what to do? I'd bought these not-so-perfect page protectors that were frustrating me and I was angry with Martha Stuart for flaunting her perfect system at the most annoying, inopportune time. I had to make this work and I had to do it without the help of Martha. Apparently, irrational snubs combined with stubborn independence is how I roll!

I decided I'd buy some adhesive-backed velcro to secure the openings, which may or may not have worked, as the stamp sheets barely fit the width of the protectors (so where to put the velcro?) and then buy either a legal sized binder, a three ring scrapbook album or photo album so my pages would fit properly. My simple, inexpensive storage solution was becoming more and more expensive and complicated. In the meantime, my stamp binder had to lay flat on my shelf and I needed to use an exorbitant amount of care flipping through it to keep all my stamps in place.

Flash forward to today, when I decided it was time to buy some more ink for the printer. Off to Staples I went, intending to also price their legal sized binders. As I walked in the store, there it was; a poster of Martha Stuart smiling sweetly at me, inviting me to check out her wonderful array of products in aisle 6. So I did. I am so glad that I did!

Below are shots of my new, working-just-fine stamp binder. The first shot is my ity-bity stamps, stored in baseball card protector sheets:

Next is an example of the stamps that needed a standard letter-sized sheet protector:

And finally, my truly perfect Martha Stuart 2-up pages complete with protective flap openings that fit just right in my binder:

I am so happy to have this project done! Caving in to the Martha products helped me get there a whole lot cheaper and easier than my makeshift options would have. Plus, the results are far more satisfactory than my fist option would have been!

I am, however, still unimpressed with little Ms. Perfect and her not-so-perfect timing! Hmph!

Out of This World

I think I had as much fun creating this layout as my guys did creating their Lego UFO! It started off with a trip to the LSS. I debated between an outer space line by BoBunny and A Boy's Life by Echo Park. I would have loved to mix the two together, but the greens clashed and the BoBunny line had space monkeys throughout it that I just wasn't happy with. I also preferred the versatility of the Echo Park line, knowing I'd get more bang for my buck with the scraps.

Because I wanted to use the negative space for my title, I made it with my Cricut Design Studio to get the spacing and alignment just right. I pop-dotted it onto the layout for some added dimension.

All of the other die cuts are from my Accent Essentials cartridge. I sanded around some of the elements throughout the layout for more depth, interest and because I bought the Core'dinations cardstock for BOTH colours!

And finally, the journaling. I'm getting back into the habit of journaling and labeling more. After all, one of my favourite parts of scrapbooking is telling the story!

Snow Fun

It is a beautiful, spring-y day outside, I've already kicked Cole out to ride his bike and enjoy the sunshine and I'm blogging about a winter layout? What can I say, it's been such a mild winter I can still look back on it fondly!
This layout is chock full of the new goodies I got on my most recent scrap shopping trip. The snowflake strip was fussy-cut from new BoBunny patterned paper and I found the Glimmer Mist in the discount bin, although I honestly didn't expect it to work on this layout (that's like a double-score, isn't it?). You can read about our day on the very cool, oh-too-perfect-to-pass-up snow tube journaling card.

The pictures were taken by the Tube Park staff which I purchased at a ridiculous price I wouldn't have paid if it weren't such a special day for us. I'll never do it again, as I had to bug them to let me check the pictures from their computer (um, really? People pay you for pictures they don't first look at to be sure of the quality?), then bug them to email the pics to me days later (instead of the half hour I was promised) and then continue to bug them because one is still missing and will remain missing since I got tired of arguing with them.

As much as that all ticks me off, I got the best picture out of the bunch that shows all of us together on a day that was very important for me to capture. I'll take the good out of it and just accept the rest as a lesson learned.

So, What Changed?

This is a picture of all my chronological scrapbook albums. The album on the left is 2011. The albums on the right are all the rest. The bottom album is from 2010, the next one up contains 2004-2006, the top three are from 2007, 2008 and 2009 but not necessarily in that order. If asked, I would have said that I scrapped less in 2011, but the size of these albums tells a different story.
So, what changed? Good question. I went through all of my albums to find the answer. A quick flip-through shows a lot of the same types of layouts; New Year's, birthdays, funny and/or cute and/or interesting everyday moments, kid milestones, coloured eggs and carved pumpkins.
Have our lives gotten more interesting? Not really. Busier? Don't think so.
So really, what changed? Well, let me tell you:

• From 2004 to 2006, I had a separate album for Christmas and another for vacations. This freed up a lot of space, and allowed me to fit 3 years worth of layouts into one album. 2006 marked 10 years together for Scott and me, and seemed like a good cut-off for these themed albums. I also liked the idea of the whole year being together.
• Our pets got more interesting. Don't get me wrong, our dear German Shepherd, Tabitha had her puppy moments. But by the time I started scrapbooking, she'd grown into a mellow, well-behaved, albeit beautiful, dog. Beautiful, as we know, only gets you so far and there were only so many layouts I was willing to make of our Tabby in the same regal poses. The cat fared a little better, but even he couldn't compete with the puppy escapades, cutesy faces and melt-your-heart cuddly moments Lilah and Bella have given us.
• I take more pictures that I can use. Going from film to digital and obtaining progressively better and better digital cameras, along with more practice and being less timid about getting the pictures I want has given me a little more to work with.
• I've changed albums. In 2010, I switched to albums that fit both 12x12 pages and those with 4x6 sleeves. So now, more of the pictures I'm not scrapping end up in my albums. They say this is quicker. They are wrong. I still get fussy with title and journaling inserts. I'm ok with that.
• My layouts have gotten "bumpier." 2011 was the year I really kicked up the texture.

And that's my thoughts on the ever-growing size of my scrapbook albums. Hopefully I'll be able to keep things in check this year. I need to, I'm officially out of room on my shelf!