If Scrapbooking was an Olympic Sport!

If Scrapbooking was an Olympic Sport.. I think I could be a medalist!

We have two teachers having baby showers tomorrow, so.. you know it.. two scrapbooks!

First is the one for baby boy.  The desired color scheme was blues, greens, khaki and white.  I was thrilled when I found this paper!  In fact, it came in a little paperpack, so I bought two of them to get 12 sheets of matching cardstock and made the pages. The bonus here is that there were boy stickers with the paper pack!!

In the above picture, I used a ton of eyelets and put them in the polka dots at random intervals.

Can you see the buckle on the left picture? I love it!

These brad things are self adhesive. I love them. So easy!

The safety pins are holding on elastic!  It is really fun in person! I can just see this page about a Growing Boy!! Wouldn't that be super cute :) ?

The second album was for a baby girl.  The colors here were brown and turquoise.  This was harder!
But, I found a pattern that was great and went from there.  

 I love the whimsy yet elegant look of these two colors together with the silver!

 More of those self adhesive bradlets!

 The embellishment here is glittered clips!

 Ribbon on these!! I can't make an album without using ribbon!!

And finally, more sticky buttony things!

And there you have it. My favorite baby gift! Total time spent? Two hours. And no, I didn't make all the pages from "scratch." I used my Close To My Heart layout books for most of the pages, but I make a habit of ALWAYS using scraps to make more pages, so a few are my own spur of the moment designs.

Why I think all mom's should scrapbook :)

Proof Positive of why I love to scrapbook!!

Don't you just love these pages.  It makes my heart go a flutter. Granted they are my children, but I just love making memories and then putting them on paper.  My girls love looking at the books and it's almost like we are making the memory again!

I know. I'm a cheezeball.

One really cool thing about scrapbooking is the instant gratification you get looking at a page.  No, I'm not even close to being current on my scrapbooking.  Do I have pages of Lexi or Kylie made as a baby?  A few. But no worries. I scrapbook what I want with what I have and will worry about the rest later!

Here are the bluebonnet pictures from a few weeks ago. I went to my monthly scrapbook class Friday night and we made the base layout that I used for Maddie and Kylie's pages. The rest of the pages were "scraps"!! Yippee... The four little pages will be insert pages on Kylie's larger page.

All the paper and embellishments are Close To My Heart. 

Enjoy the pages and I hope they make your heart smile like they do mine!

A Few HandMade Quick Card How-to's and tips!

WARNING!

IF YOU ARE NOT A CRAFTER,
YOU WILL WANT TO SKIP THIS POST!!

For the rest of you, here are a few how-to's
and tips for fast and easy handmade cards using scraps.

Here are few pictures of the finished cards. I made 12 cards using only the scraps from a set of pages I made. I don't think they look like cards made from leftovers!

In order to get the quantity of scraps for the cards, I had to make some pages :) Here are the pages. I used one paper pack (it had 12 pattern papers and 10 cardstock plus I used an assortment of base pages.) This made 26 12x12 pages, or 13 layouts. For more information on how I do that, search page patterns in my search bar!

1. After taking pictures of my pages and ooh and ahhing over more picture ready pages, I started with my stack of scraps. Sort the scraps into groups according to WIDTH!
2. Any piece that has a width of 4" or more I put back into my bag. I consider this to be too big to waste on a card. I might use it later, but it's a keeper for a scrapbook page in my opinion!
3. Now, I take my pile of 2" scraps and sort those according to pattern and color. This is the pile I start with when making cards.

4. Once sorted, I pick up a 2" piece and glue it onto a card base. No real thinking goes on here.  I will cut it to size in one direction, but I really do just try to only make one cut per piece of paper at this stage of card making. By doing this, in a matter of a minute I have card bases ready to go!
5. Now, add a pop of interest by using up first the remainder larger scraps and then go to the 1/2" and 1" stacks to tie two different patterns together or for just a fun band. The key at this stage is to make a nice looking card, but to not spend more than a minute on the layout. We aren't making award winning card designs here. We are a making a dozen cards in flash!

6. With the 12 card bases ready, I then look for a few stamps to use and try my best to keep it to only 2 or 3 different stamps and inks.
7. I stamp the sentiment on the card sometimes, but I happen to be really, really bad at placement and smudging. So, I have learned to stamp on another piece of paper and glue. Besides, I think it looks nice when the sentiment is layered. :)
8. Finally, I spend most of the time embellishing the cards. Over the years, I have made LOTS AND LOTS of heavily embellished and thick cards, but they then don't fit in the envelope very well and it's expensive to mail them.  So, I try to just embellish with flat things or try to keep it somewhat simple.  As you would guess, I only use what's readily available.  I'm not going to go out and buy coordinating ribbon for my cards! That would ruin the free factor!
9. So there you have it. My completed cards. Because I can only do a couple of things at a time and have to referee children, or cook or clean or whatever, I can't tell you how much time was spent making the cards, but probably no more than 2 hours total if I had to guess to make 12 cards! Not bad!! And even better, my premade card box has been refilled!

And here is one last look at the set of stuff.

12 cards.

26 pages

and a bag of scraps to use when I put pictures on my pages.

Papers and Stamps: Close To My Heart

An album for a Daddy and of course, more scrap pages and cards!

Yes, Father’s Day has come and gone, but I wanted to show you all what I made for Doug.  These years are speeding past and I wanted to make an album that we could go back and look at all of the Father’s Days easily.  So here you have it.  A picture from each year taken on Father’s Day (or as close to it as possible). 
Amazing isn’t it! To make sure that we will have matching pages for the future, I have gone ahead and made 20 pages to finish the book. With kids spread out in ages as far as ours are, it’s a lot of years in order to get them all grown!

The above album is 8x8, so I had some great scraps. With the leftovers, I have made some regular 12x12 scrapbook pages and cards.  Here they are. I have to say, I love my manly cards!!

Thanks for stopping by.  Go do something creative today!

Meaningful Child Play meets Cost-Effective and Efficient Scrapbooking/Card Making!

As a mom I am always looking for ways to keep my kids busy and happy.  One of the best ways to do this is to allow them to scrapbook with me.  Yes, it makes THEM happy and keeps THEM busy, but it does pretty much take all the stress-reliever of scrapbooking away.  So, to find a happy medium, I have developed a plan… (yes, I always have a plan [and sometimes even a spreadsheet])!

Here is what I do with some of my scraps… I give them to my children to scrapbook with or to make cards.  Don’t you just love Lexi’s cards!  She even included a sculpture on the bottom right-hand card!
She was so proud of her cards, it kept her busy and it didn’t cost me a dime!

Moving on…one of my goals this summer is to get closer to being “caught up” on my scrapbooking.  I find that I can really get bogged down on a layout and could easily spend an hour on one double page spread.  To combat this, I really like working from premade patterns.  Close To My Heart has developed some really great books for this purpose.  I have tweaked the patterns some and then combined them so that I can get the most bang from my buck!  Instead of getting a layout or two from a set of papers, I make 10 or 12 layouts from one pack.

While some people don’t like to make pages without pictures, I find it freeing.  I use what I have and make it work.  I know that when I get pictures, I can move things around or add something else.  I DON’T embellish the pages at this point!  It’s also really easy to make pages with lots of stops and starts and interruptions when you work from a pattern!

So this summer, I am trying to use up all of my old paper.  I am in the simplifying mode and not the hoarding mode.  I am only purchasing paper for a specific event or project or in order to complete a page pattern that I already have started!

Here is what I have done so far!

Yep, it’s a lot of pages!  More than 100!  I have probably 50 more that already have embellishments.  My goal is that by the time I go on a scrapbook retreat in August to have around 200 premade pages to work from!  How freeing is that!  All I will have to do is print out the pictures, attach and then get to do the fun part of adding ribbon and stickers and stamp!!

Lastly, one of the things I have enjoyed the most about working from patterns is that I don’t have a ton of leftover pieces that take up space.  So with the leftovers I do have, I am going to make cards!  Here are some cards I made today.  My requirement is to use the pieces that are leftover from the patterns (to NOT cut into a new piece of paper.)   

So for those of you who say you aren’t creative enough to do this, I say YES YOU ARE!  If you can follow simple instructions you can make a scrapbook page or a card!  So no more excuses!  Get CrAfTiNg!!