When I use a sketch, it has to fit me and the way I scrap. I don't work the other way around. I love the work that Ashley does and am very excited about her sketches. Thank you for being generous and sharing your ideas.

This is my LO for her Sketch it Out challenge at Club CK. I kept the original design, but I used larger photos. I was very excited to try matting everything on black CS. I've seen this around a lot lately and LOVE the crispness and clarity it brings to the LO. For these photos, I thought using the black would highlight the red shirt instead of the green grass and blue jeans my son is wearing. The long banners were perfect for a sports LO. Because the photos and banners are larger, I used smaller embellishments, and made the title smaller as well. I chose to sew with twine along the right side of the photos, creating my own chevron, that mimics the stitches on a baseball.

 CS-Bazzill, PP-Moxie, Paper Pizazz, letter stickers-Cosmo Cricket, word embellies-The Paper Loft, Twine-Doodlebug.

What's so funny?

Out of nowhere he'll start giggling.  It's the best giggle I've ever heard too.  Just once I'd like to be inside his head so I could know what he is thinking and what's so funny! I love these pictures.  But what else is new.  I like every picture where he is smiling.  When he smiles, I smile. That's just the way it works.

I kept is simple, creating a photo block with the 4 photos.  Bella Blvd PP, MME journal tag, OA and Sassafrass letters, random buttons.  I got these metal clips in a mystery box swap.  They are so fun and have lots of uses!  Today I wanted to wrap the twine through them to create a frame around the photos. I wrapped brown all the way around.  Then I added green twine on the horizontal lines, and orange on the vertical ones. Done!

Late Nite Scrappin'

Yesterday I had the pleasure of a little late nite scrap session.  Yes, all by myself.  I surfed around a bit too. I feel like I am finally getting back on track.  My room is cleaned out, but I have a list of things I want to change in my room, Slowly but surely, I am making these changes, as well as saving time to scrap!

So, last night I was able to sit down and dive back into my pile of photos waiting to be scrapped.  I did two pages!  Both happen to have my younger son as the main subject.

Sometimes I am ok with a few photos on a page.  Most of the time though, I like to use 3 or more.  That's when can get confused and need some guidance. I print all of my photos in 4x6.  I know that can limit the amount on a single page.  I am just figuring out how to get the most out of iPhoto, so now I can print odd size photos at home!  The first LO I finished, I used One-Page Sketch #2 from Sketch Support.  I changed the orientation from horizontal to vertical and used multiple PPs.  The photos are fairly busy and not well focused on my son, so I left the embellishments to a minimum.  I stitched the stars in white, then outlined the centers in stickles.

CS is Bazzill, PP & journal tag are Echo Park, Ribbon-American Crafts, letter stickers are Pebbles and CosmoCricket. 

The second page I finished, I used a sketch from LoveJoyPaper.com. Again, I changed the orientation. I  omitted the border edge and in it's place put the border sticker.  The photos and PP were busy, so I also left out the third accent photo. The large gear overlapping the bottom of the right photo kind of takes its place.   The round accents really played into the title.  

PP and stickers are Kaiserkraft.  Letters are October Afternoon and American Crafts Thickers.

All About Me

This month I have been taking the All About Me class over at BPC.  It's hard! Not only do I have to take a self portrait, I have to write about myself! And that's only the first assignment!  But that's why I am taking the class right?  Well, we are on week three now, and I am only just finishing and posting the first assignment.  Take a self portrait, write all about yourself and create a LO.  We were even given a sketch.  There was lots of writing involved. How do you see yourself, how do others see you are a couple of examples.  We were to then take the best of what we wrote and use that as the journaling of the LO. Taking the photo was really no big deal. I took this a few weeks a go right after I had my hair cut.

I have spent the last few weeks thinking and writing, gathering my supplies, but not really putting it together.  I spent most of the day yesterday on my computer, once again browsing challenge blogs.  Sometimes I just like to see what ideas I can use from them, sometimes I really want to participate.  This week it was both!

I don't do very frilly feminine pages very often, but I wanted to for this assignment.  So thank you for the inspiration to Frosted Designs, for the Friday Challenge to use 'wings' on your LO and to ScrapFit for the Step Class idea of making my own stick pins.  I used these paper butterflies that I love and never use, making one into a pin just using glue dots to stick it together.  Lastly, I always look to see if I can do the Club Ck weekly One Hour Challenges.  Yesterday the idea was 'Grace' and to use something different on your LO.  I made the flower using a Gluber, the lace, the butterflies and the stick pins are all things that do not regularly appear on my pages.  I was finally able to complete my week 1 assignment!

Always a Challenge!

It's been about a week since I sat down to scrap! I have lots of ideas floating in my head.  I finally wrote some down so I would't lose them.  I'm beginning to have a process!  I some time perusing a few challenge blogs, looked throughout my photos and made some decisions.  

ScrapFit Challenge #63 has a wonderful sketch that fits within my realm that I wanted to use. The tried and true challenge that I participate in every week, is the Issue Challenge at Club CK.  I was struggling to decide on my inspiration, a daily task. I thought about putting on the orthotics every morning, and the three dingy, greying velcro strips on each one.  I thought about the water droplets on the glass shower that I have to squeegee every morning.  Then is came to me....NutraGrain Bars.  I've been getting them out of the pantry every day for YDS breakfast for about 5 years. We buy the big boxes at Costco hat have AppleCinnamon, Blueberry and Strawberry flavors in Green, Blue, and Red packages.  So, I got out the ScrapFit sketch, my pictures, some PP scraps, some spray ink and whipped up this page.  I like how it turned out.

Snuck one in!

I am supposed to be cleaning and organizing my scrap room among other things.  But when I saw the Club CK One Hour Challenge-use circles, was at a time when I could participate, I had to do it!  So I did!  Not only did I write my journaling before I had a title, I realized they Frosted Designs 3/2 Friday Challenge is Numbers!  So for the first time ever, I took my title from my journaling.  I never do that! Voila! Double Whammy! 2 really fun creative challenges.

I used a sketch that I found on Pinterest by Jana Eubank.  I'm always looking for ideas on how to use one vertical and one horizontal photo.  My PP are Echo Park and MME. The big circle chipboard is MAMBI that I painted with Making Memories paint.  I painted the banner cycles with Glimmer Mist, but they came out really flat so I added Stickles around the edge to jazz them up a bit.  The number are Thickers, the letters and word circles are MAMBI.  The small chipboard dots are Fancy Pants.  Ribbon is unknown.  Twine is MME and the journal tag is also EP.  Ok, back to work now.  Playtime is over.

LOAD Aftermath: It's Project Month

My totals for LOAD were 25 single page LOs, 7 double page LOs for a total of 32 LO's, (or 39 'pages' if that's how you count them).    So why does't it feel like I made even the tiniest dent in my stash?

I had a really fun time working on LOAD this time.  Some prompts made me think and they were hard to do, but I'll just lump those into the "Creativity Heals" group. (thanks CK). I don't think I came away with any startling discoveries about my 'style'.  I really tried to give myself an hour each day to do my project, so it was kind of like a daily One Hour Challenge. I would quickly decide on my photo, story, PP and embellies and just stick with it, (which is my same MO for Ck OHCs). There were quite a few days where I wasn't feeling it or were time pressed, so I used some 1/2 finished, pre-made pages.  They were really a life saver.  It made me think that maybe I should put some 'kits' together for next time.  Maybe even a few 'go to' sketches for those kinds of days.  All in all, I am very happy with my results.  If nothing else, I proved to myself that not only could I do a L O A D, but I could also make the time for myself, for ME to do it.  I think that is just as important, if not more so.

So now, after a month of scrappy indulgence, it's time to clean up.  The only place the stayed relatively neat is my desk.  After i finish a LO, I put the stuff away that I used so I have a clean area to begin again.  This is what my scrap room looks like.

This is the view from the doorway

 I took this standing in front of my desk.

just stuff everywhere.  These are embellies, a bin I was just throwing random PP into to be put away later and the box that became so important of unfinished LOs.

Last night I put all the LO's in the right albums. and this afternoon, I'm beginning to put stuff away. 

I decided I will re-organize as well.  That will be project #1.  As I've had a chance to use my room a lot lately, I am finding there are some 'go to' items that need to be in better places.  I don't think it will be too bad.  Just moving a few things around.  Ha! we'll see!

Project # 2 and #3 are pretty similar.  I have an album from our trip to Disneyworld in Jan 2006 that needs journaling desperately.  The same thing goes for my album from my 40th Birthday Party. Beautiful pages, with no words on them!  I'm one who has too many things going at one time, and get eager and excited to start something new.  So many things go unfinished for a long time.  One thing I've really appreciated about Club CK, is in order to post in my gallery or a challenge, things have to be finished all the way.  I'm hoping to finish those two books this month.  I'll still be doing my LO's for the Club CK challenges though!  but I don't think I'll hit 32 again for a while.