Bright and Cheery

For the past few days, the weather has been cloudy and gloomy and I decided to scrap my way to brighter days.  I used some bright, fun papers from the Delovely collection by Cosmo Cricket to decorate a 6x6 chipboard book I found in the dollar bin at Michael's (I've made some great finds there lately!).  The five pieces of chipboard were attached with a binder ring in the upper left corner, but I wanted mine to be able to stand up, so I used the crop-a-dile to punch holes in the lower portion as well. 

The photos I chose to use were from the first 'Girls Weekend' my mom and I took to Dresden, Ohio.  For three days we shopped.  I'm not kidding.  I couldn't even begin to guess how many bags we had - the truck was full!  We spent the first two nights in a hotel, but decided to change things up and spent the  last night at a local bed and breakfast, The Inn at Dresden.  It's a beautiful property set high on a hill.  I thought the hill was scary going up, but that was easy peasy compared to driving down- Yikes! 

Altered Card Box

Since I've been making Christmas Cards all year, I decided to alter a recipe box to store my cards.  I picked this box up at Michael's in the $1 bin and I love the clasp.  I used Basic Grey Christmas paper and inked the edges. 

Christmas in September?

Actually, it's been Christmas since January for me!  Last year, I was barely able to get my cards out before January and the fact that they were made at all is due to taking my supplies on a business trip and working on them at night in the hotel.  The cards were OK, but not my best work.  I generally send out 25-30 cards a year, so I decided to make the commitment to complete at least 2 cards per month for 2010 and figured that would get me close so I wouldn't be struggling in December to finish cards and projects.

I've done really well as I now have 23 Christmas cards ready to go!  I did only two cards most months, but since I can make 4 cards almost as easily as 2, a few months slipped in with extras.  The above card is one of 6(!) I completed for September.  I used a really simple design and mass produced the cards using only 2 pieces of solid cardstock for the base, two sheets of double sided cardstock for the main focus and a page of die cuts for the embellishments.  By using both sides of the patterned paper, I was able to make all six cards a little different.  Add a little ribbon and a Merry Christmas stamp inside the card and they're ready to be mailed!

Baby Shower Gift

I purchased this painters tray months ago but hadn't used it for anything.  I received an invitation to a baby shower and decided it would make a nice shadow box for a baby's room.  The mom is decorating the room in pink and brown so I used a rich chocolate brown as the base piece behind each rectangle to ground it a little and give some separation between the white tray and the lite colored papers.  The papers are from a baby girl stack I picked up on sale at Jo Ann's.  I added a few embellishments, but wanted to leave space for the baby photos and journaling of first impressions, date of birth, weight and height.  I have some chipboard letters that I want to use to put on the little hanging tag, but they haven't decided on a name yet so that will be added later.  I also finished the frame off with chocolate ribbon around the sides. 

Best Friend

This is Theo.  He's my most difficult subject to scrapbook.  When my brother and I were kids, we didn't have any pets because we spent so much time out of the house between school, piano lessons, sports and camping.  As a result, we both adopted dogs in our early 20's.  His first fur-kid was a bulldog named Ella and he's now the proud papa of  two labs, Apollo and Alana.  My dream dog was a Shar-Pei.  Theo passed away 5 years ago after a full life of chasing squirrels, riding shotgun in the truck and catching an afternoon nap in front of the fireplace.  I still miss him each and every day.  I have tons of photos from every stage of his life, so you'd think scrapbook pages would be easy.  Not so much.  I've purchased enough dog themed products over the past 10 years to use every photo I have, but my head goes to another place when I start looking through the pictures, I loose all desire to put them on paper.  Does anyone else have this problem? 

This layout is one of my favorite photos of him because it's so funny.  It looks all sweet with him peeking out from the flowers with his head tilted.  It reminds me of having professional photos taken where the photographer tilts your head to some unnatural angle and you end up looking like you're very pensively starting into space.  I find it extremely funny because it's all an illusion!  More than likely, someone was holding food in front of him and that's what he's staring at so longingly.  That it happened to be in front of a flower arrangement is irrelevant and just added a natural embellishment.  I know I'll love the album when I'm finished and treasure it forever.  Thanks for looking.