I’ve been wanting to share this for awhile.
I’m proud to announce my next venture: I’m designing photo book pages for an online photo retailer! That means you can order custom photo books with themed photo book pages and covers I have designed! The site is not live yet, but it is coming soon! Keep watching for the official announcement!
I’ve been trying to find the time to scrap an occasional page here and there. Now that it’s (supposedly) summer here, the time to do fun creative stuff has been replaced with spending time outdoors. When I do find the time to be creative, I find myself going for fast and simple creations. I whipped up this page one evening in a short amount of time. It’s very simple, but I like it.
The photo was one I took for Project 365 back in April. Dad and Gigi were being silly one day and I snapped some photos of them together. I gave the photo an antiqued overlay when I retouched it. And when I used it on the layout here, I blended it into the background paper to make it even more subtle. Just a very simple ribbon, tag, and wordart to complete the layout.
I took some casual photos of Gianna on Mothers Day. She’s become a little ham for the camera. When she wants to, that is. Here she’s picked some dandelions and is modeling with them. Such a stinker! Anyway, I wanted to take this photo and create a special layout since the photo was taken on Mothers Day. I really wanted just something simple to convey what it feels like to finally be able to celebrate Mothers Day. I mean, the best part about Mothers Day is just having this little girl who made me a mom.
Beyond the sentimental part of this layout, there’s something else really cool about it. I made all the elements myself! Just part of my effort to push myself to do new things. It’s an exciting and frustrating process all at once. Frustrating because there’s so much I want to do and haven’t figured it all out yet! But I’m learning, and that is VERY exciting!
I set out to make some homemade gifts and cards for Mothers Day. Neither one of these things took a long time to make, but I think they turned out great. Both my mom and my mother-in-law like bath salts, so it was a logical gift to make!
These simple cards were so easy. The images were some I had received in trade already stamped for me, so I just had to color them. I used my watercolor crayons and an aquapainter. I mounted that image onto a layer of always artichoke cardstock. I love that color green! The card base itself is certainly celery and was stamped with my favorite Sanded background stamp in chocolate chip ink. I wanted to add a little ribbon embellishment, so I used my wide grosgrain celery ribbon and made a little loop. I adhered it to the image layer with a little vintage brad. I wanted to use a Happy Mothers Day sentiment, but the stamp I had was too large for the cardfront, so I stamped inside and instead used the generic ‘for you’ sentiment on the outside.
To make the bath salts, I took out a bunch of my soaping supplies. Normally I make bath salts with a combination of epsom salts and dead sea salts. One is readily available at any pharmacy, but the dead sea salts are harder to come by and must be ordered. I didn’t have any dead sea salts left. (I use them in my bath whenever I can!) So this batch of salts was made purely with epsom salts. But that’s OK, because part of the purpose is to salt the water, but the other part is to provide a nice aroma, and any salt can serve as a vehicle for the scented oils. I colored the salts with some mica (which I had on hand for my soaping) and used some fragrance oils to provide scent. Mixed them up in a bowl and then poured them into some sturdy cellophane bags. To finish the bags off, I rolled the tops down and tied them with a wide organdy ribbon. I also wanted a little tag to decorate the bag. The flowery stamp is actually an image from a set of scallop stamps that coordinate with the SU scallop circle punch. I didn’t like the inside sentiment, though, so after I stamped and punched the image out, I stamped a smaller 3/4 inch circle from brown paper to look like the center of a flower and to cover the sentiment up. I wanted a little more dimension, so I added a threaded button to finish it off.
I think these salts turned out great! I am especially partial to the peach one in the center. Good thing I mixed up an extra bag just for myself!
I made this page a few days ago. I’ve been struggling with finding my creativity lately, and I thought I’d FORCE myself to sit down and create a page. I looked to the challenges on Splitcoast for inspiration – and there was a digi scrap challenge to use word art on a page. Easy enough.
The main photo on this layout was the starting point – it is a recent photo of Jay and Gianna kissing that I took and posted as part of my Project 365 blog (which needs updating, I realize). So I took out some of the other photos I took at the same time and retouched them to match the main one. I really like how this turned out.
Digital paper is by Holly and wordart is by Natali. Shadows by Flergs. The layout was a scraplift of a template I saw online recently. (I don’t remember who created it.)
I do have a monthly goal to create 20 pages a month, but I’ve had a very difficult time keeping up with that goal, even when I do a scrapbook day out of the house. which gives me time to create 10 or more layouts in a sitting. I’m not sure if it’s because the creative juices have slowed to a trickle, or if I’m just too busy with other things. It’s probably that my creativity is waning BECAUSE I’m too busy with other things. Which reminds me…
I have a couple of exciting announcements to make soon. :) Nothing house or baby related, though… so don’t even go there. :)
Be sure to check out my Project 365 blog as well… I created a new blog header and will be posting more photos there soon.
I’ve spent some time getting my new stamp/scrap/photo space organized. It’s not complete, but it’s functional, and that makes me happy. However, I’ve just not had the creative energy to do anything! In fact, I’ve been trying to force it, and it’s only made me more frustrated. Finally, Monday night, I was able to find some inspiration. Gigi and I spent the evening in the stamp room and created some fun stuff.
These are the cards I came up with. The blue card is meant to be a sympathy card, which I sent to our previous next door neighbor. Scotty passed away the week after we moved after a very quick battle with cancer. He and his wife Marilyn were always very friendly, and Scotty will be missed. I wanted to send a card to Marilyn to express our sympathies.
The other two cards I made had no real intended purpose – I just felt like stamping them! When I make cards, I often don’t start out with something specific in mind. I usually just start playing with stuff and letting it happen. You’ll often see my cards incorporate a dark brown color – that’s just my usual style!
I’ve been able to spend more time in my stamping room this week, and I’ll have more cards to share in the next few days.
I realized the other day that I haven’t blogged in six weeks. Yikes! In that time, my family and I have moved into our new house (FINALLY!) and have spent a few weeks unpacking and organizing. We are not done yet – there are some finishing touches to be done with the house (I’m looking for the perfect mirrors for my bathroom and am improvising for the time being. Also, we neglected to order a door handle for the front door, so we are using the very unmatched brass colored round door knob from the previous door. ) But we are getting settled. There are still boxes to unpack, but there’s an end in sight, I think. :) Unfortunately, this work of moving and getting settled has left me little time to be creative, and when I do have time to be creative, I have lacked the energy to do anything creative. So I haven’t edited any photos, created any scrapbook pages, or stamped anything in a long time. I have managed to keep photographing each day as part of my project 365 commitment, but those photos still reside on the memory cards – I haven’t even transferred them to the computer yet!
But I am bound and determined to blog tonight. And also to start posting some of the last 2 months’ worth of photos to my project 365 blog.
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One of the decisions we made as part of remodeling the house was choosing paint colors. And it wasn’t an easy decision-making process. We decided on a palette of greens and browns for a very earthy, nature-inspired theme. But for a long time, I’ve been wrestling with the idea of painting the kitchen red – kind of a pizza-sauce color. I decided it against it. Red is bold and vibrant, and I decided to play it safe.
But this red color kept weighing on me, and the more I tried to not think about it, the more I couldn’t help but think about it.
Last weekend we shopped a local furniture store that’s going out of business and finally found a black kitchen table to go in the small dining nook. The table, however, did not come with chairs. So we headed to Pier 1, which is my favorite store to shop. I love going there and just looking at all the pretty stuff. And so when we went there, I knew I had a lot of really gorgeous chairs to choose from. And then I saw them: these pretty red velvet dining room chairs. After some back and forth, I decided to go for it. The red chairs would be the bold, bright, daring accent against the safe colors I used in the rest of the house. It was the perfect answer.
We also picked up a pretty red bowl and charger to use as a centerpiece on that table. Plus, some red pillows, some red rugs, and some red gerbera daisies to carry the red accents through the house.
Slowly, it’s all coming together. It is starting to feel like our home, like we belong. It’s a wonderful feeling.
Just wanted to post a few more photos of some of the homemade Christmas gifts I made this year.
This first is a travel journal I made for my little sister. It’s just a blank album that I did an altered cover for. Very simple. I thought she could attach some photos, do a little journaling, and have a quick and easy travel scrapbook.
Again just some travel-themed paper mounted on black cardstock is the main piece for the cover. I used my favorite laser cutter to cut those letters out at my LSS (RIP).
This next project was a gift to Gianna’s grandparents. I made two separate books. when I was done with them, I thought they were so cute I wanted to keep them for myself!
The pages in these scrapbooks measure 5x5, so I took some of my favorite scrapbook layouts from 2008 and had them printed at 5x5 size and simply mounted them to the scrapbook pages. I added a few embellishments to some of the pages to add a little dimension.
The front cover has an opening that shows a photo on the first page. Getting that photo aligned was harder than I thought it would be! Added a few flowers and the year as embellishments.
And then the inside pages. Since I already had the scrapbook pages done, this was a really quick and easy gift to make. I still have a few pages to add to give to them but the rings used to bind the book are removable, so it’ll be super easy to add pages and give them to the grandparents.
Fun stuff!
One of the projects I’ve been wanting to post here was the fun photo album/scrapbook/journal thing I made for my hubby for Christmas that highlights our trip to California over Memorial Day weekend. I have been sort of focused on my project 365 blog recently, and this blog has taken a bit of an unintended backburner. If you haven’t see my project 365 blog, you can see it here. I haven’t missed a day yet! Well, photos don’t always get uploaded the same day I take them, but I do try hard to get the photos uploaded to the blog on a regular basis. You can see them here: http://cameragirldenise.typepad.com/denise_365/
Anyway, back to this blog.
My intention has always been to do a complete digital book for this trip, but I’m taking my time with it. I currently have about 25 pages scrapped (with a goal of about 100 pages when it’s done). Remember, I took 1100 photos on this trip and have lots I want to include. But I also had an itching desire to create a paper album as well. I knew I didn’t want it to be as formal – just something to showcase the top 50 photos from the trip and tell the story more concisely.
Digging through my scrapbook cupboards I discovered an empty wire-bound journal. No doubt I purchased it to use for photos from our trip to Italy nearly 9 years ago. (I will NEVER be caught up with my scrapbooking!) But it was still unused and figured it was perfect for this project.
The journal had blank black pages and just the right number of pages to hold my photos. Remember, it’s wire-bound already so I can’t add any pages to it.
I had ordered my photos from Shutterfly and included a white border on them. It’s really easy to do and it makes the photos look more classy, I think.
I also knew I wanted this journal to be very Martha Stewart-ish... simple and classic. Nothing says simple and classic better than photo corners. I remember scrapbooking in 1985 in my bedroom in the basement, putting photos of my various elementary school activities into a huge album with black pages and photo corners. Either my tastes are outdated or some things are just classic. I’m going to say classic never goes out of style.
Looking back, I should have used the kraft colored photo cornes for this project to set the white photo border off from the black pages, but done is done.
I used the handy laser cutting printer at my local scrap store to cut out those pretty red letters. Sadly, this store went out of business about two weeks after I finished this journal. I will MISS that laser cutter. I will miss the store, too… but that laser cutter was definitely the highlight of the store! The letters are cut out of a cranberry colored cardstock and are on the front cover and then inside for each ‘section’ that separates each of the cities/regions we visited.
Then, to mark each day that we were there, I stamped the days of the week onto kraft cardstock and placed them in the appropriate spots in the journal.
I dressed up the front cover of the journal by putting a piece of black velvet ribbon between the black and kraft sections. The cover design is a piece of wine-themed scrapbook paper mounted on black cardstock to set a theme for the book. Then, I used the best photo of the trip as the main focal point of the cover.
I didn’t do any journaling inside this book for two reasons. First, it’s just meant to be a photo album, and I took great effort to find photos from each of the places we visited that told the story really well. It should be pretty evident going start to finish exactly where we went while we were there. Secondly, the bound digital book has journaling and I didn’t want two books saying the same thing.
I think I have one more homemade gift idea to show you… and then it’ll be time for Valentine’s projects. :)
I have time for just a quick posting today. I'm sooo not used to this back to work routine after having that nice break over the holidays! This mama is tired! I haven't done any scrapping or anything fun (other than snap photos - more on that in a sec...) since going back to work.
But I wanted to share a layout I did over the holidays. Every year I try to do a year in a review page for Gianna to show a photo of her from each month. It's my favorite page to do each year because it's fun to go back through all my photos and see how much she's changed!
I did my annual shutterfly purchase last week, and my photos arrived yesterday. I got a stack of close to 500 photos from 2008 printed and delivered, so I will have fun organizing them and getting ready to scrap them and put them in photo albums.
Regarding Project 365, I have been taking photos every day, I just have not had time to download them to my computer and do the necessary computer work on them, so I will update that blog over the weekend when I have an hour or so to devote to doing it. It's been fun challenging myself to take my camera with me and get some photos of our everyday lives. And when I think about the journaling I want to include with each photo, I know it will be a fun thing to look back on at the end of the year. (Like the story I will have for Monday's photo regarding our cold weather and my uncooperative car battery...)
Until next time....
Earlier in December I joined a digital recipe card swap where the participants would create a digital recipe card and everyone would get a copy of the file to be printed later. Think of it as a pretty recipe card, done much the way you'd scrapbook a layout. I got 67 fun new recipes done in a 4x6 size, so I can either print them of at home or upload them to a photo service. Because they are 4x6, they will be pretty affordable to reprint. :)
So on New Years' Eve, I cooked our traditional NYE meal: chicken carbonara. It's a recipe that is sooo good and sooo easy, but it requires ingredients I don't normally shop for and has about a billion calories a serving, so we save it for a special occasion. I think this is the third year in a row we've made it for New Years' Eve. I guess it's a tradition now. :)
So I can never remember exactly how I made it previously, and I don't remember whose recipe I use - Rachel Ray, Giada de Laurentiis, or someone else... so I decided it needed a recipe card (plus, I never follow their recipes exactly... I do my own thing with it). And since I was fresh off of making them for my swap, it was a piece of cake!
So I've decided to share the card with you.
Don't freak at the amount of heavy ingredients. It's sooo worth it. It's not something you'd eat every week, just once in awhile, so a little cream and egg yolk is justifiable, don't you think?
Here's a link to the full-size file for you to use:
http://www.4shared.com/file/78986565/7a3f113c/CarbonaraRecipebyDenisew_copy.html
The recipe card was predesigned by As You Wish Designs at Shabby Pickle, so if you want to try the cards out for yourself, it doesn't get any easier than buying her files!
I have been eager to share these on my blog since I stared working on them early December! I held off because some of the recipients read this blog, so I didn't want to give away the surprise. I really made an effort to do more handmade gifts this year - especially for grandparents and godparents. Plus, it gives me a chance to do fun creative stuff as well. I think I really scored when I created these photo frames. First of all, they were so much easier than I thought they'd be. Secondly, they turned out better than I expected. Thirdly, I think the recipients liked them! (Well, I'm going to assume they did!)
These first two were 12 x 12 frames. (I actually made two of the red/brown one.) I covered them with coordinating paper, which was convenient, since paper comes in 12 x 12 size! I tried a few different kinds of glue until I found on that worked best. I ended up using Stampin Up!'s Crystal Effects - which is awesome stuff! The hard part is to not use too much so that it doesn't seep thru the paper or out from under the edges.
Then I used a sharp exacto knife to cut open the opening for the picture. Then I took a sanding block and sanded all the edges. This part was messy; I was wearing black pants. But it looks so cool. I sanded the photo opening as well.
I glued some big brown ric-rac on the red/brown frames. I knew I wanted to add some flowers to give it a 3d effect, but I knew the traditional paper crafting choices would be rather limited. So instead I headed to the silk flower section of the craft store and bought some flowers there. I used hot glue to glue them on, and then that was all there was to it. Best of all, the photo is removable, so the recipients can put a new photo in there later on if they like.
This next one I made for my little sister. I had her name for our family Christmas exchange, and since she's a big traveler, I tried to get her some travel-themed gifts. (She's sitting on a beach in Puerto Vallarta celebrating her 30th birthday as I write this.) I created this travel frame for her to use to feature a photo from one of her many vacations. (I also created her a travel journal, but I'll share that in another post.) The embellishments on this one were from a travel scrapbook kit I purchased from Stampin Up.
These next two were made for Gianna's dance instructor and her daycare provider. We haven't given the dance one out yet - and I'm going to have a hard time parting with it! It's soooo adorable! That ballet dress embellishment on the front is a Jolee's sticker and was worth the $3 I spent on it alone. It is so cute! Plus, it matches the dance costumes Gianna's class wore in their recital! The second one for Gianna's daycare provider I thought she could use to put a photo of her daycare kids in.
If I wanted to, I could have sealed these frames with ModPodge to protect the paper. I decided I wasn't patient enough to want to wait for ModPodge to dry. Plus, knowing me, I'd screw something up and make them look worse somehow. (I've been working on knowing when to stop. :) )
So after some consideration and suggestions from others, I decided to use Explore as my One Little Word for the year.
I want to explore new things, new opportunities, new locations, new techniques. I really want to try new things/learn new things, so I thought the word 'explore' would be a good guiding principle for me.
I'm working on the Project 365/Photo A Day thing in hope to learn new photographic techniques - both with my camera and post-processing in Photoshop.
I plan to take a post-processing course online to learn new tricks.
In my scrapbooking, I want to try new techniques - color combinations or techniques or layouts that would normally have been outside my comfort zone.
I really should learn CSS so that I can really customize my blog and take advantage of everything the $14.95 monthly fee gets me.... I'll have to think about that.
I told my dear hubby last night that I want to try out two new recipes a month. At first he thought I said two per week, but good grief, that's just too ambitious for me, and he agreed!
I would also like to travel to new places. Now the budget for the upcoming year is going to be much more restrictive with with new house and all, so it won't be any trips to Paris or Madrid in there. Heck, a trip to Orlando or Boston or NYC is out of reach. But day trips to places nearby. Places in my own backyard that offer some neat photographic opportunities. Places like Madison County, Iowa (ok, so that's like 5-6 hours, but doable over a weekend), The North Shore of Minnesota. Various Minnesota wineries. Stuff like that.
Some things I want to accomplish photographically speaking: take more photos of my family as a whole (and not just DH and DD). Learn how to use my flash more effectively. Try new flash techniques. More night photography (or how about ANY night photography). Use my tripod (kinda goes with the whole night photography thing...)
I'd LOVE to book more photography clients, too. Even if it was just enough to pay for a new camera upgrade that I've been salivating over.... I'd be DANCING!!!
Happy 2009 everyone! Let's hear your words/resolutions/goals for the new year!
If one of my resolutions is to take more/better photos, I figured one of the best ways to do that is to commit to regularly taking pictures. Good thing the Project 365 is getting a lot of attention on the scrap/photo boards. Project 365 is a goal/inspiration/dare to take a photo a day for the whole year. I figured why not. :)
So I've started a separate blog to dedicate to this project: http://cameragirldenise.typepad.com/denise_365/
I know I won't be updating the blog every day - but I do plan to post frequently, and if I take a photo each day, I'll eventually get it up on the blog. I think this will be a fun project. It will be fun to look back at the photos one year from today and see a progression of photographs.
Also, I'm going to challenge myself to try some new techniques. It should be fun!!
Anyone else with me? There's an 'official' signup at the ScrapbookGraphics.com forum (where I've signed up), and for signing up you get some free templates to use for your photos. So if you are interested in that, here's the place to sign up: http://www.scrapbookgraphics.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4462
Hope to see you there!
Remember last year I talked about the 'one little word' that was to be the guiding principle for me for the year? It's a concept made popular by scrapping guru Ali Edwards (aliedwards.typepad.com). Last year I choose the word 'Create' as my word because I felt like I wasn't getting enough creative balance in my life and that I really wanted to take every opportunity to create - didn't matter what it was, just wanted to create.
Over the last year, I created lots of things.
So it wasn't hard to let the word 'create' guide me this year - i tried some new things. some of them I succeeded at and some of them were, well, learning experiences that I am glad i tried. :) I have to admit it was sort of fun looking back at the things i did this year and compiling this list.
So for next year, I've been thinking about what my word should be. I'm not sure I have the right word, but it's something like 'explore/experiment/push/try new things/learn new things' Explore isn't quite right because I want it to be more than a casual exploration - I want it to be about pushing myself to try new things. Experiment isn't quite right because, again, it sounds too casual. What I'm really thinking about is working outside my comfort zone in trying new things, with a certain sense of direction and things i'd like to accomplish. So maybe there isn't just one simple word to describe it, but I'll keep thinking on it.
