Month of Challenges LO’s #1-5

I’m excited to participate in the Month of Challenges at The Lilypad this year again. I didn’t finish every challenge last year, but I made around twenty pages, so I’ll call that a success. 🙂

Like last year, I’m going with a theme for most of my pages. 2014 was all about scrapping pages from Summer 2013. This year I want to concentrate on making pages from our Louisiana trip. I’m sure other topics will sneak in there too, but I’d like to keep to my theme as much as possible. Here are my first five pages.

The first challenge was to use blending. This is one of the things in scrapping that I’m the worst at, but I think I faked it pretty well. Also, that word art? Love love love. Carpe the heck out of this diem indeed!

Credits- Hunter kit and Decorative brushes by Just Jaimee

Next up was the Blind Challenge. They give you instructions, you follow them. Easy peasy.

Journaling reads- November 23, 2014 InstaFood makes everything look classier, even Burger King.

Credits- Hunter kit by Just Jaimee

Art Inspiration Challenge

Journaling reads- We stopped on the Alabama state line to rest and stretch our legs. It was right before sunset and the colors were gorgeous.

Credits- November 2014 Storyteller by Just Jaimee
Hunter template by Just Jaimee

Clean and Simple Challenge. One of my favorite pages.

Journaling taken from Instagram- Windows rolled down. Hair blowing in the wind. Smelling pine and campfire smoke. Swanee River.

Credits- September 2014 Storyteller by Just Jaimee

Photo Treatment Challenge

Journaling reads- That awkward moment where you realize you just took a picture with the backside of a Confederate soldier, who was in fact, not FDR like you had originally thought. #fail

Credits- Hunter kit and template by Just Jaimee

This is always a fun and busy time of year for my scrapping. I love that TLP hosts such fun challenges. I’ll be back soon with my next five pages.

MOC pages 10-15

I’m participating in The Lilypad’s Month of Challenges this month. I’m excited to stretch creatively, and really want to knock out a bunch of summer pages.

Our 10th challenge was to do a page about our One Word. I must admit, I haven’t done much with my word yet, not even introducing it on here. So there you go, my word is Health. It is very needed this year, especially after December, which I “took off”. Biggest mistake of 2013! It took me all year to lose 25 pounds, but only a month to undo a lot of my hard work. We’ll chalk that up to learning experience and move on.

Journaling reads- This year we are striving for Health. Physical health, financial health, and keeping our relationship healthy. We celebrated our anniversary in December by doing a 5k together. I can’t wait to do more healthy things together in 2014!

We were given a template to use on the next challenge. I love blocky LO’s so this one was a breeze.

Journaling reads- Awkward Family Photo. The mirror in this elevator did quite strange things to my face. Hotel Morgan. Morgantown, West Virginia. 6.9.13.

The next challenge was a template one also. But this time we were given two templates that we were supposed to join and make into one page. Very cool technique that I’ve never done before.

Journaling reads- Maryland Rest Stop. Driving between D.C. and West Virginia, we stopped at a rest stop with absolutely spectacular views. June 8, 2013

All of the above pages, plus every other page I’ve made for these challenges, have been made with the January 2014 Storyteller kit by Just Jaimee. I wanted to see how many pages I could make with one collection.

I love the idea of “killing a kit” that some paper scrappers do. They try to use every paper and embellishment in a kit so that there’s nothing left. That idea fascinates me. I have never ever “killed” a full sized digi kit. In digi, things move so quickly. You use a kit once, then it’s on to the next kit. I’m trying to adjust that way of thinking and make multiple pages with my new kits. I’m not sure if I’ll manage to kill the January kit (that collection is HUGE). But to date, I’ve used a piece of that kit on 17 different pages! That is completely unheard of for me. I’ve definitely got my money’s worth with that one. And I love that woodgrain alpha so much, I’m sure I won’t be finished with it anytime soon.

TLP had a sale this past weekend, so I was able to pick up a few other things, including Just Jaimee’s September kit from last year. I combined that with January’s kit for my next two pages.

The next challenge was to use a fancy shadowing technique to give your layers a more realistic look. It’s a pain in the butt to do in PSE. (I miss full photoshop sometimes!) It’s probably not something I’ll do often unless PSE ever starts letting you separate styles from their layers without a workaround.

Journaling reads- I caught him doing this pose in the car one afternoon..

Not the most deep, thought provoking journaling going on this month…

The next challenge was to do a page with fourteen goals or resolutions for this year. I took mine from this post.

Journaling reads- 2014 Memory Keeping Goals. Get a photo of me and Jason each week | Project Life | Three Times Twelve (a photo of our family once a month) | Summer Daily | Get (and stay) current with printing | Scan photos | Tag photos | 100 family photos this summer | One Little Word | I Choose class | Inspired Scrapbooking class | self portrait challenge | Organize digi supplies | Print a book

The last challenge I have to share today was to lift a paper scrapbook page. I was All Over that one! I lifted this lovely page from Adrienne Alvis. I loved the quote bubbles, perfect for a story I wanted to tell about me and Jamie! I used the FWP collab Blessed + Lucky, along with my favorite alpha from the January Storyteller kit.

Journaling reads- Wodehouse Fangirls. Our family has been huge P.G. Wodehouse fans for generations. My sister and I have read some of the books so many times that we have whole chunks memorized. We will often randomly quote passages to each other, which is probably strange to a lot of people. I’m sure not very many people get Super Excited over cow creamers like we do.

Holy balls this is a long post!

Thanks for looking 🙂

MOC pages 7-9

I’m participating in The Lilypad’s Month of Challenges this month. I’m excited to stretch creatively, and really want to knock out a bunch of summer pages.

Number 7 was an easy challenge, just use word art. This page is probably the most “my style” of the MOC pages so far. Or at least Jason’s idea of what my style is… “You put a couple of pictures up in one corner and put some stuff around them”. (Picture him waving his arms and gesturing)…

I altered the word art by using the clone tool to get rid of the “2014”. I didn’t notice that the year was also 2014 on this page, so I went back and fixed it.

Journaling reads- We were so happy to finally see that plane touch down! Only a few more minutes and we’d see [Little Man]!

Number 8 was pretty tricky. The challenge was to layer the photo so that it looks like it’s a watercolor or sketch along the edges. Masking always looks romantic to me, so I thought this would be a great time to use pictures from Jason’s brother’s wedding. I’m not usually a technique-y person, but definitely something I’d like to play around with more. And it helps to have beautiful photos as inspiration!

Number 9 was to re-do a past page. I don’t like to do that, so I just took a picture that I’d already scrapped a couple of years ago and paired it with new photos to tell a different story. Also, that very awkward “sweet” label was used to cover up an even more awkward part of the photo where a lady was standing with her mouth wide open in the background. I am not enough of a photoshop master to fix that, so if all else fails, stick an ellie over it. 🙂

I’m running a bit behind on my MOC pages, but hoping to get caught up in the next couple of days!

MOC pages 4-6

I’m participating in The Lilypad’s Month of Challenges this month. I’m excited to stretch creatively, and really want to knock out a bunch of summer pages.

These were made with Just Jaimee’s January 2014 Storyteller collection. I’ll be using this kit for as many challenges as I can. I used it on all six pages that I’ve done for MOC, and I’m nowhere near using everything.

The next challenge was to do a 2 pager. I’ve gotten a lot of practice doing 2 page LO’s with Project Life the past 2 years, so this one was easy. Very time consuming though. I used this DYY template set from Lynn-Marie. You can hide different layers to create dozens of different configurations. It’s super clean and pretty, and I will probably use them a ton.

Ideally I’d like to scrap the individual places in most of these photos, but in case I don’t, it’ll be nice to have them in a big spread. I just wrote a little overview of our trip. I was super into putting words on my instagram pictures this summer, so I had to mention that too.

Journaling reads- This is the first leg of our Epic Summer Road Trip 2013. We drove from West Palm, up through Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, and into Virginia. We got to our destination in Richmond about 18 hours after we started. It was a long day, but we had a good time. I documented our journey using the A Beautiful Mess app and Instagram.

For the next challenge, we were supposed to take inspiration from a book. It was a good challenge for me, because I remember thinking of the book Make Way for Ducklings the day we took these pictures. I used colors and layout design that were similar to the book cover.

Journaling reads- This summer could have been known as the Summer of Ducklings. We were slightly obsessed with these little fluffballs. It all started one afternoon when Jason called me and said “Come outside!”. I was confused. “Are you home?” “Yes, come outside and hurry!”. Charles and I put on our shoes and ran outside. Into the rain. That’s when I started to worry, because my husband hates being outside in the rain. When we went down, we saw this croud of tiny ducklings splashing around in the puddles. It was the cutest thing ever! These were some daredevil ducks too. They would cross the street in front of cars, all in a line just like in the children’s book. I didn’t know ducks really did that!

The last LO I did was for a cluster challenge. I was really inspired by the LO’s I saw in the double page thread, so I did another 2 pager using a panorama photo I took with Little Man. It was fun showing him the trick where you can make your subject look multiplied. What could be cuter than three of him?

I’m still a couple of pages behind, but I’ve also done a few CT LO’s that I’ll share next week. I’m sure this will be my most productive month of scrapping ever!

MOC pages #2 and 3

I’m participating in The Lilypad’s Month of Challenges this month. I’m excited to stretch creatively, and really want to knock out a bunch of summer pages.

These were made with Just Jaimee’s January 2014 Storyteller collection. I’ll be using this kit for as many challenges as I can.

The first was an art journal page. I didn’t have any deep thoughts to journal about, so I scrapped one of my favorite songs. Which also had special meaning for that particular day, as we were apartment hunting. We were definitely counting dollars as opposed to stars!

For the second LO we were supposed to use a technique to separate layers of brushwork. I’ve been itching to use that “Be awesome” word art since I bought the kit. And since we are the Awesome Family, I’m sure it’ll make more appearances.

Journaling reads- “Sorry I can’t comply with that order because I am too awesome”

I had jotted that quote down in Momento this summer, but with no context. I really wish I could remember what I asked him to do that he was “too awesome” for, lol!

MOC #1- Raincoats

I’m participating in The Lilypad’s Month of Challenges this month. I’m excited to stretch creatively, and really want to knock out a bunch of summer pages. Here’s my first page. They started us out with a super simple page.

Journaling reads- Making raincoats for the birds.

Credits:
January 2014 Storyteller by Just Jaimee