Simple Scrapper LO’s for January 2016

I loved this month’s templates for the Simple Scrapper members! They are such classic clean designs that can be used over and over again. I used a prompt from last January to talk about some of our upcoming travel plans for 2016. (I made this page back in November, so some of these have already changed).

Credits:
Storyteller Riley kit by Just Jaimee
Template 283 by Simple Scrapper
Inspired by a Story Starter from the Simple Scrapper Premium membership January 2014 #1

For my second page I chose a pocket page design. I’ve been doing that quite a bit lately when I have a lot to say. It’s fun mixing different fonts on the same page. I changed up this month’s prompt a little, but the spirit is the same- reminding myself of some of the important lessons I’ve learned… and re-learned… over the years.

Credits
Storyteller Riley by Just Jaimee
Inspired by a Story Starter from the Simple Scrapper Premium Membership (January 2016 #6)

This is 3 of 37 All About Me pages I plan to make before I turn 38 in February 2016. All of my 37 in 37 LO’s can be found here.

*I am a Creative Team Member. This means that I receive free products in exchange for making and advertising layouts for designers. However, the opinions expressed here are my own. The enthusiasm expressed here is definitely my own. See more of my CT layouts here.

Let’s Go!

I’m popping in for a minute to share my newest page for JB Studio. The theme of the kit is for New Year’s, but I went off theme and made a page about our first night in Vegas instead. I think the navy and orangey-gold worked really well for these night shots. I’m sure I’ve said it before, but that’s one thing I really love about Dani’s kits- they’re super versatile.

Journaling reads- Bally’s is right across the street from the Bellagio, but to get there you have to take several escalators and walk through an outdoor mall area. That was fine with us- more picture opportunities!

Credits:
This Year I Will kit by JB Studio

*I am a Creative Team Member. This means that I receive free products in exchange for making and advertising layouts for designers. However, the opinions expressed here are my own. The enthusiasm expressed here is definitely my own. See more of my CT layouts here.

12-11 New Releases, featuring bad airport photos and flamingoes!

Lots of goodies to in this week’s Fresh Baked from Gingerscraps. I only wish I had more time to play!

Airport Christmas tree

Journaling reads- I decided early on that I was going to take a photo of every single Christmas tree we passed during the trip, starting with the one at the airport.

Credits:
Tinsel Town kit by Connie Prince
Blessed Days template by Dear Friends Design

Welcome to Vegas!

Journaling reads-The first thing we saw when we got off the plane was a slot machine. The second thing we saw was a sign for the airport liquor store. Welcome to Vegas!

You can see more of my Vegas layouts here.

Credits-
Gotta Love This kit and cards by Aprilisa
Blessed Days template by Dear Friends Design

And last, but not least, a page from a couple of days later. And an excuse to use one of those hot pink Christmas kits!

Flamingo Christmas

Journaling reads- After breakfast, we walked around and explored outside the Flamingo, stopping at Starbucks to get some coffee.

Credits:
Christmas Ho Ho kit by Clever Monkey Graphics
Blessed Days templates by Dear Friends Designs

*I am a Creative Team Member. This means that I receive free products in exchange for making and advertising layouts for designers. However, the opinions expressed here are my own. The enthusiasm expressed here is definitely my own. See more of my CT layouts here.

Travel Tuesday- Louisiana 2014

Y’all know I love scrapping my Louisiana trip from last year! I’ve made around 30 so far, and I have many many more to go. Here’s the latest batch.

Oh, Abita Cafe, I miss you so…. This happy morning themed kit was just perfect for my photos.

Journaling reads- We had the BEST breakfast in Abita Springs. Catfish and shrimp, crab cakes and poached eggs- that was a meal we’ll remember for years to come. We loved it so much, we went back the next morning for more! November 24, 2014

Credits: Good Morning kit and cards by Cornelia Design
Heartfelt template by Dagi’s Temp-Tations

This next one is more of an AAM page, but the photo was taken in Jackson Square, so I’ll just plop it in here. Travel photo can work double duty as personality pages. Love this doodled border, and I can’t get enough striped backgrounds, so perfect for journaling.

Journaling reads- Because sometimes I can’t stop talking long enough for him to take a picture. #GoodJobJen New Orleans 2014

Credits
Storyteller Quinn and Doodled Page Borders 2 by Just Jaimee

Up next are a couple more pages from our wine tasting. I’ve already shared two, here and here.

Credits:
More Wine, Less Whine by Little Rad Trio
Cluster Madness template by Ponytails Designs

Journaling reads- It was so interesting getting to see the process behind the scenes of how all the different wines were made. From straining the grapes, to the barrels where they aged the wine, and corking and labeling the bottles, it all made us realize just how complicated it is to make wine. We learned a lot!

Credits:
Carpe Diem kit by Little Rad Trio
Day By Day 2 by Dagi’s Tempt-tations

Thanks for stopping by!

This is 2 of 37 All About Me pages I plan to make before I turn 38 in February 2016. All of my 37 in 37 LO’s can be found here.

*I am a Creative Team Member. This means that I receive free products in exchange for making and advertising layouts for designers. However, the opinions expressed here are my own. The enthusiasm expressed here is definitely my own. See more of my CT layouts here.

New Releases for February 1st

I have lots of pages to share today, so let’s get rolling!

First up are my LO’s for Simple Scrapper. I love that the monthly themes help me go beyond scrapping events, and tell different kinds of stories. I feel like I stretch myself with each one.

Journaling reads- My favorite parts of the day- watching the news together in the morning, because we’ve only been able to do that this past year. Snuggling with miss kitty after Jason leaves, because she’s only been doing that recently after years of standoffishness. Curling up together before we fall asleep, because we’ve done it for years and will do it for many more.

Credits:
Toad-ally Adorable kit by Aprilisa
January 2015 template #3 by Simple Scrapper
Inspired by a Story Starter from the Simple Scrapper premium membership (February 2015 #6)

Journaling reads- You make me cry every time you give me a card or letter. I know to grab tissue before I even open it. I can’t help it, your words mean so much to me.

Credits:
Quinn Storyteller collection by Just Jaimee
February 2015 template #1 by Simple Scrapper
Inspired by a story starter from the Simple Scrapper premium membership (Feb 2011)

Mandy has a sweet new release today called Touch the Sky, which I used to scrap another  Louisiana road trip page. I love that I kept notes along the way, or I totally would have forgotten about these little details.

Journaling reads-
I-75 Northbound
Car talk- Once Upon a Time, Taylor Swift, fall colors.
Seen- cows, Adult Superstore, the jerk who was tailgating us get pulled over by the police.

Credits:
Touch the Sky by Mandy King

As soon as I saw February’s Monthly Mix at GingerScraps, I knew exactly what I wanted to scrap, staying with Melissa last year.

Journaling reads- Melissa let us crash at her house while we were in town for Jon’s memorial service. It was great seeing her, even though it was for a sad reason. We stayed up late talking, and we got to meet Aaliyah for the first time. February 1, 2014

Credits:
Best Friends collab by the Gingerbread Ladies (kit and template)

One more from the Best Friends Monthly Mix, this time using one of the templates. I loved the cards from the Honeymoon collection, so I let those stand in for a title and journaling.

Credits-
Honeymoon Collection Bundle by JB Studio and Meagan’s Creations
Best Friends template by Dagi’s Temp-Tations

*I am a Creative Team Member. This means that I receive free products in exchange for making and advertising layouts for designers. However, the opinions expressed here are my own. The enthusiasm expressed here is definitely my own. See more of my CT layouts here.

Guest CT with Just Jaimee!

I am beyond thrilled to be guesting with Just Jaimee this month! I’ve been a huge fan of hers for a long time, and working with her products over the last year has really taken my style into a more artsy direction. Some of my very favorite pages have been made with er products.

Here are a few of my pages from her newest Storyteller collection, Quinn.

I thought I’d try 8.5×11 on for size with this one. I like playing around with different sizes in my albums. It’s for the “scrap a bad photo” challenge at the Lilypad. I probably won’t come anywhere near close to finishing MOC this year, but it’s been fun getting inspired by some of them.

Another MOC page. This one was inspired by a mood board, specifically the phrase I used as my title. It looks pretty chaotic, but I just love it.

Journaling reads- I fell in love with New Orleans long before I ever went there. It started in high school when I read The Witching Hour by Anne Rice. I was mesmerized by her descriptions of the city, especially the Garden District.

Fast forward nearly twenty years, and I was making my second trip to New Orleans with my husband. I wish I could go back in time and tell my seventeen year old self that one day she’d go to that city, and it would be just as magical as in the books. That she’d be with someone she loves who she hadn’t met yet. and that would be magical too. November 2014

Switching gears a bit-

I’ve been thinking long and hard about how I want to document 2015. Listening to the advice Megan gives in her Pocket Your Year class, I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting. I’ve tried 6×8, the PL app, planner pages, pre-designed Quick Pages, and pocket page templates I designed myself.

While I’ve enjoyed the process of exploring new ideas, I keep coming back to this- right now, I enjoy making traditional LO’s more than pocket page style. I do absolutely love scrapping with pocket page templates, but only for certain kinds of LO’s. I don’t want to do the same old 2 page pocket style page per week system. I love the results, but I hate the process of putting them together. (I think I mostly just hate making two page LO’s in general)

So last week I came across this post by Yin and I absolutely fell in love seeing her year all laid out like that. But what I found even more interesting was how she used different kinds of pages to document her year. I wondered if something similar would work for me. So I nabbed her freebie template and got to work.

I really like the result, and I’ll definitely be using her newest set of templates in my album this year. (At least until June. We all know that I go completely off the rails in the summertime!)

It has been amazing working with Jaimee and her team the past two weeks. They are so supportive of each other and so incredibly talented!

*I am a Creative Team Member. This means that I receive free products in exchange for making and advertising layouts for designers. However, the opinions expressed here are my own. The enthusiasm expressed here is definitely my own. See more of my CT layouts here.

More Louisiana trip pages and plans for my album

I tried to think of a clever title for this post, but really I think the next 25 posts I do will be pages from our LA trip, so I’m kind of drawing a blank at this point. I made up a partial list of all the pages I want to make, and it’s well over 100. I’ve done 23 so far. I know everyone is going to be thoroughly sick of them long before I am 🙂

This week’s new releases at GingerScraps worked right into my theme, so I was pretty happy!

Queen Wild has a new entry in her State of Mind series. (You can see my New York and New Jersey pages here). These are so fun!

For Alabama I journaled about our brief drive through. For Louisiana, I took random photos of signs and text from New Orleans and Abita Springs. I’ve never seen Jason so excited about a page! He has a thing for signs, so I always try to snap as many as I can when we’re traveling.

Credits for both-
Tell Your Story- November by JB Studio
State of Mind: Gulf Coast by Queen Wild Scraps

The next two pages use templates from the Snips and Pieces pack from Little Rad Trio. They were super easy to use and my pages came together pretty quickly. They look similar, but there will be a few pages separating them in my book, so I’m okay with that. I think next time I’ll space it out more between LO’s from the same template pack though. I was so busy trying to scrap that first day that I didn’t think of it until I saw them together.

Brick house credits
Turning Leaf collab
Snips and Pieces template by Little Rad Trio

Crestview rest stop credits
What A Man collab by the Gingerbread Ladies
Snips and Pieces template by Little Rad Trio

I’ve given a lot of thought to what I want the final product of these pages to be. For my whole scrapping life I’ve been quite happy to scrap a page here and there, adding to my albums whenever inspiration struck.

While I still love doing that, I wanted to try something different with this trip. I’d really like to scrap this trip to completion. Tell all the stories, show off all the photos, and make an actual book out of it.

Part of my reasoning is financial.  We took a lot of pictures, and I kept a lot of notes too. I’m going to make a lot of pages for this one. And that gets expensive. Blurb books are a lot cheaper than doing individual pages.

I’ve never “completed” a trip album before, and I’m curious to see how that would feel. I’ve been scrapping this trip for over a month and I’m still excited about it. And I’m lucky enough to have plenty of inspiration in the form of products and challenges right now.

I’ve made a separate page to house all my LO’s from this trip, similar to how I did for Summer 2013. That should be ready next week. It will be part of a bigger change to the blog that I hope to have ready by the end of February.

February will also be my blogiversary. I can’t believe I’ve had this blog for almost three years now!

Okay, enough rambling… thanks for stopping by 🙂

*I am a Creative Team Member. This means that I receive free products in exchange for making and advertising layouts for designers. However, the opinions expressed here are my own. The enthusiasm expressed here is definitely my own. See more of my CT layouts here.

New release day at GingerScraps!

I’m super excited to share that I’ll now be a permanent member of the GingerScraps CT! I guested for them back in November and had a really great time playing with all kinds of goodies! This will mean that Fridays on the blog I’ll have a New Release post with any pages I’ve made.

So here goes!

The first two LO’s are from our Louisiana trip. I’m really concentrating on those photos and stories this month, and I love the focus it’s giving me. I did the same thing last year with our first trip to California, and I made lots of pages. I plan on continuing this idea of a “monthly concentration” throughout 2015.

This page is a reminder to myself to take care of myself when we travel. I get motion sickness on planes, boats, and long mountain drives. And now I guess we can add very long bumpy bridges to the list too.

Inspired by- The red and blue of the kit reminded me of the red coke bottle and the blue of the sky as we crossed the bridge. I had to edit the photos pretty heavily to better match the kit, but I like them.

Journaling reads- Note to self- always, always take Dramamine when going over the Lake Ponchatrain Bridge into New Orleans. Those bumps are harsh!

Credits:
Let’s Party kit (Monthly Mix)
Make It Two templates by Dagi

LOM album- Places: Louisiana

The second LO is the first of what I’m sure will be many pages about St. Louis Cathedral. It’s one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen.

Inspired by- The blues and purples in the kit. I’d originally wanted to scrap different photos, but they weren’t working out. The blue hombre paper reminded me of the sky (everything reminds me of the sky apparently) so I used these instead. Another heavily edited set of photos, but I felt like playing with filters that day, so I went with it.

Credits:
Winter Wonderland collab from the Gingerbread Ladies
Make It Two by Dagi’s Temp-tations

LOM album- Places: Louisiana

And lastly I have a page about a video game Jason has been obsessed with lately. I just couldn’t pass up that fabulous journaling card! I’m sure I’ll be making plenty more pages with this kit.

I’ll be continuing with the Project 52 that I started towards the end of last year, and this is my page for Week One. I’ll talk more about my version of P52 next week.

Inspired by- That awesome journaling card! We call ourselves the Awesome Family, so it totally feeds into our collective narcism.

Journaling reads- Jason and C finally got to play Vain Glory together this weekend. They’ve been wanting to for a long time. Yay for Skype and games with co-op!

Credits: Digital Besties collab by JB Studio

LOM album- All About Jason

*I am a Creative Team Member. This means that I receive free products in exchange for making and advertising layouts for designers. However, the opinions expressed here are my own. The enthusiasm expressed here is definitely my own. See more of my CT layouts here.

Quick little post

to let you know I’m over at the Nerd Nest today talking all about Nostalgia. Go check it out to see lots of pages from our Louisiana trip last month!

December Daily, part one

We’re already halfway through the month, so I guess it’s about time I shared some DD pages, huh? I’ll start with some November pages. My cover and basic plan can be found here.

I wasn’t going to do an intro page, I always feel awkward doing those because it’s hard finding words. Then I started talking about DD on the GingerScraps forum and the words just came to me. I used Ali’s free word art for the title.

The next page is from a Shimmelle JYC prompt. My holiday manifesto took the form of a to-do list this year that I made in the middle of November. And I’m super happy that I’ve already crossed a lot of those items off.

Now onto our Louisiana pages! We went up to LA to visit Jason’s dad and brother for Thanksgiving. We haven’t been there for a few years, so we were really looking forward to it! (Posts recapping that trip are here and here). I didn’t want to overwhelm my holiday book with a hundred pictures from our trip, so I limited myself to one page per day. The first page is from the trip up.

I wanted to use pictures with holiday decorations in this book, and as soon as we stepped off the trolley, I knew this would be my photo for Monday.

I took a lot of photos of the Cathedral, planning to use one of those for Tuesday. Then I found this one that Jason’s dad caught and it became one of my favorites for the whole trip.

On Wednesday we went to our very first wine tasting at the vineyard where Jason’s dad volunteers. It was a lot of fun, and Jason wasn’t nearly as pissed off as he looks here. 😛

And Thanksgiving! I’ll do a page for that in my Seasons and Holidays scrapbook, so I kept it simple here.

Another very simple page for our trip home on Friday. We stopped in Panama City Beach, and it was one of my favorite things all year.

I used a 30 Days of Lists prompt for Saturday. We didn’t do much that day except rest and do laundry, so I wrote about what little lushes we were.

 

And then, November came to a close. Poor Jason was back at work and I got my new GS praise team avi.

Supplies used- Christmas Countdown by JB Studio, Forever Joy Holiday Basics papers, Ali Edwards WA Fonts- Avenir, Chunk Five, CK Ali’s Hand

Thanks for stopping by! I’ll be sharing more pages in a few days.