{ enjoy the ride } **REMOVED FOR PUBLICATION**

x

Bliss L O V E

I have been collecting photos of all the flowers Shawn brings me,

mostly "just because" and some Mother's day or "the kids are driving

you crazy" day...

I wanted to do a layout documenting some of these and our

11th anniversary seemed like a good opportunity.

I also used the colors inspired by the www.color-me-scrappy.blogspot.com

Challenge #4 which was based on a beautiful bowl of cherries. 

I remember being a kid and thinking that the two colors that

clashed together the most were red & pink...It literally made

me cringe to see them side by side.   No longer...

Red, pink, orange...I love them all!

{ my happy P L a C e } **REMOVED FOR PUBLICATION**

big & fluffy!

Last Spring break we had a little outdoor cookout on the firepit

and made s'mores for the kids...ok, and us too...yum.

The Publix brand large marshmallows are called "Big & Fluffy" 

and I thought it was the perfect name for this page...

My daughter had suggested that I use the bag for the title,

which I thought was pretty clever. 

Naturally, my finicky son had to eat his s'more deconstructed...

 

thru your eyes...SHINE

My daughter was outside swinging before school one morning,

which shows you how much she loves swinging to be up and out so early.

I loved this photo because of the lighting and because it was like

seeing things from her perspective, thru your eyes...

I was also trying to come up with something for the MME May challenge

which was to switch up color schemes...so I used a couple papers from

an older Lost & Found Boy collection and some of the more masculine woodgrains

and patterns from the Miss Caroline & Indie Chic collections. 

I have had this viewfinder shape in my Silhouette file and thought this was

a perfect opportunity to use it to go with my theme and title.

I had loved a layout by Marcy Penner where she machine stitched

around a cluster of photos centered in the page.  Mine is a lot

busier than hers, { sometimes I have a hard time telling myself

that less is more...in design I totally agree, in scrapbooking,

well, there are just too many cool embellishments!! } but

that is the general idea...My son said it looked like Jupiter rings,

he is obsessed with space at the moment, so I thought I should

include the wood veneer stars from Studio Calico that are awesome!



SNAPSHOTS...

I love this stamp from Lawn Fawn that I have used on

multiple layouts but I have always used it to make it look

like an authentic Polaroid print...

I wanted to scrapbook this series of photos of my daughter in

the first dress I made her.  The dress has a very small pattern on

it and the pictures are pretty monochromatic so I thought it would be

 the perfect opportunity to use lots of pattern and vibrant color. 

I used a mix of the current May Scrapbook

circle kit & bits and pieces of previous kits. 

I am loving this yellow chevron washi tape!

I also thought it was a little ironic that the text under the photo of

my daughter laying down said "celebrate"...she looks anything but.

I wanted to have some subtitles without taking away from any other

patterns so I heat embossed some stamping from one of Ali Edwards sets.

believe in YOUrSelf

Two Peas had a really cool challenge for NSD to come up with your own

color challenge from items in your home.  I had so much fun picking out

basically my favorite colors and things around me! 

I also combined this color challenge with a sketch challenge

from www.sketchesinthyme.blogspot.com  to use 4 or more photos. 

I took their sketch (#74) and flipped it on its side to better fit my photos. 

Here is the direct link to their blog post:

http://sketchesinthyme.blogspot.com/p/4-photo-pages.html

I have been really digging into my old photos of the kids because they

seem to be growing and changing so much in last few months. 

Obviously, kids change as they grow but with Mother's Day I have been

really getting nostalgic and a little sad that there are no more little ones around. 

Just big kids with big personalities! {i.e. attitudes!!}



Mother's Day Cards...

I did three quick Mother's Day Cards from the scraps on my desk...

Other than the cards themselves and the stamp everything else was

literally in my scrap pile from other projects or papers I couldn't

bear to throw away even the tiniest piece of...

t r e a s u r e....Mother's Day

NSD has been such a productive and inspiring weekend (/week)!

I have tried so many things I had bookmarked or sketched out or

photos printed of...I didn't get piles accomplished in terms of actual

layouts but lots in personal growth and self-improvement!

I did this layout after saving the tutorial that Marcy Penner did

about paper piecing chevrons and honestly, the chevrons were the

easy part...the sewing was a giant pain in the bootay.

I had pinned this print/quote on Pinterest that I tried really hard to

find the original info for potential copyright reasons...but never did. 

Anyway, I loved it and I thought of this photo and broke into tears.

We were in the hospital with my Dad for my first Mother's Day and

it was honestly a horrible first Mother's Day.  We had just found out that

the cancer had metastasized and was everywhere...EVERYWHERE.

It hard to think it has been eight years since then and so much has happened. 
Sam looks so much like him it is kind of freaky and I wouldn't have it

any other way.  He totally has captured my heart and I pray that I raise

him to be as wonderful a husband and father as Shawn is...

May Scrapbook Circle Kit!

I love the new kit from Scrapbook Circle...I think it is my favorite to date.

The colors are wonderful...this layout from my daughter's 7th birthday used

almost all SC kits, not all May but past kits as well...

I have been trying to scrap her birthday for over a year and

couldn't figure out how to do it...I had lots of photos but

no single shots that would work to tell the story.

I had seen people on Pinterest doing photostrips of Instagram

photos and I made a template in photoshop to basically

do the same thing, only cropping the digital photos I had

to cover a lot of little pieces of the party.

One of my favorite things designers are doing these days is

to use the branding strip at the bottom of patterned papers as an

opportunity to add a different pattern.  Amy Tangerine's collections

have the best ones and I have used those more than the papers so far!

NSD!! what a great holiday!

I have gotten more done than usual on the weekend...

of course, I had to cash in a much needed

endoftheyearcrazytownbreakandMother'sDayisnextweekend coupon

from my husband, BUT I did get a lot done!!  Yay! 

Anyway, I did a few layouts for the Two Peas NSD Challenges!

This was just something I had started and didn't like

where it was going and finally forced myself to finish...

I used several new things from the May Scrapbook Circle kit for

this layout of my daughter at 1 year and 7 years...

I love the doily mask from Christy Tomlinson! 

This was for the Garden Girl Morph Challenge on Two Peas.

Finally, I did this last layout for NSD Challenge # 7 at

Two Peas to use a "Polaroid" for a layout...

I have the Lawn Fawn Polaroid stamp which is a favorite

but I wanted to do something different for this so

I used the Heidi Swapp Polaroid frames for my title &

journaling and had the photo between the two.

Such a fun, inspiring, productive day...whew...

RULE no. 1 . . . don't b l i n k

I did this layout for the Color Me Scrappy Challenge #3 on their blog. 

I just happened to LOVE all the colors that were to be used in this combination...
some of my favorite papers!

Here is the link to the challenge post:

http://color-me-scrappy.blogspot.com/2012/05/challenge-3.html

I have been collecting photos of the kids & grouping them to scrap

a lot of "in comparison" layouts, from them separate & together.

My mom says that even though babies change dramatically their

eyes never change, maybe the color, since most babies have blue eyes,

but that the shape and look doesn't change. 

I am not sure if that is true but Sam's eyes seem to get more and

more beautiful every day.  He has the longest eyelashes I have

ever seen on a boy or man...every girl who buys mascara will envy him!