Inspiration Station: Beadboard

I love bead board. Tim Holtz, if you're reading this, would you put a beadboard-inspired embossing folder in your next Texture Fades product release? Thanks! :-D

I'm excited to announce...

...that I am now a Design Team member for That Scrappy Girl!

Hop on over to her blog to see my inaugural post :)

Challenging Myself

Every week Club CK (Creating Keepsakes Magazine) publishes a one-hour challenge. Now typically this is in the middle of the day on Thursday so all of you working folk like me will miss it. The good news is that they extend a "second-change" prize for a layout published by the following Monday morning.

Now, whether you're in for the prizes is one thing.... However, if you tend to be a bit behind on your scrapbooking (much like me), this challenge affords a great opportunity to challenge yourself to get one layout (just ONE) finished over the weekend. You can find time to squeeze in one lil' ol' layout, right?

This past week's CK 1-hour Challenge List it Out! got me motivated to get a layout done that I had started (digitally) but not finished. Let's put it this way, the original title was 31 things at 30 years...wanna guess how long I've had this one on the back burner?

Anyway, I decided to go nuts with a little (okay, a lot!) of October Afternoon and some Maya Road with a little Tim Holtz for good measure ;) ...and a few hours later (sooner if I hadn't been running out of glue) I had a great new layout completed.

A list of thirty-two things about me at age 32 (did you just do the math? Yes, I started this layout's foundation 2 years ago!). I decided to print the list (because it would have taken forever to line up 32+ boxes) on cardstock and embellish around the list item boxes.

*As seen in the January 2012 issue of Creating Keepsakes*

Supplies: Cardstock - Bazzill; Patterned Paper, Rubons, Stickers - October Afternoon; Punches - Martha Stewart, EK Success; Bingo numbers, flower, chipboard numbers - Maya Road; @ sticker - American Crafts; Paint - EK Success; Film strip, metal gears - Tim Holtz; Stitching rubon - Daisy D's. Software - CorelDraw, Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Detailed shots below. (sorry they're a little out of focus. i dropped my camera and i think it might have messed it up a bit. oops!)

As usual, click to bigify.

Oh, and I've accepted the fact that I'm just never going to be a 2-page layout kind of girl. Hence the action-packed, content-loaded, 1 page layout you see here. Yes folks, it's the superhero of scrapbook pages. The hard-working, single page layout to the rescue! Trust me though, there won't be any pages made in a phone booth anytime soon.

Inspiration Station: Minty Green-Orange-Black-Kraft

Sometimes you happen upon some color schemes you wouldn't normally think of. This is one of them.

Birthday Boy

More Owl Soup - can't get enough of it!

Inspiration Station: Black Ribbon Flowers

I'm thinking some double-edged satin ribbons paired with some Prima centers could re-create these lovelies.

Quick & Easy Little Mini Book

I needed a quick little mini book for a retirement gift and I only had one night to make it. (I prefer to think that was because of my busy schedule, rather than my tendency to procrastinate.) Given that I only had one night and was starting after my LSS had closed, I needed to use supplies I had on hand. Fortunately I had a line from My Minds Eye that was black, white, and gray. This made it super easy to add a  little color with my distress inks in order to coordinate the papers with the logo color of the intended recipient's employer.

Click image to bigify.

Here are some tips to make a super quick mini book still look fabulous. I think I might have spent more time finding and printing the photos than I did putting the book together!

• Use border punches to give the edges of the pages texture for interest.
• Ink the edges of the pages with distress ink to coordinate it to your theme.
• Further coordinate the pattern paper by over-stamping it with accent and background stamps (I used a favorite flourish stamp).
• Convert all of the photos to black and white to give it a unified and coordinated appearance.
• Coordinate embellishments like flowers by misting them in a coordinating color and then adding a background stamp pattern to it.
• Add die-cuts and simple theme embellishments to dress up the pages. In this mini I incorporated the mini film strip and the film strip die cut from Tim Holtz since the pictures were from a TV commercial production we'd worked on together.
• Mix up the page sizes by binding in journaling cards that tell the story.