so happy together

After a six week crafty hiatus, I'm happy to say I'm back.  I was juggling family time, working full time,  enjoying Spring Break in Florida, hosting a youth group function for our church, and was just overwhelmed with life itself.  I wasn't feeling the least bit creative, and I was stressed about nearly everything, so I took a break and regrouped. 

Now that they've started a new series of scrapbook sketches at Scrapbook Steals, I knew it was time to get back on board and find my crafty mojo.  I must say that being away from my scrappy place for so long made it hard to get back on track.  I had to clean off my desk and organize some supplies just to remember what I actually have in my collection.  This is what I came up with, using the sketch from Scrapbook Steals as inspiration:

The supplies I used are mostly from Elle's Studios and Gossamer Blue, with a little Simple Stories thrown in for good measure.   I didn't spend as much time as I would have liked on this layout, because I kept finding myself reorganizing supplies and moving things around to make room for my newest addition to my scrappy space...

My wonderful hubby salvaged these old lockers and secured them to the wall in my scrappy space this weekend.  I still need to get them cleaned up and scrape off years of old tape residue, but I've already started stashing away goodies in my newest acquisition!  Right now, I'm more excited about organizing than scrapping, but this will definitely be a work in progress.  I still have a lot of vacation photos to print out and I'm hoping to try my hand at pocket style scrapping to get a vacation album started.  Camping season is right around the corner, so my crafty time will be even more limited, but I'm hoping to stay on track and create something each week.  Thanks for stopping by!

Summer Lovin'

This week is the start of a new 10 week series of sketch challenges at Scrapbook Steals.  Having this weekly inspiration really does push me to create and means I will complete at least 1 layout a week.  After over 160 weeks of this, that adds up to a lot of completed pages.  Would you believe I'm still not caught up?  Maybe because I take more photos now than ever, or because I scrap more "everyday"  moments than just major events (birthdays, holidays, etc.) but I love that I have found such inspiration and have a chance to win cool prizes too! Here's the layout I completed this week:

 

I combined a bunch of tags and journaling cards along with a few pieces of patterned paper, all from Elle's Studio.  I love the "boyness" of this layout featuring my little man.  It was fun to "interview" him to fill out the journaling card.  And I asked him to write his own name and age at the bottom of the card, just to capture what his handwriting looks like at this stage in his life.  It's little details like this that will be fun to look back on 20 years from now.