Brown County State Park

This week my scrappy friend Marisa Torp is the guest sketcher at Scrapbook Steals.  You can check out her original sketch HERE.  Since I gave up chronological scrapping years ago, I dug into my pile of photos and found some photos from last July when we had our first ever camping trip with my brother and his family.  These photos went great with the Take a Hike papers by Simple Stories that I have been hoarding. Since I had so many photos I wanted to include, I turned Marisa's one page sketch into a two pager:

We had a wonderful four day camping adventure at Brown County State Park.  It was a sort of "meet in the middle" event where we met up with my brother and his family for a fourth of July trip.  They had camped once before, we camp all the time, but we had never camped together, so it was  a new adventure.  It was so much fun for the cousins to spend lots of time together and for us to just hang out with my brother and his wife.  Usually our trips home involve crowded family functions or scheduled activities, so it was a nice change of pace to just hang out with them and take life easy.  The only thing bad about this trip was the weather.  We were over 100 degrees everyday and never even built a campfire.  We had air conditioning in our campers, so we still had a sweaty good time! Hopefully we can convince them to camp again with us sometime soon!

Fall

We took our first camping trip of the season and were surprised by temperatures that were colder than expected.  Luckily, I packed some scrappy supplies "just in case" and was able to work on this week's Scrapbook Steals challenge inside the camper while the kiddos watched a movie.  I have a hard time deciding what products and tools to bring, but once I realize that I have to work with limited supplies, I manage to make do.  I grabbed a few fall photos and the Harvest Lane collection from Simple Stories.  All of the fun fall prints worked perfectly for this week's sketch.

National Scrapbook Day

It's that time of year again!  Time for my favorite holiday, National Scrapbook Day!  Last year I celebrated by meeting some scrappy friends for a weekend crop in St. Louis.  This year I celebrated by myself, in between shopping and cleaning.  I did manage to complete two layouts on a busy Saturday. 

The first layout I made was for the weekly challenge at Scrapbook Steals.  We're starting a new gemstone series, so this is the first of the Peridot group:

I used some bright summery papers from the Splash collection by Echo Park.  I pieced together my own sun embellishment and added some stamped arrows, sticker elements, and tags from Elle's Studio.  For details about the weekly challenge, click HERE.

In addition to a fun video chat on Friday, Scrapbook Steals issued some extra challenges for the weekend.  I only had time to complete one of the four challenges, but am hoping to complete the others someday soon.  This challenge was to complete a layout based on the words "right now", so I decided to document my 11 year old and some details of his life "right now".

I mixed layers from Studio Calico and Simple Stories and am thrilled with how it turned out.  The alphabet card that I used in the background just happened to contain my son's initials, so I added a circle stamp around them, just for fun.  Thanks for stopping by, and happy scrapbook day!

Amazing Amber Series

I've completed another 10 layouts for the gemstone series at Scrapbook Steals, my favorite place for online deals and crafty inspiration.  This group of 10 was called the Amber series, with one new sketch issued every Wednesday.  To be eligible for a weekly drawing, my version of the weekly sketch has to be posted to their blog by the following Monday.  I'm happy to say that I play along every week and completed all 10 of these on time.  At the end of each group of 10, the lovely ladies at Scrapbook Steals give away a great prize to one lucky winner chosen at random.  Now I'm crossing my fingers and hoping to win a $50 gift certificate to Scrapbook Steals!  In order to enter the drawing, I have to compile all 10 layouts in this blog post.  If you're a faithful follower, you've already seen these layouts, but just consider this a bonus showing!

 

Soar

This week's scrapbook page was completed in a hurry.  We finally have some decent weather, so we spent a lot of time working in the yard and getting the house purdied up this weekend.  When the sun is shining and grass is green, it's a little harder to spend a beautiful afternoon in my windowless scrapbook room in the basement.  But, because I never miss a weekly challenge at Scrapbook Steals, I snuck down there for an hour while hubby mowed the lawn.  If I couldn't see blue skies and green grass from my windowless room, I decided I should at least scrap pictures of them.

These kite themed pieces from the Lime Twist collection by My Mind's Eye were perfect to scrap photos of my boys flying kites at the campground.  I originally intended to use only two photos on this layout, but then I decided to use the blue sky picture as the background for my journaling.  I used a white pen to write directly on my picture and love the way it turned out.  Using the kites on my background paper and title piece as inspiration, I pieced together a larger kite to finish off the page.  Sweet and simple this week!  Thanks for looking!

a taste of summer

This week's Scrapbook Steals sketch challenge was another great source of inspiration.  Since I'm sick and tired of winter, and looking forward to a camping trip in a few weeks, I decided to do a cheerful fun layout about summer! 

I used some bright fun papers from Pebbles' Seen and Noted collection and added some fun tags from Elle's Studio.  Since I didn't have any coordinating embellishments, I decided to make a few pinwheels of my own to complete my layout.  Here's the original sketch by Melodee Cloud that inspired my layout:

Oh shoot!

This week's sketch challenge at Scrapbook Steals was created by my scrappy pal Jessica Laureano who was guest designing this week.  I modified her sketch ever so slightly, to work with the papers I selected and came up with this:

I finally broke into the few pieces of the Take a Hike collection that I had been hoarding from Simple Stories.  Since I only have a few pieces, I hate to use them all up, but decided this photo worked perfectly with this outdoorsy collection.  I layered and layered and even stamped a little.  I added a few elements from October Afternoon's Sasparilla collection and called it a day.  Thanks Jessica for a wonderful sketch!