Caught!

OK, I seriously caught my husband being bad by being on his iPad after I told him to play and engage with our 7 month old daughter, and my daughter was being bad by not playing with her learning toys and instead, choosing her silly, noneducational bath toy! Haha!

I used an older sketch from SimpleScrapper.com which is awesome that as a member we are given access to older sketch templates! It was for an 8.5x11 sketch, which I used here for a 12x12 page and a photo printed at 11x7.

I also used some ideas from the Stitched class with Paige Evans at Studio Calico, and stitched some journaling lines right onto the tag on top of the photo. Love this one!

True Story

Daddy had to take over and provide Daddy Daycare for Winter Storm Vulcan back in March. Natalie enjoyed it!

I used another sketch from this month from the SimpleScrapper.com, and mostly the printables provided by Studio Calico by In A Creative Bubble!

I used an Amy Tangerine heart stamp to stamp on the RAD title! This one was fun and easy to put together with the help of the sketch!

Cousins

Oh Natalie was still unsure about being away from Mama too long last month when these photos were taken of Natalie and her cousin - haha love that first photo... that face is too funny!

I used a sketch template from SimpleScrapper.com and didn't see that they provided a link for the free circles cut file, so I made my own! I took the layer of the template with the circles in Photoshop Elements and duplicated it into a new project. Then I filled it in with black and exported as a .jpg that I imported into the Silhouette software, traced it, and boom - new cut file!

I also used the template to add my photos to and see how they looked, size them and print them as circles so I wouldn't have to crop them myself. I mostly used the Office Hours kit by Studio Calico, but found that I had only 3 of those plastic butterflies left from the Sugar Rush kit so actually got to finish a full package of embellishments and throw away the packaging - that felt so good!

No Title?

I can't believe I made a page without a title! I didn't really think about it till I went to title this post... how very strange of me! I must've been sidetracked by how cute Natalie was looking in this photo - looking just like her Daddy!

Anyway, for this layout of my daughter, I scraplifted this layout by Lisa Truesdell but flipped it on its side and kept it pretty simple! Can't go wrong with a grid full of circles :)

I used the Office Hours Studio Calico kit - spending some more time with this kit even though I have this month's kit sitting on my table, since I think I will have some more time to scrap very soon, so I will have time to catch up with the supplies and not have to feel guilty about these purchases... sorta :)

Hello Friends

A lovely family photo of our friends who were visiting us mid-moving across the planet! Originally, I was also going to include a square photo of our family that we got too, which is why the background paper doesn't seem to match very well - it matched our photo more, but ended up putting that photo in the pocket.

This is definitely an amalgamation of supplies - I used papers from the Office Hours kit, the ampersand card from the Stitched class over at Studio Calico with Paige Evans, the envelope and cork asterisks from the Pip Embellishment kit by Studio Calico and the arrow stamp from Kelly Purkey's latest Sketchbook class that hasn't started yet! Oh and not to mention I used another sketch from SimpleScrapper.com!!

I loved the sketch, but when I got stuck, it really helped having the Spark magazine (included with the Simple Scrapper membership) to draw further inspiration from with the sketch. Also, I was able to hand stitch the ampersand in my living room instead of my scrap area in the basement, which was a nice break since the weather was nice out yesterday and I had the windows open! Maybe I will need to add more stitching on my layouts now!

Picture Perfect

Our friends stopped over with their little one on my birthday - which was our first time meeting her! Since she was a little over 5 months old and Natalie was not quite 7 months old, they didn't interact too much but it was still so nice to get together!

Before I printed my pictures, I started with a sketch for this month, from SimpleScrapper.com! It was cool because the sketches also come as templates, so I opened the sketch/template with Photoshop Elements, sized my photos and placed them on the layout digitally first. I got to see how they might look and decided to go with the sketch! That also helped me know what size to print the photos (4x3).

For the middle photo of Natalie, which I wanted to use there since she was looking to that side anyways, I grayed out the background and used a stamp brush to stamp the sentiment onto the photo. I really liked doing that!

I mostly used the Office Hours kit by Studio Calico for this layout, with the exception of the gold doily, puffy heart stickers, washi tapes on the journal card, and 2014 stamp/ink.

Family

I had this nice photo of my husband, daughter, mom, stepdad, and grandma from my birthday a few weeks ago... but my parent's have yet to update their green/white/gray linoleum flooring from the 70's and we had my daughter in a mismatched outfit... and basically all the colors in the photo were totally clashing together! So I decided to print in black and white and choose my own color scheme for the layout.

I used the Office Hours kit and stamped the plus signs on the background paper with the new Color Theory Inks from Studio Calico! I really didn't know what to do with this layout so I went to my usual label at the edge and embellishing.

For the finishing touches, I stamped with my giant alpha stamp below the photo.