Keepin' It Simple

If you were here yesterday you saw my girly pages with old pictures.  Lots of pink and flowers and doilies and lace.  Not so much today, although I did sneak flowers onto these pages.

This next page is for my Project Stash book.  This is a simple layout, just grouped the photos and stacked the paper bits.  I added a swipe of white paint around all of the edges of the papers, but didn't do the photos.  Now I wish I had, but oh, well. Then I popped on a few flowers.  Hee Hee.  Our road trip was earlier this month, you know, back when the gas prices were $3.65 a gallon instead of $4.20.  Yikes.

The photos were taken from the front seat; I just lifted the camera over my head and started snapping without looking at the screen.  This is what we look like during a calm moment of traveling, when they're not fighting over seats, messing with the dog, or trying to change the radio station.

Remember these Simple Stories supplies I stashed in my Project Stash album?  I used them on the next page, and for some other compartmentalized pages.  I just love them!  Love the colors, love that you can do the basics with them but they still look awesome.









Even though I tend to do a lot of journaling on tags and tucking them into the page, every once in a while I have a journal-heavy page.  This is obviously one of those pages.  So again, I kept it simple and used the Simple Stories Happy Day line.

The quickest thing in the world to jazz up a page is to add some type of banner. The pieces do not have to be the same size, shape, or type. They can be used for a title or just for embellishment. I hand cut these banner pieces and used some 3D foam tape to pop them up. Twine and 2 grommets finished off the banner, then I sprinkle just a couple of orange felt flowers and the page was done. The journaling took longer than putting the page together!

And one last page from the Project Stash album. Sometimes I just want pictures, even though it is a scrapbook, so I grouped these up into a large block, grabbed some OLD stickers from my stash for the title, and did one line of journaling across the top above the photo block. I love the almost flowery Spanish style background paper!

Basically, what I'm trying to say is Keep It Simple. And it doesn't have to perfect. 

 And flowers make everything better.

I'm linking up here:  WIP Monday on ScrapScene

Memory Keeping...the old and the new.

When going through pictures lately, I've come across some sweet pictures of Natalia and her cousins. Even though these are imperfect snapshots, I really want the memories behind the photos.  Plus I get to use the girly colors and flowers and ribbons and all of those fun things that I love to use on pages, since I have three boys, who prefer that I don't use flowers and ribbons on their pages, and my one girl who just prefers I don't even have pictures of her at all.

But I"ll let you in on a secret; there are flowers on the layouts I'm going to post tomorrow, the ones with the boys,  I just have to be a little more subtle about where they are and what they look like.  So come back then to take a peek.

This layout is Natalia and her cousins, and I've used some of my favorite things, that I use ALL THE TIME!  First of all is the hidden journaling tag.  For some reason I have a hard time figuring out where to put the journaling on most of my layouts.  That's why I use a tag in (what seems to me at least) 50% of my pages.



Something else about this layout that I like to do; even though the colors are in the same family, they're not too matchy-matchy.  I've got a blue-green in the flowered paper in the banners, and a green-blue on the background paper.  A coral to orange in the background, and a light rust orange of the velvet rick rack, the very orange zippers and the almost pink heart and pinky-pink frame.  And then there are the greens.  You get my drift.  It's not an exact science, and yet it all comes together just fine.

Did you spot the book page in the background on the right?  I love the patina of a well-worn book, and even though it is not front and center in the layout, it adds a little bit of depth.

And the zipper flowers?  Just a cheap, plastic zipper pulled apart and glued into a circle.  It makes me happy.  Even though I kept with the design theory of three, I added another flower to the right.




So, a doily, scallops, banners, and lace all make me happy.  As do the colors pink, brown and green together.  Again, it's a cousins photo and journaling on a tag tucked behind.

Sometimes a page is not a page without a banner.  What's better than a banner with flowers AND scallops?  A little bit of brown ink sets them off.

These girls had so much fun together.  Now they're living in three different ends of the country, and never see eachother.  Just the occasional chatting on the phone, or more often than not, on facebook.  And like I said, even though these pictures are less than perfect, they bring back fun and precious memories.




Remember, come back tomorrow for more pages with a more neutral/less pink theme, and I even changed up the journaling!


I'm linking up here:  WIP Monday at ScrapScene

Project Stash...

Have you heard of Project Life?  It is the memory keeping brainchild of scrapbooker extraordinaire Becky Higgins.  She has gone back to a simpler, more straightforward type of scrapbooking for preserving everyday life.


I love the concept of simplifying the process of memory keeping.  I also love making the more artsy pages, so I've also started an art journal to play around in to get those artsy juices flowing.  The only thing holding me back from getting the Project Life system was--I've got to admit--my frugal nature.  I have all of these supplies jumbling up my shelves and drawers, and I couldn't see plunking down any more money to start from scratch with this album.  It was tempting, but then I had an epiphany--

What if I make my own kit out of the supplies I already have?

So I dug around and came up with some stuff that I thought would work.  I already had a 3-ring 12x12 album and some various sized photo sleeves, which I hadn't even tried using yet, and some kits and other sets of paper to start my 2012 out with.  I grabbed some alphabet stickers, rub-ons, scissors, and a tape runner.  Here's what the title page ended up as:

You can see that I'm being very optimistic!  I've got big plans for 2012, whether it likes it or not!

These Photo Sleeves for Ring Albums by We R Memory Keepers are the perfect "page" protectors to mix and match to make the album so versatile.  I started out with 12x12 pages with 6-4x6 pockets in horizontal and vertical directions, and a package of sleeves with a 6x12 pocket on top and 3 vertical 4x6 pockets on the bottom.

This is also a great way to use up the scraps of the gorgeous papers that I can't bear to toss.  I've gathered some of the things together that I know I want to use and just stashed them in the pockets so I've got it all together when I sit down to create.

I mixed in some regular 12x12 pages, and next time I'll show you an "envelope" page to stash the memorabilia that I don't necessarily want on a page but I want to keep with the album.

One of my favorite, favorite, favorite things right now is Simple Stories.  I adore everything that they have!  These papers are from their Happy Days collection, and I got it from my local scrapbook store.  We have two birthdays coming up on the next few weeks, and just celebrated another, so I got these last year to document some of those.

I'm so excited to feel like I am actually on the ball about something!  And it hardly took any time at all!

Since I'm not jumping onto the Project Life bandwagon, I guess I'll call mine "Project Stash"?  We'll see.  ;-)

I'm linking up here: 
Three Mango Seeds