Tomorrow

This was one of those layouts that definitely had to be created in the 'right' time and the right mood. Life is full of ups and downs. This page talks about one of those 'downs' we went through this year. Even as I was typing out the journaling I was SO happy that we are no longer going through that stuff with the cats. Our cats mean so much to us, so when things are going on, it's really hard. Thankfully there's always tomorrow!



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Cool!

I thought these looked really cool! Only $1 today!! I'll post more later!

Sweet & Salty

I created this page weeks ago using my own designs. I thought I would post it before it snows...ugh!

And these are Pretzel Hugs!
Lisa from Creating Keepsakes talked about these delightful things in her letter in the December issue. I'm not sure if this is exactly what they are supposed to look like, but no matter, they taste fabulous! (That's Quent's fingers reaching for one)

Here's how to make them (super easy!):

Put a layer of square pretzels on a cookie sheet and place unwrapped Hershey's Hug (or Kiss) over each pretzel. Bake at 200 degrees for 8 minutes. Remove from oven and place an M&M in the center. I just smushed it right down into the Kiss.

These are the perfect sweet & salty combination! And they are so wonderful right out of the oven. It's like chocolate melting delight in your mouth!!

Quent and I were talking about how we want to try this with miniature Resees Peanut Butter cups...Mmmm!

Details

Remember those cinnamon rolls I was talking about yesterday?


Mmmm...

This is a page I created for our Montana vacation album using a bunch of detail photos I took while we were on our trip. I realize that I'm more into detail photography than big landscapes. I just love details!

Everything but the Kitchen Sink #2

Everything but the Kitchen Sink challenge was to use toilet paper in your creation. Since I'm not into making cards much these days, I wanted to create a digi-page. But then I didn't know how I would find toilet paper for such a thing. I don't have my scanner right now, so I couldn't scan any in. Last night I was looking at some of my digital elements and I saw something that I think looks like TP. So here's my page:



The 'toilet paper' is the quilted looking white thing-a-ma-jig behind the pictures. Is that stretching it a bit? Ha! No matter, I wanted to support my friends in this challenge. *smile*

Happy Sunday everyone! I'm up early this morning. I'm not sure why. Cinnamon rolls dough is rising! Mmmm...

Credits:
Graph paper
Green paper
Kraft paper
Turquoise squiggly, 'Toilet Paper', material
Flourish
Frame
Rhinestone

Don't forget about the 30% off sale going on at Little Dreamer for the rest of today!

Beginners

Are you curious about digital scrapbooking and would like to give it a try? Are you clueless of where to begin?

If I had to start all over again, I would take some of Jessica Sprague's classes. She is an incredible teacher and she's so thorough. I have learned SO much from her! I highly recommend her classes.

This is her Up & Running with Photoshop class. It's for beginners!

The list of all of her classes are here.

And if you decide to take one of these classes and you aren't sure if you want to purchase Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, you can always try their free 30-day trial through Adobe. I use the full version of Photoshop, but I know a lot of people who use Elements and you can do everything you would want on there (well, almost everything) and it's MUCH cheaper!

Let me know if you sign up for a class!

New Project

Last night I started a project I have been putting off for a long time: scrapbooking Quent's trips & photography. I scrapbook a lot of the pictures he takes, but the pictures I have been putting off are pictures that seriously intimidate me. I used to shy away from scrapping nature/scenic photos, but now I'm getting the hang of 'how' to scrap them. I think I've finally found a groove I'm comfortable in, so it is time to start another project.



I love how his photography and my scrapbooking work together in harmony. It's really fun to compliment one another's work like that. What intimidated me about this project is that I didn't want to take anything away from the photos because the photos by themselves are AMAZING! I asked Quent if he would like a photobook from Shutterfly with photos in it, and he said yes. I asked him if he would like me to use their templates or create my own. He said he wanted me to design the pages. And um, he said that like 2 years ago. *biting fingernails*

Another thing that scared me is the amount of pictures. There are lots and lots and lots and LOTS of his pictures to be scrapped. It feels overwhelming. So for starters, I'm starting with 2009 pictures.

Here's what I am doing:

1. Pulling pictures onto pages, resizing, and moving them around until they are in 'perfect' spots. Last night I did this for 15 pages. It was actually quite relaxing!

2. Picking out colors that compliment the pictures and starting to put the layouts together.

3. Including the journaling. I do this sometimes before I pull colors or add anything else to the page. Quent blogs his pictures, so I have just been pulling the journaling from the blog to the pages. That works SO nicely!

This system seems to be working well for me. Quent likes things more clean & simple, so I'm trying to honor that as much as possible.

My goal is to put all of 2009 pictures/layouts into one photobook.

Happy DSD!!

Little Dreamer is having a 30% storewide sale today and tomorrow!! Also, take advantage of their blog hop FREEbies!!! Start HERE

See below for Michelle Underwood's sale!

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Also, Michelle Underwood has everything 25% off here!!!

FREEbie!

Hey! You can find some good news at the Little Dreamer blog! There's a FREEbie! Happy Digital Scrapbooking Eve!

P.S. I have some fun pages to share tomorrow!

Beach Finds

Guess what tomorrow is? It's Digital Scrapbook Day!! What are you doing to celebrate? I'm not sure what I'll be doing. I'm sure a lot of digital scrapbooking stores will have sales, challenges, and other fun things going on. I'll let you know if Little Dreamer or Michelle Underwood are having sales.

Speaking of Michelle Underwood, here's a page I created today using the Vintage Holiday set. One of the great things about digital scrapbooking is changing the colors of the products. You can change the color by adjusting the hue/saturation or by Image>Adjustments>Replace Color. It's really wonderful! This is one of the reasons I don't think I could ever go back to regular ole scrapbooking. Digital scrapbooking just spoils me too much!!

The pictures on this page make me laugh. Quent almost always wears his Detroit Tigers cap, so basically every picture he looks the same. So for photography/scrapbooking purposes we have to spice things up a bit! He is so supportive of my habit that he even bought this green rain jacket just for me to scrapbook! Yeah...we are weird! Ha!

Overlays

I am an overlay addict! I tell you, I just can't leave things alone, whether it's pictures, paper, embellishments, etc. I love to distress, texturize, and make things grungy! So when I saw these new overlays by Leora Sanford that will be available FRIDAY (that's tomorrow!) I was pretty much squealing!! These overlays are called Sun Flare and Bokeh Overlays. As soon as I have the link I will link ya'll to this amazing product.

Just as a little teaser I thought I would show a before and after of a photo. This is a picture Quent took of us at Lake Louise. It's an amazing photo all in itself, but the poor photo has to be manipulated by me! Bwhahahaha! Cough.


(Quent, thank you for letting me 'borrow' your awesome photo!)

And this is after. I love yellows! I love the sun flares!

And what's really great about these set of overlays is that Leora has included instructions and tips on how to make these overlays work for you. This is all new to me, so I found the instructions very helpful!

25 Days template from List Girl!

One of my favorite digital scrapbookers, and fellow dreamer from Little Dreamer, Christine, just opened up her own digital scrapbook product store this past weekend. She has a lot of really fun templates! She's amazing! She let me know the other day that she will be giving away a 2-page layout template geared toward the December Daily project. It's for those who want to put all 25 photos on a 2-page layout. I think it's a great idea! There are so many possibilities with that project! So keep a lookout for that template! Just wanted to share...

One $ Wednesday

It's $1 Wednesday at Little Dreamer! There are some fun paper sets and templates!!

Arizona/Utah Photobook

Yeehaw! It's finished!!! I JUST sent in my order with Shutterfly. Doing it this route instead of what I have done in the past with getting each page printed individually and buying and album for the pages, I saved $110.81!!! This is not a joke! Ha! And I saved just under $20 with the Shuttefly sale! Awesome!!

These two layouts were a struggle. Whew! Maybe my brain was tired of coming up with ideas (the pressure was on!), or maybe it was just the photos, but I think I redid these layouts 3x each. I think it was the pictures that I struggled the most with, especially with the 'going home' page. Yikes! But it all worked out and I am very pleased with the results!


I just love the colors on this page. Credits are here (I'll update this later).

This is the last layout in the book! Credits are here (I'll update this later).

The one thing I'm disappointed with is that I didn't do a lot of journaling for this project. I could kick myself. So with that lesson learned, I'm going to focus on journaling for our Montana vacation asap. It really makes a big difference for me to have the journaling done first. If I don't, then I'm just trying to fill in words. I don't want that because I want it to have meaning.

Here's the Photobook! Enjoy!

25 Days of Templates

A class...with templates...perfect for December daily...by Tiffany Tillman! Check it out!

December Daily

It's that time of year again, according to Ali Edwards! It's time to prepare those December Daily albums. Last year I created an album for my siblings in Michigan. It was the second year we didn't spend Christmas with them, so I thought it would be fun to send them the album a few days after Christmas so the miles between us didn't feel so far. It was fun putting the album together. I had even started one for us, but I don't know, my heart just wasn't into it as much. I kept thinking, "What's the point?" I was thinking that same thing this year when I thought of doing it again for us, but then when I saw Ali's posts, I decided I just might do it after all. This time I want to create the pages digitally. My thought is I scrap one picture for each day (25 days, December 1-25) and printing the pages and putting them in the album I had purchased last year. And because the album is so cute AND the pages won't take up a huge amount, I can just add pages each year. Then I feel like there's a 'point' to it.

Ali's posts about December Daily are here.

My blog-friend Courtney talks about her plans for it this year here.

And my pages from last year are here (scroll down a bit).

Will you join me?

This album can be whatever you would like it to be.

I'm going to just add one picture per day.

It can be as simple or as complicated as you would like.

Vintage Holiday

Michelle Underwood came out with a new digi-kit today called Vintage Holiday. It's a beautiful kit that's full of lots of vintage and worn elements (which I LOVE)!! It can be used for holiday or for the 'everyday' kind of life.

Some of you may recognize these pictures from here. I've been thinking about that first page for awhile now and I decided to change it. I don't normally do that, but when I was looking at a winter scene picture to scrap for these amazing elements, I knew which pictures would be perfect.

This is a page I created with the same kit, but not a winter scene. These are some pictures from our Arizona/Utah vacation. I love the worn look on this page!

I'll be back with another post later!

Newspaper Rock & Wild Flowers

Here are a couple of more pages I created for our Arizona album. I'm trying to work on the rest of the pages so I can get in on the sale at Shutterfly.



Credits here
These pictures were tricky to scrap, but I like what I came up with.

A very colorful page! Whew!

Holidays in Hand

Hello!

Want to join me for a FREE class from Jessica Sprague???

Click on the image below for more information. Registration is easy and it starts today!!

Class runs from November 16-23!

Countdown

Can you believe it's November 1st!!??? This year is going by so fast!!

I'm excited though because today starts the countdown to some fabulous holiday product from Little Dreamer! Whoohoo! The Holiday Preview week is November 15-22. There will be FREEbies, giveaways, and lots of amazing inspiration. Stay tuned to the Little Dreamer blog!!

Credits here

This is a page I created using all product from Little Dreamer's In Good Company kit which hasn't been released...yet! It's such a fun set! An amazing Little Dreamer designer, Leora Sanford, got together with one of the designers from Paislee Press and they designed this set together. We were told that there will be add-ons for this kit, too! I can't wait!! Once they have the links ready for this digi-kit, I will link you to it.

Credits here

This is another layout I created using In Good Company. I also used one of Tiffany Tillman's templates (that's where the swirls came from).