That 70's Style

Today I have another page using Scraptastic's June Oh Snap! kit. All that colorful goodness was the perfect compliment for the hippie look we sported on Mardi Gras Day two years ago. We had six families dressing up for the occasion. All of the girls wore tie-dye looking shirts of pink, lime green, yellow, blue, and purple (inexpensive WalMart finds no less!). We bought an extra shirt and tore it into strips for the guys' matching headbands and I stenciled bright blue peace signs on the front of their lime green shirts.

Cool dudes and groovy gals we were...except for one little detail. Evidently, we had not seen a peace sign in quite a while, and no one corrected me when I accidentally stenciled Mercedes Benz symbols on all of the shirts! Too funny. When one of the kids caught a peace sign button at the parade that day, and I compared it to the shirts, only then did we realize the mistake. We laughed so hard, and now I have a pile of shirts that need another spoke of blue!

Inspired by the quintessential 70's bead curtain, I created a paper chain to embellish the left hand side of the page. It was a great use for all those leftover bit and pieces of patterned paper. And I could make use of both the fronts AND the backs of my favorite designs.

 

A little snippet of banner was hung beneath my photo. These are from a pack of various banner shapes by Heidi Swapp called Color Magic Resist. Each one can be custom colored to match any project. I simply rubbed a little Tim Holtz distress ink with my fingertip onto the all-white banner and the resist portion of the paper remained white, revealing the design underneath the color. So cool!

 

Do you remember the last Mardi Gras photo that I scrapped? It's hard to believe that I used the same kit, with the two very different looks achieved. Gotta love the versatility of these papers!

Rama Jama's

This iconic eatery in the shadows of Bryant Denny Stadium near the University of Alabama campus is a site to behold. Inside, it is wall to wall memorabilia, Crimson Tide football memorabilia. Framed pictures, ticket stubs, footballs, jerseys, autographed photos, and more line every wall, fill every nook and cranny, and hang from every available space. It's almost too much. And it could all use a good dusting and top to bottom scrub!

Chris suggested it for breakfast on the last day of our visit to Tuscaloosa. Although we came for the atmosphere, we found the food was pretty good also. And they had milk shakes, which made Kevin  very, very happy.

This page was a lot of fun to piece together...and piece I did. I cut a multitude of strips from the many patterned papers and adhered them along the perimeter of the page to make a colorful and carefree border.


Then I sifted through my stash and picked out some fun miscellany to cluster.

I can just imagine how crazy this place must be on game day. It's name, Rama Jama's, is a reference to a traditional and controversial cheer which taunts the Crimson Tide’s football opponents. It is typically played towards the end of a game when an Alabama victory is certain, and goes like this:

Hey (opponent's nickname)!
Hey (opponent's nickname)!
Hey (opponent's nickname)!
We just beat the hell outta’ you!
Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer
Give ‘em hell, Alabama!

According to Wikipedia, the lyrics originate from The Rammer-Jammer, a student newspaper in the 1920s, and the yellowhammer, Alabama’s state bird. I think it's fun to carry on little traditions like this, and I hope no one is really offended when they hear this cheer.

Supply List:
Patterned paper-Simple Stories, October Afternoon. Stickers-Simple Stories, Little Yellow Bicycle. Letter stickers-Doodlebug Designs. Fabric letter stickers-American Crafts. Card-Daisy D. Houndstooth stamp-Maya Road. Other-tags.

Oh The Places You'll Go

I captured this cool shot of Jesuit High School's Class of 2011 after they received their senior rings. All the boys gathered downstairs, cheering, whooping and hollering, happy to be one step closer to graduation. They had processed out of the Chapel of the North American Martyr's first, so when the parents stepped out onto the 2nd floor landing we were at a great vantage point to witness the celebration...and snap a few pictures. Now we play the Where's Waldo game whenever trying to find Christopher in the photograph. Thankfully he was one of only 2 or 3 boys wearing a maroon shirt, making it just a little easier to spot him in the crowd below.

It is hard to believe, but I now have four kids who have graduated high school and two who have earned college degrees. Where does the time go? And where will they go? 

In life I hope they go far. 

In distance, I hope they live close...or at least some place accessible and fun to visit!

 

Patterned papers-Echo Park, Studio Calico, Crate Paper, and Amy Tangerine. Stickers-Crate Paper, Echo Park. Chipboard-Maya Road. Chipboard letters, fabric letters-American Crafts

It Happened When...

Chris took a small point and shoot camera with him on his mission trip to Mexico, but he didn't manage to get in front of the camera very often. I do however have tons of pictures, videos even, of the poor pig that became dinner one evening. I am not kidding. There were probably 50-60+ pictures AND video clips of that disturbing episode. It must have been the highlight of his trip. The guys drew straws for the honor of wielding the knife. Then they proceeded to take photos of the entire process, from gutting to roasting on the spit. Boys!

I was particularly happy to find these great photos of my son on the same memory card. Thankfully he had one of his friends snap pics of him leaning against one of the Aztec pyramids on the day their toured the area. Finally, a pleasant subject for me to scrap. In spite of his slightly apathetic attitude towards picture-taking and scrapbooking, I believe that there will come a time when Chris will be glad that I've preserved these memories for him. If not, well I at least had fun creating this page. ;)

 

 

Papers and stickers are a mix of Crate Paper, Studio Calico, Echo Park, and October Afternoon. Large letter stickers are October Afternoon (blue) and BasicGrey (red). Small letter stickers are Making Memories.

Dine Around The World-Dessert Style

When Kevin was a baby, we took a trip to Walt Disney World one summer, and all seven of us squeezed into a cabin at the Fort Wilderness Resort. It was a really cool place actually. The kids got a kick out of the Murphy bed in the living room. It was pulled down from the wall every night, with Tommy and I as bookends and Kevin in the middle. The other four kids settled into the bedroom, girls sharing the double bed and boys climbing into the bunks. It worked. We loved the peace and quiet of the area with no banging doors or noisy hallways to keep us awake. Well, it WAS quiet until the free-roaming peacocks started up their cawing. Thankfully the beautiful creatures slept at night.

But the greatest amenity and the real reason we chose to stay in the cabins that year was the kitchen. With the full-sized refrigerator, microwave, stove, dishwasher, coffeemaker, and cabinets full of equipment, we didn't have to rely on expensive Disney dining. And we didn't have to worry about finding food that the baby would eat. We also didn't get to do things like Dine Around the World. At least not that year.

 

When I first heard of this idea, to dine in bits and pieces from one end of Epcot's World Showcase to the other, it sounded like an awesome plan. It was something I wanted to do when we vacationed at Walt Disney World last spring. We could get this and that, sharing and tasting all sorts of ethnic fare. Unfortunately, the rest of my crew wasn't impressed with the idea, so that evening in Epcot after eating regular dinner fare, I persuaded them to try the mini Dine-Around, desserts only. It wasn't hard to convince 11 year old Kevin! He eyed up the Chocolate Mouse Cake a couple of days earlier and couldn't wait to try it. I wasn't quick enough with my camera though and the only pictures I had to scrap were of him scraping the crumbs from his plate. Dine Around-Desserts...what a cool idea!

Churros in Mexico, School Bread in Norway, and Strawberry Crepes in France rounded out our dine-around. Next time, we go all out. :)

Hey Mister

Do you know that purple, green, and gold are the traditional colors of Mardi Gras? Purple represents justice. Green represents faith. And gold represents power. I know from experience that the colors of Mardi Gras are not the easiest to find in patterned papers, so when I discovered 2/3rds of them in the Oh Snap! kit from Scraptastic, an idea was born. By adding a few purple flowers to the yellow and green papers, stickers, and rub-ons in the kit, I was able to scrap these fun photos of my youngest before the parades on "Fat Tuesday".

As usual, I cut up my patterned papers so that the remaining portions could be allotted to other pages. That green border is just that...a border cut slightly larger than the yellow and both are adhered to a plain piece of cardstock. That way I don't waste an entire sheet of patterned paper and I am free to use the middle on another layout.

I had the idea to bring a little more purple to my page by cutting the title from cardstock covered with washi tape. The washi tape from my stash was a great shade of Mardi Gras purple. I laid out 5 or 6 rows of tape and ran it through my die-cutting machine.The idea worked and the paper/tape combo cut like butter. This is a technique I'm sure to use on future projects. 

Before I go, here's an interesting story about how Mardi Gras influenced the color choices of rival universities, LSU and Tulane. Supposedly, stores in the New Orleans area had stocked up on purple, green, and gold fabric in anticipation of the Mardi Gras season. Around this same time, LSU was deciding on its colors. They chose purple and gold and bought up much of the stock of these colored fabrics. Tulane then bought much of the fabric in the remaining color-green. (Tulane's colors are blue and green.) Sounds like a tall tale to me, but I'll go with it anyway.

Stay tuned, because I have one more page completed with the Oh Snap! kit...and it is the most colorful yet!

The Waiting Game

We arrived at Hollywood Studios too early for our dining reservations on this our first day of our WDW vacation last year. But we didn't have enough time to do anything else, so we picked up Fastpasses for Rock 'N Roller Coaster and headed over to the Streets of America to chill. In the photo on this page, Kevin has his nose in the Disney Guidebook for kids. He read that thing cover to cover before the weeks preceding our trip and took it with him everywhere while we were there, determined not to miss a thing. While he read up on the attractions at Hollywood Studios, the rest of us began...The Waiting Game.

 

Of course I had to do a banner on this, the 4th page created with my build-it-yourself kit. It's the perfect solution when you have a bunch of bits and pieces.

It's a fun challenge to combine and arrange all the interesting tidbits that populate the banner...tickets stubs, cards, tags, flowers, buttons, charms, etc. I don't think I'll ever tire of creating these fun and trendy embellishments.

And We Danced

This page combines the kit challenge with an idea I found on the UK Scrapper's site. Shimelle Laine of Glitter Girl fame has a monthly step-by-step tutorial and I was quite inspired by her May creation where she scrapped a strip of photobooth pics. The design was incredibly beautiful and every scrapper who completed a project inspired by the tutorial came up with a masterpiece. As luck would have it, we attended a wedding just a week or so later where a photobooth was provided for the guests' entertainment, supplying me with the necessary strip of pics! Shimelle's formula inspired the resulting page, And We Danced:

The recipe: a little BasicGrey What's Up, Nook And Pantry, and Plumeria, a couple of Crate Paper stickers, a Jenni Bowlin bingo card and Scenic route scrap from DEEP in the stash, a doily, small letter stickers from Making Memories and large letters from Crate Paper.

This design is so pretty and versatile. I challenge you to give it a try yourself!

Another Kit Challenge LO

Here's the second of four pages created with my homemade "kit", built around the papers of BasicGrey's What's Up collection:

I always have a hard time with school portraits, and they don't often make it to a scrapbook page, but this was Brendan's first professional photo after the braces came off and his smile was such a knock-out that I couldn't resist the attempt. The Journey chipboard is an old "leftover" that was colored way back in the day, and yet it coordinated perfectly. I added words, a ticket, stickers and a fleur-de-lis rub-on and voila!

Isn't it great when long lost scrappy items are re-discovered and make their way onto a page?! I still remember how much I loved this set of embossed chipboard. Another piece in the collection was misted, inked, cut apart and used to embellish this page created for Lifetime Moments back in 2009:

Tomorrow, I'll be back with a third page from the same build-your-own-kit. Wow...I feel so productive!

Late To The Party!

Better late than never, right? Just after National Scrapbooking Day, there was this Inspired By Shimelle challenge, designed to motivate scrappers to create a kit out of supplies they already have on hand. Sounds easy enough, but the real challenge is to actually USE this kit to create as many projects as possible from the same set of supplies. The idea is that this home-made "kit" would jump-start your creativity while saving time that would otherwise be spent rooting through your stash each time you began a project. Sounds like a plan to me, so I decided to give it a go (with a few modifications).

The original challenge was to create a kit with 10 patterned papers. Seriously?! I have used seven or more (pieces) on one layout! And 5 sheets of cardstock...blech...I rarely use any. So obviously I had to amend this challenge for my personal preferences and created a kit that was designed for how *I* like to scrap.

Since I had recently acquired several sheets of BasicGrey's What's Up collection, I decided to build my kit around those colors, adding a few more sheets of paper and several coordinating scraps. Then I shopped my stash for bingo cards, ticket stubs, tags, brads, and more, along with a few stickers, Thickers, and rub-ons. Lots of old to mix with the new! This is what my "kit" looked like at the start:

A week later, it's been decimated! And I have four newly created pages, favorites every one. This was the first layout I made:

It's weird, but until I photographed this layout and viewed it on the computer screen, I thought the chipboard letters that spelled "what" were black! Nope...they are brown. So strange, because in real life, they appear totally black. Hmph!

My photo of the old Hollywood Tower Hotel (The Tower of Terror ride at WDW) was perfectly suited for the What's Up collection. The photo of the occupants of our "elevator" was not so suited. I created a chipboard pull-out piece to hide it. It adds to the suspense when you have to physically slide out the picture of the terrified passengers. Tee-hee.

One of the balloons and a few buildings were fussy cut from one half of the patterned paper and popped up over the other side of the paper to give a more dimensional landscape and sky. Upon finishing the page, I realized that there are patterned papers from three different BasicGrey collections on here-What's Up, Plumeria, and Nook And Pantry. Love how they coordinate!

Tomorrow I'll share another page with my kit. :)

643 Quadrillion Gallon Pool

Now this is what I'm talking about! The beautiful clear water, warm sand, and salty breezes of the Florida Gulf Coast...it beckons!  A long time vacation spot, Destin was but a sleepy little fishing village when my parents first brought us here as kids. Back then there were no mega-hotels and high rise condos. In the mornings we would walk along almost deserted beaches looking for shells at the high tide line and at night we would light up the beach with a bonfire. The time in between was spent in the water. 

We still go back to the same beach. Some of the same houses are there. But now we stay in several condos, my parents, my sisters and I, and our respective families. We have good times. The kids run back and forth from the Gulf to the pool, from condo to condo, from one snack to the next...and the adults relax. On this particular day, the Gulf of Mexico was so calm and clear, like one big gigantic swimming pool, thus my silly title. Did you know that the Gulf contains about 643 quadrillion gallons of water? (I wonder how many zeros go behind THAT number.)

This was such an easy layout to create. The stickers, backed with chipboard were layered and pop-dotted in a cluster while colorful patterned papers anchor the opposite corner of my photo. The bright patterns coordinated perfectly with the pretty rafts in my snapshot. And that background paper couldn't be more like the sea.

We missed the beach last year...so this year we are super anxious and can't wait to go back. I'm sure I'll return with a camera full of fond memories ready to be scrapped as well.

These Lazy Hazy Days

Yep...it's summer. And I am still putting together our weekday routine, so the blog's been pushed aside a bit. There's swim practice every morning, spinning class at noon, swim meets on Tuesday nights, summer movies at the theatre once a week, live bands around the pool on Friday evenings, and we've begun pulling out games (that is games other than the video variety). During the school year, there's little or no time for games, with homework sometimes lasting until the wee hours! But now we're free. So far, we've dusted off Spongebob Monopoly, In A Pickle, and Bananagrams. Scrabble, Scattegories, and Up-Words are next in line.

A favorite "gaming" page from a few months ago, using Sketch # 72 from Susan Stringfellow's Sketch Savvy blog. Kevin has fun even when he goes broke!

Do you play games? I'd love to know some of YOUR family favorites!

Deadliest Catch

Most of my photos from this Alaskan cruise were of the scenic variety. Glaciers, bears, wildflowers, eagles, etc. It's nice to have those pretty pictures of the landscape and nature reminding us of the beauty of that region of North America. But it's even nicer to have a few pictures like the ones below...silly photos of Tommy and I having fun on our first shore excursion. Here we are in our bright yellow windbreakers, playing around with the nets and traps near the docks, pretending to work the fishing boats. I titled this page, Deadliest Catch, after the TV show that my boys used to watch.

On the layout I used a mix of older patterned papers from October Afternoon and Basic Grey, inking some of the brighter prints with Tim Holtz Distress Ink in Old Paper. Even the chipboard title letters were given a grunge look. A light touch with a Staz-On ink pad dirtied them up nicely. The small banner adds a little something to this sparsely embellished page.

These are the things we'll remember best about our trip to Alaska...goofing off, having fun, doing the unexpected. Silly us.

Sunkist

It was a tough choice. Both of the Scraptastic kits this month were awesome, but I ultimately chose Oh Snap! because of the super bright and colorful Amy Tangerine patterned papers. I had colorful photos from past beach vacations waiting to be scrapped...and we'll be going back this summer!

For my first page, I used one 5x7 photo and two patterned papers (strategically cut so that I could use the remaining portions on additional pages), then filled much of the remaining space with embellishments.

  

Stickers from the American Crafts Remarks sticker sheets were backed with chipboard and popped up for a little added dimension. I added the bitty bags and flowers from my stash and cut out a coordinating camera from another of the patterned papers. (I can see those little cameras will be showing up on a lot of my future layouts.) In this case, it was the perfect backing to highlight the little yellow letter stickers in my title.

One of my favorite embellishments from the kit has to be the Do-It-Yourself banners. They come all white with an embossed portion that resists coloration. I used a Tim Holtz Mustard Seed Distress Ink and rubbed it on with my fingers. It couldn't be easier and the results were fabulous. I can't wait to play with these some more. Watercolors, spray ink...I have some experimenting to do!