Summer Camp = Many Layouts!

Could a summer camp get any better than creating lots of layouts?!! 

I don't think so.

Over at The Digital Press this month, they are running a summer camp. They have activities each week. Although I followed a few designers over there when it started, I had never attempted to get onto their forum until May of this year when I joined to grab part of a freebie set that was broken up among different places: their forum, blog, facebook, etc.  I do both digital and traditional scrapping, so I never thought to join their forum. The summer camp has been fun.  The creative & design teams there are executing it really well, and I am enjoying myself.

Now I said, I do traditional and digital. Here's how I decide, if my photos are more event and will be multiple pages - they're digital pages. If the story has multiple photos or photos that could use more manipulation or sizes other than more standard size like 5x7, 4x6, 4x4, 3x4 - the page is digital. Lastly, If I know that I have the best supply options for doing a story in digital format, then I chose digital.

For week one, I told chose stories that  were based on supplies or photos and one story about my childhood that wasn't even on my radar to tell.

 

Since these were really poor photos, they lend themselves nicely to being very small. This was for the orienteering challenge. They provide a template (map) for you to create with. I LOVE this template so much. I did have to make a few changes to make it work for my story, but I see using this template again and again.

 

There really isn't a story here, but I knew I wanted to use so many of the photos that I took. The LOVE on the bottom right had to be taken off to enter it into the challenge gallery at TDP. The LOVE is from a retired designer from there, and only current designers are allowed. It didn't hurt the layout at all, but I will print with the love on.

This was for the Arts and Crafts challenge. We needed to look through their list of tutorials and choose 1 to use on our layout. I chose one that said expanding your digital toolkit and scraplifting yourself. Well, I didn't have anything posted in their gallery, so I chose another layout to scraplift. I turned her one page layout into a 2 page spread.

 

This was one that I thought my products might be better for the story telling. But my products from their current designers weren't school related but book related. I do have school related products so this might get reworked and another photo added in here.  

This was for the Bonfire challenge. Here we meet in the chat room and as we chat for the hour, the designer also slowly gives out a list of to do's to make your layout. So you have no idea how many photos would be used. I found this challenge the most difficult.

 

 

This was not even on my radar to tell. It was prompted from their journaling challenge - Letters Home. I'm very happy with it and having the story told.

 

For week 2, having seen what the challenges were all about gave me some "clarity". Not sure if that's exactly the right word to use. I'll try to explain below.

 This was the Orienteering challenge. The template was given. This is what I entered. With so many photo spots, I thought the template lended itself nicely for using in my Christmas pages that need to get finished.

Although after seeing the above page a couple of times on my computer screen, I did add a gray over the top of the green, blended it and changed the color of the white dots to a mint green.

I like this one so much better. I made those changes after doing the arts and crafts challenge from this week. Part of my clarity was that I have many Christmas layouts that need to be finished and I could use some of these challenges to accomplish that goal.

This started out in the letters home challenges. But as I thought about the page, I saw the "be" in a font in the background and knew that it would be better served in the arts and crafts challenge. I had to learn about the gradient tool and masking with it. The tutorial wasn't clear to someone like me that generally just uses a template for digital scrapping, but YouTube is my friend. I also used their blending modes tutorial. Although I know and have used blending modes, I often don't.   This is an 8.5x11 page and it starts the book that will, hopefully, be about the changes I hope to accomplish in my life.

This. Well. This became my letters home challenge layout.  My daughter suffers from a chronic illness of some type. Although she complained off and on of belly aches for years, I could not find any correlation to her diet or any rhyme or reason. In the summer of 2014, she became horribly bad. 2014-2015 was a miserable year and started search for a deeper medical answer. We've been to a naturopathic, to the GP, to a GI, to an ENT/allergist, to a neurologist and all to no avail. I knew I wanted to document this as a separate free standing book, but hadn't really thought about it much. The Mayo accepted her as a patient and we will be going shortly. It's been weighing on her mind.  I've done the page in 12x12 but will print in an 8x8 book once all of the pages are complete.

 This was for the Bonfire challenge. I chose my story before I went into the chat. This has one photo. but I knew I could use the same photo 2x if the challenge called for 2 photos. I could leave a fuller image or just crop in. If I needed 3, I would have  cropped in on the hands as well and converted the larger to black and white. Here is where more of that clarity comes into play.  For these challenges, I've decided to choose stories that I want to tell that could work with 1 or multiple photos. If I have multiple photos, I can use the challenge page as the left side of the layout and create a 2nd page to coordinate.

For the above, I chose a softer palette that I hope to continue throughout the whole album.

Now for something really fun. My layout for my daughter, (2 layouts prior to this ) was chosen as a gallery standout.  When Mrs Peel commented on my layout and let me know, I was surprised and honored. But, also, I was thinking this was a TDP shoutout, not THE Gallery standouts. Now I'm even more honored and quite frankly shocked.

Be Awesome

This week the challenge at Use your Stuff was to really heap the supplies on. I love to do just that. I was so looking forward to getting some mixed media going on it too. Having been out of town at the first part of the week, the getting back catch up taking longer than I wanted it to, and now gardening taking over our life, means that this lady got no time to play with this challenge.

What did I do? I finished the layout that was on my desk from before the weekend. Because, you know, I can't possibly start something new when something is already in the works on my desk.

I do like how this turned out though.  I used my stash and the December 2016 Hip Kit.

The journaling up the side reads:  This is what you get texted when you leave 2 boys alone in a hotel room.  The little chipboard puffy word pieces & my mini rectangle alphas line up to say - Random life is lovely always with you.

The text message is actually printed out where you see my husband texted the silly photo with the comment "something is going on". My reply, "dorks united?". His response, "Say what? We be awesome". This is why I chose be awesome as the title.


And something awesome happened to me this week.

My layout of the New Puppy Cuddles was one of three chosen to be featured on the Use Your Stuff Challenge Blog for Metallics.  I'm beyond thrilled!!

Doing a happy dance on the inside. I said gardening is taking over my life right now, so I have  no energy to physically dance. Actually walking upstairs is kind of a process at this point.  But off I go, I'm bushed and need some sleep so I can plant tomorrow.

Hugs,

Lisa

Shiny!

That's the challenge up at Use Your Stuff this week - #264. Use anything metallic, shiny, glittery.  Oh, My!

Here I used sequins, some MME gold die cut pieces, and glitter washi.  

Since stamping is something that I'm also trying to incorporate in all my layouts this month, I added some hearts in with sequins and enamel dots sprinkling with a color of ink that wouldn't stand out too much. Then I added the "nothing better than spending time with you" stamp in a darker color next to the journaling at the bottom so it would stand out a bit more. 

I have to thank myboysnme for the lace used here. In a forum post over at 2peasrefugees on proboards, we were sharing what we just have to buy even though we don't use it as often as we like. For me it's lace. I LOVE pretty lace. She generously sent me a large envelope full of gorgeous lace. So thank you, myboysnme. 

Doing Something Different

Every once in a while, I find that I need to change things up. Whether it's rearranging the furniture or shaking up my scrap routine. Don't get me wrong, I really, really like my scrap routine. I think it works - For Me! I don't expect it to work for every body else, after all, we're all different.  My normal routine is to print a batch of photos with the journaling and pair them with paper kits to aid in faster page production. My paper kits can be anything from a couple of sheets of paper chosen specifically for the photos/story or as is more often the case a collection or scrapbook club kit that goes with the photos/story.

But today, today I received my Clique Kit May kit. I unbox it in this video.

I decided to go and pull photos that might work with the kit right now.  Then I would dedicate myself to working on the kit and getting layouts complete with it. Since I usually jump around so much with my kits, I thought I'd challenge myself to use just this kit until it's gone. So I pulled several stories/photos. I even pulled photos that I had previously put with a different collection. Then I started working. This layout was first.

I used feathers to comply with the Use Your Stuff Blogspot challenge for this week. Well, feathers went naturally with the story anyways.

Most People are content to bird watch, not you, you bird catch.

Since I had quite a bit of journaling and it didn't fit on the layout, I decided to just do an 8.5x11 page with the journaling to go beside the layout in the album.

I'm trying to work on my video making skills. This one isn't very good, but at least I'm practicing.
I'll link it when it finally transfers to YouTube.

Selfie Memories

Today, I'm sharing a layout that I created combining the 2peasrefugee May Stash and the Scrap Our Stash Tic-Tac-Toe challenge.

For the SOS challenge, I used the last vertical column, vellum (bottom layered tag), paperclip (with the bird), tabs.

For the 2pr challenge:

• your favourite paper or pattern: I love all colors and patterns, so this was one of my favorite patterns in the June 2016 Hip Kit.
• one of the oldest things in your stash The vellum tag is from SU! when I was a demonstrator in 2002-2004
• brads: The self adhesive ones
• frames: Substituted Stamps
• tags: The vellum one above and a punched one.
• templates or stencils: Substituted Paper Scraps - Used paper scraps to cut the "selfie" title and the pink tag out of

Without further ado:

You can't see from the photo, but I also added a wink of stella glitter pen to the butterflies black body part; the owl's bow, wings, and heart; the wood veneer bird's tail, wing and breast; the bottom left rose to the white outline and the very center 3 parts.

This is the second layout that I've created with selfies of my daughter and me. It had seemed that all my selfies were either family or just me and my son. I'm making an effort to get more of my daughter and me. I guess I should make an effort to get some of hubs and me too.....hmmm. Add that to the list.

Happy selfie creating!

3 Challenges: 1 Layout

One of my favorite things to do is to combine challenges and see where it takes me on my layout.
This week I started with Use Your Stuff's Challenge #261 to use circles. Then I saw Scrap Our Stash's Sketch Challenge where you add an element that starts with every letter in the word FLOWER.  Finally, I decided to also use the 2peasrefugee board's April Stash Challenge, which suggests using -a chevron pattern, at least 2 different alphas, ribbon/twine, something metallic, something from your last purchase, and to use your punches.

This is the sketch which has circles on it.




I kept fairly close to the sketch. This is what I came up with

Use Your Stuff:   The half-circles out of stars still gives the allusion of a full circle and I love it. Other circles include the red pattern paper and the flair which says "ugh" from Feed Your Craft. That flair is perfect on top of that photo where the pup is on my son's head.

Scrap Your Stash:
F: flair
L: letters, layers
O: orange, overlay
W: wood veneer, word stickers
E: enamel dots
R: red

2PeasRefugee's Stash Challenge:
- a chevron pattern, USED pattern paper
- at least 2 different alphas, USED
- ribbon/twine, SUBSTITUTED Stamps
- something metallic, USED (heidi swapp color shine splatters)
- something from your last purchase, USED (recently reordered more of those stars as I was running low. I LOVE those things and use them all the time. I wish the had symmetrical hearts the same way.)
- to use your punches SUBSTITUTED word stickers.

3 challenges, 1 layout.  I'm sure I'm not the only one who enjoys combining challenges.

Use Your Stuff 254 & CalvinBall

Today, I'm sharing a layout I created this week using the Use Your Stuff 254 challenge. It's to use book pages. While I use many book pages in my art journaling. I'm in the midst of CalvinBall month, which means all my concentration is on cranking out as many layouts as possible.  Thus I decided to use the Fancy Pants Design collection which has been in my stash for a while and has... You guessed it, a book styled paper.

Here is my layout.

For this layout I pulled out a border punch and a star punch which haven't seen the light of day in a while and used some rub-on's. My favorite is the the sub-title under the picture which is what Logan named his explosive conconcotion - "Logan's TNT flare ups".  He was seeing if he could get a fire. It was a small box of matches with a firework wick taped together. When you throw it down it should have started to flame. Unfortunately the only tape he had was duct tape which I think is the reason why it didn't work. I should get him some paper tape.

Use Your Stuff 253

Today, I'm cutting it close to participate in the Use Your Stuff Challenge for this week. We've had illness plaguing our house this week. It's a sketch challenge that you can use the previous link to see. Love challenge blogs that you your own stash.

This is my take on it. It also uses my February Hip Kit.

Have a great weekend.

Getting Ready for CalvinBall

With CalvinBall around the corner over at the Get It Scrapped Forums (It's free to sign up, by the way), I needed to prepare.  How, oh, How do you prepare for an event that's whole goal is to get as many pages finished as you can within one month??

I started with an excel spreadsheet, because it's me and everything gets listed in excel.  Going through some of  my 2016, if I see some that spark a story for telling, I insert the date and the story on my spreadsheet in either the traditional page category or the digital page category.  Frequently if it's going to take 2 or more pages, it gets put in digital. I just find multiple pages easier with digi for the most part.

For those traditional layouts, I edit and crop my photos ready and printed and the stories journaled.

Once the photos arrive, I place the journaling with the photos and each story gets kitted with some papers. I use paper pads, collection kits, kit club kits, or papers pulled from my stash.

Next I started with a small clean up of my craft area. I have 2 Rubbermaid 9-cube units that are side by side, only one side has a desk top. I'm still hopefully, hubs can make me a top for the other side before March first.

Now I still have a few days and what to do.  Well, I was just thinking, I should use the time to really delve into some composition styles. Maybe setting a goal of 5 for each type of composition.  Then on my Facebook feed, I see this post by Get It Scrapped, about Speeding up your scrapbooking with a go-to composition for getting started. I definitely see that as a great jumping off point too. My go to is a Band, L or T or layered center comp. But I definitely want to change things up a bit too. So now my next step will be to look at some different compositional foundations. I think I'll sketch them out and tape them to the wall for easy viewing.

Also I'll continue to pick up my space, as there is always things that can be organized.

Counting Down Starts Now = 5 days.