sweetheart.

This sweet photo of Hunter is from my Instagram feed. I printed it using the Walgreens app - it's 4x4 size. They were ready in an hour & while I do like the size, the quality is a little lacking. I printed this same photo from my home printer (Canon Pixma MX882) & found the colors to be much brighter & more sharp. 

Anyway, we had a cook out for my mom's birthday back in April. Hunter is such a sweet, calm 11 year old boy. This is a stark contrast to my Bentley who at roughly 3.5 years old, is still a completely maniac, even tied out on the cable, away from everyone.

I used my July SC kits for this one & a lot of stamping. I used the stamps from the main kit + the two add on kits + the July stamp add on. I was inspired by the Paper Secrets sketch challenge HERE. The twist was to use a Project Life card. I don't do Project Life but I have a few cards left from the Echo Park everyday eclectic collection. I cut one in half here & included it in the layers above & below the photo.

little moments make life big [LCOM #29].

I strayed quite a bit from the sketch on this challenge but the sketches are just meant to be inspiration. A starting point. So here's the sketch we used: 

I was flipping through an old album & found a page with photos of my little cousins (when they were much littler!) that I wanted to re-do. I don't often re-work pages when they're done but I really wanted to give this page an update. Here's what I came up with:

First, I turned this into an 8.5 x 11 page. I used the strips to a lesser extent. I did use my typewriter for journaling on the strips, which I just took word for word from the previous page I had made. The papers are all Echo Park love story & I also used the sticker embellishment sheet from that collection as well.

The stamps are Technique Tuesday (Simple Joy) & Studio Calico (from the Wildberry Court add on kit for the circle & the ampersand, not sure which kit is the sentiment quote stamp). Inks are Prima chalk ink in ladybug & Versafine in onyx. I also grabbed some of the chipboard embellishments from MME Lost & Found3.

Check out the LCOM blog today to see what the other DT members did. Here are the rules so you can play along...

Our July prize is a 10$ gift certificate to the LCOM store and a copy of new Summer issue of Scrapbook and Card Today magazine!

How to Play Along: 

1. Make a newly created project using the provided sketch and upload it to your blog or online gallery.

2. Then leave a link to your project using the Inlinkz widget. Please use a direct link to your LCOM Sketch post and not just your blog address.
3. If you upload to online galleries, please also use tag/keyword LCOM29. LCOM products are NOT required to participate, and you can enter as many times as you want. If you don't have a particular shape indicated in the sketch, feel free to substitute.
4. There is no time limit - you can always play any week at any time, but the linking form will close on the last day of the month at 8:00pm (Atlantic Standard Time) to allow us to find a prize winner.

first perm.

When I found this photo of my first perm, it reminded me of my last perm. I wanted to try something different my senior year in high school. It did not go well & I think it's safe to say I'm not going to try a perm ever again. 

This is mostly the Sweet Valley High main SC July kit. The red sequins & the stamps are from the Molly add on & the buttons are from the Jennifer add on. I also used the July stamp add on as well. 

I didn't want to lose my mom's handwriting documenting my first perm from the back of the photo, but I knew I wanted to crop the photo because of a busy background. So I scanned the back of the photo & printed it on kraft cardstock. Then I included it as journaling on the layout.

this was amazing.

I finally had some time to scrapbook so I dug into my July SC kits & I busted out two layouts today. Here is one I did about an eagle release we stumbled upon back in February. 

I used mostly Jennifer + the label stickers from Molly. Last month I only got the main kit & I wasn't a fan of it. It was the first kit since I've been subscribing that I hardly used any of & I started subscribing in March. This month I purchased two add ons + the stamp add on, which I used here. I don't usually get the stamp add on because you get a stamp set with each kit but this July stamp add on was so amazing & I know I'll get a ton of use out of it. If you're thinking about subscribing to the SC kits, please use my referral link.

I was inspired by the Scrap Much? week 2 sketch HERE. I changed the size from the sketch to 8.5 x 11.

top 100 books|how many have you read?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible  

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman  

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare  

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier   

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

 27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

 40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood 

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel[This was a no go for me. I didn't like it.]

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac 

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante 

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt (Own It but haven’t read it yet)

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle     

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare 

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

life needs more half days & happy hours.

I recently got an order from Unity Stamp Co & this was one of the stamps I ordered that I've been dying to use. How true is this?! 

I am not good at following sketches but I was inspired by this sketch at Sketch N Scrap for my card.

I used some older October Afternoon (Sugar Shack) label stickers & a Studio Calico mask with (Doris) Mister Huey's. I also grabbed a Freckled Fawn arrow wood veneer & used moss lawn Prima chalk ink on it. My sentiment is stamped with onyx Versafine ink.

what I'm looking forward to from CHA summer releases...

•  I'm not typically a huge Cosmo Cricket fan but the Creative Girl collection is so girlie & pretty. Especially loving these two patterned papers:

• Glitz Design can do no wrong in my eyes but they hit it out of the park with the Finnley collection. Love the color combinations & the designs are so modern.

• MME is introducing a chalkboard collection called Chalk Studio. I'm a fan of MME & I think this line is super modern but I also think the stickers & embellishments seem more usable than the full 12x12 chalkboard patterned papers.

 

• Pink Paislee's Sentiment Series will be a huge hit. Labels & icons are so "in" right now. I love this entire collection.

• Because everyday eclectic by Allison Kreft/Echo Park was my favorite collection to date, I think I will also love the Allison Kreft/Webster's Pages Recorded collection.

 

• Lastly, We R Memory Keepers is releasing their Chalkboard line. (Oddly enough, I think I like it better than the MME line) 

Stencil

Sketcbook

embossed stickers

Vday 2013 using 'love knots' Gelatins Stamps.

Valentine's day in July?! I'm only five months late! Well, I don't scrapbook in chronological order so it's ok with me.

For this layout, I used the SC Wildberry Court kit + the Love Knots stamps from Gelatins Stamps. I love this stamp SO much. I used tin can Prima chalk ink on black cardstock for a really striking, pretty stamp impression.

The focus of the layout is not a photo, but of the little card that my bf put in my flowers for Valentine's day this year.

I added a couple of Chic Tags "love note" mini tags + a wood arrow from Freckled Fawn (inked with raspberry pie Prima chalk ink) & the Potty People wood veneers from Studio Calico.  

I also added a couple of other stamps... the ampersand stamp & the "me + you" stamp are from the SC Wildberry Court kit. I used raspberry pie Prima chalk ink & Versafine onyx ink for those. The 'you & me..." is a Unity stamp, also stamped with the raspberry pie Prima chalk ink.

Home.

Our SC kits are shipping late this month & this is giving me some time to use up some stuff from my stash. I found a sketch on the Elle's Studio blog & I was inspired by the color challenge at Scrap Much? Here's what I came up with: 

 

The papers & enamel dots are My Mind's Eye & the labels are Elle'sStudio. Freckled Fawn makes the wood veneers. I used the Memories of Home Technique Tuesday stamp set with Prima chalk inks in farmer jeans (house) & tin can ("Home"). I used teal damask Prima chalk ink to color one of the wood veneer arrows & farmer jeans for the other.

Love to Scrap! also has an anything goes challenge going on right now - you can use any stamp on any project.

Sketch N Scrap winner!

I just saw on the Sketch N Scrap blog that I was the winner for the June sketch contest! 

Here was my layout...

Their July card sketch challenge has been posted &you can see the sketch HERE.

happy tails to you [Gelatins Stamps card].

I've used the Cosmo Pups Gelatins Stamps set this week.These doggies are so cute!

I used some papers from teh 6x6 Dear Lizzy Lucky Charm paper pad & a resistable chipboard heart from Pink Paislee. The sentiment is stamped with tin can Prima chalk ink onto a chalk label from American Crafts. The pups are stamped with Versafine onyx black ink which gives such a great, crisp impression.

JBZ. [LCOM sketch #27]

I used my June Studio Calico kit, Roundabout + an SC mask, Chalkboard Glimmer Mist (seven seas), & some Prima chalk inks (English ivy & garden grass). I also grabbed some Glitz tape from a previous SC kit. Here's the sketch we used:

& here's my layout:

Our July Prize

Our July prize is a 10$ gift certificate to the LCOM store and a copy of new Summer issue of Scrapbook and Card Today magazine!

How to Play Along: 

1. Make a newly created project using the provided sketch and upload it to your blog or online gallery.

2. Then leave a link to your project using the Inlinkz widget. Please use a direct link to your LCOM Sketch post and not just your blog address.
3. If you upload to online galleries, please also use tag/keyword LCOM27. LCOM products are NOT required to participate, and you can enter as many times as you want. If you don't have a particular shape indicated in the sketch, feel free to substitute.
4. There is no time limit - you can always play any week at any time, but the linking form will close on the last day of the month at 8:00pm (Atlantic Standard Time) to allow us to find a prize winner.

my brother bought a house | celebrating the 4th.

My brother bought a house last month & has gotten all his appliances & is getting settled in. Mom & I went over (with the dogs) today to celebrate Independence day with a little cook out & some curtain hanging. 

I made him get out in front of the house so we could take a good photo & make moving announcements to send to family. I always get texts from my aunt & my grandma asking what his address is round his birthday & Christmas.

I made the photo cards on Shutterfly & also ordered some prints. I cashed in my Coke rewards points for 25 free prints!

Stationery Card

View the entire collection of cards.

June running stats.

Run Distance: 21.18 miles

Run Time: 3:29:30 min 

Total Time: 3:29:30 min 

This was my second biggest running month of the year. In April I ran 27.24 miles so I'm getting back on track with where I was in April before my heel injury. I'm building back up to running 2 - 3 miles (hopefully at least) three days a week. I am feeling better running over two miles & once I hit the two mile marker, I get a second wind & want to run longer/further.

live*laugh*love*

Elle's Studio had a sale last week so I placed an order to grab some of their summer tags & pennants. Can't get enough of their cute tags.Then I saw this sketch & decided to play along.

Here's what I came up with using a photo from our Michigan trip in May...

I used the Studio Calico Wildberry Court kit (which is possibly my favorite kit to date!) + Glitz washi (yellow anchor) from another SC kit & the pink "today" card is Echo Park Everyday Eclectic. My Pink Paislee chipboard hearts are inked with Prima chalk ink in raspberry pie & coldsfoot petals.

The photo was taken at Window on the Waterfront (but there was no water) during the Tuliptime Festival at the beginning of May. It was our last day in town so we picked B up from boarding & headed back there to try to get a "family photo."