San Antonio @ Night

I've finally finished the last pages of the San Antonio trip using that same sketch from Creating Keepsakes.  It was so quick to put together since it was a duplicate of the previous page.  This time I had to get a little creative with my journaling because I had too many pictures that I wanted to use, but otherwise, it was all the same products.  It was so nice to slip this layout into the book and realize I've completed everything I had in mind.  What a great feeling! Now to get to work on sorting my completed pages and getting them in books...

Finishing up San Antonio...

I had a few pictures left from my San Antonio trip that I wanted to scrapbook.  I've had this idea about a day versus night layout since I had so many night pictures from my morning walks and our Riverwalk cruise.  I found a perfect sketch as a starting point on the Creating Keepsakes website.  I used the same ink and paint technique on the edges from my other pages of that trip so this grouping would look cohesive.  I didn't use much but the pictures on the layout, but I did want a longer strip to run along the bottom of the pictures on the left.  Unfortunately, I didn't have anything that long, except, well, the packaging.  I've seen others use it on their layouts, so I thought I would try that myself and really liked how it turned out.  The layout came together very quickly after that with a section of paper and a title cut from that Pink Paislee Portfolio paper.  I also added some cute Thickers and little journaling to finish it off.  Now, I can replicate that for night and finally be completely done with the San Antonio pages and caught up completely with Project Life.

Inspired by Scrappin' Navy Wife...

In playing catch up on the blogs, I just couldn't help but lift the adorable card posted by Scrappin' Navy Wife.  So my take involved clouds glued to a plain background, a balloon cut from a design in the Silhouette Design Studio and cloud with a sentiment written in Creating Keepsake's font Fancy Cat and cut with the print and cut feature in Silhouette software.  Super easy, but loads of fun. 

Christmas in July

So after a really awful, horrible, no good day at work today with people who just were not rational (I swear there must be a full moon lurking out there because all the lunatics called me today), I came home to find that a one-hour challenge was starting on Creating Keepsakes blog. Well, actually had started about 10 minutes before, but what the heck. The challenge was to make two Christmas cards using twine (don't have), buttons or stitching on each. Well so I knew I didn't have much to work with considering I'm a really crappy seamstress. However, I love one hour challenges, but I had a dilemma. I really had a craving for french bread, which required trip to the store. So one hour challenge or french bread? Hmmm....

So my dear, sweet husband who's very worried about my stress level hears me say that I have this craving for french bread and took off for the grocery store. He came home with flowers for me, red meat for him, and the freshest french bread I think I've had in years. Yes, a few dollar trip to the store was really, really expensive (Matt + meat counter = budget disaster), but oh so worth it.

In the meantime, I fought with the sewing machine requiring that I re-do the major part of one card, dug through my embellishments to find a star and some gift buttons, whipped together two (well, really two and three-quarters) cards in the one hour and uploaded them right at the buzzer.

What's really amazing about the whole thing is that it never would have happened if I hadn't spent the whole weekend (well the whole weekend minus raspberry picking on Saturday and a Harry Potter matinee on Sunday) to clean and re-organize my craft room. So when I started the challenge, I had a clean slate to work with, knew what I had and right where it would be. For instance, the lovely striped Christmas paper was in my scraps storage container in the "multi" drawer (the storage unit right under the desk in the bottom left corner of the picture below) and was able to use scraps for every single portion of these two cards. Of course, in the one hour I made a huge mess of my room again. Why is it that I can't craft neatly? But what I love is that my whole room went back together in less than 10 minutes. Wow, I am just loving the new organization. Oh, by the way Dad, your lottery ticket in sticking up in my carousel just behind Matt's picture. I hope it's the big winner!

A little inspiration

This is my last weekend to finish up the "what we like about" pages for my team at work, but I have to admit I haven't really felt inspired lately. Tired, yes, but not inspired. But this morning I wandered down to my craft room and logged on. I immediately saw a notice on Facebook that Creating Keepsakes was hosting a one hour challenge that would start at 10:15 that morning. So I decided to find a way to use their sketch to get at least one page done. Wouldn't you know it, but the sketch was perfect and inspiring and I finished a page for Jeff and uploaded it with nearly 15 minutes to spare. That was all I needed to get my creativity jump started today and I decided to try to do another page in just an hour; this time using the sketch on Sketch Inspirations. Well, that one took longer than hour because I had to find a turtle to add to the page and I had to go fold a load of laundry and play fetch with Chewie for a while, but if you subtract out all the non-scrapbooking stuff, I think I might have made the deadline. So then I pulled up this week's sketch on Sketchy Thursdays. Add a little laundry, some more fetch, a quick trip down to the post office and the grocery store, a short appearance at the neighbor's holiday party (wow that punch really packed a punch) and dinner with the in-laws and my one-hour challenge took more like eight hours, but I got it done. Three finished last weekend, another three today, four to go. I guess tomorrow will have to be less laundry and more scrapbooking, but that doesn't sound too bad to me. Now it's off to watch Sex and the City 2 on Netflix so I can mail it back to get the original Tron for Matt.