In The House - October

I have been playing around with this idea for more than a year...I found this really cool house-shaped shadow box last fall and as a DT member over at Scrapbooks Plus, I needed to create an altered item every month, in addition to our card and pages, and this looked promising. The idea is to create the shadow box as a home decor item, but when the month is over, the elements come out and go directly onto a pre-designed 2 page layout. I recently found the time and the right paper to inspire me, and it turned out really cute! I used my Cricut to cut most of the embellishments and paper is from MME, BoBunny, Martha Steward, Bazzill and Co'ordinations. I have turned it into a class I will be offering in October, and then will create a new design each month.
I have to laugh though. It is definitely Murphy's Law. As soon as I got it finished, I found out that the store that carried the shadow box has discontinued it! Oh, I can order directly from the manufacturer...if I need 2000! Anyway, I had already ordered enough for my class, so we are good to go!
I thought this would make a really great gift, too. You could keep the house to enjoy yourself and then share the pages with somebody special every month...okay, you could give away the house, too...but I am keeping mine!

Just Cardstock & Ribbon

My favorite scrapping tool used to be my square punch, and this layout is a good example of why!When I come home from a day at the beach, I always have shots that consist of a tiny person against the backdrop of a lot of waves and ocean. A square punch helps really focus attention on the "best part" of the picture. If the image is too large, I really like the effect of splitting the picture between 2 punches. It is fun to play around with all those little squares until you find the perfect mosaic.

The rest of the layout is just cardstock and ribbon, with an alpha for the title and a few embellishments. (I must admit I loved the vellum alpha!)

Note: These pics were taken before I switched over to digital. I admit my first instinct now would be to crop them in Photoshop, making the person in the picture larger, but in this instance I am really glad I didn't. I often include small detail shots as an accent on my layouts, but this one is full of little details that really tell the whole story - and I love it!

A Glass of Wine & A Good Book

This is one of the fastest layouts I have put together in a long time! I wanted to use the cool journaling books that Debbie has at Scrapbooks Plus - I chose the Wine Journal and the Readng Journal. The "torn out paper" look is so popular right now that I didn't feel the need to trim the pages, I just added a little ink around the edges. The paper and die cuts are Andrea Victoria from MME. I created a shadow for the die cut strip by tracing it on black cardstock (using a white gel pen so I could see the lines to cut!).The die cut frame along the outside is a leftover from one I cut on the Accu-cut at the store. My friend Sarah has excellent penmanship, so I asked her to hand write my title. Thanks Sarah!

I shot the photo on my neighbor's deck. I just knew the late afternoon light would be perfect, so Louise accomodated my last minute photo shoot and helped me rearrange her patio furniture and plants. Afterwards, we watched a "chick flick" and finished off the bottle of wine!

A totally satisfying scrapbooking experience!