Live Out Loud - July Stamp of the Month Blog Hop

Hello and welcome to our monthly blog hop!  If you are coming from Haley Dyer's blog, or if you are just starting out, you are in the right place.  When you're done here, you'll hop along to Teresa Scrivens' blog and see what she made for us this month.

This month's stamp set is Live Out Loud, a set of 8 graphic sentiments.  I particularly like this stamp set for scrapbooking, but of course I can see it used for all kinds of other cool projects as well!  Here's the layout I made with these stamps:

I thought these stamps added a fun addition to my layout.  I also cut some additional sentiments from one of the "zip strips" on one of the papers and adhered them to some chipboard hearts I covered using another paper.  I also distressed everything with my Cocoa ink pad, using a direct-to-paper method.

Here's a closeup of the stamp/heart on the left page:

And here's a closeup of the right:

Supplies used to make this layout:

• Live Out Loud, stamp of the month
• Stella paper pack and Complements Canvas Shapes
• Dimensional Elements Hearts (also come in the Stella workshop on the go if you want that cute stamp set!)
• Exclusive Inks Stamp Pads in Cocoa and Lagoon

OK, now don't forget to head over to Teresa's blog!

Five

Don't forget Blog Candy Week is in progress!  You can see the rules in this post.

Today's project is a layout of my daughter's 5th birthday party, showing that you don't always need to use a "traditional" title.

 

Instead of the same old lame "Holly's Birthday" I'm likely to use when I get in a jam, I used this fun word weld of fives from the Graphically Speaking Cricut cartridge.  You can also pretty easily create these yourself using your Make The Cut software, or using your Gypsy and whatever font cartridges you have.  It does take some time, but it doesn't have to be difficult.  Of course, the easier the better, as far as I'm concerned, and all of these number word welds were the main reason I bought Graphically Speaking way back when.

The strawberries were cut from the Paisley Cricut cartridge, to coordinate with her Strawberry Shortcake theme.  The papers and journaling spot are all form the Sophia line from Close To My Heart, as are the sketch book pattern and the stamping inks I used for dimension.

Thanks for stopping by today!  Be sure to join me tomorrow when I'm hosting another Tutorial Tuesday for Cutters Creek.  The technique is a surprise, but I have THREE cards to share with you all using the same technique in different colors!

Stamps in Motion

I don't know about you, but it seems to me that my kids are constantly in motion.  A lot of my pictures these days seem to involve sports or running around, and it just doesn't feel right to have them on a static/stagnant layout.  So, for this layout of my daughter's first experience at soccer "camp", I stuck with a simple layout design and added a soccer ball "moving"across the page.

Now, if you know me, you may be shocked to see all of that WHITE cardstock in my layout.  I like me some white space, but very rarely do I actually use white cardstock as my base like this.  (In fact, if I were doing this again I would probably switch it to light green, but I do like the way this turned out.)  FYI, the patterned papers are from a new Teresa Collins kit I picked up called Sports Edition II.  I love the red, white, blue, & black color scheme - a little different than most of the sports stuff I already have, so that's an added bonus!

Now, on to the moving stamps!

This has got to be the easiest stamping ever!  Just ink up your stamp, nice and dark, and stamp your image.  Without reinking, stamp the image again slightly offset from the first.  Continue in a line until you run out of ink or run out of room.  That's it!  And leaving a slight gap between the ball(s) & grass like this also helps with the appearance of movement.

Other info: title is from the Mickey Font Cricut cartridge and the silver stars are brads.

What Girls Can Do

Last night, I hosted my 4th grader's Girl Scout troop for a scrapbook event.  We made mini (6 x 6) accordion albums, and used only paper.  The only thing I did was cut out the Girl Scout logo using Make The Cut for them to use on their front page, told them about matting some pictures, and let them loose.  (NOTE: This is allowable use of the GS logo, since it is troop level individual use.  You would not, for example, be able to cut this logo and sell it.)  My daughter later went through my paper flowers and added some, and she still needs to journal, but this is how they turned out:

This is the "outside".

This is the "inside".

It folds up accordion-style so they can either close it and lay it down, or stand it and display it on their dresser or desk.  I didn't get to see everyone's, but I am amazed at how well they did considering most of them had no clue how to use a paper trimmer or tape runner before they got there!  Never underestimate the power of girls to just get in there and do it.

Do you believe in MAGIC?

What's better than a great scrapbook sketch?  A scrapbook sketch with magic.  Coming soon from Jeanette Lynton is a new book with 35 two-page layout patterns.  But Magic is no ordinary sketch/pattern book; in fact its subtitle is Interactive Scrapbooks That Dazzle and Delight.  For every layout, there is an optional interactive element.  And the best part is that you can switch up the interactive elements from one layout to another.

Here's a sneak peek of one of the layouts from the book.  This layout features one of the most simple interactive elements - pull out journaling.  It's not the element featured with this particular pattern, but it's what I needed for my photos.

Now how cute is this layout, first of all?  I love the playful tilt of the designs.  Then, pull on the tab and, voila, journaling revealed.

Magic will be available September 1st, only from Close To My Heart consultants, with a retail price of $29.95.

Supplies used:
Robots and George Cricut cartridges
Bazzill cardstock (light blue)
Stardust papers, stickers, & Flexi Labels from CTMH (discontinued)
Doodle Alphabet stamps from CTMH (discontinued)
Tab Punch from SU!

DPL Swap Spoiler - Valentine

SPOILER ALERT! If you're in Mandies Valentine scrapbook swap on Down Paper Lane, I am about to show my contribution. If you don't want to see, don't look any further!!

There, all covered! Now, on to my fun swap items. I signed up to do mini file folders, which I haven't done in a while, so I thought it would be a little challenge. I'm happy to say that this went so quickly, I got them all done start-to-finish yesterday. I know V-day is over, but since we scrapbook after the fact we can make stuff any old time!

Here's one set of completed folders. I used my Sizzix File Folder die to cut all the folders. Cardstock used is White, Blush (Close To My Heart), Hollyhock (CTMH), and Cherry Splash (Bazzil Basics Paper). Ink colors used are Blush (CTMH), Hollyhock (CTMH), Riding Hood Red (Stampin' Up!), and White Daisy pigment ink(CTMH). I also used white embossing powder with the white ink. Unless otherwise noted, stamped images are from the All My Love stamp set (CTMH).

For the top folder, I punched a 3/4" strip of white CS with the new Pinking Hearts Border Punch from SU! (This is available through 4/30 in their Occasions Mini catalog.) The square with the heart is cut from an old piece of patterned paper scrap, layered on Cherry Splash CS, and all covered with a square clear epoxy sticker. I then added a heart eyelet for a finishing touch.

For the center folder, I random stamped the entire front with a heart stamp from Anita's Rubber Stamps. I again used the Pinking Hearts punch, added some white grosgrain ribbon, and a Hollyhock nail head (snap). The square heart image is from a discontinued stamp set, but it is easily substituted by one in the All My Love set.

The final folder uses another leftover scrap of paper for the strip across the front. Mini brads are from Oriental Trading Company. The round image is stamped in Riding Hood Red on Blush CS, then covered with a round clear epoxy sticker.

I can see these lined up on a layout as shown here, or angled randomly across the bottom of a layout. I would probably use a photo turn in my page as a means to keep the folders closed that would allow them to be opened easily for viewing.

A Friendly Reminder

Don't forget, today is the last day to enter the huge Scrap-box giveaway! See my original post here for the details.

ScrapBox - HUGE WorkBox Giveaway!

Are you dying for some organization in your life? Need to get your scrapping supplies off of the dining room table? If you're looking for some great Scrapbook storage, there's nothing sweeter than the Workbox from the Original ScrapBox!


How would you like to win this sweet setup? Take a visit over to the Midnight Madness blog, and get hooked up! Make sure you tell them I sent you.

Here are the other blogs where you can win:
Make It and Love It
Vanilla Joy
Auntie Thesis
The Mommy Files
My Organized Chaos
Life As Lou
Cricut Christmas
Capadia Designs
Rachelle’s Writing Spot

While you're waiting to find out if you're a winner, cruise on over to The Original ScrapBox and check out my favorite product, the super sweet MiniBox. There's room for this in any home, and they have enough colors/styles to choose from to match any decorating style! It only 37" wide, but stores a boat-load of crafting goodness - here's a photo:

And now, a great discount too! Enter this code when you place your order to get $100 off your shipping: 100Writes

Great Goodies Box, Batman!

The daily deals on MyCTMH websites have been going like gangbusters. I received the $100 Great Goodies Box today, and what a great assortment of fun stuff awaited me! Here's the photo of everything included:


And here's the list of what was inside:

• 5 stamp sets, including one font, two sentiment, and two seasonal sets.
• One holiday card kit (makes 12 cards)
• One bulk "consultant" bulk paper pack of More To Adore layout pages. (My niece's main wedding color was brown, so this will be great for when I get all of those pictures!)
• One Level 1 kit (I got School Zone)
• One Level 2 paper pack and MyStickease (more School Zone! Great for me since they just discontinued this paper & I've been hoarding it for my kids' school pics.)
• One Key To My Heart paper pack (from our Heart of Winter promotion)
• One "consultant" bulk roll of ribbon
• One set of organdy ribbons
• One set of designer ribbons
• One set of MyAccents
• One ink pad

Most of the items in this box were recently discontinued items, but others have had more current products. Every goody box day has had different items in it, but this is an idea of the kind of things that come in them. Retail value of this box was approximately $220.

Only one week left in our June Deal-a-Day, so make sure you check the deal every day! New deals are posted at 10:00 a.m. Central time, and removed at 9:00 a.m. the following morning. Visit my website to see each day's new deal.

More Eco-friendly Moves!

Thanks to some friendly suggestions and a few well-placed emails, I now have more eco-friendly scrapbook products to share with you!

Remember those cards I made a while back from scraps? Well, the gift the scraps came from finally had the finishing touches put on and was gifted. So, here's the final product:

This was made with all Basic Grey papers and coordinates, as well as few CTMH embellies. Since I love BG, I sent them an email about their eco-policy. Here's what I found out: they do not yet have an "official" statement. However, Nancy at BG tells me that all of their papers are made here in the US (another bonus), and their printer plants 2 trees for every one that is used to make paper. They are also big on recycling all paper used in their office. A nice step in the right direction! (If you're interested, I'm posting the remaining pix of this item at the end of this entry.)

Die Cuts With a View has a paper stack called the Green Stack, which is made with 70% recycled paper. I couldn't locate it on their website, but over at Joann's I found it in 12x12, 8x8, and Matstack sizes, plus chipboard shapes. Plus, Joann has them all on sale right now. Here's a link if you're interested: http://www.joann.com/joann/catalog.jsp?CATID=cat2002&PRODID=xprd913676

WorldWin Papers uses wind power! Here's a quote from their website: "WorldWin Papers uses wind power in all of our facilities. We choose to purchase wind power for our corporate offices as well as our converting and distribution center to help protect the environment and reduce greenhouse gasses." Check out more info over on their environmental policy page at http://www.worldwinpapers.com/environment.html


Tinkering Ink offers a limited run Becoming Green collection. It's printed on 100% recycled, 30% post-consumer waste product. You can check it out on their website at http://www.tinkeringink.com/shop/product/bg-kit-becoming-green-kit/

New kid on the block, Jillibean Soup has their first line printed on kraft paper made of 100% recycled stock. Check out their products over at http://www.jillibean-soup.com/products_landing.php.

Scrap green with Paper Trunk -- that's their motto! They use a recycled cardstock, produced with wind power, and printed with vegetable-based ink. They even have a whole page of links about living greener. Check it out at http://www.papertrunk.com/scrapgreen.php. Check out some of the links on her page like the cosmetic and household products databases! If you think the items in your home are all safe, think again... and feel free to ask me if you have more questions about safer household and personal products!

OK, that's what I have for now. If you have other companies to recommend, please post a comment and share them with us! Now, for the rest of those pictures I promised...

Saving my planet... one scrapbook layout at a time!

Since I've been "greening my cleaning" and other aspects of our home life, I've been feeling slightly guilty about this mondo paper-using hobby I have. I mean, I try to save all of my scraps and use them in smaller projects later. And I have a lot of reusable items like die-cutters, punches, templates, and stamps. Plus, I even use mostly acrylic peel-and-stick stamps, so there's less wood used for the blocks for my stamping addiction.

But, what about all this paper? And what chemical by-products am I contributing to when I buy new stamps or tools? Now, I'm not going to contribute to any landfills by dumping things I already have just because they weren't manufactured in the cleanest manner. However, going forward, I'd like to know I'm buying from more socially and ecologically responsible companies.

So, I was extremely happy and excited not long ago when I got some information on my favorite scrapbook company, Close To My Heart (of course!). I am happy to report that not only does CTMH donate lots of money to Operation Smile , but they are also "green" in a number of ways.

• All Close To My Heart papers including B&T Duos,™ cardstocks, and My Stickease™ are SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative) certified. This means the pulp used to create the papers is gathered only from certified sustainable forests, and that every process used to create the papers, from harvesting to final product, is environmentally friendly.
• Close To My Heart uses environmentally conscious vendors. The paper printer utilizes
  wind power in their facilities. The album manufacturer reuses cardboard boxes—they send CTMH albums in boxes, CTMH sends the boxes back, and they reuse them.
• The My Acrylix® stamp-making process uses soap and water soluble chemicals for clean
  up to avoid harming the environment.
• Over 80% of the waste produced at CloseTo My Heart is recyclable.

This bit of information made me feel much better about the products I'm using! Going forward, I plan to research similar information on other brands I buy, as well as the stores where I usually buy them. Let me know if you know of other environmentally friendly scrapbooking and stamping companies, and I'll give them a plug here as well!

Sanity

I don't know about you, but I tend to be lazy when I'm creating, whether it's in the kitchen or the craft room. I don't want to have to guess at how I did something when I try to do it again. When I make cards and scrapbook layouts I tend to use a lot of sketch "recipes". But, sometimes, I'll design something myself, and like it enough that I'll want to repeat it in the future.

So, I've decided to create my own recipe book for my sketches. I'm storing them on the computer, but since I'm a hands-on kind of gal, I'll also be printing them to include in an organized binder. This will also make them super easy to take with me to crops like my other sketch books.

Now that Christmas is over and my cards are finally mailed, I thought I'd share my card design with you. The final product was changed somewhat as being too labor intensive for me to complete with all of the other holiday-related hoopla I had going on, but they were pretty similar. Feel free to use my sketch for your own use, but please do not share it in any way, other than to pass on a link to it here.

So, here's my prototype card:

In the end, I didn't sand my cardstocks to distress them and I opted to leave the red presents plain. Just didn't have time for the cutting, adhering, and sanding! Plus, most of the people on our list wouldn't have noticed. I also ran out of ribbon toward the end, so I just left that off on some.

All products/stamps used are from Close To My Heart, except the card bases, which came in a bulk pack from Michaels' (I think). I used the stamp set from the September card kit promotion and the Grinch quote from the Peace on Earth sayings stamp set.

The scalloped border was made using a corner rounder punch and mini hole punch. Would have been faster for my assembly line process if I'd had the Stampin' Up! scallop border punch; guess that's on my list of things to get...



Now, here's the sketch I created:

I just use MS Word and create a table of the size of my design. For a card, I can go full-scale. If I were designing a scrapbook page, I would go half-scale. I make enough columns & rows so I have one square per quarter inch.

These card bases were 5" x 6.5", so I had 20 columns and 26 rows. For rectangles, it's easy to highlight the cells and use the "merge cells" feature to "draw" them. I then used the line tool and the oval tool for other pieces. Since it's not always exact or perfect, I add text with the actual sizes of each piece and other little bits of info.

If you'd like to try this and need more help setting up your table, just contact me. I'm happy to help try and walk you through it.

Disney Memories

Well, I'm finally making some real progress on scrapping that Disney trip from January! Here are a couple of my favorite layouts that were completed recently.

Here's meeting Minnie, after our hour plus in line. The patterned papers and regular cardstock are from CTMH. The scalloped cardstock is Bazzil, I believe. Title is a rub-on from a Creative Imaginations swatch book, the journaling box sticker is from Reminisce, and the colored stickers are CTMH. The fun flower is made using a Clear Scraps flower, painted on back with pearl paint from CTMH. I added small rub-ons from CTMH to the front along with doodles of yellow Stickles. Added some red polka dot ribbon, and stuck an EK Success bottle cap in the middle - voila! Layout also uses black grosgrain ribbon and red eyelets.


Here are Sarah & Holly meeting Princess Aurora. I LOVED making this layout, but it was not as simple as it looks! I embossed the white bling cardstock with a Cuttlebug embossing folder. Since those folders aren't very big and I only have an original Sizzix, it was pretty interesting. (Now I think I need to save my change for the Big Shot!) Luckily, the random flower design made it easier to hide the "seams" and parts I couldn't quite reach! Light Pink CS is CTMH, white and med. pink are Bazzil Bling. Darker pink is velvet paper, brand unknown (I think I picked it up at Michael's). Sewed the edges of the white bling to the page. Title is from a Cricut cartridge. All of hte paper flowers, buttons, etc. is CTMH, and I think I have one rhinestone brad from 7 Gypsies on there.

You'll notice I didn't journal on the Sleeping Beauty page. Since I'm stepping out of my box and actually doing a theme album, there were a lot of pages where journaling just wasn't neccessary. And it left me more room to add "stuff"!

Now, an additional "saving" tip: do you toss your cardstock scraps? Use them up making cards. Even if you're not a card maker, kid birthdays are the perfect opportunity for practice! They never care if they don't look perfect, and you need nothing more than a single "Happy Birthday" stamp or sticker pack. If you're not comfortable designing your own, there are plenty of books available on the subject, and PageMaps even offers card sketches now. I guess that's a future entry: cards I've made from scraps.

Until next time...