Celebrate October 2020 Registration

 

On this first day of autumn, I'm happy to announce registration for Celebrate October 2020.

Celebrate October is a prompt-driven project I created for celebrating my favorite month of the year by telling October stories and preserving October memories.

While I approach Celebrate October via scrapbooking, you don't have to be a scrapbooker to participate.

Registration is free and easy. All you need is an email address and a password of six characters. Click right here to get started, and be sure to let me know in the comments if you have questions.

I hope you'll join me!

Making My Own Patterned Paper

Happy Friday! The past few days I've been playing with my stamps, inks, and spray stains, inspired by the class Stamps Meet Scrapbook by Altenew.

I'm featuring my third attempt, though I will share the first and second at the end of this post.

First, the color palette and supplies I used:

My eyes just get happy looking at those colors! I started by cutting a sheet of American Crafts textured card stock into 4 6x6 inch pieces, then coloring the non-textured side with Distress spray stains in Tumbled Glass, Spun Sugar, Milled Lavender, and Shaded Lilac.

Next, I gathered my stamps:

First, the background stamps, which are all three from Stampin' Up! many, many years ago.

Second, my focal image and accent stamps, also both from Stampin' Up!, the one on the right being as old as the backgrounds.

Then, I got busy stamping, playing with the images and colors and having fun. I used another stamp set from Technique Tuesday as a larger image, and I used some Distress Oxide inks in some of the same colors to add a different texture to some of my images.

Here are my four patterned papers:

I tried to add some silver ink to each page, but it didn't show up to my liking, so I did some sprinkles of Distress mica spray, the pewter color, and that really finishes off these papers well.

Before these, I did a couple "practice runs," and here are those papers:

The same stamps but a different color scheme, and the inks were Stampin' Up!, rather than Distress, with Heidi Swapp Color Shine in gold.

These are a completely different color scheme, of course, with another old Stampin' Up! stamp set, and I used one stamp (the dot) on all four papers to add a sense of continuity.

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So, the next step will be to use these papers in my memory keeping. I've been really liking 6x6 patterned papers lately, even though I mostly scrapbook in the 12x12 size. I love that I made them myself and used my stamps.

Stamping makes me so happy!

Layout Share - The Last Straw

For this page about Star Wars: The Last Jedi (and my obvious feelings about it), I used a sketch from a class at Big Picture Classes, modified from 8.5x11 to 12x12. Patterned paper scraps provided all of the elements on the page, except the matte for my photo, which I cut from a 6x6 piece of paper. I added lots of embellishments, including a few hand-drawn doodles, and two different puffy sticker fonts form my long title.

Sometimes, my scrapbook pages don't work for me. I'm not going to redo this one, though it's definitely not my favorite. There's something sort of scattered about my execution of this design, which I've used on other pages I like a lot better than this one. Then again, the movie itself was scattered, as were my feelings about it, so perhaps the page works on a deeper level, even though I don't find it visually appealing.

You win some, you lose some, but this story is told, and I'm ready to move on.

Coming up: my plans for the month of June!

Layout Share - Merry Christmas to Us

I usually do Shimelle Laine's Journal Your Christmas as my album for all the holiday-related stories, but I also create a page for my yearbook, and this is the one I did for 2017.

My favorite part of this layout is those adorable snowmen, which my sweetheart bought me for Christmas way back in 2009! I've been saving them all this time, and they work perfectly on this page, which gathers plenty of photos of Christmas day, spent with my husband Daniel and my nephew D.J.

There's a lot going on here, so I chose a grid design to organize it all into a coherent visual story. I love using tags, and I love that I got some twine on the page, too! Just a little bit of Christmasy patterned paper, leaning towards whimsical to coordinate with the snowmen, provides plenty of energy and interest without overpowering the page.

I love it!

And just two more pages to go before the 2017 yearbook is complete!

(Unless, of course, I decide to do more pages later...)

Layout Share - Holidays at Somerset

Another layout for my 2017 yearbook, and another one I created with lots of stamping and a Christmas tree punch.

First, I created the tree embellishments by punching out the shapes from two colors of Distress card stock. I also punched 1/4 inch circles with a whole punch I've had for years and years but haven't used a whole lot lately.

Next, I used stamps and the same Distress colors as the card stock I chose to make my own patterned paper strips, and I used one of the colors from the tree embellishments to die cut letters for part of my title.

Lots of stars and gems and enamel dots accent the trees, and I love how this page turned out, especially how well I was able to coordinate the colors I chose with the photos.

I've only got a couple pages left, and 2017 will be all wrapped up!

Layout Share - 15 Years

I'm still plugging along on my 2017 yearbook, and here's the page I did to commemorate our 15th anniversary, which we spent on vacation in Naragansett, Rhode Island. (I wish I were there, now.)

Merging autumn and sea themes was a little tricky, but I think it turned out well. I made the leaf embellishments with stamping, ink blending, and die cutting, same with the letters and numbers. A few other embellishments from a variety of manufacturers tie everything together to make a layout I really love.

Layout Share - The Cut

For this page about getting my long hair cut off, which happened in late September of 2017, I got into the autumn-themed supplies, my favorites!

Most of my supplies are from the Fall Farmhouse collection by Simple stories, and I cut the focal embellishment on my Cameo.

The larger letters for my title, I cut old-school with my Sizzix Big Shot and some very old letter dies that I've been using quite a bit lately.

The flower clusters really make me happy, and I added a few enamel dots--I'm running out of the fall colors!--to finish out the page.

My yearbook for 2017 is getting close to done, with just a handful of pages to go!