Project Life: Week Thirty-Two

Good morning! Today I'm sharing my Week 32 layout with you. This week, my goal was to use more of my Studio Calico cards that had been piling up a little bit. I also wanted to make the cards work FOR ME. I was tired of looking at the kit and feeling like "I'm never going to use this card. I don't even like coffee". (Is it weird that most of this album is my memories, and just a few things from Jon once in a while?)

This week I used strictly Studio Calico cards, and some thickers by American Crafts. And a bunch of labels. Most of the labels were free printables found on Pinterest.

 

Here's the left hand side. I wrote out my title with foam alphas, and used a little label to write in the dates for this week. I journaled on the photo in the top right, and added a label to the bottom right. 

 

Here's the right hand side. I used labels, alphas and a chipboard sticker to make this side pretty. I modified a couple of the cards so that they'd work for me, and this particular spread.

 

The first card I modified was this one. I don't drink coffee, I drink tea. So I covered coffee with a small label and some foam alphas. I wanted it to be known that I altered this card to work for me, so I didn't worry about finding a label big enough to cover the word coffee completely.

The second card I altered was this one. In the corner, I believe it said "hello July", but the colors fit so well with this spread that I covered it with a label I cut in half and stacked to hide what it said.

I feel that if you're paying for the cards, they should be working for you. If a card doesn't necessarily fit with the theme, or overall look of your layout, I think you should modify it and make it work.

Have a great day!
-Alexandria

My Nephew's Baby Shower

Good morning! Today I'm sharing the only photos I took of my nephew's baby shower. I had this whole rant written about everything that went wrong with the shower, and all the things about it that made me disappointed, but because the day of the shower was the beginning of my 100 Happy Days, I've decided to focus on the parts of it that make me happy.

For some reason, I feel like banners aren't complete without rosette clusters. This was a tough one for me because it didn't turn out how I hoped it would, however, everyone still loved it. (I doubt they'd complain to my face anyways). I had Jon help me lay it out on the floor and figure out where we wanted to put each rosette.

We kind of had a navy/baby blue/black/white theme going on. I had this adorable mustache/bow punch I picked up a while back at Michael's and thought it would be perfect to make little clothes pins (for that game where you can't say baby). They were so cute! Luckily my mom had a ton of clothes pins on hand!

I made a bunch of these onesies. I cut them out with the Silhouette, and had my mom glue the blue trim pieces and mustaches down. This one was a little of a last minute thing. I printed what I wanted to say out on printer paper, and placed this card on top of what I'd just printed (where I wanted it to print on the card) and taped it down with washitape and printed straight onto this card.

This is something that frustrated me a little. I designed these in Microsoft Word, and printed them on sticker paper. Unfortunately, my circle punch refused to cleanly punch through the sticker paper, and so I ended up having to cut a few of them out by hand, and some of the borders didn't end up perfectly straight (oh well).

Here's the stickers on the little Jell-o shot containers. They look fine. At the top you can see the bow/mustache punch I used.

Here's the head table. This is where Carla, and the kids were supposed to sit, and I believe her mom, and my mom were also supposed to sit there, but they ended up at another table, and so Carla had her friend (the only friend that showed up) sit with her. I could have probably made the tissue paper pom poms, but because I was in a time crunch, and I haven't made any that size, I bought these from a local store.

This is my favorite thing ever. When Emmett was born, someone asked about nicknames for him, and Carla said they'd probably just call him "Em&Em". Being the creative person I am, I figured M&M's would make an adorable party favor, and so I made up this adorable sign so that it made sense to everyone else as well. (I thought it was rather funny to be honest).

Trying to switch up the angles I take my photos, and to show how many M&M's there were on the table. You can imagine how much willpower it took for me not to eat all of these before the shower started (not that many people took them anyways).

Of course I had to take a close up of this banner. It's just so pretty, and I kept it so I can use it again for other things. I made sure the "It's a boy" part was removable so that I could use this for a birthday if I wanted.

This picture is super grainy, but it was a little dark over in this corner. I put the gift table to the right of the head table for quick access when it came time for her to open them.

This is the set up I had just outside the door to the "party". I put the info about the games and the sheets for them, and the guestbook here.

I neatly stacked all the clothes pins in this little box (the lid has an owl on it), and put the instructions for the games in a frame and set it in the lid.

I put out a pen, and the little onesies that I turned into a little guestbook on the table beside it. Two additional games were placed above it.

My mom brought this little box to put the onesies in, once they'd put their well wishes on them. At the last minute I put a little picture frame with a photo of Emmett in it, in front of this.

Thanks for coming by to see the last minute and quick decorations I made for my nephews baby shower. If I'd had more time, I have so many ideas in my head that I wanted to do, but given this was all at the last minute, I think it all turned out pretty well! The food was good, the cupcakes were adorable, and Emmett got a bunch of new clothes!

Have a great day!
-Alexandria

Project Life: Week Thirty-One

Good morning! I sat down last week and looked at the number of posts I wanted to squeeze onto the blog before the end of the year, and realized that I was probably crazy, but we're going to see how it goes. There are a few things I'm completely okay with carrying over, like my Project Life album. That way I have a few weeks in the new year to get ahead on my pages before sharing them here, and it'll be one less thing for me to stress about. On the other side of that, are a bunch of things I want to post before the end of this month (Thanksgiving stuff).

Today I'm sharing my layout for Week 31. This is the week my nephew was born! There was a lot going on, but very few pictures were being taken (by me at least), so I tried to keep this layout pretty simple. I used Studio Calico, and Dear Lizzy

Here's the left side. This side was mostly focused around Sunday (the day my nephew was born). It was a crazy day. She went into labor that morning, and by about 1pm she had the baby. We went up around 3 to meet my nephew. My parents were watching my niece, and she was over the moon excited to have a baby brother. I included the photo my brother sent me, just after he was born (top right) and a photo of my niece holding him for the first time. They both look so tiny!! The bottom right is a photo from a couple of days later. I made a set of framed owls for my nephews nursery.

I cut them out on my silhouette, assembled them, and bought frames for them. They loved that I made them to match the bedding and mobile I bought them.

Here's the right side. I included two photos of our slightly neglected cats, and two photos of my niece. We stopped by to drop off the gifts for my nephew, and she asked me to hang out while she played in the pool. It was so hot out that she was lucky she could cool off in the pool.

I can't believe this was back at the end of July. The temperature has gotten cooler with it being fall, and simply looking back and remembering this week, makes me miss the warmer temperatures a little bit, but I'm loving the current sweater weather.

Have a great day!
-Alexandria

Studio Calico: 30 Days of Me - Part 1

Good morning! Sorry for the delay. Thanksgiving at my house on the 4th, work grand opening on the 10th. It's been pretty crazy around here. Hopefully things will start to slow down now that work is open. Or they'll get crazier with Christmas coming.

Here's what you see when you open it up. It's not a very good display of the dividers along the side, however I love all the ribbon, and twine sticking out along the top. If I'd have angled my camera a little to the right, you could see the four dividers along the right hand side.

I tried to angle this so I had as little glare on the pocket page as I could get, but still got a bit. This page was inspired by Maggie's title page, while keeping it more my own.
I took a small portion of a leftover page protector (I save the scraps when I trim a page down to make an insert in my weekly spreads) and trimmed it down to 4x4. I painted it with some purple acrylic paint, but had to be extremely careful. The paint doesn't adhere to the plastic very well, and chips off easily. I had to touch up a few places more than once.
I carefully adhered the thickers and the wood veneer over the paint, and gently slid it into the page. Then I added my sequins behind it and stitched it shut.

I used some silver glitter thickers I had in my box of alphas (I cut the tops off, so I'm blanking on where they're from). The wood veneer frame is from Freckled Fawn, I just painted it with a bit of white acrylic paint. 

In the back of my title page, I added sequins and wood veneers. The sequins are in some of my favorite colors and the wood veneers are music notes and a heart that says "me" inside.

Here's my first divider. I used a cutfile from Marcy Penner's minibook class at Studio Calico. I added the words "live simple, dream big, be grateful, give love and laugh lots" to the divider and cut them out of vellum. I love that you get a glimpse of what's to come on the next page. I painted over a portion of the words with some water colors.

When Maggie Holmes released the first PDF for the class, she told us that she wanted the prompts to work for us, and encouraged us to use them in anyway that worked for us. I rearranged the prompts to fit within each divided section, and as I share the different parts, you'll hopefully see that. I usually do things in order, but for this album, it was about me, and I wanted it to reflect that sometimes I do things out of order.

Sorry for the delay in posting this. I wanted to get it done before work opened, but didn't quite get it finished in time, but I hope it was worth the wait. There will be four more parts to this. There's a lot of stuff crammed into the tiny little album, and I'm so excited to share it with you!

Have a great day!
-Alexandria

What I've Been Up To & What's To Come

Good morning! I'm very sorry for not posting anything throughout the month of September. It's been pretty crazy around here trying to get work ready to open. Thankfully, we should be opening within a week from now, for sure. They're planning for the opening day to be next Friday, so things will be a little crazy until Christmas at this point.

However, between all the craziness of the last month and a half, I've managed to get a lot of things started, and a few of them I actually finished.

I took the Workspace class over at Studio Calico, though I have yet to use anything I learned to make my workspace better. I'm typing this from my iPad because my desk is such a mess that I can't even fit my keyboard on it at the moment. It;s like a tornado ran through my room. I need to get to work cleaning it up, instead of procrastinating and starting new projects that only add to the mess.

I started working on an album for my Highschool Graduation (back in 2010), and it's coming along nicely. It makes me wish I had more time. money and space to do more traditional scrapbooking. The most important of those is space.

I took a set of Mini Book classes at Studio Calico. Okay I paid for them, and read all the PDFs and watched the videos the instructors shared, but didn't make one mini album for each of those classes. Instead I took what I learned there and made a mini album for the Studio Calico 30 Days of Me class that I also took.

I took the 30 Days of Me class at Studio Calico. It was so much fun, and I loved making an album about me, right now. It'll be fin to look back in a year or two, and see how I've changed since then. It's something I could see myself doing every September to see a progressive change each year. So fun! I definitely recommend taking this class if you get a chance.

 I hosted a baby shower for my nephew in September (better late than never right?). It was supposed to be my Mom's Church hosting it, but no one organized anything so my Mom and I took over and did all the decorating, and had people bring food.

I'm currently working on finishing up a ton of framed scrapbook pages to go up at work. I made four a couple years ago for Jon's dad because he's an avid hunter, and wanted some way to display some of his favourite photos from hunting over the years. I figured that some scrapbook pages he could change out as the years go was a brilliant idea. Now he has me making almost 2 dozen pages to be displayed in the newly renovated restaurant at work. I'm a little nervous about my work being on display, but hopefully the layouts I love outshine the not so good ones.

I also started 100 Happy Days, and I'm making an album for this. I'm so glad I started this. Between the stress of work opening, and the holidays coming up, and some family issues, I needed something to help me focus on the little things in my life that make me happy. Whether it be a moment, or an object, or it lasted a second, or an hour, it doesn't matter. Happiness is almost as important as sleep, and I feel that we should try and keep life from weighing us down.

 I hosted a small early Thanksgiving dinner with my parents and siblings. So of course I did a bit of baking, and cooked the entire meal with Jon's help, AND made some paper things to decorate. It's exciting. I also had my niece help me decorate a little bit for fall, by putting some Halloween decals on my window. She had so much fun doing it.

My goal is to share these projects on my usual three days of the week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday), I'm still trying to figure out how small I want to divide these projects. I don't want one whole post for my 30 days class, but I don't want to drag it out for 30 weeks (that's crazy). I also don't want to be sharing hunting pages into the new year, or sharing my 100 happy days album beyond January of next year. While I'm figuring this out, you can have yourselves a wonderful weekend!

Thanks for stopping by!
-Alexandria