One Little Bird Guest Blogger

One of my favorite scrapbookers, Peppermint, also sells lovely digital products and has the most beautiful blog. Whenever I see her new products or her latest Project Life spread on Instagram, I think, does this girl have more hours in the day than me!? She is amazing!

As the December guest blogger at One Little Bird, my post is up today and I'm excited to share it with you! 

Head over to the One Little Bird blog to read about my process, the products I used and a few tips like how I finally figured out drop shadows thanks to an old One Little Bird blog post!

Freebie Friday - Persnickety Prints Christmas Print

When I first got into the digital scrapbooking world, I found Persnickety Prints, their blog and their awesome freebies. Lots of digital paper and cute elements offered to their customers for free! Sweet!

Black and white is a theme in my Christmas spreads, so I loved this chalkboard printable for my Project Life album! I'm going to scale it down to a 3''x4'' card.

Get yours HERE.

Christmas Layouts Part I

I'm guest blogging over at One Little Bird later this month and I can't wait to show you the fun spread I made with the There's Something About Merry papers, elements and journaling cards. I normally don't use many embellishments, but since I decided not to do a December Daily album this year, I went a little more festive. And I really like it! Here's a sneak peek I shared on Instagram:

The layouts with a lot of black and white tend to be some of my favorite so I was happy to see a lot of black and white in this Christmas set! 

I've also worked on another Christmas layout using some Ali Edwards supplies: 

Man, if I could use a wood card in every layout, I would. I just love the warmth the wood brings. The right side of this layout is still a work in progress. I'm trying out Design Q (!?) with three 4x4 squares and four 6x4 rectangles so we'll see how it goes.

Note to Self: Let it Go! (like Elsa!)

Thanksgiving 2014 was my chance to shine! I've secretly wanted to host Thanksgiving for years, but didn't want to seem too eager. So when it was going to be small scale celebration this year with just the four from my family, my parents and two brothers, I decided to step up and take my place as hostess! ;-) It amazes me every year how we put hours and $$ into preparing this dinner and then everyone scarfs down the food in 15 minutes and heads back to watch football! Yet we keep doing it and I guess we like it? What about sitting around and smiling warmly at each other like I see on holiday movies or at the end of sitcoms!?

At the end of the day on Thanksgiving, I sat down and scrolled through my IG feed and looking at everyone's Thanksgiving pictures and I started to get down on myself! I was so busy hosting and cooking and cleaning and decorating that I felt that I hadn't taken enough photos to record it all! Oh no! Especially when my sister, who is training to be a missionary in another state, asked for a play by play of Thanksgiving and lots of pictures! Honestly, I felt like I had failed in that category (and my stuffing, that was a big fail).

BUT then I sat down a few days later to see what I had, and you know what!? I had done just fine! I had plenty to work with. The day was accurately captured and I was happy. And it just made me realize that even if you don't take a picture when you wanted to, it'll be ok. You have other pictures. You can tell other stories. All is not lost. Let it go and move on. So I'm going to keep that in mind this December. I hope we can all pick something that's looming over our heads and just let it go this season.

So with all that being said, here's my layout from Thanksgiving week. Due to circumstances that are too boring to write out, I used an insert (a cut down Design B) for the non-Thanksgiving part of the week and used a Design A full page for Thanksgiving:

Hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving! 

Freebie Friday - Caravan Shoppe Christmas Printable

Are you familiar with Caravan Shoppe? This place has GREAT stuff, but I especially love that they have digital downloads! You KNOW digital goodies are so my thing. So I get their emails and much to my delight they have a free Christmas printable right now!

 I will likely scale it down to a 3x4 card for my Project Life album, but in the meantime, I downloaded it and using the magic wand tool, I recolored it to match my Christmas colors!

I'm SURE you've seen these bottle brush tree tutorials popping up everywhere, but if you haven't or are on the fence about it, I recommend it! I bought 21 Christmas trees on Amazon (they were $17 when I bought them but it appears they're now pricier!), then put them in bleach (did you know bleach goes bad and doesn't work if it's old? Yup. Now I know!) and dyed them different shades of navy/kelly green. Love my little forest! (my tree count has grown to 25- I'm turning into the crazy tree lady!). Here's the tutorial I used.

Merry Christmas and happy scrapping!

Recording Family Portrait Sessions in Your PL Album

So I got my photos back from my photographer (and good friend, Bianca!). The outfits I spent weeks picking out and the smiles I bribed my kids to smile are all there--the hard work and anxiety paid off! Pretty pictures taken by someone other than me! And I'm IN the pictures! Yay! But now what? Other than designing my Christmas cards and blowing up a photo for my wall, I wasn't sure what do to do with the rest. I thought of "sprinkling" them throughout my Project Life album but that seemed kind of weird. So I dedicated an insert to the pretty photos. Because, they're just one day of our family-just one moment in time. So I put them in the album in the week where they were photographed. I picked out some coordinating papers and brushes, but kept it simple overall.

FRONT of INSERT

BACK of INSERT

I'm having a hard time photographing my layouts, so bear with me! I'll figure this out!

AE Digital Creative Team - Just Thankful

My first layouts as a part of the AE Digital Creative Team are up in her shop here. And you can see all of  the team members' pretty faces up here with social media links. Go check out their blogs--they're full of inspiration!

So when I was creating layouts using the Just Thankful brush set, I had just returned from visiting my sister and her new baby and was so thankful that both of them were healthy and everything went smoothly as it was a bit dicey for a little while as she was in labor. That experience, coupled with great hospital photos (I thank the excellent lighting), inspired this 6''x8'' layout using the Just Thankful brushes:

Then of course, I used them again in my weekly Project Life spread:

Cousins! Melts my heart seeing my first baby hold my sister's first baby!

Other brushes from the Just Thankful set. I use them all the time! Turns out I have a lot to be thankful for.