Burn, baby burn!

Man oh man is it hot here in sunny North Carolina! As I sit here in my living room, the ceiling fan is spinning above, and I have another fan going full blast straight at my face. I'm comfortable in this little space, but if I move into other parts of my apartment, it's rather miserable. My poor a/c just can't keep up on a scorcher like this! And as I look at the long string of 90 plus days in the forecast, I can't help but worry whether we're going to make up for the incredibly mild weather we had last summer. Sigh!
Early this morning, in the pre-sweat hours of my day, I decided to 'turn up the heat' in my scrapbooking. In this layout, you can see Duke students and alumni celebrating our latest basketball National Championship. I used Pink Paislee papers from a kit they recently offered online. The flowers are all colored with Glimmer Mist. I tried to capture the school colors and the colors of the flames. Unfortunately, I really struggle with capturing the colors of my layouts without getting sunny glare in the image, so this is close to how it looks in reality, but not quite there. Soon, I'm going to make another layout featuring the people I celebrated that night with, but today, it was all about the flames!

PageMaps Challenge

Since finishing my mini-album last week, I've felt a little lost as to what to scrap next. Thank goodness for sketches! PageMaps (http://www.pagemaps.com/blog.php)is giving away a Webster's Pages prize pack to one person who submits a layout based on one of their monthly sketches. The photo at the top of this post is my take on this sketch:


I took the photograph in this layout last Labor Day weekend on Hilton Head Island. Just looking at this picture makes me start to feel calm and relaxed. The background paper is one of the new Basic Grey Basics papers. I inked the heck out of it with some Distress Inks, and then added a little glimmer mist (and some glimmer screens) to finish it off. The other two papers are from Websters Pages, as are the flowers. The "netting" is actually just white cheesecloth that I glimmer misted and then stretched and played with. I was stuck in the home improvement section of Wal-Mart a couple of weeks ago while my boyfriend was searching for something or another, and when I spied the cheesecloth, I thought, "ah ha! Who says you need to be at a scrapbook store to find scrapbooking products?" And sure enough, it worked PERFECTLY for this layout.

The chipboard luggage is from Tattered Angels. I misted, then ran ink over the top to bring out the embossing, then stickled and glittered it. The quote is from Quick Quotes. The letters are WP letters. I covered the letters with Glossy Accents and then sprinkled a sand colored embossing powder over each letter before they had dried. The result is a nice, sandy finish. I got the idea from another scrapbooker who did something very similar, but for the life of me, I cannot remember where I saw it.

And there you go! A nice, fun layout about a wonderful weekend relaxing at the beach. And the scrap mojo is back! Check out the Page Maps blog for a chance to win a great prize pack, or just to get some inspiration if you feel like you're in a scrapping funk. I'm still struggling with embedding links into my posts, so I'm afraid you'll have to copy and paste if you wanna find them from here. Again, it's http://www.pagemaps.com/blog.php .

Birthday album is finished!

Well, it's taken quite a while to finish such a small album, but finally, finally my mini album is finished! Here's the cover:

I used lots of Prima yummies and topped it all off with some Webster's Pages lace and one of their cameos. I love the Prima bling, but so do my cats, and they leave their fur as evidence! I wonder if there's a way to keep the exposed glue on those things fur-free (short of getting rid of the cats, that is). Next are two pages showing MaMa and her sisters together:


I think these are some of my favorite pages in the album. I like the coloring, and those new Tim Holtz tapes are A LOT of fun to play with! This next page is part two of my efforts to use gesso to add texture to my layouts. I like the way it looks on this page. On my other page, which I don't love so much, I tried gessoing over a glimmer screen and then pulling the screen up. The results were so disappointing that I ended up covering the whole experiment up with paper and pictures. Oh well. I'll keep playing with it. Here's the side I like:

And finally, here's the last page. Again, I put the flower on the outside of the page protector so that it's not squashed to death. I like the added depth this makes on the page!