Well, I have obviously been neglecting my blog. I have been scrapping though, just haven't had time to photo and post the layouts. My mom recently did a post... about me... to my surprise! Actually, it's more about my scrap room. So, I thought it would be good to dust off the blog and share my scrap space with all of you, too. 
This is my little scrap closet... And I do mean LITTLE! My desk measures 24x40 and there is j-u-s-t enough room for a chair, so I can close the door if I want/need solitude. It is supposed to be my hall closet, but my dear hubby decided I needed a place of my own and we could find a home for "normal closet stuff". {I actually think he could foresee me using the dining room table for the rest of our lives and never eating on it again :o) }
If you click on the photos they will enlarge so you can look closer, if you feel the need. And feel free to comment or email if you have any questions about organization or any products you see. After helping friends get organized over the years, we all come to say the same thing... once you find a home for everything it really helps you be more productive and surprisingly helps you spend less because you know what you have and whether you have room for it if you buy it, lol! Hope this helps someone out there! ;o)
Again with the wonky colors, I just dont get it! I even played with Photoshop on these! Oh well, I think we all know what shade these colors are supposed to be :o) This house bleeds orange and blue! Last year, we were fortunate enough to be able to arrange a bit of a reunion of old friends from UF and coordinated it with the Orange & Blue spring game. We had a blast and got to meet all the new additions (current & future) to our families!
This side of the layout is a scraplift of one I saw on Kelly Noel's blog. Of course, hers was sooo much cuter! I was having a hard time with all the journaling strips and fru-fru stuff. I did play with my Cricut & Gypsy with the title and title block. So, I was happy with that.
Of couse, I like to include the tickets from the event... that pretty much covers the date & place for my journaling. I just added a few little notes on the sticker plaques.
PP: Misc picked up along my travels ;o)
On to the layout, enough sports debate. This is the other layout I got done on Saturday at the crop... even though my hubby just looked at me and said "That's all you did for 8 hours, two layouts!?" What can I say, four hours a layout is actually making good time for me. 
The colors on this side of the layout are a little wonky... someday I will learn how to use Photoshop and fix this, but oh well. You get the idea! No sketch, but really similar to the Queen Bee layout and pretty simple.
PP: Reminisce Patriotic
I managed to get two whole layouts done at yesterday's crop! This is one of them, but I totally cheated and copied my friend's layout... darn near exactly! :o) Thanks Jodi! Funny part is, it still took me the same amount of time to scraplift! Jodi did this layout last year at our girls retreat and I wonder if I subconsciously encouraged Miss H to be a Bee for Halloween this year so that I could copy the layout! LOL! 
I picked up this paper in the Target dollar bins, thanks to my friend Jenn for showing it to me. It was one of the only Halloween type papers I could find that used yellow instead of orange to coordinate with the yellow/black bee theme. The little bumblebees I made on the Gypsy with layers of yellow, black, and vellum generic egg shapes. I used the flourish and bling to mimic the flight pattern. I also have to share that the day of Halloween, Miss H decided that a Queen Bee needed a crown to go with the costume. So, I used one of her old princess crowns, painted black where the "stones" were and used pipe-cleaners and yellow puff balls to make her a Bee Crown/Antennae. She loved it!
PP: Target Scrapbooking Supplies
These are not the best pictures because I had to photo them in the page protector... so you get the whole "picture" of what I did. And, I am probably going to do a horrible job of explaining this, but pictures are supposed to be worth a thousand words anyways, right?! These photos were taken a couple of years ago at the Imaine It! Children's Museum in Atlanta, GA. If you are ever in the area, it was a fantastic and relaxing place to spend an entire day! She had a blast and the place was so low key, that I was actually able to sit down and watch her play! Great place! 
Here is a closeup of where I sewed the 8x9 protector to the actual layout with the 2 photos inside, then mounted the third directly to the layout slightly overlapping the 8x9 protector.
Fritz's was a really cool restaurant in Kansas City, MO that delivered your lunch via a train! At the time, H was totally into trains and thought that was the coolest thing ever!
Oh, and you ordered your lunch via the telephone on your table and got to wear cool conductor hats! Oh the things we do for our children... dear hubby might not appreciate me posting this photo, but I think he cute as a conductor :o) 
This is one of my favorite layouts in the Disney Album... Eeyore! Super simple layout, but the photos speak to my heart! All I did was dry-emboss the lines using the indentation on my paper trimmer, then sanded to reveal the white core.
Cardstock: CTMH Craberry, Black, Grey Flannel
Patterned Paper: K & Company "Carolyn Gavin"
I think what really makes this layout so adorable is the little Quickutz die-cut manatee, this was my friend Debra's idea. I am still not sure I got him put together as nice as she had him, but he's still cute. I sanded the edges to make it pop a little more and gave him a little bling eye using the tiniest of my CTMH Sparkles, that was Granny's idea ;o)
Patterned Paper: We R Memory Keepers "NonSense" Stack
Last year, well actually 2008, we traveled to NC to visit an old college friend, meet his wife, and their adorable new son! While we were there, they took us to a park with a quiet trail, a pond, and the perfect opportunity to take some photos. I was able to sneak these pictures while Uncle Mattie tried to teach H how to skip rocks. I love how our old friend is now H's friend too, he and his family are such great people!
Patterned Paper: Crate Paper?
Last spring, my friend and I took our little ones to the Tallahassee Junior Museum. My little angel ended up acting like a little animal, maybe she should have been in one of those cages, LOL! Just kidding!
Patterned Paper and Embellishments: DCWV Stack
These adorable little guys took over our house (and everywhere we went) this past summer. My munchkin got a little bug in her ear that she wanted Webkinz and surprisingly wanted to earn them! Her very first one was a reward after a long road trip at the beginning of summer and most of the others she bought with her own money after holding a garage sale and doing extras around the house.
By the end of summer, my darling daughter had talked Granny into creating an account and adopting a couple of Webkinz herself (pink ones, of course) and during a visit with my cousins, she worked her magic and got all of us playing! During a weeks visit, my cousin, her son, Aunt Amy, Granny, Hailey, and I had all adopted pets and were all sitting in the same room playing on the website together and visiting each other's online "homes". It was so funny!
When I started creating this layout, I knew I wanted Granny to work her magic with the little animal heads! Following the basic idea of the background paper, she was able to create a paper version of some of the Webkinz we had adopted. Above it a giraffe, frog (with its cute little pink tongue), and a monkey. Below is a lion and a hippo. So adorable! Thanks Granny!
This layout was kind of like putting together a puzzle. I just started cutting down photos to the highlight the part of the picture I liked, picked a center line and built out from there, then worked in a couple pieces of pattern paper. 
Now for the die-cuts, this was super exciting! I found a cute solid pear on Lyrical Letters Cartridge (under Shift & the tall one) but I wanted it to show the seeds, like the pp. So, I found another image that was a framed pear with the seeds showing, cut it out, then used a circle punch to punch out a circle of brown and layered that underneath the part of the pear that I also circle punched out. Next, I decided I wanted some other veggies, but couldn't find what I wanted in the carts I have... so I made my own. Using my Gypsy, I unlocked the proportions to stretch the pear (above) into an eggplant (below). Not much of a difference, but just what I needed! This is the number one reason I love my Gypsy! I can take their stock images and make them into whatever I want :o) I am one happy girl!
I am sure some of you are thinking that Cricut Design Studio does the same thing, but I am a Mac user and it is not compatible. And I really like not having to take my beautiful new MacBook Pro to crops, where something might happen to my baby! LOL! This baby isn't even paid off yet! ;o) Oh, and I have also been making my own 11.5" die-cut papers that are all the rage right now, soooo cool!
