First High School Layout

Last night I created my first high school page. Still having a hard time believing that my baby is almost done with her freshman year of high school. Any way, I love how this layout turned out. Sarah not only was the manager for the varsity football team, but she was also a freshman football cheerleader. To make the initials on the bottom of the page, I use large brads, cover with card stock, used a rub-on letter then covered the entire area with liquid accents. This is the first time I have used the liquid accents, but love the effect that they have on the embellishment. Not sure but I might try printing a very small scanned version of her numerals and varsity letter to attach to the page yet.

Scrapbooking at Grace Camp

A group of us from church have been getting together on a regular basis to scrapbook. We decided that it would be fun to have an overnight crop at the church's campgrounds. We had close to 30 people join us. Everyone had a great time and we can't wait to do it again.

New Blog

I have decided to try and create a blog just for my crafting stuff. I have just started it so only have 3 posts at the moment. Planning on adding more in the next day or two. If you want to visit please head over to
Clean or Create
Thanks and let me know what you think.

5 min. layout.

I have had a few requests to post a picture of the layout that I created in 5 minutes for the Scrapoff contest at Scrapaganza's NSD crop. I must say that I love the paper that we were given to use. The paper made it so easy to be creative. I need to find more of these paper.

National Scrapbook Day

National Scrapbook Day (weekend)
As usual, I choose to spend the weekend with my favorite scrapbook store. They actually got the party rolling on Thursday evening, if you are a NYOBC member. They shut down the store to everyone but club members and had a fun announcement, autograph time, food, free gifts and everything on sale. The big announcement for those of you who are NYOBC members is that the May book was done completely by Scrapaganza instead of having many different contributors. Finally on Friday night the party got rocking. We started at 6:00 in a rented space in one of the many strip malls in Davenport. Friday night there were many fun door prizes, some serious scrapping going on, and of course yummy food to munch on. I worked on finishing up a couple of mini books. All that need to be done was put in the pictures. I finished the Meow book, the princess pirate book, and the pop up album from Rusty Pickle. Of course the Meow book is about my 2 fur children, Kitty and Sox, the princess Pirate book is on Kristen, she is such a little princess and a tomboy all mixed up and the pop up album is for Sarah. I then started working on a swap that I am doing for a Disney group. I was able to finish the swap the next day. How lucky can I be, I won a door prize, a memory makers tag punch kit. It looks like a neat tool, will need to take some time to play with it. I left around 11:00 that night. Normally I would stay until the very end, but with Sarah getting confirmed this weekend, I wanted to get some sleep and a little work done in the morning before I came back.
The next morning, I stopped at the store on my way down to pick up some more things including some adhesive. Boy did I go through a bunch this weekend. Today was favorite things day. When we walked in, we were given a store t-shirt. Several of us switched to that shirt for the day. They had huge muffins and juice waiting for us when we arrived. Yummy. We then received a store tote bag and throughout the day we were given different items that are the favorites of the different employees. Let’s see how many I can remember, cats eye liquid chalk, a blue dauber, rub on tool, black board mini book, an new kind of adhesive, a paper pack, Rusty Pickle layout, paper pack, a 12 x 12 album, a package of white flowers, a distresser, some rub on letters, a too cute purse mini book project, a mini stamp set (hearts) and acrylic block. While there I had a couple of visitors. Friends of ours who had moved to Davenport stopped in with her daughter to see me. That was a nice diversion.
One of the things that this store has started doing during NSD is a scrap off layout contest. They put a die cut sticker underneath 10-15 random chairs. The people who are chosen then have to grab their scissors, trimmer, and adhesive. You then come up to a table where you are given a paper kit, with some coordinating papers, stickers, ribbons, and a couple of other embellishments. You are given 5 minutes to create a layout. Everyone then votes on their favorite layout and the top three layouts win a prize. Last year I was one of the lucky 10 who got to do this and surprise I took 3rd place. Somehow I managed to sit in a chair again this year that had a die cut taped to the bottom. (Next year I am checking out the chairs before I sit down.) There were so many wonderful layouts this year that I have a hard time believing that I took 1st place. I won a Heidi Swapp tool tote bag. These bags are wonder I think that next year I should receive an automatic exemption to the contest.
I was able to finish up the Disney swap items that need to be done by the end of the month, and I completed Girlfriends Tag book. I think that this book will be for Kristen. I finally left around 9;00 that night as once again, I wanted to get home and get some rest before Sarah’s big day.
Too see pictures of this event check out Scrapaganza’s blog.

Modern Sock Monkey

Since I posted about my great find the other day with the sock monkeys, I decided to dig up the girls sock monkeys. They are so cute with their clothes on them, but they are lacking that made with love quality. I did find another sock monkey in with the other animals. Not sure where this one came from. Saturday I am headed to my lss for a mommy and me class and will pick up the sock monkey paper. I can't wait to make this layout. Sould be oh so cute. I will post it when I get it done.

Found: My old monkey.

I recently saw the cutest new scrapbooking paper and embellishments. It had sock monkeys on it. I wanted to buy some, but knew that they only way I would probably be able to use it, would be if I could find my old sock monkey that my Grandma Steinhagen had made for me many years ago. I thought that the monkey was gone for ever. Well today, my mom wanted us to come down and help move things out of her basement so that she could have some work done and what did I find? Not only my monkey, but also my brother's and my sister's elephant. Mom couldn't understand at first why I grabbed them out of the toybox and took them upstairs. Thankfully I had my camera with me and was able to take a few pictures. Now, lets just hope that the store still has the paper in stock next weekend when I get down there. Of course I need to look for a picture of my Grandmother also. I so can't wait to tell the story of my sock monkey. I may even dig out my daughter's sock animals and take a picture showing the old and the new. The girls sock animals were to cute to play with much, but my old monkey was well loved and made with love not mass produced. Can't wait to get this early childhood memory recorded.

A Digital Layout

I took a digital scrapbooking class yesterday. Actually it was part two, I had taken the first part the week before. Even though the instructor used a different program than what I have, I was able to follow along and created my first digital page. It is not super elaborate but I am happy with the results. Now the only question is now that I have a digital layout what should I do with it?

Productive Monday

Since it is Spring Break I have a couple of goals for this week.
1. Is to get some work done around the house and declutter things.
2. To get some scrapbooking time and relaxing time in.

So today I was able to clean up a little in the kitchen and then sorted through about 4 boxes of clothes from the basement. This resulted in 2 large 33 gallon garbage bags of outgrown clothes for Salvation Army a huge stack of clothes for Kristen and one box full of clothes that she will grow into yet. Of course still more to do.
Also managed to rearrange Kristen's room to make it a tad easier for her to get into the room and open her closet. Her room is so small that there really isn't much you can do with it.

I also spent some time working on my puzzle swaps and finished group 1 and got 1/2 way through group 2's. Plan to finish the rest tomorrow afternoon and then put it in the mail.

I have promised the girls that if they help really well in the morning they can have the afternoon and evening to play.

Tinkerbell notebook

Some one requested that I post pictures of the Tinkerbell composition notebook that I completed. So hear are the pictures. Once again these journals are a blast to do. Will have to make more. Hmmm, maybe they will make great presents.

It came in the mail

I received the coolest package in the mail yesterday. I had signed up for a one-one composition swap. You filled out a small questionaire with questions like favorite color, favorite disney character, scrapbooking style etc. We then received someone else's questionaire and were to design a composition book for that person. The person that I received loved Tinkerbell and pinks and purples so I made her a cute little tinkerbell book that Sarah fell in love with. I had said that I might use my journal to plan for our trip to St. Louis this summer. The person who had my name did an outstanding job on the journal. I just love it, she is so creative and included elements that I hadn't even thought of. It is so fun and easy to make these composition notebooks, I plan on creating several more.