These were some pages I did for a calendar a couple of years ago. I really want to try another one, this one was 12x12, I think I may try a smaller version next time, or not wait until January to start it! It was a great way to get rid of some photos I had left over from other layouts and small pictures. It's also a great opportunity to do themed pages and get rid of anything left over from the year before. For the pictures I didn't want to adhere permanently I used photo corners so they could be removed.

There aren't a lot of girls in my family, I only have nephews so I really wanted to a girl page. I found this photo invitation of my friend's daughter and had to do something with it! I had this super cute paper from American Crafts that I wanted to show off, so I kept it simple. The fact that she is adorable doesn't hurt either!

I'm trying to get into the Christmas spirit early! I came up with a cute little card for a card challenge I found. I love that we can use more than just red and green for Christmas these days; I love the pink and blue. I'll be making more with the holidays coming soon, I'll keep you all posted!

N'Awlins

Justin and I finally had made a trip to New Orleans for a couple of days and he got called back to work early, so we couldn't stay. Luckily, I was still able to get some good photos of our day. We went to the National WWII Museum, which was so educational, I was surprised at how much I learned. I used the ticket stub as an embellishment since I didn't have any actual photos of it.

This is one of my first pages and certainly not my favorite, but I really liked the idea I came up with. Not being one to ever throw a photo away (which kind of explains the addiction to scrapping) I wanted to have my class photo involved in the layout, without being the layout. I didn't want to cut it up either, so I made a pocket, cut a hole and voila! I had to print out the Strawberry Shortcake images off of the internet and cut them out, I couldn't find any of this style anywhere. I put an eyelet in the top of the photo and added a ribbon as a pull.

Justin had a lot of great pictures from commercial dive school. I made it as masculine as I could without overdoing it, using natural and neutral backgrounds. I used the front of a card he received with the logo on it.

Starbucks Kareoki night! Charlie, Kelly and I rocked "Jessie's Girl"! (Well, we thought we did!)

Laissez les bon temps roule!

Here are the pages I did from Mardi Gras! I was still in Lafayette, LA for Mardi Gras and my friend took me to the festivities. Mardi Gras is a week long affair in the south, and they get down! It is truly a site to be seen, there are parades, beads, parties, beads and good times. Did I mention the beads? The most common thing you will hear at Mardi Gras is "Laissez les bon temps roule!" which means "Let the Good Times Roll!" and they do! I actually did a three page layout about the experience, and love how they came out! I didn't use traditional Mardi Gras colors (green, gold and purple), simply because I couldn't really find anything that sparked my creativity, but these bold colors work great and I found a couple of patterned papers that had fleur-de-lis on them. I had a hard time finding Mardi Gras embellishments here in the Northwest, so I wandered the craft store and found some feathers and beads and made my own. Not only did I spend less on my embellishments, but they went a lot further than the typical embellishments, which made it easier to tie the three pages together. It was important for me to try to bring the feeling of Mardi Gras to the pages, so there is a lot of feathers, glitter and embellishments. My friend Charlie made the mask on the "Character" page which is beautiful and works great.