Summer Lovin' By Susan Tutt

Can you believe we are half way through summer already. Why is it this time of the year goes by so fast and winter seems to drag on forever?? I created a layout documenting our summertime favorites so far. I am sure we will have many more before this summer is over!


I used lots of fun techniques to add texture and dimension to my layout. Using the negative pieces leftover from a package of chipboard letters and some spray paint I created a stencil effect on either end of my page. I also had fun with molding paste and stamps to create the impressions on the upper and lower corners of my layout. Try some new techniques on your summer pages and show us what you come up with, we would love to see what your lovin' this summer!

Summer Lovin' - Share It Here!

Hello, TGIF, and happy summer!! This week's challenge is to scrap your summer photos/memories. Both Virginia and Chrissann have provided some great layouts to inspire you, so please share your summery goodness here!

Summer Lovin' by Virginia Wong

What's not to love about summer? We love the lazy days filled with sunshine galore, having picnics on the deck after running through the sprinkler; wearing shorts and tank tops or pretty summer dresses. All of these day to day activities give this Mama-razzi plenty of photo opportunities! And with those gajillion photos, I scrap! Summer photos are some of my favorites to scrap! I adore the spectrum of vibrant colours and smiling faces!

Here are a few summer layouts that I have created!

This layout sums up what my girls love to do best in the summer - swim, sun through the sprinkler, jump on the trampoline with the sprinkler underneath, and wear their bathing suit all day long! LOL

Supplies:  Ruby Rock It (pattern paper, die cuts, ribbon, brad, gems); Chatterbox (alphas); Cuttlebug (butterfly die)

At the end of a fun filled day, I love moments when there is sisterly love abounding! I love these colours! My girls wear vibrant colourful clothes all year round but during the summer, those colours bring me inspiration galore!

This layout was contributed to Valerie Salmon's Got Sketch blog.

Supplies:  BasicGrey (pattern papers, chipboard accents, cardstock stickers, border stickers); Kaisercraft (gems); American Crafts (pen for journaling and "stitching")

It's important to me to capture even the mundane of events. In this layout, we spent the afternoon exploring.

Supplies:  Kiki Art (pattern papers, chipboard heart); EK Success (border punch); American Crafts (pen for stitching); sun, house and grass designs by Virginia

At the end of summer, I like to create a summary layout of our highlights. Below is a layout from 2006 - 2010 isn't over yet! LOL

Supplies:  Basic Grey (pattern paper, alphas); American Crafts (numbers for 2006, foam butterfly); Prima (flowers); Close to my Heart (pink brads); pink felt flower (source unknown)

As you can see, I love love love to scrap our summer days! :-) Now that I've shared my summer layouts, I would love to see your summer layouts! Please post a link to your summer layouts, ok?

Summer Lovin' By Chriss Hird

We've been so lucky with this weather we've been having lately, hey? Have you found its been giving you ample opportunities for scrappable shots? I sure have! Trips to the beach, the waterpark and just general hanging out in the summer sun, having fun.

There's also some great new lines out right now that reflect this wonderful summer season. One of my new favourite paper companies, that seemed to be a big buzz at the latest CHA, was actually introduced to me by my fellow Inspired Scrapper, Erica (thanks!!) I'm loving Echo Park right now! I find it reminds me of another one of my faves, October Afternoon. They're certainly not the same, but there's something there that links them together for me.

I used Echo Park's "Sweet Summertime" line for my layout. Its so colourful and cheery, really easy to create with.


The line is chock a block full of fun double sided papers and cardstock stickers and alphas. Love it!

Here's what I did with it:


And some details:


These cardstock stickers actually do stick quite well. Do they look like they're coming up? That's because I couldn't make up my mind and re-positioned then a few times...rats! Why couldn't I have gotten it right the first time?! But let's look at the bright side, it goes to show that if you aren't happy with the placement, they do come up fairly easily.


I used complimentary coloured buttons just to add a bit of depth to my page. All in all the page is quite simple, but I loved the outcome.

I hope you're enjoying this beautiful summer and capturing some great memories. I can't wait to see your sweet summer layouts and projects!

Colour Challenge by Erica Perkins

I love the colours in today's colour challenge...makes me think of the East Coast and makes me think of eating lobsters on the beach (even though I've never done this before). The other piece of love of this inspiration page is the layout. What a great grid for photos too.

I have a photoshop program that I barely ever use, so I'm not very proficient at it, but I have learned how to turn a photo to black and white and then erase some of the desaturation to highlight the colour of one part of the photo, like I did here with the red balloon. The balloon was important because it was the first time my son could blow up a balloon fully.

I didn't have a really pale blue in my stash, so I chose this blue and made it my background, using the red and white more as accents. I pulled out some old items from my stash, like old Cosmo Cricket papers, mesh, and Cosmo Cricket blackboard alphas, which I added a few silver beads to.

Supplies used: Bazzill cardstock, Cosmo Cricket pp and blackboard alphas, AC button, magic mesh and misc ribbon and silver beads.

These colours have so much impact. I can't wait to see what you do with them.

Friday, July 23, 2010 - Colour Challenge

Good morning! Welcome to another new challenge at The Inspired Scrapper! This week we are going with a colour challenge based on an inspiration piece that I came across on one of my many travels around the Internet, at a website called weddingtimes.com:



These colours just leapt out at me! Such a great combination of cool, crisp, and clean (white, pale blue) with soft (pink) and hot (red)! These colours also screamed, "Summer!!", and nautical, as Chriss notes in her post.

We would LOVE to see what you do with this irresistable colour combination! Link up and share!

Wishing you a vibrant and colourful summer weekend!
~ Jillian.

Colour Inspiration, by Chriss Hird

This week's colour challenge rocks! These colours together are so cool, they're hot! Red, white and sky blue seems so summery to me - fresh, clean. Nautical themes also come to mind when I see these colours together. Yet when I saw this colour scheme, I had pictures in mind right away - the one's of my daughter and her BFF posing before their first Hip Hop competition. Their shorts were these colours exactly and now I had a starting point for this layout. See how just one simple idea, suggestion, inspiration, challenge can get your creative juices flowing?!



Fancy Pants' "Wishful Thinking" line really caught my eye. Penants and banners are really the new "It-Girl" of the summer. I hand cut the banner and swirl from two different patterened papers in the collection, and intertwined them. As the girls' Hip Hop competition is the subject of the layout, I felt the need to grunge it up a little. I downloaded a font from www.dafont.com and printed it on patterened paper. I then adhered it to chipboard, cut it out and inked the edges.





The girls received a pin from the event, which I decided to incorporate into the layout. I thought this would be a good idea, as we all know what would happen to it if I didn't. It would get put into a High School Musical jewelry box, occasionally get pinned to something, end up in the junk drawer before being lost for good. So instead, I clipped off the pin and used my double sided tape to adhere it to the page. Now she's got it forever!



What do these colours say to you? Go with your intuition, play, experiment and most of all, have fun with it!

Happy (belated) Birthday Jillian

I hope it was a great one ... and i hope you are off to a great start on your next little trip around that great big glowing ball in the sky!

Happy Happy Birthday Jillian!

Wishing you a very happy birthday and a fabulous year to come!

Happy Birthday JIllian

Hope you've enjoyed the beautiful day today - what a lovely day for a birthday, what a lovely person to celebrate!

From Chriss.

Birthday Wishes to Jillian

Happy Birthday to you... may your next spin around the sun be full of adventure and wonderful memories (to scrap of course).

Happy Birthday Jillian!!

Just a quick post to say Happy Birthday to a dear friend and fellow scrapbooker - Jillian!! :)
Hope you have a wonderful day!

Beach Challenge - Link Up Here!

Summer's in full swing - you must have a whole batch of new beach photos to scrap by now! Or, if you've got pictures from summers past - pull them out and get them done, then share with us here!

Beach Challenge - by Jo West

This weeks challenge is all about the Beach ... afterall, it's summer and hopefully a lot of you are logging in some sun time by a beach and getting in a whole lot of photo ops ... just dont forget to lather on the sunscreen. I have a "vintage" inspired beach layout to share with you

I love this paper die cut paper the second i laid my eyes on it. Primarily because it was postage shaped and it had a lot of detail. When it came to actually scrapping, I didn't want all of the detail of the paper to show so i used a larger photo (5x7) and i covered a portion of the patterned paper with lace cardstock as it had kind of a bubbly feel to it. I don't have any beach type embellishments so i downloaded some Marie Antoinette inspired mermaids from one of my fave graphics shops on Etsy and simply printed and cut them out. I also made a flower (i am just hooked on these right now) out of cardstock, tulle and tinsel ribbon with a little mermaid poking out of the top ... I also used bling to emulate the waves. Thanks so much for stopping by ... i hope i have offered you a bit of inspiration to spend some time scrapping your beach photos! Please link up your layouts, we would love to see them!

Sketch Challenge - Link Up Here!

Sketch Challenge by Jo West

Wowzers, don'cha just love Erica & Karen's take on this weeks sketch!!! Both of these designers took an interesting approach, customizing their layouts to their photos.

I took a fairly straight forward approach on this sketch ... i cut the main picture about 1/4 of an in narrower than shown in the sketch and i framed the 3 small pictures ... other than that it's almost the same as the sketch. I cut tree's from the patterned paper to make my own embellishments, coating them with glossy accents, a bit of glitter and popping them up on the layout. This sketch is real easy to use and another great way to get 4 pictures on a page ... I hope you are inspired to try it!

Supplies used: Hamby overlay,BG & Kaisercraft patterned paper, BG paper tape & Websters Pages letter stickers.

Sketch Challenge by Erica Perkins

I love sketches. I didn't alwasy love them, but as my time gets more and more spread out, I find sketches are a great way to get layouts done. And what's great is that one sketch can be used different ways making the final products unique as you can see from Karen's and my layouts. Same sketch, different takes. Here's the Becky Fleck sketch we used.

I wanted to scrap a series of photos I took of my son fishing this past spring/summer, the problem was that the 5x7 I wanted to use was in landscape format, not in portrait, so I flipped the sketch to make it work for me. I also increase the size of the three smaller photos a bit. I kept this layout very simple with just paper, journaling, alphas and some stitching. If I had any little fishies, or a fish punch I may have added those, but I didn't let that stop me from doing the layout. I just worked with what I had.

Supplies used: Bazzill cardstock, BoBunny Sunkissed patterned paper and alphas (supplied to me by ScrapShotz), font from scrapnfonts (scrap casual).

Sketch Challenge by Karen

Its Friday and that means a new challenge :)  This week we were challenged to use a sketch as inspiration for a layout.

This is the sketch (Pagemaps July 09).  I altered the sketch a bit to suit my pictures.  I moved the row of small photos to the side of the main photos and increased their size a bit.  Then moved the title and journalling over to the right a bit.   The butterflies on the sketch I changed to circles and buttons to match the patterned paper better.  The rest is basically the same.   Here is my take on the sketch.

 

Supplies : Basic Grey Origins, AC Thickers, Rangers Glossy Accents, buttons,ink

Notebook Edge Punch

These are some pics of some bears we saw along the roadside up near Whistler. 

Hope this sketch inspires you to be creative this week.

Scraplift Challenge by Debby Visser

This weeks challenge is to 'scraplift'!

In Jillian's earlier post she gave some great information about lifting others work; the pros and cons (?!). And some great links to others view of scraplifting as well.

I for one am A-OKAY with scraplifting; with proper credit of course!

I always feel honoured when someone likes my design enough to want to lift it. And if I lift, I always give credit to the original inspiring piece.

This week I lifted myself. I do that now and then when my inspiration is just 'flat'. I go through an older album and wait for the 'inspiration' to hit me.

This layout did that job;



It was the row of consecutive photos and the matting that inspired me.

I turned it into a double pager, as I had a few more photos and I couldn't cut them down too much.



I found that awesome die cut paper at the dollar store! Can you believe it! I think it was 4 sheets for a $1! They only had these two left, otherwise I would have bought tons of it! LOVE it!
Here are few close ups of my design:





My hubby actually said this was one of his favourites of mine. I love that he looks at and loves my scrapbooking. (I think he likes it cause it has to do with football, lol)

If you have a chance, play along! We would love to see your lifts!

And I know this is Monday and load day was Friday, but we have been SO busy I just couldn't find the 5 minutes to finish this layout and load it up till now. So please forgive my lateness. :)

Have a great Monday
Debby

Scraplift Challenge, Take 2

Here is another scraplift comparison for this week's challenge:

My scraplift inspiration -



This is a layout that I had bookmarked at 2Peas by Kathy Martin. (Kathy also has a blog, found HERE). This layout attracted me for scraplifting for three main reasons -

1. Because of it's bright, bold colours and patterns, which are always a hit with me, as well as it's linear tendencies, which I gravitate towards always.

2. Because it used one 4x6 photo with a second 4x6 photo that had been cropped. This appealed to me because I can use the photos I have on hand - no fussy/fancy enlargements or smaller reprints.

3. For some reason, 2 seems to be a magic number with me. I commonly find myself with two 4x6 photos from one moment or event that I'd like to scrap and I sometimes find it challenging to create a 12x12 page with only 1 or 2 4x6's that doesn't end up looking like too much space for too few photos. This layout handles my dilemna nicely!

So, here is my scraplift:



I stuck pretty close to the original design, while obviously using different colours/patterns. Oftentimes when I scraplift, my final result ends up looking very different from the original, but not so much in this case. This layout was particularily satisfying for me to finish because I've had these two photos kicking around for years and I knew that I wanted to note them somehow, but could never quite put an actual layout together. I've decided that I am going to try to use the photos I have on hand, especially the older ones, so this scraplift gave me just the fix I needed to get this layout done.

Thanks for stopping by!
Jillian.

Scraplift Challenge - Friday, July 2, 2010

Hello again, and as always, Happy Friday!! Here we are, in July already, and there is fun and festivities all around us! Today we find ourselves sandwiched between Canada Day yesterday, and Independence Day in the U.S. in two more days. Summer is in full swing! There are just so many things to love about summer!

One of my favorite things about summer is all the photo ops! I came across this post recently - 100 Summer Photo Opportunities. Great ideas, and wonderful inspiration, no?!

Now on to this week's challenge - Scraplifting! I would venture to guess that most, if not all, of us have scraplifted in some capacity at some point in our scrapbooking lives, wouldn't you agree? For me, scraplifting works a lot like sketches - it jumpstarts my mojo. Or, at least it takes the place of my mojo if I'm lacking!

I scraplift for other reasons too - sometimes it's because I'd like to try something outside of my usual style, or because I flat out love somebody's layout and want to make one just like it for myself! I think it is safe to say that the scrapbooking community agrees that scraplifting is completely acceptable so long as proper credit is given to the original source.

Coincidentally, I came across this recent post about scraplifting on Lisa Kisch's blog.

Here's another post about the pros (and cons?!) of scraplifting...

So, here is one of my scraplifts for this week:



I scraplifted one of my all-time favorite scrappers, Lisa McGarvey. Lisa was, until recently, a Garden Girl at 2Peas in a Bucket. She has also had her work published in some of my favorite scrapbooking magazines. I have always, always admired Lisa's great photography of everyday moments. Her pages are always very energetic, and her composition pleases me every single time. She also adds such amazing detail without looking cluttered or over done. Plus, because she has two boys who, like mine, are adorable and spirited, I can related to a lot of her everyday life. I'm sure if we ever met, we'd be totally BFF's right away. Um, ok...maybe I'm getting a little carried away...one thing scraplifting should definitely NOT look like is stalking. That's taking it too far!

Lisa's layout that I lifted, as seen below, was from the May/June 2009 issue of Scrapbooks Etc:



Other than using a different colour scheme, and adding my title to the top of the page instead of at the bottom, I think I kept pretty close to Lisa's layout. I even incorporated the use of arrows in my layout, just as Lisa had.

To see more of Lisa's great work, you can look up her gallery on 2Peas, or you can visit her blog, Four McGarveys.

Chose a layout that appeals to you, that you've earmarked or made note of, and share your scraplifts here. Come on, I know you've got some!!



Wishing you many summery photo ops,
Jillian.