favorite layouts of 2011

Are you ready for 2012?

It's almost here, which is so hard for me to believe.

It seems that 2011 has just FLOWN by, hasn't it?

Anyway, I really enjoy seeing others' blog posts with their favorite layouts of the year and have done one of these posts the past 2 or 3 years so I thought I'd go ahead and do it again after seeing some of the Scrapbook Nook ladies' work.

Some might be faves because of the pictures, some because of the design or the journaling.

There are some pages that I made this year that I really loved but they are out for pub so they are out of the running here. Hopefully next year I can get more organized and submit more!

Here goes, in no particular order: (and, since I couldn't pick  ten I chose 11 in honor of 2011)

 

I hope that 2012 brings you much happiness and many wonderful things! 

Pebbles Inc. guest designer

If I had to choose which collections from the last Craft and Hobby Association (CHA) show were my favorites, one of them would be the Fresh Goods collection from Pebbles Inc.

Because of this, I was so excited to get to guest design for Pebbles this month! I got to use the Fresh Goods line along with the cute new With Love line.

Here is one of the layouts that I created for this assignment and you can see my other projects on the Pebbles blog here: http://pebblesinc.blogspot.com/2011/12/guest-designer-becky-williams-and.html

I combined the two collections for this page and think they work together so well! 

Here are some detail shots: 

I love to mix fonts and colors of alphas and was even able to sneak in this cute "Love" stamp. 

Pebbles Inc. is  one of those companies that just keeps getting better and better over the years.

It sure was fun to get to work with these cute products. 

Thanks for stopping by my blog today. I'll share some more of these projects with you tomorrow. 

Have a great day! I'm off to decorate a gingerbread train with the kids. 

p.s. there's a giveaway on the Pebbles blog today, too, so make sure to leave a comment for your chance to win! 

http://pebblesinc.blogspot.com/2011/12/guest-designer-becky-williams-and.html

Happy Birthday to Sarah

In honor of my daughter turning 6 today I thought I'd share six of my favorite Sarah pages from this past year:

She is such a fun, silly girl and such a blessing in our family. 

Happy birthday, Sarah!

Our Not-So-Merry Elf is 8 months old today!

Today is a great day for me to post a new Lily layout!

I created this page for Bella Blvd using this as inspiration:

And here is my layout: 

This cute girl wasn't so happy to have her picture taken with her little Santa hat on! I'm glad that I was at least able to get one picture with her smiling before the tears started. 

You can see the other Bella designers' takes on this color inspiration on the Bella Blvd blog today

http://bellablvd.typepad.com/bella_blvd/2011/12/tuesday-inspiration-1.html

This sweet girl is 8 months old today which is just so hard for me to believe. 

I hope that you are having a great day!

Merry Christmas to you!

I know that it's Christmas Eve but since I may not get on here tomorrow I wanted to wish all of you a very merry Christmas to you and your loved ones.

Here is the card that we sent out- of course it had to have some chevron stripes on it this year! My sister-in-law, Ginger, took the picture for us while we were on one of our little weekend getaways with them, the template is from an Etsy store and I put it together and got a great deal on printing them from Snapfish. I think I'll be doing our cards this way from now on.

Guess what?

Santa brought my gift a little bit early...it's SNOWING!

Yes, we were teased a bit by the weatherman saying we might get a bit of snow yesterday and...nothing.

But today it's snowing and it's so beautiful!

I have a brother-in-law in Houston who would rather it be 70 degrees for Christmas but I LOVE to have snow! It always feels more like Christmas to me when there's snow on the ground.

Merry Christmas and may God bless you and your family and friends with joy and peace this holiday season.

it's almost Christmas!

Can you believe it?

It seems like each year Christmas comes faster and faster and goes by more and more quickly.

My husband likes to tease the girls about waiting a little longer to have our Christmas- opening gifts and all that jazz- just so that it will last a little bit longer. I mean, once you are done, you are done and have to wait a whole other year. They don't tend to like that idea very much, which I am sure is no surprise.

Well, now it's almost here.

How about we celebrate by me sharing a layout that I created for Jillibean Soup with some pictures of my girls from last year. Hopefully it won't take me a full year to scrap the pictures from THIS Christmas but I had fun using this year's Jillibean Soup to scrap this page.

For one of our assignments this month we were supposed to use the 6x6 paper pads (anything except for Christmas Eve Chowder) so I mixed up a little bit of this and that and piled it on a piece of white corrugated paper from Jillibean with a mix of corrugated and cardstock alphas and some Pea Pod Parts and some Soup Labels and other stickers and twine.

silly girls! They sure do keep life interesting and fun. 

Have a very Merry Christmas! 

some My Little Shoebox

Good morning!

Thanks to everyone who stopped by for Stephanie's blog hop yesterday. I think we can safely say that we gave her a nice surprise on her birthday. She had more surprises waiting at her office that I hope she enjoyed as well. Laura Vegas, our design team leader, did such a great job organizing everything!

I am up to my ears in Christmas prep and lots of scrappy projects (some I will share with you in about a week since it's for a fun guest design spot) so that I can meet my deadlines before Christmas. Right now the companies are in full-speed-ahead mode as they prepare for the coming trade show next month where the new products will be released. I am getting so anxious to see what new things will be coming our way and excited to get to create some things for the show!

I thought I'd just share a quick card today using some cute products from My Little Shoebox:

And, I don't think I've shared this here yet:

Have a wonderful day!

A Birthday Surprise Blog Hop for Bella Blvd's Stephanie Hunt

Good morning and welcome to the last stop of a very special birthday blog hop for the fabulous Stephanie Hunt, the brains and creative juice behind Bella Blvd.

We thought it would be fun to wish her Happy Birthday in a BIG way by having each of the participating bloggers create a birthday card especially for Stephanie for her special day. There are 26 of us participating in this hop to spread a little bit of birthday cheer and to wish a Happy birthday to you, Stephanie! We hope that it's a great day for you!

If you are following along in this hop you should have started at this morning at the Bella Blvd blog where hopefully Stephanie has found a wonderful surprise waiting for her in the form of this blog hop.

Simply follow the links on each blog in the hop so that you don't miss anything.

AND, since we are doing random giveaways as well you REALLY don't want to miss any of the blogs or the card inspiration found at each stop along the way. I'll tell you more about that in a minute.

If you just happened upon my blog and you haven't seen all of the other cards before mine, please head on over to the Bella blog where all of the fun begins. You should have arrived here at my blog from the blog of Wendy Wagner.

It is such a fun thing for me to be a part of this hop and I am so happy to be a member of the design team at Bella Blvd. Thank you to Stephanie for giving me this opportunity!

Here is the card that I created using one of the most popular Bella papers, this cupcake patterned paper from the Sweet Celebration collection. It was brought back by popular demand because it was so cute!

I just love the bright, cheery colors and patterns of the Bella collections. I'm glad that this cute cupcake paper has made a reappearance! Isn't it so fun? 

Now, I mentioned earlier that there will be some giveaways during this hop, right? 

Even thought it's Stephanie's birthday, we have some gifts for a few of you lucky readers as well! We know how generous and giving Stephanie is and we know she would never have a fun blog hop without a few giveaways up for grabs, too. We got permission from Robin, who works alongside Stephanie in the office, to pick TEN lucky winners who will each receive a Bella Blvd collection. All you need to do to be entered in the random drawings is to leave Stephanie your birthday wishes in the comment section. You have lots of opportunities to up your chances since you can leave a comment on each blog you visit as you go through the blog hop. There are 26 blogs, plus the Bella Blvd blog, for a total of 27 chances to get your name in the pot. We will randomly choose winners from 10 randomly chosen blogs and announce them on Friday!  

What do you think of that? 

Pretty cool, huh?

Don't forget to leave a comment here for your chance to win a collection from Bella Blvd and make sure that you leave a way for us to contact you if you're one of the winners. If you'd like to, head on over to Stephanie's blog to leave her some birthday wishes there, too. 

We hope that you have enjoyed our little hop today and that you've found all kinds of card inspiration to go and create some of your own cards for someone you love. Thanks so much for stopping by!

Have a wonderful day! 

mixing it up again

Good morning!

I know it's a little early, I am not even sure why my body thinks that 3:30 is an acceptable time for me to wake up but it seems like the last couple of weeks at least it's been that way. I really need to figure out what the deal is. I am usually awake long before baby Lily starts to make a peep.

So, since I'm up and I hadn't yet scheduled a blog post for today here I am.

While I should be addressing Christmas cards so that they can get in the mail before Valentine's Day (that's what happened last year) instead I have been checking friends' blogs, reading this and that other interesting/fun thing but not doing anything particularly productive. I need to get a package ready to send but I haven't done that, either. It's not that I am bah humbug this year but there is definitely something different and I am not so cheery- wanting to get the halls decked as soon as Thanksgiving was over this year like I normally am. I have been a bit too cranky. We still don't have all of our decorations out, there's nothing out on the lawn like we usually have because Matt's been working and recovering and we've been dealing with sick kids and running here and there and everything else. We're just behind this year.

Most of the scrapping that I've done lately has been for an assignment but the other day, at some insane hour of the morning since I was up anyway, I scrapped a page using some new things in my stash- a bit of Crate Paper Peppermint, some October Afternoon Farmhouse, some American Crafts Thickers. It was fun to play a bit and mix things up the way I like to do.

The pictures were taken a few weeks ago when we actually had a little bit of snow- it wasn't much but playing in it after the kids got out of school was a necessity because it's not often that they actually GET to play in snow. Homework waited that day and we got out and played, did snow angels, had a snowball fight- the kids thought it was hilarious to throw the snowballs in a way that I'd get hit right in the face or so it would run down my shirt since my coat wasn't zipped up enough, apparently. It was nice to be playing with them instead of feeling like a drill sergeant trying to get them to do homework or chores or to stop fighting or banging on this or that.

Anyway, here is the page with pictures of Hailey making snow angels and having a wonderful time.

I used some Twinery twine on the flowers (Fiskars punch) and a mix of embellishments from OA, AC and Crate.Funny thing, if you are much into scrapping you totally know what those initials are and we commonly get into our scrappy lingo where other people have no idea what we're talking about! Ever since I saw those cute gray American Crafts alphas I'd been coveting them and finally got some. 

Good grief, I get overly chatty at 4 in the morning. 

My 4 year old shared a new word with me yesterday- spectabulous. 

So, whatever you are doing this weekend, I hope that it is spectabulous!

sharing some more Paper Bakery love

Good morning once again.

Today I thought I'd share with you some of my other creations made with the Library Book add-on kit from the Paper Bakery this month.

First off, here's a card:

I used a Fiskars punch to make the flowers out of the tissue paper and used my EK Success zigzag border punch to make the chevron stripes. The tag by itself was beautiful but I thought the flowers added just the right touch. 

Here's a little close-up shot of the flowers: 

I used the tissue paper again to make the ruffle on the top of this layout about our summer trip to Galveston Island in Texas, not too far from where we have family living outside of Houston. 

I appreciate so much that you could stop by my blog today. 

What are you up to this weekend? 

Are you ready for the coming holidays? 

It's hard to believe that Christmas is less than two weeks away!

What is your favorite Christmas treat? 

I hope that you have a great weekend!

hot off the press!

Just in case you haven't seen it yet, the brand new Bella Blvd newsletter is up now! Check it out for lots of gorgeous inspiration and even a giveaway.

You can find out more here: 

http://bellablvd.typepad.com/bella_blvd/2011/12/decembers-bella-buzz-newsletter-is-here.html

The Paper Bakery!

Good morning!

How is  your week going so far?

Are you ready for the holidays?

It looks like Christmas exploded at our house- there are storage containers all over the downstairs, remnants of treat making in the kitchen, toys all over the living room floor...

We just have to make it through the rest of this week and then the kids will be home for Christmas break, we can relax a bit and  hopefully clean things up, too. We've just been running around like crazy and making our rounds to the doctors as well.

This month I had the fun opportunity of guest designing for the Paper Bakery, a fun little kit club that specializes in project kits that are great for altered items and also things like layouts and cards.

Here is the cute kit that I got to work with:

You can get your kit here:

http://sarahspaperbakery-monthlykitclub.blogspot.com/2011/12/december-2011-kits.html

Here is one of the layouts that I created with this kit: 

and some close-ups of some details on the page:

These are just hand-cut hearts and I used my EK Success border punch for the chevrons. 

cute blue Jillibean Soup alphas

The tissue paper in the kit was so cute! I used one of my Sizzix dies to cut the flower and then bunched up some of the blue trim to make the flower center and a piece of a fabric strip for the tie. 

The brown flower came in the kit and the others were cut from the same flower die that I used for the tissue paper flower. 

I'll share some more things tomorrow!

Thanks so much, Sarah, for the chance to guest design this month. 

I hope that you all have a wonderful day!

Thanks so much for stopping by. 

new Jillibean Soup page

One thing that rings so true at our house is that every one of our children is so different.

Sure, there are similarities but there are also little personality quirks that make each one unique.

My almost-6 year old is quite the silly one, always doing crazy things and coming up with wierd ideas that just make me laugh or drive me crazy.

Here's a page I made about her for Jillibean Soup that's up on their blog today:

You can see more of the Jillibean designers' work and see the new monthly sketch by Julie Bonner here: 

http://jillibeansoup.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/12/layouts-and-a-sketch-contest-on-thursday.html

Have a wonderful day!

a Jillibean Soup sketch contest with PageMaps!

Good Monday morning to you!

Do you love PageMaps and Jillibean Soup?

PageMaps is hosting a contest where you could win some Jillibean!

All you have to do is create a page based on this sketch:

http://pagemaps.blogspot.com/2011/12/jillibean-soup-sketch-contest.html

Create your page and leave a comment at the PageMaps blog post using the link above by January 1, 2012 (can you believe it?!) and you could win some Christmas Eve Chowder from Jillibean Soup!

a sneak peek

I have the fun opportunity to do a couple of guest spots this month and thought I'd share a few sneaks of some of the projects I made for one of them:

I'll share more soon!