Summer Bucket List

So, this weekend Big Picture Classes had a great Creative Crop for National Scrapbook Day.  There were 10 challenges and I found time to play along with a few.  Challenge #3 by Tami Morrison was to create a Summer Bucket List layout.  I LOVE this idea and was so inspired that (instead of just making up my own list) I decided to have conversations with everyone in my family to see what was on their 'wish list' for this summer.   Then I used journal cards to document everyone's Top 5 and created this page...

This was so much fun!  And I am really glad to have this documented as I think it captures a lot about us as a family, my kids' personalities/ages, and what our summer 2013 will likely look like.  I put each person's  first initial on the journal cards to remember which list is whose in the future and  I put boxes by each item so we can check them off when we do those activities.  Hopefully we will check them all off by the end of summer!  :)  Then I plan to create another 12x12 layout with some photos that highlight items from our lists.  I am soooooo going to use this idea again!  Thanks Tami!

I hope you will consider giving this a try too!  It would also be a fun idea to do on New Year's Day...hmmm...I might just have to see what my family's bucket list will be for 2014!  :)  I'd love to see your bucket list if you give this a try so link it up in the comments below and I'll come take a peek!

This Was the Year - 2011 (Photography)

Good morning!  We are surrounded by snow here in the Pacific Northwest.  It has been a lovely couple of days playing outside with my boys and snuggling up by the fire to play games and read books. 

As many of you may know, this past year I became greatly interested in improving my photography skills and took a great class over at Big Picture with Elisha Snow.  I would highly recommend it to anyone looking to learn how to shoot better photos in manual mode with their DSLR camera. 

I thought today I would share a few of my favorite photos from 2011.  I recently created an album over at Paper Coterie called This Was the Year - 2011.  It was a great way to sum up our year and include highlights from each month.  I am hoping they continue to offer this album every year! 

Here are a few that I included in our album:

 This is the deer that we saw in our backyard the first morning in our new house...so exciting!

This photo is a little overexposed but I love how it makes the sculpture look so I left it as is.

And of course I had to include at least one picture from our snow days this week! :)

I'm hoping to get a little crafting done today since we are definitely not going anywhere.  Have a wonderful weekend and I'll be back next week with a few cards to share!

Won't You Bee Mine? - MME challenge

We've had a great weekend, including a family sleepover last night filled with games and laughter. Today we took it easy and I enjoyed a lot of crafting time. I completed a layout and dug into my My Mind's Eye stash to create a card for their current challenge. With a love theme in mind I looked through my Alphabet Soup Girl Playing Cards and found this adorable little bee that was just waiting to bee someone's Valentine! :)

I love this sweet little heart paper from My Mind's Eye Alphabet Soup collection and paired it with some other patterned papers from their Quite Contrary line, some trim from the Lush and Lost & Found collections, and decorative rhinestone brads from the Lush collection. The pink letters are American Crafts pearl thickers.

Here is the My Mind's Eye sketch that Anam created. As you can see, I stuck pretty close to the sketch...just separating my circle brads a bit. And obviously I put the playing card in the place of the heart. I popped the playing card, heart, and letter 'm' up on foam squares for some dimension.

I don't know if I'm going to be able to part with this card...I really love how it all came together! And I'm pretty proud of my photo too...taken completely in manual mode! I adjusted my ISO, shutter speed, and aperture to get everything just right so all I had to do was crop a little before posting it.

Yes, I am loving Elisha's class over at Big Picture (she has a new one coming up in April). And I think you'll be seeing some layouts from me soon because the free class over at Big Picture by Karen Grunberg, Embrace Imperfection, is inspiring me to forget about my layout being 'perfect' (whatever that is) and focus on the memory and story that I want to tell/remember many years from now...because isn't that why I'm scrapbooking in the first place! :) Also, through that class I discovered another one called Layout a Day (LOAD) which sounds like a great way to get a bunch of layouts completed, discover your style, and let go of some of the need for creating a 'perfect' layout. Even if I don't end up doing that class, I think I will challenge myself to create a layout a day for a month sometime this year.

I hope you have a wonderful Valentine's Day and get to spend time with the ones you love!