A Fond Farewell to HMITM

It is with sadness that I'm announcing that we are posing the final HMITM challenge this week. I have played at this challenge for years, long before I was invited to join the design team. HMITM is one of the longest running scrapbook challenges out there, so it was an extremely hard decision to retire it. In the past year or so, participation in the challenge has dwindled, and so we decided it was time to put HMITM to bed. (I'm refusing to say that we're retiring it completely because I'm secretly hoping that some day we might resurrect it.)

Anna-Karin's challenge this week is a perfect complement to this week's challenge over at The Color Room. She named her challenge "Frosty the Snowman," and she asked us to:

• Do a winter or Christmas themed layout
• Depict snow on your layout (here are a few examples: snowflakes, torn white paper hills, dry embossing, organza, paint, vellum etc.)
• Use glitter
• Use at least three shades of blue (but you can use other colors too)
• Use something shiny or transparent

Here's The Color Room challenge:

 

And here's the page I made. I used Lydell's sketch as well as the palette as my jumping off point. (Yikes, I see that my colors are way off now that they're posted right near each other! I had the challenge up on my computer screen and I could've sworn that I was using the right colors!)

 

 

Here are some detail shots. I used some REALLY, REALLY old stuff on this page. The snowflake papers are by Debbie Mumm, Rhonna Farrer, and Sandylion (2005 is the date on that paper). I also used vellum that's been in my stash for nearly a decade. The beaded snowflakes are old Jolee's stickers. I love those and bought a whole bunch of packages so I won't run out! I initially was going to go the lazy route and use glittery Thickers for the glitter part of the challenge but in the end, I felt like a cheat, so I broke out the Stickles and added some glitter to my punched vellum border.

 

I've had these kraft word stickers by Making Memories in my stash forever and never used them before. I wanted to include journaling but really didn't have anything much to say about these silly photos, and I found some words that worked in this package.

 

These snowflakes were cut out of an old Rhonna Farrer patterned paper. There are some more sparkles on that "Limited Edition" sticker.

 

The snowmen are cut from a My Mind's Eye paper that came in a giant paper pad I got a couple of years ago from Michael's. They have sparkly scarves. I was giving my layout a last glance before photographing it and decided it needed a little something else. That something else came in the form of these sparkly domes that I thought looked just like snowballs.

I'm having second thoughts about saying goodbye to HMITM as I'm typing this blog post. :( It really does make me so sad, but I've witnessed it dying a slow death and it just pains me to see the interest continue to dwindle. Thank you for letting me share my sad goodbye. And thank you for stopping by my blog and reading about my layout!

 

Celebrate Wacky December {at HMITM}

It was my turn this week to post a challenge at How Much Is Too Much. I have a source for wacky holidays that I share with my students, and I consulted my wacky holiday calendar for December and found out:

December is Bingo's Birthday Month.
It's also Rising Star Month.
And it's National Tie Month.
The first week of December is Cookie Cutter Week.
December 5 is Bathtub Party Day!

So...I challenge you to use:
* A bingo card (if you don't have these in your stash, just google "bingo card" under Google Images, and you'll find a gazillion).
* Use something that you can tie--ribbons, twine, raffia, etc.
* Use at least 5 stars.
* Use punches or cutters or a shape templates.
* Use your imagination and whatever product you want to create "bubbles" on your page.

(It's a good thing I didn't choose National Gazpacho Day!)

I used the sketch and palette from the current challenge at The Color Room to make my page.

When I saw this color combination, I immediately thought of Dawson, one the original collections by BasicGrey. My husband loves the cheesy touristy photo ops, and I'm doing a whole album about that called Poser. This page is going into that book. I'm still trying to find a good place in my new home to photograph my layouts.

Here are a few closeups. To make my "bubbles" for the challenge. I punched circles out of one of the Dawson papers and added glossy accents to give them dimension and mounted them on the stars with pop dots.

I found a Jenni Bowlin Bingo card that had the orange and blue to match the colors in the palette. There were other colored numbers on the card, so overlapped to hide them. I used my Zutter Distrezz-it-All to rough up the edges on my page.

Thank you so much for stopping by my blog and taking a look at my page today!

Apple a Day {HMITM + WIP}

Making my page for our current challenge at How Much is Too Much coincided with work on my October Work in Progress kit, and when I opened the box, I discovered that the kit would be perfect for Janet's Johnny Appleseed challenge:

Our challenge this time is going to do a layout using apples in it. So it can be a recipe page, layout about fall or anything that uses apples. Since apples come in three colors I want the colors of the layout to have red, yellow and green in them.
3 apples
3 red,
3 yellow, and
3 green embellishments - ( buttons, brads, twine)

I'm a teacher, so I get a school portrait taken every year, and I never know what to do with them. I decided this challenge was the perfect opportunity to document my apple-a-day ritual, which I plan to add to my weight-loss album.

My hidden journaling reads: During the school year, I eat an apple a day. Every day, I bring an apple in my lunch. My favorite is apple is the honeycrisp. My apple-a-day habit started when I began Weight Watchers. I bring a knife and cut my apple into small slices so I can take a long time eating it. I usually bring a frozen Weight Watchers Smart One or a Lean Cuisine, which gets eaten pretty fast, and then I cut my apple and enjoy it for the rest of my lunch time. (School portrait - Fall 2011)

Here are a few details. I cut the flower and punched the apple image out of some Crate Paper papers from the kit. The little typewriter was from a Jillibean Soup paper. I added that green apple from an old October Afternoon paper.

I used the space in between the apple images on that pattern above to cut out the banner shapes. The border sticker came in the kit. It's also by Crate Paper.

Here's a coseup of my hidden jouranling card. I added a border sticker and a paper clip for some of my red accents to meet the challenge.

These nifty fruit labels came from a Crate Paper paper--there's a whole sheet of them, and I just love this ruler paper, also by Crate Paper.

Thanks so much for stopping by my blog and reading about my page!

Home Sweet Home {HMITM No. 180}

We have a new challenge up at How Much Is Too Much, and it was my turn to create the challenge. We're in the process of buying a new house (our street address will be 4936), so for this challenge, I challenged everyone to make a layout using...

• topic: your home (could be your whole house, a specific room, your yard, etc.)
• a house embellishment (could be prefabricated or handmade)
• choose a room in your house and use the colors as the basis for your layout
• 4 rub-ons
• 9 buttons and/or brads
• 3 labels or tags
• 6 patterned papers

For my colors, I chose my dining room (actually, these colors show up throughout my house):

I used mostly green, cream, and yellow, with a little red, which shoes up in my china cabinet if you look closely. It's been raining for days, and I can't seem to get a decent picture inside my house these days, but here it is. I tend to use a straight stitch on my pages, but I wanted to do a more decorative stitch around the edge of my page because originally when I started designing my page I had a lot more white space. I've said it before, though--I'm white-space challenged. Probably because I'm working on an 8 x 8 canvas. At least that's my excuse. And I'm sticking to it, LOL!

The journaling is a little hard to read in my photo, so here it is: It's what I shouted when I saw it. We had been driving by our lot every weekend since we had signed the contract, and it sat unchanged. Just an empty plot of land. Dirt, grass, a few trees, and the promise of something wonderful. Then all of a sudden, all that changed, and we had a hole in the ground. Our dream home was becoming a reality.

Here are some details. I've been on a mission use some of my old stash into my pages. Most of the stuff on here is pretty old. The green background paper is really old Fancy Pants. The yellow sparkly daisies are cut from an old--and I mean ancient--K&Co paper. The leaves are by Scenic Route (I'll be so sad when I run out of that paper). For my house part of the challenge, I cut out the little birdhouses from an old paper I've had from when I started scrapping over a decade ago! It pays to hoard, does't it?! We had to use 3 labels on our page (I'm not counting hte "Stop! I need a picture) for one of those). The two square labels in the photo below are actually one label cut in half and layered.

The labels are pretty old--from Fontwerks (are they even still around?). And how I love those K&Co. fabric brads. So pretty with all the little jewels. I hoard them, too! The butterflies are from the internet, printed on photo paper and then cut out. That little green circular thing is also VERY old--it's by K&Co. Remember when washers were popular years ago? K&Co. made some word washer stickers--and yeah, I bought them--and they pretty much have sat in my stash for many years--but I am little by little trying to use these things on my page--just tucking them into a cluster of embellishments sort of disguises their old-ness, I hope! You can also see two of the other papers I used in the photo below--Cosmo Cricket (red) and Jillibean Soup (yellow). And you can see that my Heidi Swapp chipboard letters are brown and ot black the way they appear above.

On this next picture, you can see my two "fresh eye" additions. (In case you don't know what I mean by that--a while back, I discovered that it helps to wait a day to photograph my layout because I always find a way to add something to improve my page). I added the home definition sticker (by Making Memories) and the second birdhouse--I felt I needed some red on the left.

I hope you'll play along this week. It's a really fun challenge, and a good excuse to document your own sweet home!

Thank you so much for stopping by my blog and reading about my page!

Take a Chill Pill

...'Cause it's Relaxation Day! True story. And we're celebrating Relaxation Day with our newest challenge at How Much Is Too Much. Anna-Karin came up with a clever challenge:

- About something that you find relaxing.
- Close your eyes and dig into your stash of scrap patterned papers and randomly pick out at 6 or more pieces of papers and use those on your layout. No peeking!
- Do the same thing and pick 10 or more random buttons, ribbons or pearls.
- Use 3 bits and pieces lying around on your desk (not patterned papers). If you have a clean desk, use 3 left-overs from your last project.
- 1 recycled item

I used this sketch from Creative Scrappers as a starting point (ever since I got on the Creative Scrappers design team, I set a scrappy goal to make a layout for each of their sketches):

Here's the page I came up with:

I have to confess that I do not really love my page, but I did have lots of fun making it.

I scratched my head when I read the second two requirements. I have all my scraps organized by manufacturer in files with the whole sheets, and my embellishments are also very organized, so trying to just reach in and grab wasn't going to be an option.

Here's what I decided I'd do: I run a challenge at 2Peas called The Stash Challenge, so I have lists of manufacturers and types of embellishments on my computer that I use to draw from when I post the challenges. I used Random.org to pick random numbers, and then I counted down the lists. Here's what I came up with for paper manufacturers: Luxe Designs, Sassafras Lass, SEI, Paper Salon, Scenic Route, and American Crafts. My embellishments were lace, baker's twine, weather accents, charms, bird, decorative brads, flowers, swirls, epoxy stickers, stamp.

Fi Kenward, Tracee Provis, and I were video-chatting on Skype as we were picking our embellishments, so we could check up on each other and make sure we wouldn't cheat! What I did, once I had my lists was go to my manufacturer folders and randomly pull scraps. Such an odd assortment of papers! Similarly, with the embellishments, I went to the particular drawer holding that type of embellishment, closed my eyes, and pulled. When I got to the "weather related" accent, I realized I didn't have those housed together, so I asked Tracee to pick a number between 1 and 130 (the number of little drawers of embellishments I have), and she said 75. My 75th drawer had metal rimmed tags.

Here are a few details. That button was in the same drawer with my epoxy stickers, and that's what I randomly drew out of that drawer. Here's a shot of some of the papers. The woodgrain is Luxe Designs; the yellow polka dot is Sassafras Lass; the turqouise is SEI; and pink and brown circles were punched out of a Paper Salon paper, and the black and white rings came from a Scenic Route Halloween paper. The red leaves were leftover from the last layout and counted for the 3 bits and pieces lying around on my desk (oops--I just read that those weren't supposed to be patterned papers--does it count as cheating if you didn't mean to cheat?).

The rub-ons are old BasicGrey ones. The pearls were on my desk from my last layout. I always wanted to get a picture of me in front of the computer because I do spend a lot of time there, and I just got a web cam last weekend, so that's where my picture came from. I was so frustrated because my printer was acting up and I couldn't get a proper print, but in the end, I decided it was okay, since it was for Relaxation Day.

The little heart is my item that came from my charm drawer--it's actually a button. And here you can see that I drew a pink metal-rimmed tag. And the punched birds came from my drawer of bird accents. The striped paper is the B side of the teal paper.

This picture shows my bit of lace that I drew out of my lace jar. My recycled item is also in this picture--the blac-and-white scalloped bit is from a package of Chatterbox stickers that was sitting on my desk. And the MOD brad was the one I drew from one of my decorative brad drawers.

So there you have my page for Relaxation Day. I assure you that even if this sounds stressful (as it did to me when I first realized I was going to give up control over what was going on my page), it turned out to be GREAT fun! I always love a good challenge--and this one was definitely a challenge! I hope you'll give it a whirl! Come see the awesome stuff my teammates made!

Thank you for stopping by my blog and reading about my page!

CCG + HMITM = One Fun Page!

I've had an extremely busy couple of weeks between my scrappy life and my home life. We're buying a house and have been cleaning, cleaning, cleaning to get our house ready to list. So I last week I had to choose between doing a page for Color Combos Galore or doing a page for How Much Is Too Much. In the end, I decided I couldn't decide, so I combined the challenges. Here's the Inspiration Board I had to work with:

Our challenge at HMITM is called Clowning Around (It's International Clown Week), and we had to use:

• 8 buttons
• 1 flower
• 11 different patterned papers
• 1 red circle
• mist or paint

From this prompt, I immediately thought of making a page for my Book of Silly (yes, I have an album of silly family photos--actually several volumes). Debbie had provided a picture of a clown to use as inspiration, and as I was going through my photos, I came upon this picture of my nephew with his hair dyed bright red for school spirit week, and I knew it was the perfect photo for both of my challenges. Here's the page I came up with (for the life of me, I couldn't get a straight photo of this page--sorry!):

I used sketch 166 from Creative Scrappers as inspiration for my page. (Ever since I got on the CS design team, I set a goal to go back and do all of the sketches--which will take me a long time since there are so many!)

Here are a few details. I love Brian Andreas. I have all of his Storypeople books, and I use a lot of his stories for my Book of Silly. I thought this quote would be fun to use with this picture. I made the journaling label by using the RGB codes to get the perfect colors and then printed it out on photo paper.

That electron thingy with the pearl in the center is a BasicGrey rub-on, rubbed onto a transparency.

Eleven patterned papers are a LOT for an 8 x 8 page, so I decided to use bits and pieces cut from papers. The background woodgrain is Hambly. They gray is by American Crafts. The red polka dots and the eye charts are by Jillibean Soup. The periodic elements paper is Reminisce. Those green circles with the off-white bubbles in them are cut from a Crate Paper pattern, and the circle numbers are cut from a My Mind's Eye paper.

Here you can see more patterned papers I used. The red circle with the star is from an old Scenic Route Christmas paper. The leaves are cut from a Luxe Designs Paper. They wre bright lime green, so to tone them down, I added an olive colored chalk. They were still too bright, so I brushed gesso over them, and that gave me almost the perfect shade of green for the palette. I got that electron image from the Internet and printed it on photo paper. The part of the HMITM challenge that was trickiest for me was the flower. I didn't want a girly page, so I hunted through my stash to find something that would meet the flower requirement and found this little brad. I found a bunch of gray buttons in my stash to meet the 8 button requirement.

You'll have to go check out the awesome work the CCG and HMITM teams did with these challenges, and I hope you'll play along. Both challenges are immensely fun!

Thank you so much for visiting my blog and reading about my page!

Merry Christmas! - Christmas in July at HMITM

We have a fun challenge up at How Much Is Too Much! Fi gave us a "Christmas in July" challenge, and we had to use:

2 + photos [at least 2]
1 x Christmas tree image, any size
5 x patterned papers, i.e., Christmas patterns,
5 x metal embellishments, and any other embellishment in increments of 5

Scrapping Christmas pictures always presents a challenge for me. I always enjoy making the pages--trimming them with pretty decorations--but since I like the focus to be on storytelling, I don't always have stories to tell for the multitude of Christmas pictures we take. So I hemmed and hawed over what to do, and just decided to go for it and scrap these fun pictures of my mom and Gram with their "loot piles."
 
I used the current sketch at Once Upon a Sketch as inspiration for my page design. My pages always look different from the sketch since I scrap 8 x 8, and sometimes it's hard to shrink things down. I used the Bedford Falls kit from Noel Mignon, along with a couple of odds and ends from my stash.
 

I almost always put titles on my pages, but I just couldn't think of a good one (since I didn't have a story--my titles are usually drawn from the stories) and I didn't have a lot of space to work with (one of the problems of scrapping 8 x 8!), so I just decided it was okay to not have a title.

 

 
Here are some details. I cut the circles of the Santas out of one of the patterned papers in the kit--here's Santa holding a Christmas tree (to meet the Christmas tree part of the challenge). The rub-ons I used are pretty old, by K&Co.
 

The banner die-cuts were so pretty, and I prettied them up further with these gigantic pearls that I had in my stash.

This medallion design was on the edge of one the Pink Paislee papers, and I cut it out and tucked it behind the photos so you couldn't see the missing parts.

 
So, while this was, in some ways, a tricky challenge for me, I had a lot of fun using the Bedford Falls kit, which I just got on sale from Noel Mignon half price, and I'm happy that I finally scrapped these two pictures from Christmas before last. Go take a peek at what the rest of the team made for this challenge, and I hope you'll play along--you could end up in our How Awesome Is Too Awesome Hall of Fame and become our next Guest Designer!
 
Thank you for visiting my blog and reading about my page!
 

Happy Independence Day!

Our new challenge is up at How Much Is Too Much, and it's my turn to host the challenge. I called my challenge "Stars and Stripes" forever, and I'm asking players to use:

** elements that include STARS (embellishments, patterned paper, etc.) and STRIPES (ribbon, patterned paper, etc.)
** a flag or banner accent
** and to play off the date we're celebrating, July 4, 1776, use:

• 7 - brads
• 4 - four-word title
• 1 - photo
• 7 - labels
• 7 - seven-sentence journaling
• 6 - patterned papers

I also used this week's Color Combos Galore challenge:
 

I had this cheesy photo of my husband from last year's 4th of July printed and never scrapped it, so I thought this was a good chance to scrap it. I dug deep into my stash for some of the papers. That gray background paper is by Sweetwater (are they even still in business?). I've got some old Scenic Route paper on there, and the red stripe and tape measure print are also really old, from back when vintage was all the rage. Funny how styles come back--just like fashion (good thing I'm a packrat! That Hardware ticket behind my picture is also really old.

I wanted to use this My Mind's Eye star paper, but it was too vibrant for the CCG palette, so I thought of brushing white paint on it, and at the last minute, I spied the tub of gesso that I bought a year ago and wondered if that would do the trick, and it did! The turquoise paper turned into "Back in Time Blue!"

Here are some details... That kraft journaling spot is by Making Memories and is pretty old. I mounted it with pop dots so I could add the flags behind it. The die-cut accents in front of the journaling spot are by October Afternoon. The CCG Inspiration Board led me to add the "road trip" sign, but I thought it was fitting here because my husband is a trip, lol!

Here are a couple of the 7 requisite brads. That heart-shaped one is by Making Memories. It was from a Valentine set, but I thought it was perfect for this page. The small letter stickers are by Lily Bee.

You can see the brush strokes in this shot. The number paper at the top is by October Afternoon. I tucked a little 7 Gypsies sticker in between the layers. I got those pins from Michaels--a pretty big batch for just a couple of dollars. They were in the floral section and were called flower pins or something like that--I have no idea what their intended use was, but I thought they would be fun for my scrapbooks.

The "5&Dime" strip is a cut-off strip from the October Afternoon paper I used at the top of my page. I was needing a little somethingbeneath the picture, and that did the trick. The "Circus Peanuts" name of the paper seemed fitting for the picture, lol. There was a gap between the two phrases, so I was able to use some of the brads I needed to include for the challenge.

I've said this before, but I just recently started waiting a day before photographing my page to see if I my page feels "complete," and I'm often finding that I need to add just one or two more things to make it feel finished. I added the "76" (cut out of a Glitz Designs paper) and the asterisk sticker (from a really old Bookworks sticker sheet). If you scroll up and look at my page and try to imagine my page without these two addtions, you will see why my page didn't feel complete.

I hope you'll hop over to HMITM and see what the rest of the team did and play along with us and also visit CCG and see the new design team's beautiful creations.

Thank you so much for visiting my blog and reading about my page!