Three Simple Design Techniques

Playing with paper and photos is one of my favorite things! Today I want to share a favorite recent layout I put together with photos from a visit to the Top of the Rock in NYC.

I'd like to point out three simple techniques I used to help this layout come together.

1. Paper Tearing. I went a little old school with the technique along the right side of the page on the edges of the layered paper strips. Paper tearing adds a nice extra touch of texture and looks great when layered with a stack of papers. The little white edge add an extra touch of contrast.

2. Grid Design. This is a classic way to layout a page. I love using grid designs on my pages because it gives me a place to focus where photos and embellishments are added to the page.

3. Journaling Between the Lines. Looking for lines in patterned paper that can be a guide for your journaling is a perfect place to incorporate your handwriting into the page design. The lines in the paper design help keep the writing neat and straight. This triangle design didn't provide a traditional straight line to write on, but it gave a great space for writing and kept my journaling straight and neat.

Next time you're stumped of how to start a layout, you could give one of the about techniques a try to get you started. I'm sure you'll have a finished layout in no time.

This is the last of the layouts I'm made for now that include photos from our recent girls trip to NYC. As you can see if you've been ready my blog this month, I took a lot of photos! It feels so good to have some favorites printed, combined with words and ready to go into an album.

Layout Supplies /// Let's Do This Kit /// This Way Add-on /// Love It Add-on

Playing Along with Paper Issues

Hello! Hope you've had a fantastic weekend. We enjoyed Hannah's last soccer game of the season, a bit of relaxation and some family time. Now I'm ready for a new week!

This week Scrapbook Circle is sponsoring the challenge over at Paper Issues and I thought it would be fun to play along with the Prints Charming Challenge. You can find out all of the challenge details over on their blog. A Scrapbook Circle kit is up for grabs, so I hope you'll join in the fun.

For my take on the challenge, I decided to mix seven different patterned papers to create this layout. Since some of the prints only show slightly, I think the overall balance of print and color works on this page. I used white cardstock and and this digital cut file to create the random circle cutouts. Adding white to the top of the paper helped to mellow out all of those patterns.

This page is all about a visit to Billy's Bakery when we were in NYC last month. If you look closely in the photo, you will see a vintage floral wallpaper in the background and that is where I took inspiration for the colors and flowers that were used to embellish the page.

It's been so much fun to go through our NYC trip and print out a bunch of favorite photos. One of my favorite things about a trip is getting to relive the highlights once I'm home and scrapbook about them.  

Now one more of our stories is recorded. I love documenting our family stories!

Layout Supplies /// Let's Do This Kit /// This Way Add-on /// Love It Add-on

Journaling Blocks for Storytelling

It's Saturday! I'm looking forward to checking off several Scrapbook Circle tasks from my to-do list today and then watching my daughter play in her last soccer game of the season. Should be a great day!

Today I want to share one of my favorite quick journaling tips with you. Sometimes getting words on a scrapbook page isn't the most fun part of putting the page together. I've found that when I incorporate a few journaling blocks into the page design, it makes journaling easy because I have a designated and limited place to write.

On this page, it is designed using the rule of thirds to create a nice balance on the page. The top third includes the title, the middle is the photo and a subtitle and the bottom third was reserved for the journaling. I used the journaling blocks from the Scrapbook Circle April Printable on this page, but there are lots of different journaling block options available from a variety of companies.

I love journaling blocks because it gives a defined place to write. When I'm using a limited space like this, I think through what my journaling will be and think about much space that will take. Sometimes I air write just above the space to get an idea of how many words will fit in the space. 

Occasionally, the spacing a little off and I'll have extra room which is great for adding a date or location. If I start writing and it looks like I'm going to run out of space, then I do my best to use less words to tell the story. Or if I really have more that I want to share, then I would find a way to work another journaling block into the page design.

Hope this tip for working journaling onto your page gives you some inspiration for an upcoming layout!

Using a Big Photo to Tell a Story

Hey there! Hope your day is going great. Things are good here. I got the kids off to school this morning and decided to try out the 7 Minute Workout App I've had on my phone for months instead of going for a run. I loved it! I'm thinking I'll mix it in with jogging for a hopefully well rounded workout. After blogging, I'm heading out to meet my sister and two cousins at Joyride Tacos for lunch. Love that place. Their veggie tacos are my favorite.

Today I want to share a layout where I used one 8.5 X 11 photo as the background for the page. I think this is a fantastic way to preserve a favorite photo in a scrapbook.

A fine tip sharpie works perfectly for journaling directly onto the photo. This is an easy way to write on a big photo layout so that you aren't covering the photo up with journaling cards or other embellishments where you can write. The "on this day" I used right before the journaling is a rub-on and it went on perfectly smooth right onto the photo.

I intentionally kept the embellishments to a minimum so that the focus would stay on the photo. Making the photo black and white gave a nice contrast to the little pops of color provided by the embellishments.

So there you have it: a big photo layout with a few simple embellishment and another story documented.

Layout Supplies /// This Way Add-on /// Love It Add-on

Project Life: October 7 - 13

This week for my project life album was really fun to put together because there were a lot of things to include besides pictures.

This week covered a few days at home and then three days in NYC. Plus is was also Max's birthday. There were two inserts for this week: one was this 6 X 12 page protector that held Max's birthday cards and the other was these coin holders with pockets that holds a bunch of small 2 X 2 photos.

Video Chat with Cousins /// Lego Building /// Soccer Dinner Date /// Haircut /// Birthday @ JFG

NYC Boarding Pass /// 911 Memorial /// Carlo's Bakery /// Tickets

I think these photo pockets are my favorite way to document vacations in the PL album because they allow me to use a lot of photos in a little space. The little NY themed papers mixed in with the photos are sticky notes I picked up at the MOMA gift shop. I knew they would come in handy!

We are up in Salt Lake City today enjoying time together with my siblings and parents. My youngest sister is leaving on a mission for our church in less than two week and we wanted to get together before she leaves. We are trying to keep warm. My thin AZ blood is not used to this cold weather!

NYC w/Kids Day 3

Are you ready to hear about more of our adventures in NYC? You can read more about day one and day two on previous posts.

My family got to spend 5 days in NYC while my husband attended a conference   My friend Janet and her three kids joined us from Baltimore while we explored the city. Our husbands both met up with us later in the day after the conference ended for Ward and Janet's husband took the train into the city after work.

Magnolia Bakery

Where is the best place to start a day in New York City? A bakery, of course! We met up with our friends at the bakery where the kids all choose muffins, milk or banana pudding.

The first time we visited Magnolia Bakery a couple of years ago with my sister, she insisted that we order the banana pudding. It seemed like a strange thing to order at a bakery, but we trusted her and I'm very happy we did! It is so creamy and delicious. I even came across this recipe and think we may need to duplicate it at home.

We found a seat along the edge of a fountain and enjoyed breakfast in the very chilly morning air.

NBC Studios Tour

We walked a 1/2 block from the Magnolia Bakery to NBC Studios. We had purchased our tickets ahead of time and we were set for a tour at 10:30 in the morning.

Before the tour, we took some time to browse around the gift shop. They had great items relating to almost all of their shows. This was one of my favorites from Friday Night Lights:

Unfortunately, they didn't allow any photos on the tour and they even made us turn our phones off. It was very difficult to resist snapping a photo, but we followed the rules and now don't have any pictures of the studios. I did snap one photo before we started.

The tour was more interesting than we thought it might be. We visited the Nightly News with Brian Williams Studio, the Dr. Oz Studio and the Saturday Night Live Studio. The highlight was the Saturday Night Live Studio where we got to watch the Saturday Night Live Band rehearse for that night's show.

Another highlight was at the end of our tour where our two boys volunteered to do a mock newscast. One sat at the news desk and read the teleprompter and then the other got to stand in front of a green screen weather map and give the forecast.  It was killing me not to snap a photo! They did offer to sell us the 2 minute newscast for the price of $30. No thanks.

Rockefeller Center

NBC Studios is located at Rockefeller Center so after the tour we walked around and watched the ice skaters outside.

We also needed a stop in at the Lego store.

And then the American Girl Store. Our girls really enjoyed watching the dolls have their hair styles at the salon.

Margon Restaurant

By now we were all hungry and ready for lunch. We used Yelp to help us find a Cuban place a short walk away.

This was a narrow restaurant that was definitely where locals go. The people ordering were helpful in recommending things. The beans and rice were so good!

Billy's Bakery

After lunch, we decided to walk over the Chelsea to High Line Park. Along the way, we decided to stop in at Billy's Bakery for a treat. Yes, another treat. My secret is to not order my own treat and share with the kids or order something, but not eat the whole thing. That way there is room in case another treat presents itself sometime.

Billy's Bakery has a great 1940's home kitchen feel.  They have pies, cakes, cookies, cupcakes and other sweets too. This time I opted to try this peanut butter chocolate treat. (I ate a little and then save the rest to give to Ward when he met up with us.)

I hear their banana cake is amazing, so next time that will be on my list!

Highline Park

This is a beautiful somewhat new park in Chelsea that is built on old elevate train tracks. There are staircases built to enter the park every couple of blocks. There is a cement sidewalk lined with beautiful plants and park benches.

It was really busy the day we were there, but it was still easy enough to walk around. The kids were a bit disappointed because they wanted a park with a playground, but sometimes we need to do something the moms want to do!

The highlight for the kids was this mime/magician preforming at the park. We ended up spending about an hour walking through the park and enjoying the beautiful afternoon.

Chelsea Market

After the High Line, we walked down stairs to ground level and took a really short walk over to Chelsea Market. Fun fact: this is where the Oreo was invented here as this used to be Nabisco's home.

This now houses a collection of shops and delicious looking restaurants (we were actually too full to try any of them) plus is the the Food Network's headquarters.

Just outside of the market, Food Network had a trailer set up with Marc Murphy from the show Chopped handing out ice cream sandwiches. All of the kids love the show Chopped, so they were very excited to meet him. I love rendom things like this that you happen upon while walking around.

After this, we walked to a nearby park and let the kids run around for an hour before heading to Penn Station to meet up with Janet's husband.  We all made our way back to our hotel where we had pizza and a movie for the kids and the adults went out to a little Italian Restaurant around the corner from our hotel.

We found our dinner place via Yelp and it was perfectly cozy, quiet and delicious. It was a perfect ending to another fantastic day in New York City.

NYC w/kids: Day 1

Earlier this month our family was fortunate to get to spend five days in New York City. I love that place.

We went because my husband had a two day conference to attend and decided to have our family go along since the kids were on fall break. We had our three kids (ages 12, 10 and 8) with us and we all had a blast. We even met up with friends from Baltimore for 3 days of the trip and who also have kids the same ages as our kids.

I thought I'd share what we did while we were there in case you even find yourself planning a trip to NYC and would like some ideas on things to do. Of course, I'm not an expert on NYC, but thought it would be fun to share what we did.

Since we were there for 5 days, I thought I'd share a post for each day of the trip during the next month. So here's a look at what we did on day 1.

Red Eye Flight

Since we were traveling from the west side of the US, we decided to not waste daytime traveling and took a night flight. We departed Phoenix at 11:30 p.m. and we all tried (somewhat unsuccessfully) to get some sleep. We arrived at 7:00 a.m. into JFK and took a taxi to our hotel in Manhattan. We dropped our bags off at our hotel in Union Square and then we were off on our adventure.

Walk, Walk, Walk

The kids thought they might not survive all of the walking we did on the trip, but they did! We were sure to pack good walking shoes for everyone plus a supply of band-aids. One of my favorite things about walking it that you get to see the city and find places you'd miss if ou were on the subway all of the time.

For example, on the walk from our hotel to the Empire State Building we stopped at a cute corner cafe for a delicious bagel breakfast. I was excited that our family all ate breakfast for a total of $9. Not bad for NYC.

You also get to see awesome city views while walking.

We ended up walking at least 40 miles during our time in NYC. Perfect for working off calories from all of the treats we sampled along the way.

Empire State Building

This is something that is fun to do once while in NYC and we hadn't done it as a family. There were people outside of the building trying to get us to buy upgraded tickets to the Empire State Building where we could skip the line, but that would have been a waste of money. The lines weren't bad and moved quickly.

It was a clear day and we had great city views. It was crowded, so we just took our time and waited for our turn to see the views from each side of the observation deck.

New York Public Library

We happened upon the New York Public Library while we were walking from the Empire State Building. I'm so happy we stopped for a look around.

It was a beautiful old building where you could easily spend a whole day exploring and relaxing. Not only do they (obviously) have books, they also had several museum style exhibits. We took some time checking out an exhibit titled "Lunch Hour" that documented the history of lunch in NYC. It was a cool exhibit that my husband, kids and I all enjoyed.

Lunch

There are so many restaurants in NYC. We used Yelp to help us locate places to eat. On this day we wanted something quick and cheap and we found a pizza by the slice place really nearby. This isn't hard to do since there are pizza by the slice places all over town. It was a perfectly quick and tasty lunch.

9/11 Memorial

We had reserved tickets for viewing the 9/11 Memorial at 1:30 in the afternoon. We took a subway down to the Memorial site. The tickets are free, but you need to reserve and print them at home. They do run out of tickets ahead of time, so if you are planning on going be sure to reserve your tickets as soon as possible.

This was a very peaceful and reflective Memorial that is beautiful and well done. There are two large square fountain structures with waterfalls that are on the site of the Twin Towers. The names of everyone who died on the site on 9/11 are engraved around the outside edge of the fountain.

This was a very reverent place and it was moving to be there.

Visiting this site gave us an excellent opportunity to talk to our kids about what happened that day while we were walking to the site.

There were nice views of the new Freedom Tower that is being built near the memorial site.

Carlo's Bake Shop

We took a PATH train from the World Trade Center site across the water to New Jersey so we could go to Carlo's Bake Shop which is featured on the TLC show Cake Boss. The ride was only 10 minutes and cost the same ($2.25 per person, per ride) as ride the subway in the city.

It was a 5 minute walk from the train station to get to the bakery.

There were cases filled with cakes, cookies, cheesecake, brownies and pastries. Heavenly!  We selected a few things to share and then sat out in front of the bakery to enjoy our treats and the beautiful weather. We decided that the cannoli was our top pick our of the treats.

Central Park

After the bakery, we made our way to Central Park via the train and subway. This is one of our favorite places in the city. We visited Central park 4 out of the 5 days that we were in NYC. The kids LOVED playing on the playground here. It's a perfect place to relax and enjoy the city. There are vendors all around the park selling pretzels, nuts and other small snacks. Since Max's favorite snack is a soft pretzel, he was pretty happy to enjoy a pretzel at the park.

At this point in the day (around 5:30 p.m.) we were all VERY tired since we really hadn't slept much on the plane the night before and had been going hard all day. Everyone was begging me to go to the hotel to take a little nap. I knew we would probably not wake up for hours from the "little nap", so we decided to push through the tiredness and get some dinner before turing in  for the night.

Max Brenner

We decided on Max Brenner for dinner because they have the most amazing chocolate drinks and it was close to our hotel. This is a chocolate lovers paradise. They have a huge assortment of chocolate drinks (an entire menu for them) plus the food is quite good. They even dust their fries in cocoa powder. 

We called from Central Park and made a reservation so that we would have to wait for a table. 

By 8:00 p.m we were officially exhausted, so we headed back to our hotel and went to sleep. We slept until 8:00 the next morning and then we were ready to go again. The red eye flight not only is great because you don't use up a travel day flying, it is also a nice option because you are so tired that first night you are adjusted to the new time zone. Since is was only 5:00 p.m. at home, if we had flown during the day, I'm sure the kids wouldn't have wanted to go to bed until hours later.

Thanks for joining me on day 1 of our NYC adventure! Day 2 will be posted soon.