Love Life Love You

I've been having so much fun the last couple of weeks carving out time to scrapbook. It s something that I'm making a priority because it really is important to me.

The February Scrapbook Circle Kit, Today is Beautiful, went live today and so I wanted to share my favorite layout I've made with the kit so far. I still have this stack of goods from the kit to use, so I'm hoping there will be a few more layouts to come.

This layout came together with a bit of inspiration from my friend Jennie. She was working on a wedding video for her sister in law and said how many selfies they had taken over the past couple of years. I decided to look through my photos and see how many I could find from 2014 of Ward and I. We had about 20 decent photos of us together. Is this a lot? A little? I have no idea, but it was the perfect amount to put on this layout.

This paint chip paper from Crate Paper just called out to have lots of the little spaces filled with photos and embellishments. I loved printing out lots of small photos and then pairing them with bits and pieces from the February Kit.

I've noticed that Ward and I tend to mainly take photos together when we are on trips or at special occasions, so I'm going to work on taking more photos together during more regular daily moments this year.

Thanks for stopping by today! Hope you have a terrific Tuesday!

K + D >>> Scrapbook Circle Blog Hop

Welcome to our Scrapbook Circle Blog Hop! Scrapbook Circle has a new creative team, as well as a fabulous August kit, and we'd like to introduce you to both today. We are giving away five August Kits and the winners will be selected from the comments posted along the hop. 

If you just left the talented Tessa Buys blog, you are in the right place. If not, I hope you'll join us for the entire hop by starting at the Scrapbook Circle blog.

We are all so excited to feature the new August Island Paradise kit today. I hope you are filled with inspiration!

One fun thing to note: Scrapbook Circle is running a promotion this month that all new subscribers can choose a past kit to ship for free with their August kit. Just add the Island Paradise kit to your cart, then add a favorite past kit to your cart and use the code "FREEKIT" in the promo box at checkout.

As I mentioned in the post about my sister's bridal shower, we've had a whirlwind couple of months around here prepping for Kristen's wedding. The day came and went earlier last month and I'm now enjoying time looking through some of the pictures I took on the wedding day.

I printed off a couple of my favorites and used them on a layout celebrating Kristen and Doug's wedding day. Their story is quite amazing and I hope she gets it all written down somewhere. Not only does she now have a wonderful husband, but four really great kids too. Instant family. I couldn't be happier for her.

I loved using the August Island Paradise Kit on this page. The black and white background paper was a perfect backdrop to the wedding photos mixed with pops of color from the embellishments.

Layout Supplies /// Scrapbook Circle August Island Paradise Kit /// Bungalow Add-on /// Tiki Torch Add-on

I hope you've had a fantastic time hopping around to the Scrapbook Circle team blogs today! Remember to comment along the way while you hop and we will choose five lucky commenters to win an Island Paradise kit. Winners will be posted on the Scrapbook Circle blog next week.

Hello Island Paradise!

Island Paradise. Doesn't that sounds nice right about now? Well, I guess the next best thing to being on an island paradise is having a scrapbook kit with that name. The August Scrapbook Circle Kit, Island Paradise, is now live on the site!

I'm loving the bright colors and the cool textures and layers that can be created with the embellishments. I think my favorite embellishment is this cork. It's a Scrapbook Circle exclusive and I'm loving using it.

Want to see more? Head on over to the Scrapbook Circle site.

Also, Scrapbook Circle is offering a FREE PAST KIT to all new subscribers. Sweet! Just add the Island Paradise Kit to the cart, then choose a favorite past kit and add it to the cart too. Use promo code "FREEKIT" at checkout and the charges for the past kit will be removed.

If you've been thinking about a new Scrapbook Circle subscription, now's the perfect time. Plus, subscriptions are only a 2 month commitment, so what do you have to loose?

Day @ The Lake

I'm having so much fun going through pictures from this summer and choosing a few favorites to print and scrapbook. Last month, we got to go with some friends to Lake Havasu for a long weekend on the lake.

We had a great time spending two full days playing on the boat. My favorite is surfing. I'm definitely still learning, but having a lot of fun. I'm perfecting crashing into the water quite nicely.

All of the boat photos are always taken with my phone because I'm nervous to pull our the big camera on the boat. I had some fun playing around with the pano feature on my phone and here's a look at how it turned out. 

Layout Supplies /// Island Paradise Kit /// Bungalow Add-on /// Tiki Torch Add-on

We Love Oceanside

The beach. Our family loves the beach. We wish we lived closer, but at least it's only a half day drive away. We have Wyndham timeshare points and decided it was time to used them to book a room for a few nights in Oceanside, CA.

Side note: we've had Wyndham time share points for 8 or 9 years and we love having them. We bought them on ebay for a tiny fraction of retail price. We do pay annual maintenance fees, but it is much less that the cost of the hotel would be out of pocket. Plus Wyndham rooms have a family room, kitchen and bedroom(s) which gives us room to spread out and saves us money because we make breakfast and lunch in the hotel and only go out for dinner.  Okay enough about that, just thought I'd share something that has worked well for vacations for our family. :)

We spent a weekend in Oceanside in June and loved every minute of it. We traveled with another family which worked out great because everyone was always occupied with a friend. We spent time digging and building in the sand, boogie boarding (the kids, not me because I don't like cold water!), eating fish tacos, a morning run along the beach (just me!) plus lots of relaxing. Perfect!

Now I want to start planning a return trip.

Layout supplies /// Our Adventure Kit /// Away We Go Add-on /// Happy Day Add-on

Beach Braids

If you are looking for the Glitz blog hop, you can go here.

Happy Saturday! We are enjoying a beautiful Easter weekend here in AZ. I'm hoping to get a bunch of eggs cooked so that my kids can color them today. I'm also working on a talk that I'm giving in church tomorrow. What could be better that the topic of Easter for a church talk?

Today I want to share a layout I put together about a trip to Mexico a couple of years ago. We were there with friends and our girls decided to have their hair braided.

It was a bit of a funny event. We arrived at the beach and settled in on some lounge chairs and the kids immediately started splashing in the water. My husband, Ward, left to walk to the beach hoping to find a taco stand. When Ward came back about 10 minutes later, we were all involved with one of the many beach vendors that are well known on Mexican beaches.

The girls were getting their hair braided, Jennie and I were looking at dresses and our friend Dave was getting a massage in his lounge chair. I guess you could say that we were their target market!

Thanks for stopping by! Wishing you and your family a happy Easter!

Can You Ever Have Too Much Ice Cream?

I'm pretty sure that you can have too much ice cream, but on our cruise last month, all of our kids were frequent visitors to the self serve ice cream machine. Who can blame them? All of that running around the ship can really help you work up an appetite!

They even got creative with getting the most ice cream per trip by filling two cones and putting them together.

I had some fun putting this title together with a mix of sticker alphas and letter from these Dear Lizzy cards.

Ice cream is sounds pretty good right about now!

Layout Supplies /// Scrapbook Circle Charmed Life Kit /// Lucky You Kit

Grandma's Sugar Cookies

Sorry I've been MIA almost all month! Our family got to go on an amazing 8 night Disney Cruise and all of the prep and then time away has taken over February. Now I'm back and trying to recover. Luckily, I created a layout before I went on vacation that I can share with you today! I'm hoping to post vacation pictures tomorrow.

One of our favorite Valentine traditions is having Grandma bake and deliver her amazing sugar cookies to us. The cookies are thick and soft and the cream cheese frosting is perfect!

We may or may not have indulged on cookies for breakfast the next morning.

If you need to make yourself some of these cookies, you can find the recipe here.

Okay, I've got to get back to work. I'm finalizing all of our paperwork for our taxes and getting the Scrapbook Circle kit ready to go live tomorrow. Oh, and just to make this month much crazier, we found a house we totally love (we love our current house too, but we couldn't resist making the change!) and we are closing on it tomorrow. So on top of the usual business, we bought a new home this month. Luckily we aren't moving until May, so I have time to process the change and pack!

Layout Supplies /// Scrapbook Circle Story Time Kit

Happiness Is...

This month over on the Scrapbook Circle blog the challenge is to use the theme "Happiness Is..." to inspire a layout. You can stop by their blog for all of the details.

I used a photo booth strip of photos that were take last month when Audrey went to her friend's 13th birthday party. They did a scavenger hunt and the mall and decided to stop in for a quick photo booth visit before checking things off of their scavenger hunt list.  I love that Audrey thought to take these photos!

These girls have been friends since they were born and it is so fun to watch them grow up! It really seems pretty much impossible that they are going to be teenagers this year, but I guess it really is true.

For the title on this page, I wrote "Happiness Is..." with a thick black Sharpie on white paper. Then I took a picture of the paper and loaded the image into photoshop. I bumped up the contrast and saved the photo as a jpg. I then opened the file in my Silhouette software, traced the image and cut out the title in my handwriting. Man I love the Silhouette!


Layout Supplies /// Story Time Kit /// Page-Turner Add-on

I Love Banners!

You would think that I would tire of making banners, but for some reason, I just love them. They are a perfect way to decorate a little space.  After making a few layouts, I still had a bunch of pieces left from the Scrapbook Circle Only You kit and decided that it would be perfect for a banner.

The base of most of the banners pieces came from a 1959 dictionary that used to be my grandmas. I love using the pages from that dictionary in projects. I figure that it makes the book more meaningful because I get to look at  the pages displayed in my house rather than just have the book collect dust on a shelf. 

I just set out all of the remaining pieces from the kit and started misting, cutting and layering things. 

All of the banner pieces are attached with Glitz Designs paper garland (in the kit.) I dabbed little dots of glue to line up with the banner pieces and glued the garland to the top of the banner.

For fun, I added different sized banner pieces including little tickets, an Elle's Studio tag and the"sweet" die cut tag from Fancy Pants. 

That's it!  I don't do a lot of decorating for Valentine's Day, but I do like to add a few love themed touches here and there.

Banner Supplies /// Only You Kit /// You and Me Add-on

Horse Riding Lesson

Santa was very generous and brought Hannah horse riding lessons for her Christmas present. Hannah had asked for a bike, so Santa was a little nervous that she might be disappointed, but thankfully she was thrilled with her gift! She was counting down the days from Christmas until January 8th when she got to go to her first lesson.

I snapped these photos on my phone, but I'm planning on taking my real camera out to a lesson where I can get some nicer shots. It always seems like such a bother to carry around our big camera, but the pictures are always so much better. Oh well, I am thankful that I'm able to capture so many everyday photos on my phone.

It was a lot of fun layering a bunch of stuff on this page. I just kept adding until it felt right. I also had some fun with Heidi Swapp's color shine in Bronzer (on the happy tag) and Tropicana Teal and Primrose (on the tags tucked into the striped bag.)

It was so fun watching Hannah during her first riding lesson. We was a little timid and really excited and happy. She said that she was really sore the next day. I think being sore was something new for her!

I used the sketch by Diana Fisher that is up on the Scrapbook Circle blog this month. It was a perfect starting point for my page! You can see what others did with the sketch here.

This layout also works into the Scrapbook Circle Challenge "Make Your Point" that was posted today. The challenge asks that you use arrows on your layout. Stop by the SC blog for more details. If you play along, you are entered to win a $10 credit to the shop!

Layout Supplies /// Only You Kit /// You and Me Add-on

Us

This morning I woke up and went right into my scrapbook room. With all of the holiday craziness, there hasn't been much time for creating layouts. Luckily, I did keep up with my December Daily album with month and my project life album is current. But sometimes I just want to make a layout.

So today was the day for a layout.

I've had my January Scrapbook Circle kit sitting on my desk for a couple of weeks and I've been anxious to dive in and use it. The grey, pink and teal combo is one of my favorites right now.

For the background paper on this page, I sliced it into strips and then attached it to a piece of card stock with the stripes slightly staggered. This idea came to me because I wanted to use my new typewriter on the page, but 12 X 12 paper doesn't fit into the typewriter. So I cut the paper with the intention of just putting it back together as it was, but then played around with the new paper placement.

Want to see my new typewriter?  I must say that I love it!

After I got the typewriter, my sister mentioned that my parents had an old typewriter table on their back patio. My dad said I could have it if I wanted it. Seriously?  How cool it this?

I'm pretty sure I'll be typing on as many projects as I can.

Have you seen the January Scrapbook Circle Kit, Only You, yet?

Plus there is a fun add-on kit, You and Me, too!

Hope you are getting a little extra time to spend with your family this holiday season!

I Love My Sisters

Did you know there is a national sisters day? It's the first Sunday in August. I didn't know about the day until I saw someone post a sister picture on Instagram last month.

We were at my parents' house that night and my mom pulled out a picture of my sisters and I from when we were little. I snapped a picture of the sisters picture with my phone and have it on a layout today.  Can you tell which of the girls is me?

Now the four of us live in three different states and don't get to spend a lot of time together, but I still feel close and love it when we are all together.

Just for fun, here's a look at what my sisters and I look like today. (Plus we've added a baby brother who is 10 years younger than me to the group.)

Hope you have a great Sunday relaxing with your family!

Layout Supplies /// Scrapbook Circle Talk of the Town Kit