Simon-Garden of the Gods

For those of you who don't know, I think my nephew Simon is one of the cutest kids in the world. Besides my kids, of course, and then my children just barely beat him out as cutest. He is adorable. So, it was my lucky surprise, when looking through pictures, to decide what to scrap next, I ran across these two gems. I LOVE THIS KID!! Elements are from Jady Day Studio, "Safari Dreamin'" and "Blooming Friendship" and Sweet Digi Scraps "Why Don't We..." And the leaf came from Stephenie Ogren "Norwegian Wood". I love it when combining lots of different designers and kits works out so well. YAY! And Mom, I didn't do any journaling this time because I didn't want any typos. :) P.S. Thanks for pointing out all the others ones to me. The funny part is, on the animal one, I even had Carl proofread it, and ran spellcheck in Word, but since "awsome" was in all caps, it skipped that word.

Zoo Fun with Family

Pretty much the exact same thing as my last page, but with a different kit (Sweet Yleana by Jady Day Studio, which is retired and no longer available), and no rounded corners. Plus, this time there were three pictures that just could not be cropped into squares, so I was able to crop them so they were about twice the size as the squares. It took some precise measuring and very zoomed in resizing, but I think they look pretty great! And this pretty much finishes up the zoo pictures. There is one picture that I just wasn't able to fit in, but it was just a picture of a funny sign at the zoo. It said "Attention Hunters: Moose in Area! Be sure of your target" I thought it to be a funny sign to have at a zoo. In the zoo's defense, it was in an area that they had made to look like the woods and great outdoors. That's where the four-wheelers were located. And there were some information displays about conservation and safety.

Zoo Animals

This is the second to last post in the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo Series. I still have to do a spread with pictures from all of us at the zoo, and some other fun stuff. I had a hard time doing this one. According to PhotoShop I have 50-some-odd layers, but in reality I deleted the first 30 or so layers from trying to crop different pictures in different ways, and then deleting them because I didn't like the way things were turning out. I got to a point where I had all my pictures cropped, and sized properly (a big feat considering the pictures came from at least four different cameras) but then just didn't like the way they were fitting on the pages, but I did like the two photos that were square, so I deleted the other eight pictures and went searching for new ones. Some of my previous ones were used again, but cropped differently, but then other ones didn't work, so I had to go find new ones. Then, once I had them all sized and in place I decided I wanted rounded corners instead of square ones, so thankfully I knew that I could just copy each "layer" (picture) into a new file, and they wouldn't lose their positioning. It took a good two hours this morning getting everything done, but I really LOVE the way the two pages turned out!What do you think? By the way, everything you see is from Jady Day Studio's kit "Safari Dreamin'" available at scraporchard.com

Abigail and the Animals

More zoo. This kit is "Love All Year Long" available from Jady Day Studio over at scraporchard.com. This kit is so versatile and awesome. I just love it!

Junior Zookeeper

More pictures from our trip to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in August 2009. There will be a few more pages at some point in time. This one has taken me about three days to do, because I was having a hard time getting inspired. This has to be my favorite memory from the day. Abigail and I were visiting the reptile house and Abigail had already petted a snake, and a tortoise that was wondering around, and then, instead of checking out the other animals, she decided to check out a large table in the middle of the room. As she was climbing onto a stool at the table (which I was trying to get her down from) a zookeeper asked her if she wanted to help. And, of course she did, so she was able to prepare the food for one of the tortoises there. By the way, most of this is from a kit called "Summer Salsa" by KG Designs from SYTYCD 2009. The turtle is from a kit called "Imagine That" by Designs by Jen Yurko, but I changed the colors, and some of the buttons are from Doo Hickey Designs "A Mother's Melody" and "Zippity Doo Dah" by Sherry Ferguson.

Fun at the Zoo

This is from the kit "Mr. Kite" by Lyndsey Riches. I got it as part of the "So You Think You Can Design" contest back whenever that was. I think it's the first kit that I've used from that contest that wasn't by Jady Day Studio. I thought the colors were great and the theme was fun. To celebrate the occasion the kids and I jammed out to the Beatles this morning. I am not really a fan of this song. It's a little too weird and hard to follow. But the kit is cool, and that's all that really matters. Bryant almost fell asleep on my lap while we were listening to the Beatles on YouTube. Finally I had the kids get off the couch and we all started dancing (we had the lovely "Twist and Shout" to help us out). At some point in time I'm going to do more pages from the zoo, since there is a lot more on there that I haven't done, like the 4-wheelers and Abigail being a Junior Zookeeper.

Bath Time

I made the bubbles on the left hand side myself.

First Day of Preschool

No contest here, just thought I'd better get this red letter day scrapped before it turned into one of those projects that I know I should do, but haven't gotten around to doing. Yari's "Little Scholar" kit would have been a good one to have for this day, but I haven't gotten around to buying it (though I might now) yet.

Family Pictures 2009

This one is also for the contest. They never limit you on how many entries you can submit, so I just keep going until I get sick of it. This LO was lifted from Keyr's "Winter Play". I loved the simplicity of it, just a few embellishments with the snowflakes, and lots of pictures. I love it when I see LOs that really let the pictures tell the story and be the focus, instead of all the embellishments. I also loved all the journalling below the main picture. I flipped the LO so everything was on the left hand side, instead of the right, for several reasons. #1, my main picture had all that empty space on the left that I could cover up with my side pictures, and #2 Abigail and Bryant were both looking to the right in their pictures, so their focus draws your eye to the middle of the page, instead of off the page if they had been on the right-hand side of the page. Good design principles there. Thank goodness for my Elementary Education Art class! This time I used "Totally Lovin' You" from Jady Day Studio because the green in the kit was the closest green that I could find to our shirts in all the complete kits that I have (which isn't as many as I used to think). And the blue and brown were also great. The only color I didn't use from that kit was the pink (and I guess the gray), but, those people that know me know that I'm not a pink person at all!

The Faces of Abigail

This is for a contest over on the Jady Day Studio Babes blog. The contest involves "lifting" from another person. Lifting is a big compliment in the scrapping world. What it means is that you see a layout you really like, and use an idea from it, either layout, colors, theme, well, basically anything, and implementing that in your own layout. For this contest the Babes are having people pick a layout from Keyr (one of the Babes) and then post a link to it on their blog. So I am lifting Keyr's LO called "Faces". I liked this LO #1 because of the LO overall, and #2 because I have taken so many pictures of Abigail, trying to get just the right one. So as soon as I saw this LO, I thought of the pictures I took of Abigail for her third birthday and knew I would be able to create something great. I decided to use the "Blooming Friendship" kit from Jady Day Studio (Yari) instead of "Totally Lovin' You" because I like the colors in "Blooming Friendship" more than "Totally Lovin' You". The bright colors really speak to Abigail's personality more than the more subdued tones of "Totally Lovin' You". I'm thinking of doing one with some of Bryant's pictures too, using the same page from Keyr, but this one took me about 2.5 hours to do, so I might not. Also thinking about doing a lift using our family pictures from this fall too. We'll see.