My Thinker

Little could I have known way back when these pictures were taken and I scrapbooked this layout just how prophetic they would be about my sweet son.  I was not present when the photos were taken, my husband took them while the two of them were up in the mountains hiking, but when I saw them I instantly fell in love with them.  I'm not quite sure I've ever seen pictures that summed up his personality so well!  He's been a deep thinker his whole life, and now that he's almost 20 years old, I realize how well all that thinking has served him.

I could possibly alternately title this page: "You just never know when those weird things you bought are gonna come in handy".   All the patterned paper on this page was bought at this little off-the-beaten-path scrapbook store.  They were selling these packs of paper that were nothing but strips--approximately 4 inches wide--there were about 100 strips per pack, and I momentarily thought "What will I do with 100 strips of the same patterned paper...and when will I need just four inches of it?"  But they were only about a dollar per pack, so I bought them anyway--lots of them in all different colors and patterns.  Then I tossed them in a drawer and they never made an appearance again until this page came along.  The piece under the title needed to be a little wider, so I just lined up a couple of strips and glued them on together.

The word "thinker" is another word I made using WordArt.  I flipped it and printed it on the back of one of the strips, then cut it out with my precision scissors and craft knife.  The other letters are metal tags that I bought in a plastic bag from the same store--no name brand on them or anything.

One of my all-time favorite elements to include on a layout is poetry.  Maybe it's the English major buried deep inside me, but I just think poetry expresses feelings that can't be expressed any other way.  Sometimes I write my own poems, but they are usually cutesy or funny and always rhyming.  I love this one to go with this page, and I'm not even sure how I found it...but it must have been some kind of miracle.

If you haven't ever created a page like this, I challenge you to do it, and I'm not talking about the layout--I'm talking about capturing a child's soul in photos and preserving it so succinctly that fifteen years down the road you can look back at it and remember that moment when you discovered exactly who they are.  

Life is a HIGHWAY!

Long before Carsland opened, I just loved the movie.  So when Tow Mater and Lightning McQueen showed up at Disneyland for the first time, I definitely knew I had to get some pictures!

 This is a page I put together long before the Cars Cricut cartridge came around.  The Cars characters, logo and tires with skid marks are 3D stickers that I got at JoAnn's.  The paper is just some loose hodge podge paper that I had in my stash.  The ribbon came from Pebbles, Inc.  I love the black ribbon with white stripe down it...it looks like a road!

When I do pages with a theme from a movie I like to include my favorite quotes from the movie.  This really great gem is from an advertising billboard for Rust-eze.

I used these fun quotes from the movie and printed them in Word.  I just added the shapes to my page and then added text.  It's super easy to find movie quotes with a simple online search.

This part of the title was made with a Sizzix alphabet called Rat-A-Tat.  I cut them in black and white and just inserted the white pieces into the circles.

I made the word "highway" with WordArt and a free font I downloaded off the internet.  (Unfortunately my computer crashed since then and I lost all the fonts I had downloaded, so I don't remember the name.)  Since I wanted them in black and I couldn't print on black paper, I flipped it upside down and printed it on white, then glued it on the back of the black paper to cut it out.  Then I used a white pen to add the lines.  Very simple and easy--I really need to get a Silhouette so I can use more of these online fonts.

Since doing this page I have acquired the Cars Cricut cartridge and been to Carsland twice...I really can't wait to get some time to do some more Cars pages!

A Slice of Summer

In honor of the warm weather we've been having (and wishful thinking that it will last) I decided to offer up a fun reminder that summer is right around the corner.

The funniest thing about these photos is that my mom deliberately bought a watermelon not so that we could enjoy a nice refreshing treat on a hot summer day, but because she wanted to take some awesome pictures to scrapbook and thought a watermelon layout would be super fun.  So this was a staged event, and considering most of the kids didn't really care for watermelon, you'd never know it from the pictures.  But mom was right, and the page was really fun to put together!

This is a fairly simple page, and I love using small pictures of everyone individually whenever I can. I was sure to include the story of how the watermelon eating fest came to be too--a very important part!

For my title I used some rub on letters and small metal letters from Provo Craft.  The word "summer" was made on the computer using WordArt--I spelled out the word and printed it three different times on three different colors of paper and then cut them out, slicing the letters up to get the different parts of the watermelon.  Then I glued them on white background and cut them out by hand (This was in the days before Cricut--it would be a lot easier now, as long as I had the right font!)

These little slides were made using a technique my sister picked up at a local scrapbooking store.  The clipart images were printed on a transparency, then while the ink was still wet, covered in embossing powder and embossed.  It's hard to tell they are shiny in this picture, but they are.  Until I went searching for this page, I had forgotten all about this little trick, so now I need to do it again!  The shiny stuff on the front of the slides are microbeads.  These happen to be staying on well, although I haven't always had that kind of luck.

So there you have it...my personal invitation for summer to begin.  As sure as I sit here typing it will probably be snowing tomorrow...