April 1st Challenges

The first day of April which means that it's time for some new challenges. First up is a new sketch and color palette at Sketches With Color.

The sketch:

The colors:

And my layout:

I used lots of Dear Lizzy Lucky Charm and a picture of my sweet Paolina when she was 8 months old. It's hard to believe she will be three years old in about 2 months!

Now for the April 1st Challenge at About a Boy, which is to use chevrons on a layout.  Here's mine:

Santiago is the baby in the striped shirt, and about 6 months old. Love looking back at his chubbiness...he's so slender and all boy these days

Thanks for looking, and I hope you will take a chance to participate in both of these challenges!

S.W.A.T. 5th Saturday Challenge

Since March has five Saturdays, S.W.A.T. is running a bonus challenge this month. And boy was it a challenge for me! We are to create a circus-themed card. I don't know why it was so difficult for me...I love making cards, but I was absolutely stumped on the "circus" theme. I browsed Pinterest and etsy for some inspiration, but still found myself stumped. In the end, I went through my stash, found a cute MME lion diecut and it seemed to flow from there. While I can truly say that this was a challenge, in the end it was fun and now I have an adorable card to send to Santiago's friend back in California who just celebrated his 4th birthday.

Thanks so much for looking. I hope you will head over to the S.W.A.T. blog to see what the rest of our Design Team created and maybe you will be inspired (and challenged) to create a card too!

Scrap Our Stash Challenge

I love getting to do "just for fun" scrapbooking! And I love it even more when I have brand new product to play with! This layout has some older stuff...the background paper is Basic Grey Perhaps...but the diecut stickers came from my new CP Maggie Holmes collection kit (see yesterday's post), and the papers are from the Dear Lizzy Lucky Charm collection (which was a gift from a generous scrappy friend of mine!) This layout is also unique to me because the photos are actually from this year...2013! I am so so far behind in my scrapping that I find it difficult to justify getting recent photos developed when I have a plethora of them from years ago sitting around waiting to be used. But when I needed to get some photos developed for Santiago's Science Fair project last week, I just couldn't resist having a few recent ones printed out as well. Note to self though, I will not get them developed at our local Wal-Mart again...the color quality is way off the actual. But it was still fun to actually scrap photos from just two months ago!

This layout is for the current challenge at Scrap Our Stash. We were to use the provided sketch and dig into our stash to create a mixed alpha title (or journaling). I feel slightly guilty for using  new product on the layout (afer all the, blog is about scrapping our stash right?), but since the background paper is pretty old, the banner was made from scraps and the title was from my stash, I do feel like I "scrapped my stash" at least a little bit lol.

Paper Secrets Challenge

Now that I'm getting caught up on my various Design Team projects and duties, I've finally found the time to do some "just for fun" scrapping. So of course I headed straight over to all of my favorite blogs and challenge sites to see what was currently running. I ran across a fun sketch over at Paper Secrets and thought I would adapt it into a  two-pager since I had several photos of Paolina that I was itching to scrap. And why is that do you ask? Because I finally had a little extra money and was able to actually break my two-year spending freeze on scrappy supplies to buy a few goodies. Among my new purchases was Crate Paper's Maggie Holmes paper collection. So adorable...and the colors coordinated absolutely PERFECTLY with Paolina's pajamas in these photos. I also had the opportunity to play with a fun mask (see the dark pink polka dots in the top left & bottom right corners of the layout) as well as a pendant punch that I just bought. The weather has been a bit funky around here lately so I had to take a photo of this layout indoors, so unfortunately (even with editing in Picasa) the lighting does not do justice to the beautiful colors in this collection.

Thanks for looking!

Let's Get Sketchy! March Week 4 Challenge

It's Monday which means it's time for a new sketch challenge at Let's Get Sketchy!  Here is the sketch for Week 4 of March...

And this week there's a twist...a color palette

I adapted the sketch into a two-pager...

I used photos from Christmas 2009, because quite honestly I'm probably the most behind on scrapping Christmases above all else, so any excuse to get those pictures done is good for me! But just because the color combo is red and green, it doesn't mean you have to scrap Christmas photos. Make sure you check out the blog for non-holiday inspiration from the rest of our talented design team.