The Indecisive Artist

Just Keep Scrapping…

Some more layouts to share with you all…

The one was inspired by a challenge I hosted on SCS for Virtual Scrapbook Night. My challenge was to use the song “Everlong” by Foo Fighters as inspiration for a page. If you look closely, you’ll see some of the lyrics blended into the background paper. This is hubby and I 10 years ago!! This was one of our engagement photos.

 

Took this photo of Gianna one afternoon while I was photographing some friends. She was all dressed up in her fairy wings and tutu. Template was by Biograffiti, available at ScrapArtist.

Another Biografitti template… Since this template uses lots of photos (I’m normally a photo-per-page type of scrapbooker), I decided rather than try to use a bunch of photos from a single event, it made more sense to show a series of photos of my little girl from Day 1 up thru her 4 year photos. Can’t believe how fast she’s grown!!

 

Happy Thanksgiving!  

CT – Biograffiti – 3 New Fall Layouts

I’m happy to announce that I have joined the creative team for Biograffiti, the fabulous template artist who sells digital designs at www.daydreamerdesignworks.com.

I have created 3 layouts using her latest Fresh Start 3 template kit, found here.

This first layout was inspired by a recent trip to a local winery. I love doing scrapbook pages about the every day things that don’t necessarily involve photos of people – but rather, photos of the every day things we do. A trip to a winery is definitely scrapbook worthy!!

Template by Biograffiti. Papers and elements from Shabby Princess and Weeds and Wildflowers. Shadows by Flergs.

 

This next layout was inspired, NOT KIDDING, by a photo I found listed on etsy. One of my favorite things to do is search etsy for our names. LOL. Just to see what products out there might be named after us. I found this ADORABLE photo called “Gianna’s Ruby Slippers” listed there and fell in love with the idea. Being a photographer myself, I just had to give it a try! So when I saw these adorable ruby slippers at my favorite store (Target!), they went into my shopping cart without hesitation. Spending $14 on a pair of shoes JUST to take photos of them… totally impulsive, and yet, sooo worth it! Luckily, Gianna LOVES the shoes, so getting her to model them for me was a piece of cake. This is the resulting scrapbook layout.

 

Template by Biograffiti. Papers and elements by Gina Cabrera and Creations by Rachel.Stitching by Traci Reed. Shadows by Flergs.

 

This next layout is my sweet little pumpkin picking pumpkins at Grandma’s house.

Template by Biograffiti. Papers and elements by Shabby Princess, Shabby Miss Jen, and Creations by Rachel. Shadows by Flergs.

Family Layouts

After the marathon session of cranking out layouts for my California book (which should arrive in the mail this week! woohoo!) I really wanted to create something completely non-California. :) I recently did a family portrait session for ourselves. It started out just as an attempt to take photos of Gianna, but since Jay and I were both available, we got in on the photos as well. I gave Gianna the wireless remote to snap this photo of us and knew I had to create a layout.

I’m also on a mission to create some printed layouts to put in frames to hang on my office wall. I bought some adorable 8x8 frames recently, and they are just waiting for some layouts to fill them. I plan on using these two layouts for sure!

 

 

This next layout features a photo I took of Gianna while on a trip to Duluth. My sister, Gianna, and I took a recent road trip ‘up north’ and spent a day in Duluth. We took tons of photos!!! This one is from the afternoon, when we walked along the shore of Lake Superior, near the lift bridge, and stopped to throw rocks into the lake. I tried teaching her to skip stones, but it seems I’ve lost my touch. Still, we had fun throwing stones and watching the ripples across the water.

I am loving this time of year! Fall is definitely my favorite season (with summer a close second), and for me, fall means scrapbook time. I have some lofty goals of completing a number of layouts over the coming months, including another attempt at a photobook chronicling our girls’ trip up north. Wish me luck!

 

PS – just a few more days left on the Hoorray photobook free shipping offer!

California Photo Book

Remember when Jay and I took a trip to California? It was Memorial Day weekend, 2008. Yeah… 16 months ago. Well, I finally finished up the photo book I made to highlight some of the 1100 photos I took. If I haven’t been sharing scrapbook layouts here on my blog it’s because I have been entirely focused on completing this photo book by Sept 15th. I didn’t want to share any of the individual layouts until I had the entire thing complete so that I could show the book in its entirety.

Well, here it is. :)

It ended up being 84 pages total, and I’m really proud of how it all came together and how I was able to see a project like this through to completion. Now I’m just getting ready to order it. I can’t wait to see it in a bound book!

Feel free to take a peek at the book. After all, I’ve been waiting to share it for a long time!

Normally when I scrap, I scrap whatever I’m in the mood for. I could never be a chronological scrapper – I’d never be caught up. Instead, I prefer to scrap whatever inspires me. The benefit to this is that I always have a little bit of something from multiple time periods. Because I use post-bound albums, I can rearrange the pages when I need to. (It’s usually a yearly task as it takes time to rearrange everything.) The drawback with wanting to do a photobook is that I have to commit to having the entire set of layouts complete before the photobook can be put together because there is no inserting more pages later one when I get a whim and decide to add something, you know? For that reason, a photobook is big commitment for me to make. :) However, it was worth the effort. I love the idea of a complete book telling the story of a trip start to finish.

I have to admit, though, that I had no idea how long this process would be for me. I did make an effort to retouch most of the photos before putting them on the page, which always adds time to the process. I intentionally kept the pages simple – it was to be all about the photos and not necessarily look like a scrapbook. Just a base paper, some photo frames filled with photos, and text and/or alphabets to tell the story. I’m so glad I went with a simple approach – it helped me both keep the focus on the photo and the story without distracting elements, and it also helped streamline the process so that I was able to create 84 pages for the book without getting tired of the task. :)

Photobooks Available! Free Shipping, too!

I’m pleased to announce the launch of my first photobook with Hoorray.

I’ve been busy working on my designs since spring, and am happy to say my first design went live a few weeks ago. Now there’s a promotion for free shipping for my blog readers, so I wanted to post a big announcement here!

 

Free shipping is available through the end of September only, so don’t delay!

My book can be accessed directly via the link below. I’m proud of my first book, a photobook designed to highlight the little girl in your life. Inspired by my own little princess, this book features pinks, browns, and greens on simple, classic page designs to allow your photos be the focus.

When you create your book, feel free to mix and match the background pages and page layouts to your liking. Don’t like the blue pages? No worries! Just replace them with another available background.

I’ll post announcements here when additional photobooks are available.

Now, I’m off to create my own copy of my photobook. I plan to do a quick tutorial for my readers to show how easy it is to create these long-lasting treasures! I recently did Gianna’s 4-year photoshoot, so I plan to put those photos in my photobook. Can’t wait!

I hope you enjoy my books!

Catching Up: A Couple Gianna Layouts

I have been really bad about blogging these last few months. I think I may have overextended myself with things I want to accomplish. I have a monthly goal to scrapbook 20 pages each month. My average so far? 6. Last year I completed 15 pages a month. I haven’t updated my Project 365 blog for months (though I am still going strong taking a photo each and every day.) I don’t know what it is… I thought that once we moved to the new house, I’d have more time to scrap and do my thing, because, after all, I now have my very own scrap room to use. The truth is that sometimes weeks go by without me stepping foot into that room! Work (my real job) has been busy and challenging as well. And now that Gianna is 4, there are lots of activities to participate in: Soccer, T-Ball, Swimming Pool. It’s all going by so quickly.

I have also been very busy creating scrapbook designs for sale as photobooks… and once the designs go live, I will make a big announcement here! Hopefully I can encourage a few people to make some photobooks with my designs!

I do want to share a couple of layouts I’ve done recently. I really wanted to share one of Gianna’s dance recital last May, but I already moved the layout to my external hard drive. (I fight a CONSTANT battle with finding space on the laptop’s hard drive… but I just bought myself a new, portable external drive and soon ALL my photos and scrapbook stuff will reside on that instead of on the laptop drive and leave me some room on this computer for insanely large disk space requirements of Photoshop… and maybe even Illustrator if I can get the courage – er, time – to try to learn another program.)

Instead I will share a couple very recent layouts.

This is of Gianna at soccer practice. Yes, we bought her a special pink soccer ball. :) Soccer didn’t actually go so well for us. She liked the idea of playing with the ball and kicking it around the field… but when it came time to compete and play tag games with the other kids… the idea of other kids kicking HER BALL away from her was a bit too much at time. Luckily in TBall, no one steals your ball, and it’s going much better for her! She ADORES TBall.  Still, I love this layout of her with her soccer ball because you can see her really making an effort. She looks so cute as a soccer player!

 

This layout is about the night I took Gianna to the hair salon for a quick cut with the intention of taking her out and taking portraits of her afterwards. She ended up with her hair braided, which, while it was totally cute, is not something she normally wears, and wasn’t the look I wanted for her formal photos. So loved them so much that I couldn’t bear asking her to take them out either. I still took some informal photos of it and made them into this layout.

Exciting News!

I’ve been wanting to share this for awhile.

I’m proud to announce my next venture: I’m designing photo book pages for an online photo retailer! That means you can order custom photo books with themed photo book pages and covers I have designed! The site is not live yet, but it is coming soon! Keep watching for the official announcement!

Digital Scrap Page – Dad and G

I’ve been trying to find the time to scrap an occasional page here and there. Now that it’s (supposedly) summer here, the time to do fun creative stuff has been replaced with spending time outdoors. When I do find the time to be creative, I find myself going for fast and simple creations. I whipped up this page one evening in a short amount of time. It’s very simple, but I like it.

The  photo was one I took for Project 365 back in April. Dad and Gigi were being silly one day and I snapped some photos of them together. I gave the photo an antiqued overlay when I retouched it. And when I used it on the layout here, I blended it into the background paper to make it even more subtle. Just a very simple ribbon, tag, and wordart to complete the layout.

I Love Being Your Mom

I took some casual photos of Gianna on Mothers Day. She’s become a little ham for the camera. When she wants to, that is. Here she’s picked some dandelions and is modeling with them. Such a stinker! Anyway, I wanted to take this photo and create a special layout since the photo was taken on Mothers Day. I really wanted just something simple to convey what it feels like to finally be able to celebrate Mothers Day. I mean, the best part about Mothers Day is just having this little girl who made me a mom.

 

Beyond the sentimental part of this layout, there’s something else really cool about it. I made all the elements myself! Just part of my effort to push myself to do new things. It’s an exciting and frustrating process all at once. Frustrating because there’s so much I want to do and haven’t figured it all out yet! But I’m learning, and that is VERY exciting!

Mothers Day Cards and Gifts

I set out to make some homemade gifts and cards for Mothers Day. Neither one of these things took a long time to make, but I think they turned out great. Both my mom and my mother-in-law like bath salts, so it was a logical gift to make!

These simple cards were so easy. The images were some I had received in trade already stamped for me, so I just had to color them. I used my watercolor crayons and an aquapainter. I mounted that image onto a layer of always artichoke cardstock. I love that color green! The card base itself is certainly celery and was stamped with my favorite Sanded background stamp in chocolate chip ink. I wanted to add a little ribbon embellishment, so I used my wide grosgrain celery ribbon and made a little loop. I adhered it to the image layer with a little vintage brad. I wanted to use a Happy Mothers Day sentiment, but the stamp I had was too large for the cardfront, so I stamped inside and instead used the generic ‘for you’ sentiment on the outside.

 

To make the bath salts, I took out a bunch of my soaping supplies. Normally I make bath salts with a combination of epsom salts and dead sea salts. One is readily available at any pharmacy, but the dead sea salts are harder to come by and must be ordered. I didn’t have any dead sea salts left. (I use them in my bath whenever I can!) So this batch of salts was made purely with epsom salts. But that’s OK, because part of the purpose is to salt the water, but the other part is to provide a nice aroma, and any salt can serve as a vehicle for the scented oils. I colored the salts with some mica (which I had on hand for my soaping) and used some fragrance oils to provide scent. Mixed them up in a bowl and then poured them into some sturdy cellophane bags. To finish the bags off, I rolled the tops down and tied them with a wide organdy ribbon. I also wanted a little tag to decorate the bag. The flowery stamp is actually an image from a set of scallop stamps that coordinate with the SU scallop circle punch. I didn’t like the inside sentiment, though, so after I stamped and punched the image out, I stamped a smaller 3/4 inch circle from brown paper to look like the center of a flower and to cover the sentiment up. I wanted a little more dimension, so I added a threaded button to finish it off.

 

I think these salts turned out great! I am especially partial to the peach one in the center. Good thing I mixed up an extra bag just for myself! 

Digi Page – Dad and Daughter

I made this page a few days ago. I’ve been struggling with finding my creativity lately, and I thought I’d FORCE myself to sit down and create a page. I looked to the challenges on Splitcoast for inspiration – and there was a digi scrap challenge to use word art on a page. Easy enough.

The main photo on this layout was the starting point – it is a recent photo of Jay and Gianna kissing that I took and posted as part of my Project 365 blog (which needs updating, I realize). So I took out some of the other photos I took at the same time and retouched them to match the main one. I really like how this turned out.

Digital paper is by Holly and wordart is by Natali. Shadows by Flergs. The layout was a scraplift of a template I saw online recently. (I don’t remember who created it.)

I do have a monthly goal to create 20 pages a month, but I’ve had a very difficult time keeping up with that goal, even when I do a scrapbook day out of the house. which gives me time to create 10 or more layouts in a sitting. I’m not sure if it’s because the creative juices have slowed to a trickle, or if I’m just too busy with other things. It’s probably that my creativity is waning BECAUSE I’m too busy with other things. Which reminds me…

I have a couple of exciting announcements to make soon. :)  Nothing house or baby related, though… so don’t even go there. :)

Be sure to check out my Project 365 blog as well… I created a new blog header and will be posting more photos there soon.

Mojo Found

I’ve spent some time getting my new stamp/scrap/photo space organized. It’s not complete, but it’s functional, and that makes me happy. However, I’ve just not had the creative energy to do anything! In fact, I’ve been trying to force it, and it’s only made me more frustrated. Finally, Monday night, I was able to find some inspiration. Gigi and I spent the evening in the stamp room and created some fun stuff.

These are the cards I came up with.  The blue card is meant to be a sympathy card, which I sent to our previous next door neighbor. Scotty passed away the week after we moved after a very quick battle with cancer. He and his wife Marilyn were always very friendly, and Scotty will be missed. I wanted to send a card to Marilyn to express our sympathies.

The other two cards I made had no real intended purpose – I just felt like stamping them! When I make cards, I often don’t start out with something specific in mind. I usually just start playing with stuff and letting it happen. You’ll often see my cards incorporate a dark brown color – that’s just my usual style!

I’ve been able to spend more time in my stamping room this week, and I’ll have more cards to share in the next few days.

Holy Cow It’s March

I realized the other day that I haven’t blogged in six weeks. Yikes! In that time, my family and I have moved into our new house (FINALLY!) and have spent a few weeks unpacking and organizing. We are not done yet – there are some finishing touches to be done with the house (I’m looking for the perfect mirrors for my bathroom and am improvising for the time being. Also, we neglected to order a door handle for the front door, so we are using the very unmatched brass colored round door knob from the previous door. ) But we are getting settled. There are still boxes to unpack, but there’s an end in sight, I think. :) Unfortunately, this work of moving and getting settled has left me little time to be creative, and when I do have time to be creative, I have lacked the energy to do anything creative. So I haven’t edited any photos, created any scrapbook pages, or stamped anything in a long time. I have managed to keep photographing each day as part of my project 365 commitment, but those photos still reside on the memory cards – I haven’t even transferred them to the computer yet!

But I am bound and determined to blog tonight. And also to start posting some of the last 2 months’ worth of photos to my project 365 blog.

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One of the decisions we made as part of remodeling the house was choosing paint colors. And it wasn’t an easy decision-making process. We decided on a palette of greens and browns for a very earthy, nature-inspired theme. But for a long time, I’ve been wrestling with the idea of painting the kitchen red – kind of a pizza-sauce color. I decided it against it. Red is bold and vibrant, and I decided to play it safe.

But this red color kept weighing on me, and the more I tried to not think about it, the more I couldn’t help but think about it.

Last weekend we shopped a local furniture store that’s going out of business and finally found a black kitchen table to go in the small dining nook. The table, however, did not come with chairs. So we headed to Pier 1, which is my favorite store to shop. I love going there and just looking at all the pretty stuff. And so when we went there, I knew I had a lot of really gorgeous chairs to choose from. And then I saw them: these pretty red velvet dining room chairs. After some back and forth, I decided to go for it. The red chairs would be the bold, bright, daring accent against the safe colors I used in the rest of the house. It was the perfect answer.

We also picked up a pretty red bowl and charger to use as a centerpiece on that table. Plus, some red pillows, some red rugs, and some red gerbera daisies to carry the red accents through the house.

Slowly, it’s all coming together. It is starting to feel like our home, like we belong. It’s a wonderful feeling.

More Gifty Things

Just wanted to post a few more photos of some of the homemade Christmas gifts I made this year.

This first is a travel journal I made for my little sister. It’s just a blank album that I did an altered cover for. Very simple. I thought she could attach some photos, do a little journaling, and have a quick and easy travel scrapbook.

Again just some travel-themed paper mounted on black cardstock is the main piece for the cover. I used my favorite laser cutter to cut those letters out at my LSS (RIP).

This next project was a gift to Gianna’s grandparents. I made two separate books. when I was done with them, I thought they were so cute I wanted to keep them for myself!

The pages in these scrapbooks measure 5x5, so I took some of my favorite scrapbook layouts from 2008 and had them printed at 5x5 size and simply mounted them to the scrapbook pages. I added a few embellishments to some of the pages to add a little dimension.

The front cover has an opening that shows a photo on the first page. Getting that photo aligned was harder than I thought it would be! Added a few flowers and the year as embellishments.

And then the inside pages. Since I already had the scrapbook pages done, this was a really quick and easy gift to make. I still have a few pages to add to give to them but the rings used to bind the book are removable, so it’ll be super easy to add pages and give them to the grandparents.

Fun stuff!

Photo Album Scrapbook Journal

One of the projects I’ve been wanting to post here was the fun photo album/scrapbook/journal thing I made for my hubby for Christmas that highlights our trip to California over Memorial Day weekend. I have been sort of focused on my project 365 blog recently, and this blog has taken a bit of an unintended backburner. If you haven’t see my project 365 blog, you can see it here. I haven’t missed a day yet! Well, photos don’t always get uploaded the same day I take them, but I do try hard to get the photos uploaded to the blog on a regular basis. You can see them here: http://cameragirldenise.typepad.com/denise_365/

Anyway, back to this blog.

My intention has always been to do a complete digital book for this trip, but I’m taking my time with it. I currently have about 25 pages scrapped (with a goal of about 100 pages when it’s done). Remember, I took 1100 photos on this trip and have lots I want to include. But I also had an itching desire to create a paper album as well. I knew I didn’t want it to be as formal – just something to showcase the top 50 photos from the trip and tell the story more concisely.

Digging through my scrapbook cupboards I discovered an empty wire-bound journal. No doubt I purchased it to use for photos from our trip to Italy nearly 9 years ago. (I will NEVER be caught up with my scrapbooking!) But it was still unused and figured it was perfect for this project.

The journal had blank black pages and just the right number of pages to hold my photos. Remember, it’s wire-bound already so I can’t add any pages to it.

I had ordered my photos from Shutterfly and included a white border on them. It’s really easy to do and it makes the photos look more classy, I think.

I also knew I wanted this journal to be very Martha Stewart-ish... simple and classic. Nothing says simple and classic better than photo corners. I remember scrapbooking in 1985 in my bedroom in the basement, putting photos of my various elementary school activities into a huge album with black pages and photo corners. Either my tastes are outdated or some things are just classic. I’m going to say classic never goes out of style.

Looking back, I should have used the kraft colored photo cornes for this project to set the white photo border off from the black pages, but done is done.

I used the handy laser cutting printer at my local scrap store to cut out those pretty red letters. Sadly, this store went out of business about two weeks after I finished this journal. I will MISS that laser cutter. I will miss the store, too… but that laser cutter was definitely the highlight of the store!  The letters are cut out of a cranberry colored cardstock and are on the front cover and then inside for each ‘section’ that separates each of the cities/regions we visited.

 

Then, to mark each day that we were there, I stamped the days of the week onto kraft cardstock and placed them in the appropriate spots in the journal.

I dressed up the front cover of the journal by putting a piece of black velvet ribbon between the black and kraft sections. The cover design is a piece of wine-themed scrapbook paper mounted on black cardstock to set a theme for the book. Then, I used the best photo of the trip as the main focal point of the cover.

I didn’t do any journaling inside this book for two reasons. First, it’s just meant to be a photo album, and I took great effort to find photos from each of the places we visited that told the story really well. It should be pretty evident going start to finish exactly where we went while we were there. Secondly, the bound digital book has journaling and I didn’t want two books saying the same thing.

I think I have one more homemade gift idea to show you… and then it’ll be time for Valentine’s projects. :)