Month: March 2023

Don’t You Hate Unfinished Projects?

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Don’t you just hate unfinished projects? I cut the pieces for this layout over a month ago, but since it required I get out the cuttlebug and cut the small papers with the Thin Cuts® I just set it aside for later. Well, later has arrived and I am calling Fridays “UNFINISHED FRIDAYS”.  Every Friday I will pull out a project that has gone unfinished and get it done. You will then see the finished project on my facebook page.

Today’s layout was from a kit called “Celebrating You.”  I had to search for the pictures which I had already had printed through Persnickety Prints which is the same company that prints your free photos if you subscribe to the Scrap with Heart Program.  They do beautiful work. Like I was saying before I got distracted, I had to find the pictures I was going to use.  If I had been smart, I would have put them in the drawers with the papers I had previously cut.

This layout took a bit more work on my part. I had to actually mark my papers to know where to put the triangles.

I thought I had found a way to save the wear and tear on the magnetic mat I use with my cuttlebug. The directions said to stack the squares, and when I cut them, it didn’t damage the mat at all, but then I had to manually cut all the cuts apart because it didn’t cut all the way through. I will try this again, with perhaps more thickness in my stack, as not damaging the magnetic mat would be an awesome savings.

I hope you will join me each Friday for “Finish It Up Friday” and work on those unfinished projects.  Send me a photo of your finished project and get entered into the monthly drawing for a free stamp set. Send it to Carol@CreativelyCarol.com and I will post it here on the blog.

Now go check out my facebook page and see the finished layout!

 

Scrapbooking is a connection word in many social circles

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Scrapbooking is a connection word in many social circles; whether you are talking to pre-teens to those of “a certain age” (sorry, I can’t wrap my head around calling myself “a senior” to everybody in between.  Usually everyone still have some printed pictures, but that has been changing over the past 30 years and how to care for their photos. In the 70’s, people used those “magnetic” albums, which were not really magnetic but has a sticky background and a clear cover you could peel back to arrange your pictures. The big problem with those is they don’t protect your photos from fading, the chemicals used were not archival quality and as many of us has learned after leaving photos in there for a couple of decades, photos are very difficult to get out!

Scrapbooking was always a social event. Scrapbook stores were everywhere and they hosted scrapbook nights. My daughter, a new mother t the time and I were first introduced to scrapbooking at a church meeting, then continued at the local scrapbook store every Thursday  night.  Now, before you start thinking, I don’t need to scrapbook with anyone, one of the benefits of these scrapbook nights, with different degrees of experience there were more opinions and suggestions on how to improve on a page when you felt something was missing. This is not like the suggestions you get from your mother-in-law, without any solicitation, but if you ask, they would have ideas. I learned a lot about scrapbooking from those wonderful women.

Now, after most brick and mortor scrapbook stores have closed, covid hits so we are isolated and all of that wonderful information has all but disappeared, along with the rows and rows of paper, embellishments and such. Yes, we still have the big three craft stores, but I don’t like the quality of some of the papers, and things don’t seem to match as well either. That is a topic for another day.

This list of twenty things every scrapbooker wants to know will help answer hopefully, most of your questions.  The posts over the next few days is intended to give anyone interested in scrapbooking a straight-forward and concise over-view of what someone new to scrapbooking needs to know. The concepts and ideas that follow come from my 25 years of scrapbooking experience and that of my scrapbooking friends.

If you have questions on this wondeful journey, please leave them below and I will try to answer your quesion.

Trip of a Lifetime Layout and Sketch

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Early this morning, I returned from a trip I took with my mother who is 82. It was just her and I. I wanted to be able to spend some one-on-one time with her while she still knew who I was.  You see, I had an experience when I visited my grandmother, in a nursing home for the last time. I knew it was going to be a good-bye visit as we didn’t live close to her anymore, and it was already breaking my heart, but when she kept patting my check and saying, “now who are you again?” it took every ounce of courage not to break down.  This was the last time I saw her, and she passed a couple months later.  I didn’t want that to be the case with my mother. So today’s layout is for a travel page. I will share more details about my trip later.

I have decided to turn things around, I am posting a layout, so you can see how the patterns and colors are put together, and under it, I have posted the sketch with measurements. Remember, you can make whatever adjustments are needed to work for your own layout. This is a page that could also use your scrap patterned paper,

Trip of a lifetime layout

 

My Stickese die cut shapes are used for the embellishments on this page, so your page stays very flat, if that is important to you. Here is the sketch:

Trip of a lifetime sketch

 

 

If you want to add more pictures to your Trip of a Lifetime page, you can use the patterened paper blocks and add two 2″ x 2″ photos in each square!

Creatively,

Carol