Recycled Wallpaper QP Freebie

Recycled Wallpaper QP by pinktoque

I’m baaaaaaack! Hopefully you liked the Recycled Wallpaper mini pack freebie given away yesterday :) Today as promised I’ve got the coordinating quick page to give away, too! It’s 3600 x 3600 pixels (12″ x 12″) and 300 dpi. It uses a little from the Recycled Wallpaper pack and then I added some other random stuff as I went. It’s a little pink, but pink is a very good color :)

Download the Recycled Wallpaper QP here!

Don’t forget that unless otherwise specified, my digital scrapbooking elements are for personal use only. Be sure to check out the TOU included and let me know if you have any questions. I hope to make some more new stuff in the near future, as time allows. Right now I’m back home in Indiana for a brief period this weekend in order to interview with the school district I taught at before I moved up to Canada. Cross your fingers! If I get a job offer, Lucas and I will pack up the boys and we’ll be on our way.

And of course, finding out last minute (Wednesday) that I was going to need to take a plane to Indy the next day (Thursday), one of the most important aspects of the packing wasn’t which outfit I was going to wear for the interview, or my teaching portfolio… but what knit projects I wanted to take with me for the flight! Haha. Ok so I’m probably exaggerating a lot (It took a long time for me to decide on an outfit, and I spent several hours touching up my portfolio), but it was a very important part of the packing. I had to figure out the patterns I wanted to take and wind some yarn for those projects into cakes to pack in my carry on.  I’m going to be working on Danido Crafty’s Bebeh Earflaps Hat and the Modern Cabled Baby Bib by Andrea Pomerantz. I’ll let you know how it goes! :)

Have a great weekend, and wish me luck!

Tags: baby, interview, teaching

Craftster Feature and New Scrapbook Pages

You & Me Together by Shallya Kitby, using the kit Cherish for Love by Fanette

I am most honored to be notified that my DIY Batman Soap Tutorial was a Craftster-wide feature recently, AND was also chosen as a featured project for Quarter 2 of 2009 in the Bath & Beauty section.  WOW! I really appreciate all of the “this rocks!” votes I received on the tutorial and am glad it’s gone over so well :) Thanks everyone!

This weekend I got around to some much neglected digital scrapbooking. It feels like it’s been forever! Several months ago when I was doing more digi scrapping I had started stockpiling various quick pages that I’d found on DigiFree as I came across them daily.  I was just saving them for a rainy day I guess! The weather has definitely been rainy here in Calgary lately, and so on Sunday I went back through the folder and turned around 33 of those quick pages into new pages of my digital scrapbook.

Kissletoe by Cinnamon Designs

Firstly, I went back through photos I had on my hard drive, which took me all the way back to November. There were a couple of events in the fall and winter that needed to be scrapped, such as Lucas’ birthday party, outings with friends, and Christmas. I also realized that the more digital pages I had in a single scrapbook in My Memories Suite, the slower/longer it took for the program to load the scrapbook when I wanted to work on it. This makes sense since it had to render all of those thumbnail previews along the bottom, and the more elements and extras on a page to render, the longer that would take. Multiply that times 40 odd pages or so, and you can see where I’m coming from. To help with the clutter, I decided to sum up the end of 2008 by adding a few more pages to finish off the year, and then start a whole new, separate album for 2009. So now I have a Family Life 2008 album and I’ve started a Family Life 2009 album that will be ongoing for the rest of 2009.

Green Lagoon by Miss Vivi

Family Life 2009 was a fun one to start on and where I had the most catch up to do, because we’re already just over halfway into the year and so much has happened in the first part of 2009! Really the pages just started flowing once I went back through the photos I had stored away in my Pictures directory. I had some great new photos of Oliver and Winston in their Flames gear to scrap and some Calgary Flames quick pages I had created myself last year to use with them. I had quite a few newer photos of Lucas and I together that were begging to be scrapped, and of course a LOT of photos from our recent anniversary trip to Nova Scotia. It was hard to narrow down all of the fantastic photos we’d taken to just a few digital scrapbook pages, but I managed!

An Apple Day by MimiLou

Then I scrapped our recent family outdoor activity of choice: rollerblading! Lucas and I have been rollerblading fairly regularly for almost a year now, but just recently (like 2 weeks ago) we decided to start trying to rollerblade with Oliver and Winston, too. This has been ridiculously hilarious and A LOT of fun, and a great form of exercise for the whole family. Oliver could stand to lose a few pounds, tbh. But shhh, we don’t tell him he’s fat. (Ok we do, but it’s mostly hair, right?)

County Fair by GWTW

Then of course most recently, as in this past weekend, Lucas and I attended our first Calgary Stampede ever!  As I mentioned in my previous post, the Calgary Stampede comes to town for 10 days every July and turns the entire town into a rodeo.  Suddenly everyone here thinks they are a cowboy. To be honest, the Stampede was very much like the Indiana State Fair, just with a rodeo attached. It was great fun though, because it’s been years since I’ve been to a state fair of course.

All of this work to catch up my digital scrapbooks inspired me to create something of my own to share, and I played around with some new background papers and a couple of matchy-matchy elements to go with them. Nothing fancy, but I plan to give those away later this week, along with a quick page I made to go along with them. How exciting! Although knitting has dominated my crafting time for the most part the past several months, I don’t plan on letting my digital scrapbook get that far behind again, so hopefully that means more scrapping and more freebie goodies for you, too :)

In creating a 2009 album and leaving it open-ended to add on as life happens, I’ve started fast-forwarding in my mind to imagine what other upcoming pages I’ll need to scrap about. Most exciting is the next chapter in Lucas and I’s lives where we move back to Indiana and roadtrip with Oliver and Winston to get there, along with the birth of my first nephew coming up in October. The 2009 Family Life album sure will be a monumental one!

Tags: Batman, Nova Scotia, quick pages, rollerblading

Latest Layouts

First of all, HAPPY LABOUR DAY! I finally got around to some digital scrapbooking of my own today and scrapped up some memorable new photos taken in the past couple weeks. I just wanted to pop in and share them with you!

The first involves my handsome husband and I, and uses papers and elements from Summer Splash by Christine Ousley, christinescraps for BTST.

The second is a compilation of some photos with my friend Michelle. Michelle was my maid of honour in my wedding and has been my best friend since moving to Canada. We met when we were both working in the Human Resources department of Safeway. We’ve both found new jobs but do just about everything together. This page is dedicated to her friendship and uses elements from the Citrus Berry kit by Vicki at AWP (A Work in Progress).
I love Vicki over at AWP so much that I used another one of her freebie kits, Fired Earth, for this layout of Lucas and I. Aren’t we cute?
This last one I did using the Express Yourself freebie kit by RPENN. Yay for girls just wanting to have fun! This is me with Kim and Michelle. We’re hawt mamas!
The hanging date tags you see in the last two are not part of the kits mentioned but instead are from scrapmatters.com by the Golden Girls digital designs. They’re super cute! Anyway, just wanted to share what creative things I’ve been up to this holiday weekend; hope you liked the layouts! Enjoy the rest of your long weekend.

My Recent Layouts and Pages

I’ve spent so much time lately planning out my beachy layouts for our trip last weekend to Penticton that I just haven’t had time to sit down and put them together with the actual photos! I’ve also spent too much time making and not enough time using my creations or new freebies that I’ve downloaded from others, so I’ve got some fun layouts to share this post so that you can see what I’ve been doing besides taking photos and practicing my design skills.

And of course, the big family road trip last weekend to British Columbia had to be scrapped about! The highlight of the trip was that it was our first family road trip with our new puppy, Winston the mini schnauzer, who is 6 months old. Not only was it his first big road trip, it was also his first time at the beach and his first swim. Our 5 year old border collie, Oliver (Winston’s big brother) has been to Penticton several times and has swam in the lake on the beaches there before, but this was a first for Winston, so Oliver showed him the ropes and we took them to an off leash doggie designated section of Okanagan Lake to experience it all leash free. So in a way it was also Oliver’s first time getting to swim freely, too. I took more pictures that day than I did any of the other days combined! This first layout here (up, left) uses an overlay template for the photo with wording and elements that I created last week in honour of the upcoming trip in a mini kit that I named (surprise!) “A Day at the Beach.” You can snag that freebie mini kit HERE in case you missed it. The second (below, left) is a layout of my design using elements and papers from “On va à la plage” by Créé par Latham

These are just a few of the pages I’ve put together recently — and of course one page isn’t nearly enough to cover all of the excitement of our trip… so for the full album of our trip check out my digital scrapbook! (The trip and most recent family stuff is in the Family Life album). I sometimes just do a page or two at a time and upload it to the appropriate album there, so it’s always changing. Like just recently our little Winston got his first ever haircut… another one of those “of course I had to scrap about it” situations. (You know what I’m talking about!) The traditional schnauzer cut on him is so adorable and I feel like he’s all grown up now with his pronounced old man beard. Be sure to check it out in the Oliver and Winston album!