December Daily 2015 Walk Through

We've got a lot of first today! My first "real" youtube video (meaning not a video I posted for storage ^.^) and my first completed December Daily album! Whoop whoop! And I'm glad to say I didn't sound as weird as I expected to.  Yay!

This is a photo of my "filming setup" ^.^ I have my camera tripod on the bed with my ipad balanced atop it and a mug to make sure the ipad stays.  I stood on a step-stool so I could see what was in frame and turn the pages at the same time. Talk about making it work!  I think it game out pretty nicely considering the behind-the-scenes.

I hope you enjoyed the walk through of my December craftings!

Story Time: Happy Holidays 2015

I love how the year ends with Thanksgiving and Christmas!  It's like, 'Congratulations! You made it! Now eat a whole lotta food with your family!'  This past holiday season was nothing different in that sense.  I spent Thanksgiving and Christmas days with my family and we ate lots of food... albeit later than expected, but what's new?

I did feel different this year tho.  There was a distinct lack of super-christmassy spirit... but I attribute it to the long hours of work at the studio.  Spending the whole day convincing other people's families to smile is quite draining.  But anyway, I made it through!  Yay me!

This December I decided to try my hand at creating a December Daily scrapbook (link) and I'm so glad I did!  Telling a story each day and remembering to take pictures was monumental in me actually making memories of this holiday season.  Now doing the December Daily album was hard!  I'm still working on finishing up the last few pages.  I'll be sharing it on here soon.  ^.^ yay!

Next November/December I want to take even more pictures (God willing) and maybe do some video.  I know that even though I look like a crazy person snapping random pictures of little bits of life, looking back on them will be great.  Lamar really liked looking through the album and he kept telling me how cute I was for doing it.  Maybe next year, instead of only December Daily, I'll make it a holiday album and start it at Thanksgiving and keep on through New Years.  That's really ambitious, but it would be awesome to have!

Some of my favorite memories of this past holiday season are:
1.  quality family time / skyping with my family
2. finishing the breast cancer survivor afghan
3. secret santa with friends and family
4. our christmassy bedroom
5. Ryan white elephant gift exchange

How was your holiday season?  Does your family have any particular traditions?

All About Us Scrapbook: Part 2

Here is part 2 of my scrapbooking adventure!  Huzzah!  These pages were a lot of fun to put together.  At first, creating the layouts was kinda daunting, each for its own reason.  The full 12x12s were hard because I literally started with a HUGE blank canvas... I also felt like I was wasting space if I didn't pretty much cover the whole paper.  On the other hand, the Project Life pocket pages were hard because I didn't think about photo orientation when I was choosing photos to print.  So I'd end up with not enough photos in the proper sizes and have to figure out ways to trim them to make them fit.  *shrug*

With future layouts, I wanna get more into layering and embellishing.  Right now my pages are very simple... photos, journaling, filler cards.  I definitely have plenty of room for growth.

Now lets get into these next layouts!

These photos are from the first time Lamar and I went to Lake Guntersville State Park.  I love everything about these photos!  Lamar was super proud of the black & white one he took of Kiva watching me wade.  He said he had to shoot it a bunch of times to get it just right.  I'm glad he did because it is quite beautiful.

This is Lake Guntersville State Park one year later after the huge tornado outbreak.  It's crazy that wind did all this destruction.  Oddly enough, whenever I look at these or remember this trip, I feel this almost awful reverence for nature... how a storm can chew a tree to splinters.

This paper is uh-MAZE-ing!  I had a lot of fun going through all the text and highlighting the bits that fit us.  My favorite line in it is, "I can't wait to see the journey we go on together." I also love that sentiment paired with this photo from our engagement shoot.

All the photos on this page had to be trimmed and MAN it was so fiddly!  I got to use more of my little letter stickers and did a lot of journaling as you can see.  One of the best parts of this layout is the sticker on Lamar driving the go-cart.  I wanted a race car themed sticker for the photo, but I didn't want to go and buy a whole set.  What I ended up doing was drawing a flag on paper, cutting it out, and running it through my sticker maker.  Ta-da! Handmade stickers in my scrapbook!!

Of course, as a doggy-mommy I had to do a few layouts dedicated to Kiva & Toot :)  The journaling on here are things the dogs enjoy and a handful of their nicknames.  I found these packets of paper die-cut embellishments on clearance at Joann's and used them on this page.  I feel like I was dipping my toe in the embellishment swimming pool ^.^ Not bad. Not bad at all. 

Here's another page of the girls.  I water color painted the background paper, and I think that'll be something I try again.  I used a page of dog themed stickers on here and wrote a little journaling around their close up shots.  

That's it for this part of the All About Us Scrapbook ^.^  I have been working busily on finishing the rest of the pages.  Then I ended up adding the remaining 12x12 page protectors back into the album.  So when they're all done, the album will have 20 12x12 layouts and 10 Project Life layouts.

I've already purchased a new ringed scrapbook album to make it easier to change up the page protectors.  And I'm trying to decide how I want to approach the new book.  It'll probably be just like this one, a running record of our lives as we go. 

All About Us Scrapbook: Part 1

In my last post I mentioned that I've recently gotten into scrapbooking. I've always been a hoarder of photos but I never really did anything with them. My digital photos were in folders on my computer (if they were lucky... The unlucky ones are on some sd card) and the printed ones were in boxes.  Back when we were wedding planning, I got a '101 free prints' offer for signing up on shutterfly and so I went and printed out photos that we had taken throughout our relationship. It was a lot of fun going through all the old photos and reminiscing.  When the prints came, I put them all in a photo album and that was that.

Fast forward a year.  I somehow stumbled upon the planner community on YouTube which led me to @theresetgirl and her Listers Gotta List monthly challenges (see May -here- & June -here-).  I loved the decorating that I was doing and it was nice to reconnect with my love of papers and stickers and cutting and pasting ^.^ As I created the different daily designs, I would show them to my friends. One particular friend is a scrapbooker and she kept telling me that somewhere hidden beneath all my crochet hooks and yarn is a scrapbooker waiting to emerge! I would just shrug. To give me the shove I needed to start, she gave me my first album.

This is the 12x12 album Tiffany gave me.  It is perfect for the All About Us theme I decided to do!

The day I did a YouTube search for 'scrapbooking for beginners,' I knew that I was going to make the plunge.  I started watching lots of videos about regular scrapbooks and project life ones and I couldn't decide what style I wanted to do.  Eventually I decided to do half and half.  I think that decision made my first foray into scrapbooking much easier.  So without much more ado, here are the first pages and layouts I've completed in my All About Us album.  I'm super proud of them and I can't wait to finish this book so I can start another!

I love that Lamar and I favor the color green.  It makes color choice verrry easy ^.^  When I was arranging this title page, I went back and forth about leaving that empty space in the upper right corner.  I'm glad I did because the negative space turned out quite balancing.

This page was a little frustrating but also a lot of fun.  The frustration came from the pawprint paper.  I started laying out my photos on the page and realized that the pawprint paper was not 12x12... understandable because I got it from an estate sale.  So I ended up having to look for another paper to go behind to fill the dimensions.  When that was done, I went to add in the title and all the words on the photos.

This page was to highlight some of our favorite things.  The top left is on a train to the airport in DC, top right is our family, middle left us at Monte Sano in Huntsville, middle right us after photographing our first wedding, bottom left our brothers, and bottom right us at Donut King.

This was the first project life style layout I completed.  I wanted to use all the cuddly photos.  The bottom left photo is my favorite, I have it framed also :)  It's from when we first started dating.  It was a really nice fall night and we were walking around Big Spring Park in Huntsville.  Good times ^.^

This was the first traditional scrapbook page I made.  I love the paper colors.  The photos were taken at Lamar's apartment in Huntsville.  His beard and mustache are always quite prickly, but it makes me laugh :)

This page is just a mishmash of photos from a bunch of different things we've done together.  I love the weird faces we're making in the top left photo, but neither of us can remember what or where we were!  So it went on the page with a "no idea" caption ^.^

This page gives me a little homesick for Huntsville feeling.  The bottom photos are of Big Spring Park at nighttime.  Lamar and I loved walking around there.  We'd take the dogs out there and feed the ducks and fish.  I really want to find a place down here that's sorta like Big Spring Park.  The photos at the top are from our engagement photo shoot.  We had a lot of fun :)

I hope you enjoyed part 1 of my journey into the land of scrapbooks!  I'm still working on finishing the album.  I can say, though, that I am totally hooked!  I'm already thinking about what my next album can be.  Maybe our wedding... but I have a shutterfly photo book... Do I need both? What do you think?