Day 2 – If These Walls Could Talk...

Lain’s prompt for today was geared towards childhood bedrooms, but traveling has forced me to keep my project quick and easy.  No time for hunting through photos for my children’s messy rooms or journaling about how I shared a room with my little sister until I moved away as an adult.  Instead, I went back to the easy-access of that project box with my son’s college scrapbook supplies.  In it were some photos of his very first dorm room and I used the page to highlight some of the differences in an ROTC dorm that make it a little different.  I used the striped background paper to accentuate the clean lines and rigid neatness of the room.  It’s simple, clean, and perfectly demonstrates what his daily life is like in the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets.

Day 1 – In the News: Welcome to the SEC!

Welcome back to LOAD!  Many of you know that means that I’ll be featuring lots of scrapbook layouts over the next month or so, but if you’re new to this blog, you may not know what that’s all about.  LOAD is a cute acronym for Layout A Day, a month-long online workshop and challenge hosted by Lain Ehman of True Scrap.  I’ve been participating in LOAD a couple of times a year since 2012 and I have so much fun and learn so much about myself and scrapbooking that I just have to share!  So for the next 31 days or so (with a few pauses for some other cool stuff), you’ll get to see all my crafty LOAD creations!

Each day, Lain sends us an email with a video and a prompt.  The video is where Lain goes into detail about the prompt.  Sometimes she will share her reasoning, or give you some ideas on how you can utilize the prompt, and she always provides an example made by either herself or one of her helpers.  As a participant, I generally use the prompt to make my page (although I’m not required to do so), and then post it to the LOAD Flickr page.  Sharing our layouts in the Flickr gallery is great because we can see what some of the other 500+ scrappers are doing and get a lot of great ideas.  I usually keep a log of all the prompts along with some notes and ideas for future pages using that same prompt.  It’s a great way to kick-start my creativity, and the prompts have directed me to do some really insightful pages that I probably would never have thought about doing.

Some LOADs I have more time on my hands than others, but this particular May, I have been busier than a centipede at a toe counting contest, so I apologize in advance if any of my pages are not up to my usual muster.  May 1^st was no exception because I was on my way out of town to visit my son at college, and being the first day of LOAD 514, I was a bit challenged to get something done quickly before I left.  But I’ve found that even on my rushed days, there’s still time to scrapbook if I plan carefully.  You can, too! 

For Day 1, Lain chose the prompt “In the News”, and I knew I did not want to work on something elaborate, so I went to my stack of “projects in progress” and pulled out my son’s college album.  I’ll talk more about my projects in progress stack in a later post, but for now all you need to know is that I had a bunch of pictures already printed up, paper and embellishments were all together and I just did some quick computer journaling to round it all out.  I selected this particular story and photo because it was something I knew I could journal quickly, it didn’t require a lot of fancy embellishments, and all my supplies were right there together.  The page went together super fast, and technically it is still in the theme of “In the News” – it was a news-worthy event and I used the newsprint patterned paper as one of my layers.

Thanks for dropping by today.  Come back tomorrow to see what I did with the theme “If These Walls Could Talk.”

ConGRADuations!

Welcome to The Craft Squad blog hop!  If you hopped in from Stamping Inferno, then you are in the right place!  If you just wound up here on your own, then “Howdy”, and welcome to the Crafty Neighbor blog!  For the next few days, this blog will be participating in The Craft Squad blog hop – a little something we do once every month.  This month, our theme is “ConGRADuation”, and all the participating blogs will be posting projects around that theme, so I hope you’ll follow all the links in the hop until you circle back here!

At first, I was a little worried about coming up with something for this month’s theme.  I hadn’t printed out any graduation photos to use in a layout, and I really didn’t have anyone to give a graduation card to, but after I got the wheels turning, the answer was obvious.  One of the most common types of gifts my son received when he graduated high school was gift cards.  Almost every one of them came in some kind of clever card or holder, but almost all of them were store-bought.  I’ll even be the first to admit that I often just stick the gift card in a regular handmade card or else I buy a cute holder to put it in. 

Gift card holders are challenging, but they don’t have to be.  Once I got started, I came up with all kinds of ideas, and then I couldn’t decide which one, so here are all five!

For today, I’ll focus on three of my favorites.  We’ll come back and look at the other two when the blog hop is over.  This first project was inspired by a gift card holder we made in our 3^rd Wednesday Stamp Club.  I used some scraps leftover from a scrapbook page.  This card is super simple! 

The notch in the pocket was made with a Stampin’ Up Modern Label punch and the “ConGRADulations” was created in Photoshop using the Warp Text feature of the Text Tool.

For the next card, I really wanted to do something with a “chalkboard” feel, so I rounded up every stamp I could think of that could be used on a graduation card.  I had more than I thought I did!  To select the best, I laid the stamps out upside down (print up) , and fitted them together like puzzle pieces.  When I had something I liked, I flipped them over and stamped in black ink first to check my work.  Once I was satisfied with the order, I stamped in white pigment ink on the black paper and embossed it with white embossing powder.  A little pigment ink on a sponge rubbed over the embossed areas helped to create the “erased chalkboard” look.

For this particular card, I chose to make a money or check holder, but you could easily reduce the size of the base to make it work for gift cards, too.  The dimensions for the bill holder are 9.5” x 7.25”.  Score parallel to the short side at the 3.75” and 7.5” marks. 

This last card for today is very unique.  It was inspired by a gift card holder designed by Sharon Armstrong for our 3^rd Wednesday class.  The base of the card is actually made from an envelope.  Cut about 1” off the end of a sealed envelope, then put the cut edge through a decorative border punch.  The insert is the size of a standard A2 card – 4.25” x 5.5”.   To secure the gift card, simply attach it with a pop dot or other adhesive.

That’s it for today!  Please hop on over to Laura's Treasure Chest of Memories blog to see what she has posted for you, and be sure to come back once the hop is over to see the rest of my cards!