First Blog Hop!

Welcome to my part of the Young Scrappers blog hop!

Young scrappers is a group on 2peas made up of scrappers anywhere from their teens to their thirties. Every month we have a new forum, where we talk about our lives, our pages and help each other out any way we can. It's definitely a fun place to be, and I've grown a lot with these ladies in the 6-ish months I've been there. 

This month, to celebrate the leap-year, we decided to do a blog hop! My theme is "Pinterest Inspired" since Pinterest has definitely affected the way I scrapbook. We have some giveaways and fun challenges along the way so make sure you visit all the blogs and enter comments to win goodies or participate! 

My page was inspired by these three pictures from Pinterest. I wanted a page of what friendship means to myself and my two best friends in their own words and this layout with the three circle pictures was the perfect starting point. I also loved the colour scheme in the second picture with the cake decorations, and I thought it would be cool to incorporate the petal type design around each of the pictures. Continuing with the circle theme, I wanted the grey middle stripe to have an overlapping circle pattern like the third picture. 

Here's my planning page. Whenever I scrap using inspiration pictures I like to have them ordered according to the individual page. That way I can focus on just the pictures that I want to use as inspiration rather than having too many irrelevant things to look at. 

And here's the final product! As you can see, there were a couple minor changes to the sketch I made, but I stayed pretty true to my plan. I changed the title and the layout of it, and added in a couple of hand stitched hearts, but that's about it!

Products used (all from memory, I don't really keep very good track of what all the products I buy are called): 

Teal paper: Poppy Seeds collection by K and Company

Orange paper: Don't remember, but it was a birthday/celebration pack

Lime and Peacock paper: DCWV stack (either brights or basics)

Grey circles paper: Made it myself using Photoshop :)

Thickers: American Crafts Lullaby in Teal

Scallop punch: Martha Stewart Double loops punch around the page

My post challenge is to see how you can use the overlapped circles inspiration. I want to see what you create, so please comment with a link to your creation! The deadline for all challenges and giveaways is Sunday at Midnight so get goin! :)

Your next stop is  Monica!

- Becks (twopeas name: yelppuppy) <-- Blog hop starts here. If you stumbled upon my post first, please start from the beginning. --> - Rachel (RachH) - Loni (LonR) - Rosie (OCLittleFlower) - Christina (hodgepodge200)   - Monica (Monica B.)  - Caro (Caro_frenchie) - Jen (JenRitchie)

Family Portrait

Another page inspired by this photo I found on Pinterest.

The circles in the above picture are made of saran/plastic wrap but I used tissue paper circles. The ones on the bottom were completely glued on but I didn't like how they turned out so transparent. So the top ones were only glued in the middle so they didn't change colour and the background paper would stop wrinkling.

My dad brought home all these drafting letter stickers and I thought the big red ones went perfectly.

The little red accents with the houses and the deer are actually cut from  a Bath and Body Works gift card holder :) they were too cute to pass up. The little scalloped deer circle actually was the start of the entire layout.

That's all from me for now :) but get ready, there's a blog hop coming up on wednesday that I'm a part of!

The Three

So looking at a lot of scrapbook blogs lately (especially American Crafts) and I've noticed that quilts can provide a lot of inspiration for a page. I decided to give it a try and went and pinned all the cool quilt images I could find. I really loved how bright and cheerful this one was and I just loved the colours. 

I was planning on scrapping these pictures separately but they just seemed to work better together. And I love how the orange and red I pulled from the quilt picture can actually be found in the orange stripe on my sweater and the red mittens and Rachels red shirt. Not the typical colour scheme for a winter layout but I love how it turned out. 

I made the paper rosette by hand (not actually very difficult, just takes patience and tiny folds so it fits under a page protector) and then glued on the scalloped brown circle with a lighter brown punched flower and a number "3" Thicker. It looks really wrinkly because my dad hid my hot glue gun and I had to use white glue which soaked through the paper and made it indent. Next time I'm letting it dry upside down. 

The journalling is all done on my old typewriter and stitched on the page.

And just a close-up of the paper strips and the stitching.

Overall I'm really happy with how my layouts are turning out lately, I think I've kind of begun to find a style I like and a lot of inspiration to draw from. 

Snowflakes and Mittens

Finally started to scrap all my favorite pictures from the photoshoot with my best friends. Even though I wasn't wearing a jacket (shame on Christina) I made sure to bring along the best mittens ever. If anyone was in Canada during the winter Olympics they'll know about the mitten craze our country went through. Only one store (The Bay) stocked them, and everyone wanted them. So it was ridiculous how quickly they disappeared off the shelf. Luckily my grandma grabbed a pair for my brother and myself :) so we got our mittens!

I made the transparencies using the same method I posted about here, definitely easy and I love how you can resize them to exactly the size you want ( like I did to the big doily near the top). Stamps are from October Afternoon and My MInds Eye

Simple white cardstock tag with hearts stitched across the bottom. The letters are actually from drafting sheets (they're like rubons). My dad is an engineer and sometimes brings home cool stuff like this for me to use.

 The white-ish paper strip is actually a photocopy of a paint by numbers canvas I never got around to starting. I was looking for something to fill the space and it was just lying on a shelf beside me, so why not?

P.S. Dennis is the best

P.P.S. Courtesy of Dennis himself 

Custom Transparencies

Occasionally I come up with an incredibly cool idea, this being one of these times. I know how in demand transparencies are for paper crafters, I also know how much we hoard them (there's one doily transparency I just can't bear to use because I love it so much). Sometimes you can't even find a transparency that will fit the project you're working on, but you desperately wish there was one... So i came up with a solution using a couple of things I found in my house.

My mom used to teach at university, but when she left I got all of her old materials she didn't need anymore. This included a whole stack of overhead sheets meant to print notes on. Basically they're clear sheets, one side is smooth and one side is a little grainy so the ink sticks. Using these, and a printer/computer and a couple of old stamps, you can make your own transparencies for scrapbooking or cardmaking. So here's how I did it...

Step1) Stamp the images you want onto a plain white piece of paper, then scan it onto your computer.

Step2) Transfer the images onto an editing program (I used Photoshop Elements, but you can definitely even use word and open the image into a Word Publishing Layout). Remove the white background and darken the stamped image as dark as it can get (unless you're wanting a colour image, then just shift the hue to whatever colour you want)

 Step3) Build the transparency image you want. I used 3 different stamps in mine, a happy birthday stamp, a frame stamp (I cut out the middle where there were lines for journalling) and a small flourish stamp for the corners.

Step 4) Print out your image on a sheet of white printer paper to see exactly where it will print, then tape your piece of overhead sheet on top, making sure the rough side is facing upwards. Feed the paper back into the printer, making sure when it prints out, the image will print directly over the image you printed previously.

Step5) Print again. This time your printer will print on the overhead sheet. 

Step 6) Taadaa! A fancy home-made transparency!

I'll post a couple of projects later where I've used this technique.

Expeditions

Sometimes it's kind of difficult balancing my want of taking photography with the necessity of schoolwork. Also, it's difficult that I live so far from my friends and my brother hates me taking pictures of him. So usually I'm just stuck taking pictures of flowers. You can get some gorgeous pictures of flowers but there's only so many things to do with them. I've always wanted to try portrait photography. I know I don't have much training or experience capturing people, and I'm kind of just an awkward photographer in general, but luckily my best friends are willing to fool around with me and get some awesome pictures taken. So here is my second... maybe third attempt at taking portraits. Hopefully you like them, because I know I do :)

And these three were actually taken by my friends :)

I love the lack of focus here, but I'll have to get around to teaching them MF