A Few LOs for You!!

Oh how I wish I could have a way to take better shots of my layouts for you. My camera just doesn't capture the true feeling of the LO and I don't have a scanner to use to scan them. Hopefully someday I can master taking pictures of a LO. Until then you will have to make due with these not so good pics. :)

This first LO is of Jordan's 6th grade year of basketball. I always have a hard time trying to pick a couple of photos so I try my best to fit 3 or 4 on a page. I have to do a little cropping here and there but I am happy because I am able to put more pics on a page.

This next LO is of Jordan's State swim meet. I have had a lot of LOs to do to try and catch up some so I have kept these pages pretty simple. After all, I still have three more kids to catch up on. And I'm not doing so good. But, I am happy with simple pages because it still gets my story across and that is the main thing.

This last page is of Jordan's Regional swim meet in Minnesota where 9 states competed in this meet. So exciting for Jordan and the rest of us. Again, I kept this page fast and simple but I was happy at all the photos I was able to include.

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you have a great week!!!

Last Post Before Our Vacation

Hi all. I just wanted to get one last post on my crafting blog before we go on vacation. We are going to Maine this year and with the whole Batta Family. It should be so much fun and we are anticipating some beautiful scenery and wonderful hiking adventures. Not to mention the ocean and lighthouses. I am so excited to see the lighthouses, don't know why, but I am. I just think of it as a beautiful work of solitary architecture along the shoreline. A beacon of hope for many ships who once passed. A lot of history in some of those lighthouses. I plan on taking many pictures and posting them on my family blog so watch for that in my sidebar under Family Blog.



This first LO I did was for a Hero Arts challenge. We had to create something with the theme vacation in mind. And speaking of vacation, these pictures are from 7 years ago when we all went to Montana. I don't know why I haven't scrapped them yet, I am thinking it is because I did a 12x12 album which takes so much long than an 8x8 album (which I have done for all our vacations since). No better time than the present, right?

Here is my second LO for you. This was also created for the Hero Arts Challenge. And I am still using the same vacation pictures from Montana. These little paper flowers I made are so simple to do. I just tore out three large circles from cardstock and three smaller circles. I then crumpled them up and curled the edges a little and then put a solid black circle in the center with a light blue brad. If you would like to create these but with a little more flare and more colors, visit this post HERE on Dawn McVey's blog. She is the master and creator of these beautiful flowers.

I hope you all have a wonderful upcoming week. Be thinking of me when I fly out Saturday morning at 5am on a 44 seat plane. I am a little freaked out about riding on that stinkin, small plane. But it is only to Minneapolis. I can do this. Or maybe I can do this with a little tranquillizer. :)

Supplies River Rafting:

cardstock - Bazzill Basics Paper

patterned paper - October Afternoon

stamps - Hero Arts

gems - Hero Arts

letter stickers - American Crafts

journaling sheet - Making Memories

butterfly punch - Martha Stewart

ink - Memento (black), Colorbox (blue)

Supplies Going to the Sun Road:

cardstock - Bazzill Basics Paper

patterned paper - October Afternoon

stamps - Hero Arts

letter stickers - Adornit (black), American Crafts (white and blue)

ink - Memento

brads - BasicGrey

Your A Game

In honor of Jordan's birthday yesterday, I thought I would post a LO of him and his good grades. Jordan has always been a great student and always works hard for his grades. I just wanted to finally put that accomplishment on paper or actually on a LO. I never have to help him study for a test or help him with any of his homework. He does it all by himself and actually gets most of his work done in school, it was rare he brought any homework home. Just very proud of him.

Supplies:

cardstock - Bazzill Basics Paper

patterned paper - Jenni Bowlin (large diecut paper), October afternoon (apple paper, striped paper on tree), BasicGrey (red paper)

chipboard tree - Maya Road

ink - Signo Uniball (white), American Crafts (black)

cricut - Making the Grade cartridge (A), George and Basic Shapes (rest of title)

We Are... Wildcats!!

I have another layout for you. This one was from a distressing challenge over at the Hero Arts Blog a couple of weeks ago. We had to have some sort of distressing on our projects. I chose to distress the edges of my star squares by fraying the edges and by inking them. I love how the look turned out. I also love this set of star stamps by Hero Arts. You can find them here. They are so great to use on boy cards and pages. Even though I have three boys myself, it is still hard for me to do masculine pages. They take me sometimes three times as long as the pages I create for my daughter. But, these star stamps sure have helped to make it a little bit easier for me. And even though you can't really tell, I hand-stitched the journaling lines for my story. Since the star stamp set gave me creativity to realistically finish this page in less than an hour, why stop at that and enjoy the extra free time. Let's go even farther and hand stitch on my page and add another 30-45 minutes. I just can't make it easy, can I? But, I still enjoyed the process.

Supplies:

cardstock - Stampin Up!

stamps - Hero Arts

ink - Colorbox (distressing), Memento (stars)

border punch - Fiskars

felt stars - American Crafts

letter stickers - Scrap Works

die cut letters - Ellison sunset alpha dies

thread - DMC

6th Grade

I knew I was forgetting to post a LO for you. I wanted to post this a few days after I posted Zach's school LO but I guess it slipped my mind. Anyway, here is Jordan's school LO. It is pretty simple but I still fuss and fret over everything that I put on my pages. So this page probably looks like it took only a half an hour or so, it really took over an hour, maybe even close to an hour and a half to fully complete. I love having my Cricut machine, it cut out the number 6 and the title for me. All I have to do is press a few buttons and it does all the work for me. Gotta love that!! I didn't do any journaling on the page, instead I listed all of his supplies for the school year. Much simpler for me and I like to go back and see how the lists change over the years.

Products used: CS - Bazzill, PP - BasicGrey, Pen - Zig, Cricut cartridge - Making the Grade & Teardrop, Glitter - Making Memories, Chipboard - ?

Autumn Fallin' From Trees

I thought I would share with you one of my favorite layouts. I made this a few months ago for a challenge and I was so thrilled when I got a comment on it by one of my favorite scrapbookers/cardmakers, Jennifer McGuire. She is one of the Hero Blog top designers and has her own column in the monthly Creating Keepsakes magazine. Her work is amazing and she inspires me in so many ways.

Anyway, for this challenge we had to pick a sketch to go off of and with the sketch I chose I knew exactly what pictures I wanted to use. And yes, I said pictures, plural. So many people thought that this was one big picture of the kids but really it is four pictures put together. In case you can't read it the title is Autumn Fallin' From Trees (a title to one of my favorite songs by Jaymay) and the journaling says, "How could you not love the autumn with these cute faces peekin' out at you?"

Products used: CS - Bazzill, PP - BasicGrey, Stamps - Hero Arts, Letter stickers - Making Memories, Die cut letters - Ellison Sunset die cuts, Ink - Memento, Pen - Zig