Guest CT with Just Jaimee!

I am beyond thrilled to be guesting with Just Jaimee this month! I’ve been a huge fan of hers for a long time, and working with her products over the last year has really taken my style into a more artsy direction. Some of my very favorite pages have been made with er products.

Here are a few of my pages from her newest Storyteller collection, Quinn.

I thought I’d try 8.5×11 on for size with this one. I like playing around with different sizes in my albums. It’s for the “scrap a bad photo” challenge at the Lilypad. I probably won’t come anywhere near close to finishing MOC this year, but it’s been fun getting inspired by some of them.

Another MOC page. This one was inspired by a mood board, specifically the phrase I used as my title. It looks pretty chaotic, but I just love it.

Journaling reads- I fell in love with New Orleans long before I ever went there. It started in high school when I read The Witching Hour by Anne Rice. I was mesmerized by her descriptions of the city, especially the Garden District.

Fast forward nearly twenty years, and I was making my second trip to New Orleans with my husband. I wish I could go back in time and tell my seventeen year old self that one day she’d go to that city, and it would be just as magical as in the books. That she’d be with someone she loves who she hadn’t met yet. and that would be magical too. November 2014

Switching gears a bit-

I’ve been thinking long and hard about how I want to document 2015. Listening to the advice Megan gives in her Pocket Your Year class, I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting. I’ve tried 6×8, the PL app, planner pages, pre-designed Quick Pages, and pocket page templates I designed myself.

While I’ve enjoyed the process of exploring new ideas, I keep coming back to this- right now, I enjoy making traditional LO’s more than pocket page style. I do absolutely love scrapping with pocket page templates, but only for certain kinds of LO’s. I don’t want to do the same old 2 page pocket style page per week system. I love the results, but I hate the process of putting them together. (I think I mostly just hate making two page LO’s in general)

So last week I came across this post by Yin and I absolutely fell in love seeing her year all laid out like that. But what I found even more interesting was how she used different kinds of pages to document her year. I wondered if something similar would work for me. So I nabbed her freebie template and got to work.

I really like the result, and I’ll definitely be using her newest set of templates in my album this year. (At least until June. We all know that I go completely off the rails in the summertime!)

It has been amazing working with Jaimee and her team the past two weeks. They are so supportive of each other and so incredibly talented!

*I am a Creative Team Member. This means that I receive free products in exchange for making and advertising layouts for designers. However, the opinions expressed here are my own. The enthusiasm expressed here is definitely my own. See more of my CT layouts here.

More Louisiana trip pages and plans for my album

I tried to think of a clever title for this post, but really I think the next 25 posts I do will be pages from our LA trip, so I’m kind of drawing a blank at this point. I made up a partial list of all the pages I want to make, and it’s well over 100. I’ve done 23 so far. I know everyone is going to be thoroughly sick of them long before I am 🙂

This week’s new releases at GingerScraps worked right into my theme, so I was pretty happy!

Queen Wild has a new entry in her State of Mind series. (You can see my New York and New Jersey pages here). These are so fun!

For Alabama I journaled about our brief drive through. For Louisiana, I took random photos of signs and text from New Orleans and Abita Springs. I’ve never seen Jason so excited about a page! He has a thing for signs, so I always try to snap as many as I can when we’re traveling.

Credits for both-
Tell Your Story- November by JB Studio
State of Mind: Gulf Coast by Queen Wild Scraps

The next two pages use templates from the Snips and Pieces pack from Little Rad Trio. They were super easy to use and my pages came together pretty quickly. They look similar, but there will be a few pages separating them in my book, so I’m okay with that. I think next time I’ll space it out more between LO’s from the same template pack though. I was so busy trying to scrap that first day that I didn’t think of it until I saw them together.

Brick house credits
Turning Leaf collab
Snips and Pieces template by Little Rad Trio

Crestview rest stop credits
What A Man collab by the Gingerbread Ladies
Snips and Pieces template by Little Rad Trio

I’ve given a lot of thought to what I want the final product of these pages to be. For my whole scrapping life I’ve been quite happy to scrap a page here and there, adding to my albums whenever inspiration struck.

While I still love doing that, I wanted to try something different with this trip. I’d really like to scrap this trip to completion. Tell all the stories, show off all the photos, and make an actual book out of it.

Part of my reasoning is financial.  We took a lot of pictures, and I kept a lot of notes too. I’m going to make a lot of pages for this one. And that gets expensive. Blurb books are a lot cheaper than doing individual pages.

I’ve never “completed” a trip album before, and I’m curious to see how that would feel. I’ve been scrapping this trip for over a month and I’m still excited about it. And I’m lucky enough to have plenty of inspiration in the form of products and challenges right now.

I’ve made a separate page to house all my LO’s from this trip, similar to how I did for Summer 2013. That should be ready next week. It will be part of a bigger change to the blog that I hope to have ready by the end of February.

February will also be my blogiversary. I can’t believe I’ve had this blog for almost three years now!

Okay, enough rambling… thanks for stopping by 🙂

*I am a Creative Team Member. This means that I receive free products in exchange for making and advertising layouts for designers. However, the opinions expressed here are my own. The enthusiasm expressed here is definitely my own. See more of my CT layouts here.

Quick little post

to let you know I’m over at the Nerd Nest today talking all about Nostalgia. Go check it out to see lots of pages from our Louisiana trip last month!

December Daily, part one

We’re already halfway through the month, so I guess it’s about time I shared some DD pages, huh? I’ll start with some November pages. My cover and basic plan can be found here.

I wasn’t going to do an intro page, I always feel awkward doing those because it’s hard finding words. Then I started talking about DD on the GingerScraps forum and the words just came to me. I used Ali’s free word art for the title.

The next page is from a Shimmelle JYC prompt. My holiday manifesto took the form of a to-do list this year that I made in the middle of November. And I’m super happy that I’ve already crossed a lot of those items off.

Now onto our Louisiana pages! We went up to LA to visit Jason’s dad and brother for Thanksgiving. We haven’t been there for a few years, so we were really looking forward to it! (Posts recapping that trip are here and here). I didn’t want to overwhelm my holiday book with a hundred pictures from our trip, so I limited myself to one page per day. The first page is from the trip up.

I wanted to use pictures with holiday decorations in this book, and as soon as we stepped off the trolley, I knew this would be my photo for Monday.

I took a lot of photos of the Cathedral, planning to use one of those for Tuesday. Then I found this one that Jason’s dad caught and it became one of my favorites for the whole trip.

On Wednesday we went to our very first wine tasting at the vineyard where Jason’s dad volunteers. It was a lot of fun, and Jason wasn’t nearly as pissed off as he looks here. 😛

And Thanksgiving! I’ll do a page for that in my Seasons and Holidays scrapbook, so I kept it simple here.

Another very simple page for our trip home on Friday. We stopped in Panama City Beach, and it was one of my favorite things all year.

I used a 30 Days of Lists prompt for Saturday. We didn’t do much that day except rest and do laundry, so I wrote about what little lushes we were.

 

And then, November came to a close. Poor Jason was back at work and I got my new GS praise team avi.

Supplies used- Christmas Countdown by JB Studio, Forever Joy Holiday Basics papers, Ali Edwards WA Fonts- Avenir, Chunk Five, CK Ali’s Hand

Thanks for stopping by! I’ll be sharing more pages in a few days.

From the Vault- Hello New Orleans

I’m currently recovering from The Plague, so I’m giving my addled brain a rest this week and sharing some more pages from my Projects folder.

An 8.5×11 page I made last month. This will be the cover page for my Louisiana scrapbook. Which currently has two pages. We’ll be heading back up there this fall, so I’m hoping to make a bunch of pages from our trip from 2009 (blogged here and here).

Inspired by- An assignment in the Inspired Scrapbooking class to use lots of pictures and one word. (The opposite of this assignment). Designed using a Page Maps sketch.

Credits- June 2014 Storyteller by Just Jaimee

Library of Memories album- Places: Louisiana

Remembering New Orleans Part 2

Here are some more photos from our 2009 trip to NOLA. See part one here.

One thing that struck me about walking around the French Quarter was the many textures. Everything looked a little worn, but so charming. I took a lot of pictures of the sidewalks, doors, and the sides of buildings. Not interesting to anyone except me, but I loved all the textures.

Yay Bourbon Street!

Loved poking around all the tourist trap voodoo stores.

I took a lot of religious studies classes in college, so it was fascinating seeing the juxtaposition of Catholic symbolism and voodoo icons.

The way the streets are set up reminded me a lot of Palm Beach. You have the main streets, but you can duck through these ached alleyways and see courtyards with little shops or people’s homes.

This is a real guy! All painted in silver, except for his socks. Okay, it might seem obvious from the photo, but it’s very disconcerting walking down the street and seeing “statues” move!

By this point, we were ready for some refreshments and a rest. On to Cafe du Monde. And yes, the beignets really are as good as advertised!

Some more walking around. Loved all the colors on the buildings.

Then we went to the Saint Louis Cathedral. It was breathtaking!

This was, unfortunately, the last of our pictures in New Orleans. The camera was dead, and our phones were on their last legs, so we needed to save batteries.

Pictures we didn’t get to take-

Having a blast drinking hurricanes.
Walking the streets at night.
The front of the Bug Museum.
The fabulous jambalaya and seasoned potatoes.

This makes me so sad, but gives us more incentive to go back there! We had the best visit. Jason’s dad is an excellent tour guide and his brother had us laughing the whole time. We couldn’t have asked for a better trip. Well except maybe more pictures…

Remembering New Orleans

Jason is home this week, so that means we’ve been watching a ton of Super Bowl coverage. The thing I love most is all the great NOLA shots between the commentary. I feel the pull of New Orleans like no other place we’ve visited.

Jason’s dad and brother live near New Orleans, so we knew we wanted to spend a day there during our visit in 2009. But first we had to get there.

We always take pictures at the state borders whenever we travel. Sometimes we’re lucky enough to have someone willing to take our pictures, but mostly we just snap each other.

The next day, we met up with Jason’s dad and brother. I never got his brother’s permission to put up pics, so this post will be just me and Jason. (John, let me know if you read this!) We ate at the Broken Egg Cafe, which was delicious! You seriously cannot get a bad meal in Louisiana. That is my firm belief. Unfortunately this was before we started obsessively taking pictures of our meals, so you’ll just have to imagine my crawfish omelette.

Driving into New Orleans.

The Superdome.

We walked around the Riverwalk Marketplace, a shopping center by the river.

Then we took a ride on the ferry down the river.

Such interestingly shaped buildings.

I’ve realized that it’s impossible for me to narrow down my photos any further, so I’m going to split this into two posts. Tune in tomorrow for the rest 🙂