Monthly Challenges

In addition to participating in the Project Scrap Girls challenge, I also try to participate in Scrap Girls' monthly challenges, where they pick a different theme to scrap about. Note--I did participate in January's challenge, but I will post that later. February's challenge was to scrap about family. I really liked this quote that I had found by Gail Lumet Buckley, "Family faces are magic mirrors. Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present, and future." I decided to use pictures of me and Jason from when we were younger, along with pictures of our parents from around that same time. Then I used a picture of me and Jason from when we were engaged. I used Brandy Murry's Background Blenders for the layout design. That's what made all of the photo masks. I altered it a little, since there are 9 photo masks, set up like The Brady Bunch. If I had a child, I would have done a solo picture of Jason, me, and our child, but I guess that can be a future layout. The background paper is actually a combination of 2 from Trish Yochum's Mosaic Retreat. All of the embellishments also are from that collection. 

March's challenge was to scrap about a smile. My nephew, Kyle, had just lost his front tooth, so I thought that it would make an adorable layout. The polaroid template is from Brandy Hackman's Write It Down. The background paper is from Brandy Murry's The Bees Knees collection. The journaling tag and cut papers are from Amanda Sok's Watercolor Whimsy (the Assemble Your Own Zoom Page) collection. The letters that spell out "smile" is from her Watercolor Whimsy collection. The handwritten "Your Smile" is from Brandy Murry's By Hand word art, and the buttons are from Amanda McGee's Applique Flowers emellishment template.

For April's challenge, they said to scrap about silly pictures or antics. Well, I had already planned to one day do a layout featuring the MANY pictures I have where Jason is being goofy, making a silly face, etc. I figured this template by Syndee Nuckles was perfect for a lot of pictures like that. It's from the Quick Collage collection. All of the papers are from Chere Edwards' Bliss collection. The circle tag and bow also are from this collection. The word art "a playful expression" is from Amanda Sok's Watercolor Whimsy (Assemble Your Own Zoom Page).

Project Scrap Girls (March)

This was the first layout I posted for the 2010 Project Scrap Girls challenge. This was the first time I extracted a photo, and I really liked how it turned out. The pictures were from one day when we were at my in-laws' house, and my husband was playing with his nephew. You can tell how excited he was, just clapping Jason's hands while he would say "Boom. Boom." I really like using the film strip for similar pictures like I had, then for the one I caught of him looking right at the camera, I enlarged it and extracted. The film strip template is by Sarah Batdorf. The background papers and the template to blend them together are by Brandy Murry (The Bees Knees collection and Background Blenders II). The "March" letters are by Amanda Sok from her Watercolor Whimsy (this is the same for all of the March layouts).

My second layout, from my nephew's birthday party. For the red background paper I used a paper template from the Panagea collection by Durin Eberhart. The red and yellow paper also was a paper template from the Appassionata collection by Amanda Sok. The layout of the photos was from Caroline Kaiser's Squares and Strips collection. The letters for "4th" are from Trish Yocum's Mosaic Retreat collection. The other font is Glitter Font that I got from a website, but I don't remember where.

This layout was commemorating my birthday, even though it was a very low-key day. I didn't have a picture of me from that day, so I just took one of myself when I was doing this layout. It wasn't that great, but I wanted to try out this new action that I had bought from the site. An action is basically a bunch of steps that are saved together so that you don't have to remember all the steps. You can buy the actions to load into Photoshop. Originally, I hadn't wanted to buy anything that I would be able to do myself. However, I really don't know that much about the settings for certain things I am doing (like blurs or filters or things), so when someone has already figured it out for you, and it only costs a few bucks, then yeah, I'll buy it. So this was a sketching action, which just turns your picture into a sketch. But the settings include the color as you see. (It's from Brandy Murry's Sketch It 2). The paper and flowers were from Brandy Murry's The Bees Knees (I recolored the paper). The frame is from her The Bees KneesAssemble Your Own Zoom Page (also recolored). The ribbons are from her Wrapped Frames collection. The 37 is from her Nuptials collection. (If you couldn't tell, Brandy Murry is one of my favorite designers. Love her designs!) This layout also was the second one of mine that has won as a weekly layout winner in the Scrap Girls newsletter. Again, I was surprised, but excited.

Lots of birthdays in March for my family. This layout is about my niece's birthday. She lives in Germany, so we didn't get to celebrate it with her, but my sister sent me pictures. The background paper is from Trish Yocum's Mosaic Retreat collection (recolored). The layout template was from Caroline Kaiser's Squares and Strips. The other papers, the little flower in the frame, and the "5th" is from Amanda McGee's Gleeful collection. For the other font I used a glitter style by Cheryl Barber.

In January and February I did a good job of getting my 4 layouts posted on the site by the end of the month. But I got behind in March, mostly because all of my events were from the 20th and after. Then, I was waiting for my sister to send me the pictures of my niece, so the last layout wasn't done until April. Then I've been stuck on one April layout, so I am really behind now. Oh well. I definitely want to stick with it, because it will be nice to have a completed album for 2010 (whenever I choose to print it).