Throwback Thursday - Bright Sunshiny Day

One of my goals this year is to use some of my stash of old supplies - and to find ways to incorporate them with my new supplies. Even thought we are only days from the premier of the new CTMH catalog, I dug into my old stash at the Crop N Time event this past weekend to create this layout.

For this layout, I started with the large piece of blue paper from Sarita that I had cut with the Cricut. Then I went to my scrap bin. I pulled papers had pink and salmon colors as well as some that coordinated with the neutral kraft base page.

Tip: When choosing papers from multiple packs or collections, use one color or shade as your guide.

I ended up including strips from Claire, Sonoma, and another paper so old I can't remember the pack! The three strips coordinated with each other and provided contrast to the large Outdoor Denim die cut and kraft base.

When it came time to embellish, I dug deep into my stash again. Both the pin on the title tag and the die cut arrow have been hanging around in my bag for a number of years. I only found these particular embellishments because I recently reorganized my entire collection.

How do you store your embellishments so that they end up on layouts not in bags? This is an area where I could use some help, and I would love to hear your ideas!

Happy crafting!

Finishing things up

I've spent a lot of time over the past couple of weeks finishing up layouts that have been sitting around in progress. Some of my scrappin' girls frequently poke fun at me for the number of unfinished projects I have at any one time. Some reasons my layouts languish on my desk unfinished: I run out of time in one sitting, I don't have the supplies I need where I'm working, and very often, I run out of inspiration and/or nothing seems to be working right. Taking a break from a layout really helps me. A fresh perspective is often just what I need.  Sometimes the number of works in progress gets out of hand. The nice part is then I can sit down and "finish" lots of pages in a short amount of time. Here are a couple that I have finished recently:

This has been one of my son's favorite phrases for the last few months. It warms my heart when he says it. I used CTMH's Sonoma paper packet and a few metal accents.

I didn't plan the design with journaling in mind, so I had to add it in after the fact. Thank goodness for hidden tags!


This one has been in my head since I first saw the sketch at least three months ago at Scrapping Everyday Miracles. I knew just the photos, papers and memorabilia I wanted to use. The challenge was to gather those three items and the sketch in the same place.

The paper is very old CTMH from the Animal Cookies paper packet.

I'm glad I waited until I actually had everything I envisioned for the layout. I really like the way the map looks with the cute zoo animals on the paper and the stickers. After all of that waiting, I didn't have much to say that wasn't already evident so I took a light approach with my journaling:

Although they took a long time to complete, I think they were worth the wait.

How about you? What have you been working on lately?