WPBC Scrapbook

Hey all!

Happy Easter!

In honor of the holiday, I thought I'd show you what I've been working on lately. Recently, I was asked to create a scrapbook to give as a gift to our new pastor. Of course I said yes.

We prayed and prayed for a new pastor to lead our church. After two years, our prayers were answered and David Carothers accepted the call to be our leader. In late January, we celebrated our covenant with him with a special service and celebration afterward.

Volunteers took pictures -- nearly 800 of them! -- and I put together an 8 by 8 book that included the best of those and also messages from some of our membership. I've posted a few of the pages below.

The book will be given to the Carothers family so they can remember the special day and know they are an answer to prayer. It is nice, especially with Easter right around the corner, to scrapbook photos of church family worshiping, loving and celebrating God's goodness. He is so good, all the time!

Carey creates!

SO... this head cold is really getting me down. But it has allowed me the time to create a little diddy for my friend Shelly.

Tracy actually was the inspiration for this little coffee book. She had one casually lying on the table as we came in. I, of course, sprinted toward the little scrapbooking bit of joy. It is a little gift-card holder friendship book made out of -- get this -- a coffee sleeve! How cool is that?

I simply cut the sleeve open and used it as a pattern to cut colored paper to cover the top (and disguise the logo on the sleeve). I also cut inside pages and decorated them with ribbons and stickers. The last page of the book, on the inside back cover, is simply a folded piece of paper that I attached with a dimensional dot. The dimension allows the gift card to simply slide right in!

What a fun way to invite my friend to coffee! (If you're reading this, Shelly, await a hand-delivered message from your husband this evening!)

Here's what the insides look like:

Post-wedding panic = need to shop

Oh. My. Goodness. I've just received two DVDs filled with images from my wedding. The photos are lovely. I will post the cream of the crop when my panic attack is over. How on Earth will I make a scrapbook of normal size from literally 900 images from my wonderful wedding day? Not to mention photos from showers and all that. YIKES!

This type of problem will only be solved with serious shopping. Shelly! Mom! When exactly are we going to that scrapbook store in Bakersfield?

I'm married!

There are about a billion things to do when planning THE social event of the season. I'm choosing to blog the creative few that I managed to take pictures of during the crazy season before my wedding. First, the cookies. NolaMom, the cookie-baking fanatic mixed up batch after batch of cookie dough, chilled it all, rolled it out and baked close to 200 wedding cake-shaped cookies. For a while there, cookies covered the whole house. Cindy and I got together and frosted and frosted and frosted and then we decorated the cake cookies to look just like the beautiful cake Melinda from Dede's Decor created for me. (I'll post those pictures as soon as I get them back from the photog.) The result:

After two whole days of packaging the cookies, I started work on the guest book. (I feel I should mention here, in the interest of full disclosure, that I started the book the day before the wedding) I do realize that you can hop on over to Michaels and buy a guest book for 12 bucks, and have little to no stress about the whole thing, but really, is that me? I think not.

I made a 6 by 6 album using just a few papers and embellishments, added photos from our engagement shoot and left space for my guests to sign. The result is so fun. I just can't stop looking at it. And, it is great that people wrote more than just their name. Instead of getting just a record of attendance, Gary and I have a book filled with wishes from our closest friends.

So... after guests signed the book, this is a little video of what they got to see, thanks to the oh so bouncy camera work of my co-worker, Shawn. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSum_ZN-S8U

I can't wait to show you the scrapbook I'll create for the wedding and the honeymoon. Want to know about the honeymoon? It was truly wild...

Sea lions in San Simeon, just across the street from the zebras. Yes. Zebras, right off the highway.

Fun site and a celebration! Hooray!

Busy, busy, busy. With all the wedding planning and a crazy busy work schedule, things haven't actually been going so well on the creativity front. I've got a great plan to do a creative scrapbook album-type thingy instead of a traditional guest book. Actually sitting down and doing it, however, may be troublesome. So, to make a long story short, I found this lovely web site and accompanying blog that celebrates the lives of real women with real schedules and discusses how real women scrap! Looks like I'm not alone on the busy front!

Here are the links.... http://www.realwomenscrap.com/index2.php and http://realwomenscrap.typepad.com/scrapbook_lessons/

And, during the month of August, the site is celebrating blogging as well. I've attached the site's blog-a-bration button so you can click and find out what it is all about. Hope you like it.

Rock, paper, scissors

OK... First, the rock. I'm engaged! To a wonderful man. Hooray! (And you guys thought it would never happen...)

Second, do you realize what this means? This opens up a whole new world of scrapbooking possibilities! Party favors! Invitations! I don't yet know how I will use all the nifty wedding things that are out there, but heavens, I've got the ring. That's practically an invitation to go shopping, don't you think? Golly... there's so much to do.

Mini scrapbooks

As much as I love just sitting down to create something of my own, there's a great enjoyment that can come from making a kit. All the pieces are there, there's no need to stress that it won't look good. It is just a fun time working with paper and color to create something you know will be great when you finish. Well, Mom and I have done two Bo-Bunny scrapbooking kits recently. Yesterday, we took a class at Reflections of the Heart. The class was "You make my heart sing" and featured a mini accordion-style scrapbook in a metal tin. I mostly followed the kit, but made adjustments along the way.

Here's the cover and a glimpse of the inside:

We had another kit, a scrapbooking calendar of sorts, that was also from Bo-Bunny. The kit has a page of sayings that went along with each month of the year. The idea is that you could put one picture from each month and at the end of the year, have a great memory of 2007. Because we only had one kit, Mom and I decided we would just use it as guidance. We could find our own paper and each do a calendar album. Well, because we own just about every printed paper known to mankind -- like only knitters have stash? I don't think so! -- we went shopping in our scrapbooking rooms. It took us about a million years to find just the right paper for each page, but I think our finished projects turned out a zillion times better than the original. I put my completed pages in one of those 6 by 6 SEI mini-albums. I just love those! Here's the cover and a couple sample pages.

Scrapbooking is an art!

I finished the canvas scrapbooking dealie that I've been talking about for months. I saw one of these in a scrapbooking store in the Sacramento area. The sample at the store was advertising a class. Because I'm not in Sacramento, I decided to see if I could make one without paying the $20 for the class. The silly thing is it was SO easy! The canvas is 12-by-12 and was on sale for half off at Joann's. I printed my own picture and used scrapbooking stuff I had in my stash. The whole project took about 10 minutes to complete and most of that time was spent looking at my pink papers! Now that I know how easy it is, I simply must do about a million of them. It took me longer to print out the 8 by 10 of Grace than to complete the whole project. If you can scrapbook, you can do this. I simply mounted my photo on paper and added the ribbon. To stick it on the art canvas, I used Red Liner Super Sticky Tape. Instead of using paint to give the canvas edge some color, I sponged some ink in a matching color along the edges. What fun!