Magazines and Idea books

I love magazines and idea books to look through when I'm not in the mood to scrapbook. It usually puts me in the mood. I was scouring over them a couple of weeks before the crop I went to recently. While looking through them, I sometimes will sketch out layouts from the magazines especially if there are a lot of pictures per page. (like the picture above) I love to use sketches because sometimes my little mind just won't come up with cute ways to place a bunch of pictures on a page. But with sketches, then you have a chance for some variety. I have quite a few websites on the side of my blog that gives sketch ideas, but my favorite books for it are Becky Higgins' sketch books. You can't go wrong with those. Scrapbook Etc. also made a layout book that I enjoyed. And so did Becky Fleck. There's one more set of books that I've heard only good things about, but I've yet to get them or even see them, but they are called Blueprint Layouts.

I also like to look for cute ways to use all those embellishments that I just "had" to have like flowers, stickers, and chipboard. Magazines give countless ideas to scrapbookers.

I must admit though I used to be obsessed with them. I received every scrapbook magazine that was made, well almost all of them, but now I don't receive any. I usually get them from the library or I look over them in Barnes and Nobles (if I ever make it there.)

You can even get inspiration from regular magazines too for colors to use together and even layout ideas.

Croppin Day

I had a great time at the Cougar Crop in Kentucky this past Saturday. I got almost 33 pages done. I say "almost" because I still have to add a title to one of them, and a sticker to the other. Regardless, it was so much fun. Here's the pages I got done minus the unfinished pages.I still can't believe that Mindy won the grand prize...a brand new Cricut!! Who-hooo!!!!

Pages

Here's my latest scrapbook pages that I actually like. The one with Kaleb and all the flowers makes me laugh. I dont' usually make girly pages for my kids. Sure, I might use flowers every now and then,but not this many....but man, the kid has a purse fetish, and so I thought a little girliness was slightly appropriate. Can you blame me??
The other one is just of some cute pictures of him last April or March of some funny faces he used to make....and yes, the pictures are supposed to be crooked. (I found this idea in a magazine, so I thought I would give it a try!) Oh, and see those litle triangles next to the red and blue ribbon...and the circles?? Know what they are? They're photo corners that I thought would work as arrows. (No, I'm not a genius. I saw it done in a magazazine!)

Cougar Crop

I can't wait. The yearly Cougar crop is coming on Saturday, and I'm getting ready to P-A-R-T-Y!!!!!! Who-hooo!!!!!!!!!!

Great things come in small packages

Brads are one of my favorite embellishments. Okay they are probably my very favorite because they are cheap and you can use them on almost every page.

1. You can decorate embellishments. See the plane?
2. You can add a border with shaped brads. See the snowflakes? 3. Decorate a frame.
4. Separate a word. B*Day
5. Put brad in the center of flowers or to attach other embellishments..i.e. the arrow.
6. Make design elements on your page with the brads. See the circles made with brads?
7. Hang charms on....the & sign. 8. Attach ribbon in a fun way. Oh, and the keys on this page...they're brads too.
9. Decorate a title simply.
10. Make a fun border.

Seriously, brads are probably the second most versatile scrapbooking supply around..paper being the first. Gotta love the little things

Doing a little bit of damage

If you guys have a Cricut, you should go here to get some cartridges. Manufacturer price is $90, but they are selling them for $30. I actually bought some for school, so it seemed to justify the cost. That's the beauty of the Cricut, it's very versatile! You can use it for almost anything. One of these days I'll write a review about how wonderful the machine is and everything you can do with it.