Howdy friends!
Fun stuff to share this Monday morning.
Before I jump in, guess what I did yesterday? Ran 5 miles - farthest yet! AND cleaned out my closet. Would you believe between Nick and I that we filled 5 (yes 5) GIANT black lawn garbage bags with clothes? Yep. All TOO BIG. All will be going to charity. Sad to be seeing some of my favorites go, but I'm not hanging on to them as a 'just in case I need them again one day'. Nope!
As of Saturday, I'm down 30 pounds. Took FOREVER to get there - almost a year ago when I started. I'd had a busy fall traveling last year, including 2 trips to Europe in 1 month. I was literally eating my way through the US and Europe back then!
Now I'm 10 pounds away from my goal weight - what I weighed when Nick and I got married 15 years ago. And I think I might just want to go past that and set a new goal weight. Maybe 20-25 lbs more from where I am now. We'll see!
OK, on to some creative stuff.
Last month Amber from MemoryWorks asked if I would be their 1st guest designer and play with their new Elementary Simple Stories collection. It's a great concept - everything you need in one simple kit to document your stories. You can read more about it here.
They've introduced 2 different Simple Stories collections - Life Documented and Elementary (a great school kit collection).
So back in September Amber sent me a box full of Elementary goodies, and off I went creating. And this is what I came up with.
I've always struggled scrapbooking school photos. But this collection made it super easy to document some fun school traditions in our family. This 1st layout is all about Jack's first set of straight A's a few years ago. My dad asked me to scan Jack's report card and email it to him. A few weeks later, Jack had a letter in the mail from him, with a crisp $5 for each A. My dad even cut apart the report card and taped the subject/grade to each $5 bill. Jack was thrilled with his reward! I started with kraft cardstock as a base, spritzed it with a slightly darker brown mist and then cut apart various elements from the collection.
Another school tradition, first day of school photos on the front porch. Because they boys wear uniforms to school, it's hard to tell the difference from one year to next. I thought it would be fun to capture this same spot from year to year in a layout.
LOVE the green grid background in this collection, super fun! Would be great for a Christmas page as well. You can get a good feel for all of the fun patterns in the collection in the pendant banner I made. I popped them off of the page with a pop dot and curled the points just a tiny bit to give a bit more dimension. Also outlined the alpha stickers in the collection with a black pen to help them stand out.
When I saw the fun red polka dot pattern in the collection, I immediately thought of the 4th of July (another theme I have a hard time scrapping. Notice a theme? School and 4th of July? Maybe it has something to do with my fear of scrapping red and blue!). The collection is really versatile in that all of the coordinating embellishments work for school themed projects, but the papers work for all sorts of things.
So much product included in this kit, I have plenty of leftovers to keep scrapping school. Now, I just have to find the time ;)
Thanks again Amber and MemoryWorks for inviting me to play with your fabulous Simple Stories products this month!
