Hello everyone, it’s Kim.  I’m here today to bring back a blog feature that we haven’t done in a while… a Thursday Thievery!  I have personally always enjoyed these posts, so I’m glad to share some scraplifting fun today.  You might ask, “What is Thursday Thievery?”  This is where we pick a layout from one of our lovely team members and the rest of us create our own scraplifted version of the layout.

So what layout are we going to “steal” today?  Let me tell you, it was hard to pick just one!  But the layout I chose is one I’ve had my eye on for a while… “Sweet Nothings” by Casharina!

There are many things I love about this layout, but here’s what jumped out at me for my scraplift.  Number one, the cluster of stitched frames.  I could think of a LOT of frames and stitching from the shoppe that would make a great cluster of pictures, and so this was a must for my layout.  Number two, the simple dot border.  I like its simplicity and that it is pulled a little in from the outside edges of the layout.  I think I tend to use borders along the edge of my page, so I wanted to try pulling it in a little this time.  And number three, the placement of the elements.  Casharina has placed the elements just right in her layout, and I used that as a guide for mine.

Before I show you my scraplifts (because I couldn’t stop with one… I made TWO!), I’ll share what happens a lot to me when I start to scraplift a layout.  I see something in the gallery that is oh-so-perfect and think I just have to create a layout like that.  And sometimes, my layout does resemble the one I first saw.  But quite often, my own style takes over and the resulting layout might not actually look much like the original one.  I know it’s still inspired by what I saw because I know my thought process.  But it’s also quite different.  Does that happen to you??  This is what makes the Thursday Thievery posts fun to me… seeing how each person notices different things in a layout and seeing how they interpret the inspiration.

So here goes… This is my first scraplift of Casharina’s layout.

And here is my second scraplift (I think this one is a bit more of an exact scraplift than the first).

How about the layouts from the rest of the team?  Here is Rosy’s.  Love the stamps and the beautiful pops of red.

Kylie’s layout is seriously too cute!  And I love that she chose to use a couple of different photo frames in her cluster.

Jenelle’s layout is full of goodness from the Gracie kit.  And what a great “everyday moment” to capture, as we’ve been talking about on the blog recently.

I hope you’ve enjoyed a little bit of thievery today!  As always, we’d love to see your scraplifts (and all your lovely layouts) in our gallery.  Thank you, Casharina, for letting us be inspired by you today!  You can browse through her gallery for more inspiration.  Bye-bye for today, but be sure and stop by tomorrow as Kylie shares some colorful inspiration!

KimInspiration, Uncategorized 6 Comments

Hi everyone!  Beckie here with you today :)  

I typically bring you lots of photography posts, and one thing I’ve learned from perpetually viewing the past 2 years of our lives through the lens of my camera, it’s that our lives are FULL of thousands of incredible moments.  I’ve spent hours trying to master technique, work on composition,  and create incredible portraits of my family.  I’ve captured the smiling faces of my kids, the happy moments like parties and birthdays, and all usual big moments each year.  I’m SO thankful to have the shots I have!  But when I look through my scrapbook pages, I feel like something’s missing.  I feel like someone looking through my album 40 years from now won’t get a true sense of what we’re all really like.  

I feel like I have lots of photos and pages that capture what we are, but not enough that capture who we are.  

So this year I’m making a conscious effort to document REAL LIFE,  as it is right now.  Imperfect and amazing and overwhelming and even a  little messy.  But I want it to be true and honest, and I want someone looking back through these pages one day to know that my husband is an amazing dad because he sits and plays with the kids, really pays attention to them, every day.  And that my amazing, beautiful daughter has a shy side that I sometimes don’t understand.  That I worry that some day she’ll get taken advantage of or pushed around by the more aggressive kids.  And how about me?  I think I’m only in two photos in all of last year , and there’s truly nothing in my albums that gives any indication who I am.  That I’m strong, independent, and brave – but also disorganized, impatient, and sometimes overwhelmed by everything going on.  

So – This year I’ll be making a few changes.  

1.  No more waiting for the perfect moment to take a photo.  My son has ketchup on his face and chocolate milk on his shirt? Yep, that sounds like him.  So it’s a perfect photo of him right now.  Clutter on the counter on a Wednesday night while my daughter is doing homework?  Yep, probably.  It’s a perfect time to take a photo of what our evenings are like – because it’s our real lives and I never want to forget these days.  

2.  More thoughtful journaling.  I’m going to try to avoid the obvious “so cute, so loved, growing so fast” comments I tend to make in my journaling, and really focus on including little bits of who they are right now.  That my son is obsessed with potty words and my daughter absolutely loves to be tickled when I wake her up in the morning for school.  

3. Pages without photos of people.  Or perhaps even pages without photos at all!  Not every page as to have an amazingly cute shot of one of my children smiling.  Seriously.  I want them to be able to look back and have a sense of what life was like  – including the things that make up our lives right now.  

So my theme for the year is going to be REAL.  I want to capture real moments, real things, and the real thoughts that make up the essence of who we all are right now.  I created two new layouts to get started!

This one is so important to me.  I can’t believe I haven’t scrapped about my husband’s diabetes before now – it’s something very big that we live with.  It’s also amazing to me just how far medical treatments have come in just the 15 years we’ve been together!  I love the idea of having a little time capsule of what it is like to live with diabetes today.  Wouldn’t it be amazing if some day, in our children’s lifetimes, they find a cure?

And on a more lighthearted note, this is another page I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time.  The pics aren’t perfect for sure – but they perfectly capture him as the true pack rat that he is.  He’s grabbing loads of sticks and leaves that he wants to keep, to take home to add to his “collection” (collection of JUNK, that is).  We hope it’s just a crazy phase he’s going through, but regardless – right now he is obsessed with keeping things.

I hope some of the things I’m sharing here today encourage you to share a bit more about yourself and your loved ones in your scrap pages!  If you have any layouts you’d like to share, please link back to them here in the comments so we can go leave you some love – and get inspired in the process! 

Thanks for stopping by today!  The FEBRUARY project SCRAP 2012 templates will hit the blog tomorrow…so be sure to look out for them!!

BeckieInspiration, Uncategorized 25 Comments

Hi all…it’s me Casharina, and I am here to share a little about what inspires my digital scrapping.

Inspiration…well it can come from all over.  Most of the time, if I’m being completely honest, I get inspiration from others.  I love to look at other layouts that have themes similar to something I’d like to scrap about, or the colors I’d like to use.  I love to use our very own inspiration gallery here at the Shabby Shoppe ~ there are so many fantastic scrappers who post their finished projects!  I also like to search the internet.  I’ve even been attempting to use Pinterest lately to find new inspiration for digital scrapbook layouts.

One of the best ideas I have ever come across was finding a layout about the “EVERYDAY”.  This layout meant a lot to me because I seem to only scrap the big events in our life, however I want to remember the everyday moments…the way my girls dress up and have their hair a mess, or how on other days they’ll lounge around in jammies all day but Kaytlynn will work for twenty minutes to fix her hair, other times they’ll play all day with their baby dolls – carrying them around in their shirts or pushing their strollers to the store or church!  LOL…these are the memories I never want to forget.  These are the memories I really need to remember to “catch” on camera and then scrap.  Little things that I know I’ll forget.

Some of the ideas I’ve found through the gallery and online that have inspired my everyday scrapping include:

• making a page with baby’s first words…there are words that my kids have pronounced so cute and I never want to forget them
• another idea is doing a layout about my daughters “binky” (our cuddle blanket that she’s had since she was only 6 months old and she has slept without him twice in the past month at the age of 6.)
• I want to remember the way that Khylea Ray will dance to any tune and sing at the top of her lungs in the living room, but ONLY after someone has “introduced” her as: “Princess Khylea Ray.”

These are the important things that I really need to focus on more…things I need to remember.  I hope this little post sparks some creativity and challenges you to create a layout, NOT about a big event, but about a small important memory that you never want to forget!  Here’s my first layout focused on the “small” stuff…it’s a picture of my girls after a full day of playing together like best friends.  Sadly, that doesn’t happen a whole lot around here and I thought it would be one of the best memories to start with!

Thanks for reading!  Join me again tomorrow for some Valentine’s Day hybrid projects…I can’t wait to share!

CasharinaInspiration, Uncategorized 4 Comments

Inspiration in Action?  Scraplifting Yourself and More?  What Inspired Me?  Rosy here and I can’t decide what this post’s title should be?!…but hopefully you’ll find something to spark your creativity nonetheless!

There are so many ways to go about designing a scrapbook layout.  Today I’m going to share two of my layouts and how I was inspired in designing them.

The first one uses a method I call “scraplifting yourself”.  I’ve done this numerous times and it’s a great page starter!  I browse through my folder of digital scrapbook layouts and pick one that I like.
This time it was “you are loved”.

Then I copy all of the photo and paper spaces onto a new layout and clip new photos and papers to them.  Play around with the rotation, placement, and embellishments and you have a brand new layout!

You’ll notice that on this one I rotated the main photo and papers to better fit my photos.

I love doing this because it gives me a little head start on the page, yet keeps my own personal style and I’m pretty sure to end up with something that I love.

Sometimes I’m inspired by a simple embellishing idea.  For my summery layout (one of my last 2011 pages to scrap!) I knew that I wanted to keep the photo large so as not to lose the lazy summer day feel, but I wasn’t sure where to go from there.  I remembered some e-mail ads I’d received and stuck in an inspiration folder (yes, I subscribe to junk mail because they’re pretty, lol!).

Here’s what I noticed and liked about these ads.

ads are all from here

Using these little bits of inspiration, I came up with this layout.

I know many of us are going through winter right now, but this one is for you on the other side of the world!

I did (again) turn a stripe into a plaid on this last layout.  I’ll be back tomorrow to show you how I did it!  Thanks for stopping by!

RosyInspiration, Uncategorized 16 Comments

“There is no such thing as a worthless conversation, provided you know what to listen for.  And questions are the breath of life for a conversation.” ~ James Nathan Miller.

Hello everyone!  Jenelle here again with a little bit of journalling inspiration for you today.  I’m hoping my post will inspire you to think about the words in your life – the dialogues, conversations, quotes and funny sayings that often surround our days but can so easily be forgotten, let alone documented.

I’ve been setting myself some scrapping goals with the turn of this new year – I’m trying to become more organized and have a clearer purpose for the layouts I create and the particular memories I want to document.  I’m not usually a ‘linear’ scrapper (ok, I’m all over the place really!) but I am hoping to be more structured this year.

One of my first goals is to set myself a little scrapping tradition and every January from now on, I am going to record an interview with my two sons and turn it into a layout.  I think a gift of memories is a wonderful gift for any family member or friend, so I am hoping one day my boys enjoy reading these question and answer sessions I had with them.  I’ve started a Project Life type folder and will slip these layouts into my January section.  I will also be inserting my Project Scrap layouts for each month in my folder, like a ‘review of our month’ at the start of each section.

For the layouts I created this year, I simply grabbed my pen and paper and sat with each of my boys and asked away, scribbling down their answers!  They both thought this was pretty exciting, like they were a “movie star being interviewed or something!”  Anna had a great idea a while back that has always stuck with me and that is using the voice recorder on her i-Phone/Smart Phone to record funny sayings or conversations that she doesn’t want to forget.  I have also started doing this to document the funny things my kids say or their cute little conversations and it is so quick and easy and can be tranformed into a layout any time.  Simple. Quick. Documented.  That’s my new goal this year!

So what to ask?  Obviously your questions would be age appropriate, but here are a few of the questions I asked my boys:-

• What is your favourite colour?
• What is your favourite food?
• Who are your friends?
• What are you looking forward to this year?
• What is something you’re good at?
• What do you love most about your family members? (list individually)
• If you could be any animal, what would it be?  Why?
• What is your best memory?

Adding a current photograph is obviously a must and the boys may even like to draw a self-portrait that I could scan in or add to my scrapbook album alongside the interview layout.  The questions I ask them will obviously change as they get older, but I would like to keep some of them the same, to see how their answers change over time.

Here are the layouts I came up with for this year’s interviews.  Nick at 6 and Corey nearly 4 – their likes/dislikes/hobbies etc – all documented in interview format.  Most years I create a layout for them around their birthday where I journal about their milestones/achievements/likes/dislikes etc, so the journalling on these is now the actual interview, verbatim.

I also asked our very creative Shabby Artists if they’d like to play along and scrap some of the words/conversations/quips from their daily lives and from their family members.  Amazing what they have all come up with!  Words, words everywhere!  I love that we have all gone in different directions here.  Fabulous inspiration.

Kylie interviewed her nieces over their summer school holidays and I just love their responses alongside those fun summery elements and photos!  I hope you continue the tradition next year Kylie!

Kim has come up with a wonderful idea.  She’s documented her Grandmother’s thoughts and memories on becoming a Mother, a Grandmother and then a Great-Grandmother.  I just loved reading this journalling Kim.  What a treasure – those photos and your grandmother’s memories are so special.  Finally, Rosy has documented some of the funny sayings her two little ones come out with – kind of like a ‘toddler dictionary’ really!  I love it – how funny for them to look back on!  Thanks so much for sharing these with us ladies.  Of course, you can see the full layouts and credits in our Shabby Artist Gallery.

I hope my post today will have you noticing more and more the role that quotations and conversations play in your life and that you then make them a regular part of your memory keeping.  Maybe you could set a little scrapping tradition for yourself and follow it through every year?  I am relying on you all to keep me on top of my once-a-year interview, now that I have made it official!

Thanks for stopping by.  Be sure to check in tomorrow when Kylie shares our newest Easy-As-Pie Template Challenge with you.  Can you believe we’re up to number 20 already?!  Kylie will also be announcing the winner of Template Challenge 19, it might just be you!!  Until then, happy scrapping everyone!

JenelleInspiration, Uncategorized 8 Comments