Thursday, October 27, 2011

You Can Never Go Home Again... Or Can You?

 We bought a house and we are moving!!

Well, we bought the house about six years ago or so, but yes, we are moving back to our old house.


It's interesting how life works. 

We thought the house had sold, we moved out the first week of June and the buyer moved in and was to rent our house from us until his house sold.

Well, with the market and all that... his house didn't sell.  So out he goes and we go back.

It could have been a disappointment.  But it's not.

We found that we love our house.  We missed our house.  The girls asked every day to go home.

So now we are going home. 

But I painted a number of rooms and we got new carpet, so it feels like a new house.

Yeah for us. 

No buyers remorse for us :)

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Scrapbooking Made Easy, it's all in the Method!

As you all know by now, I'm a busy woman.

So I have had to figure out how to streamline some things along the way.

One of those is basic scrapbook pages.
By streamlining the method of creation, I have more time for my favorite part...

EMBELLISHMENTS!

So while you may be tired of my preaching easy scrapbook pages, I just can't stop myself :)

To start, choose 10 patterns and 12 pieces of cardstock that go together. 
Plus you will need base pages of white or cream depending on your color scheme.
 Here are my chosen pages.
Notice that my pieces of cardstock are really papers with a dominant color and a small pattern!!

The next step is to choose a set of page layouts that you like.  
Most of mine templates are taken from Close To My Heart's template books.
In fact, all of the layouts for this set come from Imagine.

To be honest, one of my very strange quirks is that I LOVE to take the layouts and place them on paper
and see how many layouts I can make with a little paper as possible. 

So while some of you might groan, I live for graphing paper!!

Once I have my cutting guides ready, I cut the paper.  The biggest part of the learning curve is to
 NOT STRESS over which page is which!
It's all part of the game.

As you cut your paper, label each piece in pencil and then when finished sort into piles.
Below you can see my pieces sorted with white between each grouping.
The first time you do this, it will take some work. 
You won't like some of the pages. 
In the midst of trying to figure out what to do you, you will be taking my name in vain!

But when you figure it out, well...

Then it is FUN!!

All of the above layouts were pieced and placed in the span of about three hours.

That's 18 12x12 pages.

That's enough to fill a gift book.

Plus, I had a good bit of scrap paper to use for journal blocks, embellishments and so forth.

So, if you haven't tried this type of scrapbooking, try it!

In fact, I'll teach you how.

Stay tuned for more details....