first batch of days for my december daily!

ok - i'm starting my december (yes, i'm still calling it december - i made that little graphic to say december and i don't want to change it - so it's a december daily!) daily album super early! we started Christmas stuff on Thanksgiving, right after dinner, so my album will go every day from November 22 all the way to December 31. and man is this sucker going to be full - i might need to tone down the dimension at some point but right now it's making me happy!

so here are my first two days in my album

November 22:

(you already saw the album cover and the first page...if you haven't you can click on the December Daily graphic at the top of the post to see all of my December Daily posts for this year!)

so for the left side i had the back of my vellum page to decorate. super simple journaling page - i didn't want to cover up to much of the vellum because i wanted the snowflakes to stay visible :)

(what kind of pen do you use to write on stickers?! i want a good pen - not a marker - about .03 that won't smudge. suggestions?)

for the right side i made a photo collage of the christmas lights on my Selphy and stitched my christmas light beads along the edge of the page protector. :)

 close ups:

and on to November 23:

be honest, are these two pages too weird together? i LOVE both of them individually, but i think the left page might be way to pink! (i don't go for pink often, but when i do, apparently i go crazy with it!) 

i cut the sunburst pattern on my silhouette in the 4 pattern papers and then pieced them together and then did a lot of stitching. totally worth it :)

 and more close ups:

i'm having a hard time trying to decide if i need to redo the left side of this spread; i could save most of it for another day and make something that matches my quilted sunburst page better- share your thoughts!

anywho, have a great day!!!

Project Life week 47

Hi!

i dislike that this is going up so late in the day - i actually finished this late yesterday afternoon and took my pictures so i could blog early this morning - but when i went to write my post this morning i realized the pictures looked like they were taken in a cave - HUGE difference between the morning and afternoon light in my living room! so i had to wait for the sun to come out so i could take the pictures again :)

and tomorrow's post will be this late too because it's not picture ready yet and i doubt the sun will last until it is :)

anywho, here's last week!

we went out for Thanksgiving dinner and i really wanted to include the menu because i was awesome - but then i didn't have a clue what to do with the other side of the 8 1/2 x 11, so i went with a quick little thanksgiving layout!

*i don't know when i decided that feathers were this year's fall symbol! i blame Studio Calico for not making wood veneer leaves for me!* :)

so here's all of the pages together:

and here's the back of the menu page:

 and another insert!

 and the back of that insert!

yay Christmas lights!

(you'll see these pictures again tomorrow in the first day of my December Daily album!)

and a pocket page with the program and cd soundtrack for the christmas lights:

and the rest of the week:

we live alone so i set the camera up on the tripod and decorated with the camera remote in one hand all night, so glad i did though, love finally having pictures of us decorating!

this spread is going to be in a design A page, with the middle row split up into 3x4s when i get my order next week - for now it's hanging out in a design C and man does it bother me that the 3x4 cards keep sliding around in there!

still caught up!!! yay!

see you tomorrow :)

-becky

Thanksgiving recap and crafty excuses

Hello and happy holiday season! it's finally here!

before i move on to Christmas this week i thought i'd share a Thanksgiving recap with y'all :)

also - i had a lovely 4 and 1/2 day weekend with Jeff - which means i didn't get anything crafty done all weekend!

so, here goes!

 

 today is day 5 of my holiday running streak and i'm still going strong :)

although it's very chilly outside so most of my miles will be on the treadmill - so the only variation i'll have in most of my running feet pictures is my sock color :)

on to Thanksgiving day!

 we went out to eat with family in Virginia Beach at the Founders Inn and Spa - it was lovely 

 

we got to the restaurant about 30 minutes early so we decided to play around and take some pictures :)

this is my Jeff ❤

and me

 and my feet!

 

 

and a leaf pile ready to jump in that we didn't even have to rake ourselves! score!

 me

 

 us at dinner

which really was delicious, but i've been missing my leftovers - so i think we'll go back to cooking next year

 ok - dinner's over, now it's christmas time!!!!

to finish the day we went to Virginia Beach and drove on the boardwalk for the Christmas lights (i took about 300 pictures!)

very very fun holiday weekend :)

and today should be fun because i'm off to the scrapbook store (which is 3 hours away!) to shop for my Studio Calico Secret Santa!!! (ok, and maybe a *little* for me!)

have a good one!

thankful rambling

Happy Thanksgiving!

I am so grateful for so many things and so many people that it would be impossible to list them all. I would like to share some of my favorites and some of my most surprising blessings :)

above all else i am thankful for Jeff, my husband. he supports me, encourages me, laughs with me, challenges me, and loves me in ways i could never have imagined. he makes all of the other good in my life possible. 

he is my miracle.

I am thankful for my parents. they are my best friends and they are always there when i need them. They have been unfailing in their support and encouragement for me to find my passion in life. It still needs a little tweaking but i do believe i have found my niche at last.

I am thankful for my friends and family. especially the ones i can laugh with and go on adventures with :)

oddly enough i am thankful for the project life album i made this year. capturing a year in our lives has been almost therapeutic for me. It has not only made me see how fantastic our lives really are but it's made me live each day on purpose and it's made me more comfortable in my own skin. I used to only scrapbook the great pictures and if i thought i looked fat in a picture it would stay locked up in the computer. now that i have an entire page or two to fill up every week i include everything, fabulous looking date nights, bad hair days, bathing suit pictures, all of it. i'm much less critical of myself, which makes me healthy and happier and i've got a better appreciation for how my husband sees me ♥

I'm grateful for my blog, all of my blog readers, and the community over at Studio Calico. In real life i have one friend that scrapbooks. just one. It is so amazing to me to be able to share my art, rambling thoughts, and whatnot with so many wonderful, uplifting, and inspiring like-minded people.

to wrap this list up, i am thankful that for the first time in about 9-10 years, i'm not cooking thanksgiving dinner today! I'm going out to eat! no messy kitchen and dishes to distract me from decorating my christmas tree this weekend :)

so thank you to all of you.

Have a wonderful and blessed Thanksgiving.

♥ Becky

December Daily Page 1

I'm back with more of my December Daily album to share with you today!

I finished the front page! (and it took me hours...i *might* need to simplify if i have any hope of finishing the album before Christmas 2013!) I loved the cover of the album so much I definitely felt the pressure to make the first page pretty - and I kind of love it :)

I wanted it to be sturdy so i stitched a vellum sandwich with two vellum pages around a clear transparency page that came in the kit and a remnant of a snowflake hambly overlay from last year. So i have to prettiness of the vellum but i'm not so worried about it curling or tearing on me. I did decide to do my album daily starting on Thanksgiving. I sat down and made a list of all of the Christmas activities I have planned and i decided that i can definitely come up with something everyday. The downside to that is since i'll be cramming an extra 10 days (plus the extra 6 days after Christmas) i decided that the chipboard pages from the album had to go - they were too bulky - and i'll need to order another pack or two of the 4x6 photo sleeves.

so here's my page: - i love the trees painted gold and sparkly with the naked trunk!

 here's a brighter picture of the page:

i so very much wanted a full November stamp to stamp on the tab but all of mine were way too big and none of my alphabet stamps could make it fit either. boo.

and here's a nice dark shot so you can see the snowflake overlay in the middle a bit better :)

 

happy happy happy!

so look for daily posts from me with my DD pages starting i think on Saturday (i figure if i do an activity on say, Thursday, then i wouldn't get to make the page until Friday, so then on the third day, Saturday, I would actually be able to schedule a morning blog post with it!

any thoughts on blogging during this DD madness? should i add my DD pages to whatever normal blog post i have up for that day (because i have a passel of cards to make and still more project life) or should i keep the posts separate so that later if anyone wants to go through the DD posts, there isn't a ton of clutter?

thanks for stopping by!

lemme know what you think!

Project Life week 46

So excited to be getting close to the end of this album! It's bursting at the seams full of a great year :)

 It was a good week :)

We went out for all you can eat wings with some friends on Tuesday (and i made the happy discovery that my favorite wing place finally has blue cheese instead of just ranch!). On Wednesday my friend Sherrie came over and we scrapbooked with my mom via facetime. Sherrie came over again on Thursday and we went shopping in VA Beach and Smithfield. On Friday i got my puppy back from my Aunt!!! (she watched her for me for the last month)

I applied for the Project Life 2013 Creative Team yesterday. Wish me luck!

my december daily album!!!

The most wonderful time of the year is definitely upon us!

I'm so excited to share my December Daily album with you today. Seriously. it makes me giddy. The first day after i finished i actually carried it around the house with me so i could look at it... (on second thought, maybe i shouldn't share that here, i should save it for therapy!)

I'll admit that i wasn't sure about the 4x6 size. but i love it!

It should be packed full by the end of the year as i'll start using it this week! I decided to include all of the Christmas stuff from the end of November in it. I went back and forth a bit about how to include it all and if i really wanted it to be a daily thing in december and i decided that i'm going to make two tabbed pages, one for november and one for december and i'm going to include everything Christmas in this little album. I'm definitely going to add something every day in december, and i might start with the daily thing on Thanksgiving (we're going to see the christmas lights on the boardwalk @ VA Beach!) but i'm not sure about the rest of November yet.

Anyways, that's quite enough rambling about that because i'm bursting to show you this!

isn't it pretty!!!

here's the spine:

here's a shot to show you how freakin' SPARKLY this sucker is :)

and another:

(seriously, it has 3 types of glitter sprays on it!)

oh. and the gorgeous wood veneer? i painted those with nail polish!

just to show how crazy i was about masking off the spine for the teal spray painting:

and wouldn't you know that some teal paint still seeped in under my masking tape?!

anyways thank you so much for visiting today and i'll be sharing my intro page and my tabbed month pages later this week :)

-Becky

weeks 44 and 45

 i'm caught up in project life!!!!!!!!!!

(it took almost all year...)

i have the last two weeks to share today and for the rest of the year you should hopefully only get one week at a time :)

so here's week 44:

• i included all of the pictures of my halloween decorations
• and yes, that is a picture of a bug fogger box - we've been having flea trouble all year, couldn't keep them off of our dog no matter what we did, and we came home from disney and were immediately swarmed - it makes me itch just thinking about it. so we got home in the middle of the night, woke up early the next morning and went straight to Lowe's for the fogger and some more stuff to kill the fleas in the yard. fun homecoming :)
• a global shot of hurricane sandy - we didn't get anything more than regular rain (thank goodness!) but Jeff did get an extra day off from work as some of the bridges and  tunnels were under water.
• yup - i included a picture of disney buying lucasfilms. it's a big deal to my people :)

and week 45:

• not that much happened this week.
• i took a screenshot of the election results from cnn.com, edited out a big ad on the right, and stuck my i voted sticker on top :)
•  another screenshot of video chatting with my momma :)
• lots and lots of outside housework on sunday - and i forgot to take any pictures (which was just as well since i was powerwashing all day and i still don't think i've dried out yet...) so i took a picture the next day and added the text of the work we did

today i have the lovely luxury of not knowing what i'm going to work on in my studio. it seems like for the last couple months whenever i've been in my studio i've had to work on catching up on project life, so now that i finally have, caught up that is, i can make anything! woohoo!

(anyone else bet that i won't know what to do with myself and will only end up having my day sucked up by pinterest now?)

i suppose that's quite enough rambling for today. have a lovely day!

-becky

two disney project life weeks :)

 hi!

so i really did mean to post these two weeks last friday, but they took forever to finish! 

for one thing i had way to many pictures (i was merciless about deleting pictures but i still ended up with about 500 good vacation pictures!) and it was really hard to pick which ones i wanted in my PL album. Also - i run out of things to say about vacation pictures so journaling is out of the question.

In the end i just printed a bunch of full sized pictures, stamped on almost all of my pictures like it was going out of style, and added a few little embellishments here and there :)

enjoy!

week 42:

week 42 left page:

insert a:

• let me just take a second to say how much i love that little stamp in the top picture!

back of insert a:

insert b:

back of insert b:

and the right side of week 42:

aaaaaand on to week 43!:

left side of week 43:

front of the insert:

back of the insert:

and the right side of the week:

see? lots and lots of stamping. but i love it :)

my album makes me super happy and i'm ONLY TWO WEEKS away from being COMPLETELY CAUGHT UP!!!!!! (and both weeks are already printed and just need to be put together and embellished!!!!)

have a great day!