GreenChicken31

Oh where to start?  It might seem like I've been neglecting my little space on the web, but I haven't really.  I've just been sick, sick some more, and sick again!  I seriously have had every stupid thing going around.  Every time I start to get better, BAM, I get something new.  Utter insanity! Anyways, here is a page I made for the Memory Nest a couple of weeks ago, well this is a revised version.  I made it when I had a really nice high temperature.  In my mind it looked amazing.  Now I'm not so thrilled with it.  So, I tried to improve it a bit.  I added some gel medium triangles.  I've been wanting to try it for two months and now just felt better enough to try it.  I also added some stitching and a few mist splatters.  It has a lot more interest in it now.  I'm still not 100% happy, but it is a lot better.  I might have to do something more with the title.  Maybe add some alpha stickers or something. You can kind of see the gel triangles.

  I'm on a major fall kick right now.  I just love all these fall photos and colors.  This is my layout for the Memory Nest's make it Monday  and the colors remind me so much of maple trees.  I just love their golden and orange hues.  I made the background with stamps and then covered in gesso.  Once that dried, I used gelatos in my favorite yellow and orange hues.  I spritz some water to make it drip.  Then I painted the circles in more of my favorite colors.  I'm really happy with how vivid this became.  

  It's been a while since I played along with a Kreative Koncept sketch since they go through facebook with their challenges now.  It also helps that the weather has been yucky and I finally feel like I have time to scrapbook.  Anyways, the sketch was really busy.  I ended up not putting in some hand stitching like I originally planed.  I know I like my pages when they end up being more simple than over worked. 

  Happy Monday!  It seams that fall is in full force out in the Pacific Northwest.  I feel like all it does is rain and rain every single day.  And now with the time change, I feel like I never see the sun anymore.  But all the drizzle has made for great scrapbooking.  I made this page for the Memory Nest's Make it Monday .      I really enjoyed the fact that the sketch has some tilt to it.  My layouts often tend to be very straight.  Occasionally I'll tilt a photo, but not the entire thing.  This page felt very refreshing to me, or maybe it was just the fall leaves and the crisp air that is all around now. My background was made with gelatos and a little bit of mist.  I'm loving the blue with the normal fall orange and yellow hues.  I also stitched the title in an ombre color scheme.  I just love the extra texture it creates.

  This is a page that definitely reflected the week color wise.  It rained and rained and rained this week.  But all that rain didn't stop us!  This is also one of the pages I used to submit to Freckled Fawn's creative team call.  It would be cool if they picked me, but I bet they got hundreds of amazing submissions so I don't want to get any hopes up.  I had to try though!

  Ok, please don't laugh.  I know I'm posting week nine and it's October.  I'm also realizing that I never even posted week 8!  I'll have to do that later.  Anyways, this page documented a week that was a bit stressful.  It's when we found out our landlord wanted to sell their house and gave us a very short time to move out.  It's just taken me some time to get over the bitterness.  Of course a lot of good happened this week as well.   It's a week that I took lots of photos, so I added a half page to get them all in.  I even had to make a little pull out to include a few more photos.  I used up a lot of old stuff so that made me excited.  That was my goal when I started this.

  This was the layout that was supposed to be for this sketch challenge on the Memory Nest .  Sometimes things just get a little mixed up.  It's a cute page so that's all that matters in the end!   I love making fall pages.  They are my favorite to scrap.  I always get such wonderful photos this time of year. It's so tempting to use orange paper or other fall colors, but I decided to try and go for a different color scheme this year.  I'm really loving the blue and purple with the orange.  The biggest challenge was finding purple.  I don't have much purple paper and couldn't find any embellishments other than some confetti and sequence!  I definitely need to build up my purple stash!      

Ok, I think I might be losing my mind.  I have so many projects to work on and things to do.  I need more hours in a day!  It doesn't help that I gave up and just went to bed at 9:30 and slept till 8am!  That NEVER happens.  Nobody woke me up in the middle of the night and I had no crazy dreams or anything!   It was a solid long night of sleep and boy did I need it.  Hopefully, I will have the energy to finish making birthday presents and can get a start on Halloween costumes.  I already caved in and just bought some curtains for our house instead of making some.       I have managed to get a little bit of scrapbooking in.  Here is my make it Monday layout for the Memory Nest .   My little guy is becoming such a character.  He LOVES those tigers in the photo.  He crawls all over the house with them.  Somehow, they always find their way under my feet.  The painted lines behind the photo are supposed to be tiger stripes.  At first I made them a bit to short, so you couldn'

I love when I can make a page that doesn't necessarily need a lot of explanation to get the story across.  I feel like the pictures captured everything just right.  I wish that happened more often! I was expecting my daughter to love the cotton candy, but was so shocked when she didn't like it!  I think it was the texture. I made this page using this sketch for the memory nest .  It's a fun layout challenge.  Simple sketches have so much room for creativity.  I just wish I had more time to scrapbook.  I feel like I have so much to do that I never have time to scrap.  Hopefully the weather will cool and I can find more time.  Plus, having a little guy who is getting into EVERYTHING doesn't help.

  I totally didn't realize that today is Monday.  Labor day has really thrown my weekend thinking off.  Anyways, here is my layout for the Memory Nest for the make it monday.  There is a twist to.  You had to use up some old stash.  The "&" paper and the orange paper was left over from some kit thing I had gotten once a year or so ago and never really used much of it, because the were 8x8 in size, so it was a good chance to use it up.    It's a really funny photo that I wanted to scrap for a long time ago.  I never thought I would use "one of those leash things" on my kids, but right as I had turned into a huge waddling pregnant woman my daughter hit the I'm going to do nothing but run away from you phase.  That bumble bee backpack became my best friend for a few critical weeks.    There is some cute stitching around the clouds that was a pain to do, but ended up as a cute detail.  I tried to do some painting thing, but it wasn't ex

  Ah it's Monday and not only am I sharing this layout that I made for the Memory Nest , but today I get to go to the dentist and have for the second time in my life a very small cavity filled and I am horribly nervous.  My deathly fear of needles is making my stomach turn in hundreds of knots.  I couldn't sleep at all last night thinking about it.  Oh I can't wait for it to be done!     As you can see, I ended up making a page that is fairly far from the sketch.  I started with one photo of my little guy and then ended up wanting to put a bunch on, so I had to move from the sketch quite a bit.  I did keep the spirit of the sketching by keeping the weight of the page being on the left side.  And I'll be honest, I'm not really in the mood to blog right now as the stupid dentist is taking over my mind!!!!!!

I just wanted to let everyone know I'm doing a guest post over at Punk Projects today.  It is about my tips for working with crazy background papers.  It's the first time I've ever done a guest post before, so I'm really excited!

  It's make it Monday again over at the Memory Nest .  I decided to use this photo of my daughter who is about to give a big kiss towards her brother from the day he was born, because my little guy just had his first birthday. Crazy! I've made a few layouts for his book, but none for my daughter's with her perspective of his entry into the world.     And I just realized I was going to stitch a big heart in the background and I completely forgot.  Anyways, we have had a stream of guests staying with us.  Lots of visiting time and running around doing touristy things and not so much crafty time.     And I just had to share this collage of my little guy growing over the past 12 months....sniff.  Every month I've been taking a photo of him with my juggling clubs.  I did it with my daughter and always enjoyed the little photo sessions.  Can't wait to get these photos on some layouts!  

Wow is it really Monday already?  It doesn't feel like it should be Monday at all.  My husband spent all weekend riding his bike from Seattle to Portland.  It was a crazy hot weekend for the crazy STP ride thing.  So it was the munchkins and me all weekend long and boy did it feel long.   Anyways, I wanted to share the page I made for The Memory Nest .  It turns out I still had one more rainbow page in me.  I felt this sketch would work really well with these photos I had sitting around from my wedding that still needed to make their way onto a page.  I'm loving how the soft rainbow watercolor strips turned out.  I was a bit hesitant to cut into that paper, but it worked out.  Unfortunately, I can't say the same for my family room walls (actually just one wall that I wanted to test out before I did all the others) that I tried to paint gray this weekend.  It turned out looking periwinkle!  Not sure what I'm going to do about that!

  I am oh so very behind on my project life.  I knew it was going to happen, but I was hoping it wasn't going to happen so soon lol.  Oh well, I shall try to catch up.  I have discovered so far that I do prefer my normal 12x12 layout scrapbooking than project life.  It could be I just need to figure out a few layouts of the cards that work best and stick to them so I can make the cards quicker.  I do know though that I will appreciate making the project life stuff a few years down the road.  So we shall see if it will become something I'll do again next year.

  I've got one more rainbow inspired layout to share. This time I played along with Scrap Our Stash . I used the following five items up from the list. 1. Stripe Paper (I may have a rainbow stripe addiction when it comes to paper) 2. Paper Clip (the orange arrow at the top) 3. Wood Veneer (the cute arrow) 4. Flair (I've got two.  The circle heart from Amy Tangerine and the square sunshine from a Freckled Fawn Kit) 5. Enamel Dots (I've got a few green in one corner and a few orange in another)   I used a bunch of pop dots on this layout to keep some of the corners up and to give the clouds some layering.  I kind of forgotten just how handy those little things can be in giving depth to a page. I also decided to keep my journaling hidden since this page has so much going on pattern wise with no good breaks.

  Happy Monday!  I just wanted to share the page I made for the Memory Nest's Make it Monday . It's bright and bold and not a page for those who like soft gentle pages.  It really looks less crazy in person.  The background paper is from Heidi Swapp and I choose it because the rainbow circles reminded me of the rainbow pegs from the photo.  I also added some machine stitching and some ribbons for some nice texture.  Hope this provides some more fun rainbow inspiration!  Now go create!  

When I noticed SWAT's drill for happy feet I knew I had to try and get a layout done.  I have had this photo of my daughter's mismatched shoes printed out for a long time and it has been waiting to be scraped.  As you can see, I'm still very much in my rainbow kick.  The embellishments are fairly minimal because the background paper is really busy.  It's kind of a crazy page, but so is my daughter's outfits most days!

  I've totally been on a rainbow kick lately.  I made this page for the SWAT selfie challenge  and for Lasting Memories challenge .  Selfie challenges are everywhere!  It isn't very often I make a page for myself.  This time I got all messy with gelatos and mist.  I'm really glad I'm able to keep my sewing machine out all the time now at our new house.  It's nice to be able to quickly get a few stiches on a page.  I'm betting I'm going to have a lot more stitching on my pages now.  

  The past two months (actually more like three) have really been a whirl wind.  I can't remember what I've blogged about so here is the short version.  In March we found out our landlords wanted to sell the house we rented.  We looked at renting and buying.  Then we ended up buying our first house about two months ago.  We had to redo all the floors so it took two weeks before we could move in.  About a week after we moved in we had to fly to New York to throw a surprise 50th wedding anniversary for my parents.  It was a huge success.  We flew back and unpacked house for a few days before we flew again.  This time to Michigan for a wedding my daughter and I were in.  The little guy got sick.  We flew back and went to the dr.  Little guy is better.  Now I can finally enjoy my house and work on unpacking and getting some quality scrapbooking time in!  Woot!   Now, I finally am able to work on some challenges.  I made this supper bright and happy page for The Paper Girls

  Happy Tuesday!  I'm just about to fly back to Seattle from Michigan.  My little family and I were in a wedding.  We had lots of fun, but also got a ton of mosquito bites!  I certainly do not miss those buggers!  Anyways, I wanted to share the layouts I made for the Memory Nest just before I flew around the country with the new to me Memories kit!      The hues are not normal colors I work with, but they have a beautiful soft charm.  They look fabulous with black and white photos.  And there is plenty of papers that you can cut into fun bits and pieces.  I love papers with lots of versatility.  I feel like I get lots of bang for my buck this way!     The paper with all the colorful squares was probably my favorite piece out of the bunch.  It was so easy to cut them out.  It made it super easy and quick to put embellishments in each one.  This definitely was my favorite page I have made in a while!   Of course they look great with color photos too!

I haven't even been home 24 hours yet since my surprise flying (which it has become clear that I have poor luck with flying) in for my parent's 50th wedding anniversary but I just wanted to share a bunch of layouts I have so far this year for The Memory Nest  since it is Leslie's Birthday.  Boy I have made a lot!     Don't forget to use the Saskia code!