Rock On

When I saw the new kit by geniaBeana Scraps and Cluster Queen Creations I was so excited to get scrapping. I had just taken the perfect pictures.

First let me share the story: My kiddos love to put on music DVDs and dance around. And I'm not talking little kids music either. They prefer the real stuff and good stuff at that: David Crowder band and Mute Math are favorites right now. Often times the hockey stick is transformed into a rock'n guitar for the occasion. The other night was no exception. My four year old picked it up and started jamming. My little girl was upset that he was not sharing, but before I had to intervene and set up a sharing schedule, she had a light bulb moment, ran to our toy shelf, and dug around until she found a tiny guitar puzzle piece. Then she joined right in the jam party.

And here is the layout I made:

I love how it turned out.  Oh, and while the layout is mostly about my daughter, isn't my son so cute just jamming away!

If you are interested here is the kit.  Again, I can't say enough about how much I love this kit.  I'm itching to use it for another layout.


And I also used one of these templates for the layout:

Warping shadows in PSE

One of the challenges at ScrapOrchard this week is about warping shadows.  AND they have a fabulous tutorial for PSE users.  The trick for PSE users is that you have to create a shadow on a separate layer which takes a few extra steps, but then it is easy to stretch the shadow around and get it to look like parts of elements are lifting further off the paper than others.

Let me show you what I mean.  Here is the layout I did for the challenge:



Can you see the string at the bottom of the layout?  I stretched or warped the shadow at the tips to make it look like they float above the page higher than the parts of the string that tuck under the photo.  This really helps it look more realistic.  I also warped the kite string and the butterfly shadow.  On the butterfly you can really see it - the left wing looks bent up a bit higher than the right.

Oh, and I loved how the layout turned out.  They are some of my favorite pictures from last spring and I used this great kit by WM[squared]:



If you would like to try this out or play along with the challenge at ScrapOrchard, here is the great tutorial I mentioned:
http://scraporchard.com/forum/showthread.php/20732-Warping-Drop-Shadows-in-PSE

Chore Chart

My kids love playing video games and I am never sure I how to best allow them the fun while still keeping a healthy limit on their "screen time."  At our house, we have settled on having the kids do chores to earn video game time.  So I found a whole bunch of apple shapes that I had left over from teaching.  I wrote "5 min" on each.  For doing small chores, the kids earn 1 apple and for larger chores 2 apples.  I even thought to add that I will take away apples for complaining about chores which has been a huge blessing.

When I saw this kit by WM[squared] and Studio Jen D I knew it would be perfect to create a chore list for the kids:

I love the way it turned out:



After creating the chart and having so much fun with this kit, I decided that I would scrap a layout about our chores for video game routine.

Back to scrapping

Not only have I been on vacation for a while, but I've also been without my laptop so that meant almost no scrapping for the past two months.  However, I now have our family computer set up to scrap with and am back into the swing of things.  I wanted to share with you some layouts I created with some gorgeous collabs released at ScrapMatters today!

First up, I used this fresh and flowery beautiful collab by geniaBeana Scraps, LDrag Designs and Siamese Studio.


And created these layouts.  First is one of my Project Life pages where I also used some Slip Ins by Traci Reed.


Then this fun one with a template I'm working on.  This was my oldest back just before his first birthday - 6 years ago!!


Then I got to work with this fun and summer kit by Fiddle Dee Dee Designs, Find Your Bliss, and Alissa Jones.


This is a layout about my second son getting Cheerios for a treat. It uses one of the templates from the collab also.


And this one shows some of our recent vacation where we had all 8 cousins (age 1 month through 6 years) together at the cottage for a week.  It sounds crazy but since we had all three sets of parents there too it was actually relaxing because we could rotate child care duties.