Making Cookies

Making Cookies with my daughter was so much fun this year.  She was able to do each step by herself and was very proud of her finished gingerbread men.  One of my New Years Resolutions is to include myself in more of my Scrapbook pages.  I never do, and years from now when my children get these books, they will have no pictures of me.  So, even though I am still in my pajamas and have no makeup on, I included the picture my husband took that morning.  Another resolution is to go on a diet so that I look better in my photos :) 

For this page I used papers and embellishments from the Homestyle Happiness download, perfect for Christmas pages. 

#132192

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I also used the gingerbread man from the Homemade Happiness template page.

The ornament shapes are digi punches from the Holiday ornament keepsakes kit. (#131360)

Thanks for stopping by today!

 

 

Featured Sample

My page was a featured sample at MyDigitalStudio.net today!! yea!  that was so fun to see! I love all the samples there and am so happy to be featured!  check it out!!

Love those smiles!

I found yet another My Digital Studio challenge group!  YEA!  This one is on Facebook, and is called "Simply My Digital Studio Challenge".  I some how stumbled upon it the other day, and it was started by some other Stampin' Up! demonstrators who's digital pages I really love so I am glad I found it.  They post a challenge each week, I think on Monday.   So, a few weeks back they had a challenge on using multiple photo boxes grouped together, somewhat like the challenge at My Digital Studio Monday a few days ago.  And then last week they had a challenge on using cropped embellishments or cropped stamps, basically just having you learn to use the cropping feature.  So this page combines both of the challenges in that I grouped three photo boxes, and I also cropped an embellishment.  The XOXOXO used to be all in a line, but I cropped it down to just XO, and then copied that two more times and lined them up underneath each other.  I really like the end result.   Hope you do too!  Let me know if you have any questions! I am happy to help. 

My Digital Studio Monday Challenge

I made this page for the My Digital Studio Monday Challenge for December 17th.   It may seem familiar to you if you've been looking at my blog for a while, and that's because I decided to make it match the page I made a few weeks back.  The pictures are from the same visit with Grandma, and I thought they would look nice opposite each other in my album.   I used to feel that everything had to be a two-page spread.  In my mind you had to look at both pages at the same time, so that meant that they needed to be about the same event and go together.  Thankfully my thinking on this has changed.  Another blogger, and I can't remember which one as it was a couple years back,  pointed out that in a 12 x 12 page layout, your eye really only looks at one page at a time.  I thought about this and got out my books and she was right.  I needed to get over my matching hang-up.  I am glad I did too because there are so many times you only have enough photos to make one page, and those photo's would sit unused because I wasn't sure what to do with them.   Anyway, enough on that.  Here is the sketch:

 

I like the grouped photo boxes at the top that contain one picture.  There is a video on this at the main My Digital Studio website.

 It's a fun technique, I'm sure I'll use it many times in the future.  Here  is another page I made using that technique a while back.

Thanks for stopping by! 

 

 

Reindeer Day!

It was so much fun to go to my son Zachary's Reindeer Day!  Mrs Cortez has so many cute projects for them to make and I loved the Reindeer hats!!  So Cute!  The kids had a blast. 
I showed my son the page I made and he said that he liked it, and that the reindeer at the top was really cute.  So glad he liked it, the reindeer was probably the hardest part of the page :)  and the page was super easy.  I made it this morning because I woke up sort of early for some reason. I couldn't fall back asleep, so  I made some coffee and got on the lap top.  Reindeer day was just two days ago and my page is already done.  How great is that!
One of the new features of MDS2 is the ability to color in the stamps with multiple colors.  Here is a step by step tutorial if you haven't tried this yet.




Step one, chose your stamp.










 Step two, change its color to the color you will use the most.

Select the Coloring tool from the menu on your right hand tool bar.

Your stamp will pop up in to a new box. 

You can change the brush size, you can zoom in, and you can reset if you want to start over.

 

I zoomed way in to do the dots on the scarf.

Done!!

Thanks for stopping by!

 

 

two page spread

The other day, (too long ago I know!) I posted a Christmas page for a Challenge at MDS Monday.  Well, I wanted to add a matching page because I had a few more pictures that I wanted to add.  The quickest way to do that is to Insert a duplicate page.  There is a little button on the top tool bar, look for "insert" and then you will get a drop down menu with a few choices.  For my project I chose the "insert duplicate page mirrored".    Then I delete the photos and add  different ones.  Easy!  I, I know my lines will match up.  The only tweaking I needed to do was flip my papers because they had words on them, notice the fa la la?  Well, they looked like al al aF :)   also the red has a bit of  HO HO that read OH OH.  So, I clicked on the papers and hit the flip button.  Done! 

Another Christmas page

Today's page shows the kids decorating for Christmas.  Last year I did it all while they were at school as a surprise, and it ended up that the surprise was on me as they were a bit upset that it wasn't a group effort.  So, this year I let them do it all.  David was happy to do the lights and place the star.  Jillian and Zachary did the ornaments, which means that the bottom half of the tree has a lot more ornaments than the top half :)  I've decided that I need to let that go and let them be proud of their tree. 
This page was also designed by Heather Summers, it was so cute I left it almost completely the same as hers. 
My hint for you if you end up using the stocking punch, make the whole thing in the size it comes up on the screen, put it all together, then group it all.  After you have it all grouped, then you can go ahead and resize it and turn it and put it where you want it.  It's harder to line up if  you resize it before you've put the toes and heels and top on.

Grandma's Christmas Decorations

This page is for the second challenge over at MDS MONDAY.
I love sketch challenges, they help kick start a project.  The papers and elements for this page are from the Jingle and Joy kit.  The page is also inspired by Heather Summers, who used this kit in class a few weeks ago, her class always gives great ideas, like the digital tape behind the Hello Christmas so that it stands out and so that the dotted paper doesn't distract the title.   I did the same thing with the snowflakes on the ribbon.  The snowflakes were really cute, and I wanted to add them as a border, but against the patterned paper they just didn't look good, so I added a Very Vanilla ribbon behind them and they work great. 

Here is the sketch from the challenge.  Why not give it a try?















Thanks for stopping by!

Christmas Postcard

 I have been working on some Christmas cards for this year and I decided to do them in My Digital Studio!  I choose 5 by 7 postcards for this year, they come with nice envelopes and are less expensive than a card that opens.  You get to completely design the front and back.  Here is the first style I made, pretty traditional.  I made the front like a scrapbook page.  The postcard uses the papers and Embellishments from Winter Wonders and snowflakes from Jingle and Joy.

Here is the back.

Here is the second postcard, a bit more fun with a chalkboard background and the  kids making Grinchy faces. 

This is the second side.

Thanks for stopping by!!