Happy Friday, peeps! Picasa, Blogger, and I had a difference of opinion concerning uploading images this evening (Friday Favorites and Geek Girl are the only posts I still use Picasa for- go figure), so I'm posting this quite a bit later than I'd intended! I've got some great crafty picks for your long (if you're in the US) weekend, though, so lets go ahead and get this party started!

From the top left:

• I've been smitten lately with Deb Duty's amazing scrapbooking style. She recently posted a set of layouts that I adore, all created from Studio Calico's Elmwood Park kit, as part of a layout a day challenge to herself. You also can check out all of her layout posts here in the scrapooking section of her blog. And she's inspired me to try a layout a day challenge of my own- maybe in October when it starts to get cold and I need to hibernate in a crafty coma. :)
• I was quite excited to learn that My Mind's Eye recently added Monkia Wright to their design team. I've followed her blog for several years and love her mini albums especially, which is what MME brought her on board to do! You can check out her first post for them and the great album she made here.
• Maile Belles explores watercolor techniques with spray inks and mists and makes several lovely cards in the process!
• Speaking of cards, Maggie Holmes shares a peek into her creative process for making them on Studio Calico's blog.
• Valerie Mangan made this cute little mini album out of a pack of dividers for the Martha Stewart Binder system at Staples. Love!
• It's just a mini kind of day, isn't it? Learn how to make this itty-bitty album at I Lowe Scrap. 
• Stephanie Baxter wrote a great post on what she's learned about her personal scrapbooking style- awesome layouts, and quite thought provoking!
• Just for fun, how about some DIY glittered vases at The Sweetest Occasion?
• Lisa Andrews posted this fun mini album in a jar- love the mashup of decorating and memory keeping!

TTFN!

layout | first halloween featuring the dcwv bewitched stack

Today I'm happy to introduce the newest Halloween themed stack that's now available at JoAnn stores, the  Bewitched Stack. Is anyone else experiencing the urge to wiggle your nose right now? Halloween Stacks have long been one of my favorite items from Die Cuts with a View- in fact, if you've been a reader here long enough, you might recall my Halloween Glam post from two years ago that featured (among other collections) the Midnight Spell stack. I loved the scrollwork, chandeliers, and candelabras in that collection, and there are several patterns in Bewitched that will coordinate with that older collection along with lots of fun new motifs as well!

This jack-o-lantern damask print is probably my favorite in the whole collection, along with the orange-on-black grid and the sweet orange glittered polka-dots. And, as you can tell from the stack's cover, there's plenty of bright green and purple included, too.

The Bewitched collection of stacks includes a coordinating 12x12 cardstock stack along with a set of mat stacks (patterned, cardstock, and adhesive cardstock- I'll touch on that last one a bit more in a week or so when I share a Project Life week made using this collection) in a handy 4.5x6.5 inch size.

I dug into both the 12x12 patterned paper and cardstock Bewitched stacks to make this layout documenting my adorbz nieceling's first Halloween.

Funny story about those photos- I didn't take them! You see, as much as I love Halloween, I have very few photos from it because our festivities begin and end with carving pumpkins and handing out candy to kids. Photos of sculpting jack-o-lanterns are a staple in my Halloween gallery (and I've already scrapped last year's- yikes!), but I never have any costume photos to scrap since we don't dress up. So I emailed my brother and begged him to send me any photos he had of Sophie in her costumes. Luckily he'd taken these on his point-and-shoot camera and I was able to edit them up a bit before printing them out.

And I may be biased, but I think she was the most adorable flower ever. :)

The Bewitched stack includes a sheet of cut-out tags, journaling spots, and little bits of text art like the "little monster" square above. I also used one of the journaling spots on this page, which you can see in the photos below (along with some super-old embellishments from my stash- those brads harken all the way back to Basic Grey's Eerie collection!).

I still have Project Life weeks made with both the Bewitched stack and the Autumn Melody stack (that I previously blogged about here), so stay tuned for those over the next couple of weeks. We're not quite through with this round of DCWV stacks yet! And is anyone else excited to see what they come up with for Christmas?!?

lawn fawn layout | simply fascinated

I love the new Dewey Decimal collection by Lawn Fawn, and my absolute favorite part has to be those chunky little letter stickers in the photo above. They're the perfect font- so similar in size to the Sassafras alphas that I still hoard, yet with a completely Lawn Fawn-designed font. And, guess what?!?! There's a green set to go along with the Christmas collection, too! And there are a wonderfully ridiculous number of the letter 'e' on each sheet, so no worries about running out.

This layout was up on the Lawn Fawn blog last week as part of the Inspiration Week festivities- it was a lot of fun seeing what the other design team girls came up with for the same paper set!

While Dewey Decimal is quite fall-and-book-themed on the A sides, the B side prints are a great mix of versatile patterns that work well with just about any subject, including a trip the aquarium! Darren is seriously fascinated with both the leafy and weedy sea dragons there, though I can't remember which variety is in this particular set of photos. I think they're the weedy sea dragons, but I'm sure that Darren will come down the hall and tell me as soon as he reads this post. :)

I found myself reaching for kraft paper for the background of my page when I started this layout. I've been bouncing between white cardstock and patterned paper backgrounds lately, and my beloved kraft has fallen into disuse. I'd forgotten how much it made colors pop, and I definitely need to remind myself to use it more often from now on.

I added just a few white accents to the page- a couple of sections of heat embossed hexagons from the new Interlocking Borders stamp set and just a little bit of white mist over the Circle Graph mask from Studio Calico.

If you've been waiting for them, all of the new Lawn Fawn papers, stamps, and stickers are now in stock at both Simon Says Stamp and Two Peas in a Bucket, so shop away!

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Supplies (click on images for product links):

InLinkz.com

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pink paislee sketch layout | i want to love climbing

We're getting sketchy over at Pink Paislee, with everyone working off of the sketch by the lovely Valerie Salmon this week. My layout went up today, and I opted to put my own spin on the design instead of following the sketch exactly.

 

The most notable change that I made to the original design was to use my standard photo size of 4"x3" instead of the 3.5"x3.75" photos indicated. I tend to print lots of photos ahead of time, so using my standard size meant that I didn't have to print new, almost-square photos just for this layout- I find it much easier to flip through my album of printed photos to find two pictures that I already know that I want to use together than it is to scroll through my massive photo library and find two photos in a set somewhere that I think will work well as a pair. Does that make sense? Perhaps I need to write a post about my photo storage binder sometime?

Since I made my photos slightly larger than the sketch specified, they ran into the allotted journaling room, basically squeezing it all out. That was no problem, though, since the design left plenty of empty space to the left of the picture. I simply filled it with a chain of Chat Clouds from Pink Paislee's Indigo Bleu collection to create my own custom journaling spot.

I also played around with the layered papers at the bottom of the photo, replacing the punched strip of paper with a border sticker and adding a chunky hand-torn (I hardly ever do that any more!) strip, too.

I'm curious- how do you all go about using sketches? Do you follow them exactly? Make minor modification? Start out with the indicated design and end up somewhere else entirely? Or maybe you're like me and do any or all of the above, depending on the day, your mood, and the current phase of the moon?

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Supplies (click on images for product links):

InLinkz.com

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