National Scrapbook Day Giveaway!

It was about 6 years ago I sat home on a 2 month maternity leave with my new baby boy, Cole. It was really hard for be to not be at work since I am a person that has worked since I was 15 and had never taken more that 5 days off at a time. Cole and I desperately needed to get out of the the house one afternoon (it was the middle of winter) so we took a drive to visit my Great Grandmother. She was home visiting with one of her daughters who had stopped by. While we were there we got to talking about scrapbooking and some of the fun tools they use to scrapbook. I was very intrigued by our conversation since I had just taken about 7000 photos in the few weeks since Cole had been born.

I went home and scowled the internet for anything about scrapbooking and with in a few days made a trip to JoAnn Fabrics and was ready to start scrapbooking. I was hooked, I could not enough of it! I would wake up for before my son to scrapbook, as soon as he was down for a nap I scrapbooked - it was just what I needed.

Its so fun to look back on those pages now! Every inch of my page was filled with bright patterned paper and lots of stickers. My favorite items were my decorative edge scissors and the baby cards people had mailed to me - I cut all the cute things off the fronts to use on my pages.

Scrapbooking has done so much for me in the past 6 years. It has preserved my memories, given me a creative outlet and brought me great friendships.

Since its National Scrapbook Day I want to share some great goodies will fellow scrapbookers! Leave a comment on my blog about your first scrapbooking experience. How did you get hooked? I will check back on Monday and randomly choose 2 people to win one of the goody kits above. Be sure to leave an email address so I know how to get in touch with you to let you know you won!

Happy Scrappin!

Sneak Peek Giveaway!

Here are few sneak peeks to my 2 giveaways on Saturday, May 1st - National Scrapbook Day! Come back on that day for a chance to win!

If you've got it, use it.

I am practicing what I am preaching! Being on the destine team for Practical Scrappers is an awesome opportunity! I love what that their motivation is to use what you have. A few months ago I did a 'spring cleaning' on my scrapbook supplies and pulled aside items that I have had for a long time and were either no longer my style or I had used most of the product. When I was done I had a basket filled with half used sticker sheets, rub-ons, chip board pieces, die cuts, ribbon and brads. So I decided to take this basket and my scrap paper collection and make some cards with it.

I was shocked how much I loved these once unwanted products on my cards! I produced 20 cards in the coarse of a day (between laundry and meals) and my basked is about half empty!

Take a few minutes and clean out your embellishments and then see what other crafty things you can make with them! Everything has a use!


This card was a special one I made with my new cricut cartridge, Create A Critter for my good friends birthday! So much fun to make!

My First Desgin Team!

Today has been a great day! It started at 5:30 when I received an email from Practical Scrappers inviting me to be a member of their Design Team for this up coming term! I have been wondering their website for a few weeks now and thanks to a friend who pointed out they were looking for new members on their design team, I entered and was one of 15 lucky ladies!

I have seen a few other design team calls but I really love what Practical Scrappers stands for - using the supplies you already have! Yup, we all have supplies that we pick over time and time again but rush out to buy the newest item. Don't get me wrong, I don't plan not purchasing new product! However, lets try and use some of the stuff we have!

Take a look at their website and see what they are all about, even become a follower! I will be participating with them for the next several months in creating layouts and cards for their challenges. I hope you will stay tuned!

What a great day!

Current Events

My boys (my husband and my son) got a new toy this past week! An electric rock crawling truck! I am not sure which one was more excited! Its so nice to see them having 'their' things together. They even spent the weekend making a large pile of rocks (or a track as they call it) for their truck.

Cole has been out of school for over 2 weeks! He was out sick for 3 days and then he was off for spring break. With school vacations come a babysitter. I am so grateful to have a babysitter that is engergtic enough to keep up with him all and and who is extremely creative. I came home one day and they had made one of these paper fortune tellers (I had not seen one of those since I was in Junior High!) and Cole got the biggest kick out of this thing. Everyone he saw for the next 5 days had to have their fortune done - mine was 'Ninjas will attack you today'! It really is the simple things that kids love the most!


Don't let the cutness fool you! He is a Uno shark in disguise. We started about a year ago with kids Uno and have progressed to adult Uno. You should see the pure joy he gets from telling us, his partents, 'skip you' or 'draw two'!


We have been tuning in to watch Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution (well tuning in on abc.com when we have time) and we are fairly healthy family when it comes to eating but we all have a sweet tooth. I am the girl that asks 'whats for desert' before dinner is served so I am by no means giving up my treats! But I did spend my Saturday morning making Lemon Dream Cupcakes, from scratch. No boxed mix here and I guess there is some peace of mind in knowing exactly what you are eating. I did love them.... every last one!

Those are some of the things that have been happening in our house hold this past week! Whats been going on in your world?

Clip It!

I love coupons! My husband thinks I have a coupon disorder but he is happy I have it. My family of 3 gets groceries once a month (other than the necessities or odd items we run out of) and thanks to my grocery coupons and the fact that my favorite grocery store doubles all coupons up to $1.00 (Yup, I really get $2.00 off an item!) I save and an average of $130 per month!

I am not sure I can fully explain what kind of crazy thrill I get out of savings so much money on my grocery bill but I just cant wait for the sunday paper every week! So your probably wondering what grocery coupons has to do with scrapbooking?? Well, since I am able to save about $130 per month, thats is $130 that can be spend else where! Now I defiantly do not spend $130 each month on scrapbooking (although I am sure I could!) but it does give my family budget the extra fluff to get those fun things we want.

Here are few tips you might not know regarding coupons:

* On mondays go to a store that sells the sunday paper and ask if they have any left and would be willing to let you take the coupons! This will allow you to save more on some of the products you will purchase multiple of.

* All You - this is a magazine that is issued by Walmart and only available at Walmart or though a subscription. However, this magazine has about $80 or more in coupons in it every month! These are good coupons for groceries, cosmetics and house hold items. Sometimes you even get free samples. The coupons in the magazine can be used at any store, not just walmart. So, if you use just a few of the coupons the magazine pays for its self!

*Allyou.com - this is website that goes with the magazine and you can print lots of coupons from their site for free. These coupons are different that ones in the magazine.

* You can also purchase coupons on Ebay! They come in different groupings but typically its in a lot of 100 coupons! I have paid $2-$3 for a lot of coupons and if I just use 3 of them I have paid for my investment!

I hope you take another look at the Sunday paper this weekend and think about how much money you could spend on scrapbook supplies!

The picture I posted is my receipt for my grocery shopping trip on monday! I was so excited to see $120!

Let's try something new!

I could not wait to start playing with this bright new paper from BoBunny when it arrived in the mail! I had also wanted to challenge myself to try something I had not before (which is what I like to do to all my scrapbooking friends!) So I used a few peices of double stitched ribbon to make my flowers by picking out one side of the stiching and cinching it together. I love them! You can dress them up with adding embellishments to the middle and layering them.

This page was really fun! To start with my 6 yr old son took this picture of me after we had been camping for 2 day! But to my surprise I like the picture - no make up and all! I really enjoy Websters paper but sometimes have a hard time using it and not making it look 'victorian' but I had fun with this page! I also used lots of embellishments and pop-dots to get the layers.

I am sure you all have scrapbook tools that you love but dont use, sound familiar? I love my cricut and gypsy - I really do but I often forget to use them when I am scrapbooking so I forced myself to use it an I am happy I did. I use he Accent Essentials cartridge to create my sun and it turned about fabulous using Prima paper with soft yellow velvet swirls! I also crated my little trees with a circle punch and cut the trunk free hand - they turned out better then I thought they would. This page just makes me happy looking at it!

Every boy is a super hero at one time or another! I just loved this picture and who was I going to put Batman and Bumble Bee (transformer) on the same team? They United! I just cant tell you how much I adore the little green super hero guy! This Monstrosity Collection by Sassafrass Lass is ADORABLE for little boys! I have never been a scrapper to cut images or shapes out of paper but I think the flags look great cut apart.

I hope some of my layouts will inspire you to try something new! Is there a trend or an idea you see a lot and want to try? I would love to hear about it!

Good Times

This was a fun picture to work with and the Cosmo Cricut Paper was a perfect choice! My son really is a morning person and gets up greeting the day with a song! My tree is simply circles piled together, I am so in love with my circle punch again!





I had taken all of these pictures of some of my scrapbook friends and I and then had them printed in wallet size. I really had no idea what I was going to do with them. I played around with them for a while and had the layout but then I had trouble coming up with a title. After much giggling and coming up with crazy titles this is what we came up with this, 'Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, I am a scrapbook addict, How about you?' I love how it turned out!