Monday, April 22, 2013

Scrapbook Layout: Yes, Sammy Gets to Play too!


This is the third of three baseball layouts I made about the boys' Fall Little League season.  This one is about Sammy tagging along with Zack's team.  Sammy is just as crazy about baseball as Zack is, so it was really sweet that he was able to play along with the big kids. 
 
As far as the design and the outcome, this one might be my favorite.  I got to use my three new washi tapes plus some pieces of packaging I thought were cute.  I recently bought some small letter stickers because when I tried to put together titles, all my letters were too big.  These teeny orange tile letter stickers from Basic Grey are the perfect size. 
 
It will rest next to the "bonus team" layout in our album, so I chose some items just to tie the two together in a pleasing way.  The paper on which the two smaller pictures is matted is used on both layouts, as is that bright orange color.  I also used black ink on the edges and droplets of Mr. Huey opaque white ink spray on both.
 
Oh, and I put a stamp of a tape measure showing four-and-a-half on the paper embellishment at the bottom of the page, thinking of Sammy's age.  James completely surprised me by noticing both the stamped image AND realizing the age connection.  He gets a gold star in the category of Scrapbook Appreciation for that one!

Friday, April 19, 2013

Scrapbook Layout: bonus team


This was the second of three stories about our Little League experience this past fall (see the first layout here).  Because I had fewer pictures and much of the story was recorded in my typewritten journaling (which will be behind the layout), I was able to do a single page layout for this one. 
 
This team had a much different feel that our main team, so while that layout was old-fashioned and vintage-y, this one was more intense with the bright orange and the bits of black.  It still has some distressed elements, though, with inked edges and some white ink droplets, so there is a little continuity there too.  I included a selvage off of an orange print fabric because I liked the progression of numbers - it reminded me of the players numbers and the lineup.  I also included the sticker from the fancy hat for the team.  It is black and reflective-yellow, so I added some yellow to the other embellishment groupings.  I am really pleased with how it turned out!

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Scrapbook Layout: Little League Fall 2012

I am thrilled to have finally finished this layout about Zack's first season on Little League this past fall.  I started it over Christmas and got stuck.  I did a couple of other things in between, but I really wanted this done and had a hard time with it.  The main problem was that there were really three main stories about this season that I wanted to tell, but there was no way to capture all of it on one layout.  I knew that when I started, so I was planning to do more than one page, but when I went to try to do this part, I couldn't separate the stories enough to know exactly what I was trying to do here.  Zack had his main team, which was full of delightful people that we became really attached to.  We loved watching all of them improve so much.  But at the same time, Zack substituted a couple of times on a more skilled and aggressive team.   That was a lesser part of our season, but because there was some drama involved, there was a lot of story there.  And finally, Sammy got to tag along too and I wanted to capture the story of his participation. 
 
I wasn't able to get un-stuck until I typed out the long, drawn-out story of our whole season, with all the interacting parts and people.  It was great to capture it all for the sake of our family memories.  I plan to print it on cardstock and tuck in between this layout and the next one.  After I did all that writing (and it took a long time!), I was able to come back to this page and be much more content to limit the journaling to this one part of the story.  I wrote about what a good experience we all had with this team, even though we lost every game and added some photo captions.
 
A couple of notes on the layout itself - the background paper is plain cardstock but I used a number stencil and a sponge and ink to add a very subtle pattern, concentrated in the corners.  The title is die cut with the QuicKutz Chocolate alphabet die (which I bought specifically so I would have some medium-sized numbers on one of my dies. 
Stay tuned in the next few days to see the other two pages that tell the other two stories! 
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p.s. I'm not sure why I'm having such a hard time getting a good photo of the full layout but I tried again.  Hopefully it's a little crisper!