All's fair

After finishing my butter cow page a couple weeks ago, I was in the mood to continue my Illinois State Fair scrapping and completed two layouts last night. I had spent an evening at the fairgrounds with my friend, Michele, and while wandering around inside the lower level of the Grandstand before the Boyz II Men concert were were attending, we discovered a display area with old characters that were lively and well-known features of the Dairy Building when we were kids: a talking cow and animated milk carton. Both were deactivated in the display, but we could touch them and pose with them for photos, which we did.

I used my other layout to focus on my favorite fair foods: Vose's corn dogs, elephant ears and soft-serve ice cream from the Dairy Building (or a milkshake, as it's called if you buy it from one of the two stands designed to look like giant milk cartons). I was able to have Michele take photos of me with all but an elephant ear (too much food for one night!).

I love the paper I found for the food page -- if you look closely, you may be able to see the Illinois State Fair logo printed on the background. I found it at Paper Boutique, and I was so excited because it's hard to find scrapping materials that are themed that specifically. It was a bit pricy -- I believe it was close to $2 per sheet -- but I couldn't resist the splurge.

I'm looking forward to a day of scrapping this weekend at Paper Boutique. It's been a while since I've had the chance to spend an entire day cropping, and I plan to focus and make some progress. What will I work on? Stay tuned ... :-)

A salute to the dairy heiffer

I was in the mood for a small project last night, and I was overdue to design a one-page homage to the Illinois State Fair butter cow for my Favorite Things scrapbook. I knew I needed to make a butter cow page when I found a sheet of yellow, teal, gray and tan cow-print paper last spring at The Paper Boutique ( http://paper-boutique.com/). Isn't it funny how the supplies you find sometimes determine your projects as much as the reverse? 

I also pulled out my big bag of pre-cut letters, which have been in storage since I got my Sizzix Big Shot a couple years ago and started using it exclusively for lettering. I'm having a big of crank fatigue, though, so I'm feeling the urge to sort through my many incomplete sets of letters and use what I can. Some of my headlines might resemble hostage letters for a while! (Luckily, I only needed a few letters for this page and had all I needed in the same color and style.)

I had printed two pictures of the cow -- I wanted an overall shot and a close-up of the face. I didn't have room to use both, since I had enlarged the overall shot to a 5x7, so to make room for the large headline and journaling block, I cut out the close-up and used my Ranger Liquid Pearls to highlight it. I also used a sponge dauber to add some Stampin' Up! Bermuda Bay ink to the glittery die-cut letters so they would stand out more boldly against the lively background of the cows. I still wish I'd had darker-colored letters, but sometimes it's nice to use up old supplies and clear out space. Cleaning out clutter freshens my imagination and improves my creative process. 

I'm hoping to find more time to scrap this weekend and complete at least one more small-scale project. I might stick with the state fair theme and work on some pages from a night at the fair this past summer when I went to the Boyz II Men concert with my friend Michele. With all the snow and slush outside, it seems like the perfect time to focus on warmer times. 

Happy scrapping!

Finished family vacations album!

Finally, after what seemed like a year (but in reality was probably closer to two  months), I have wrapped up the family trips album. Previously, I posted photos of pages I had done of Los Angeles and a high school trip to Washington, D.C. The remaining pages consisted of a D.C. trip in college, for a wedding, and a pair of Colorado vacations that I took with my parents when I was in junior high and early high school. Those particular trips had few photos and little information written on them, so it was hard to determine exactly where they were taken and when, but I patched together a general set of pages with a few memories.

Here are layouts from the second D.C. trip, which, in addition to the wedding, included visits to the Newseum and the National Holocaust Museum:

This intro page shows a few of the D.C. monuments on the left, 

as well as a picture with family members of the wedding party.

Here we have a layout dedicated to the wedding itself.

I wanted to keep my layout for the Holocaust Museum 

dark and simple.

The Newseum had lots of interesting exhibits outside. 

I don't remember if cameras were off-limits inside, 

but the outside pictures were all I had (above and below).

This D.C. trip was by car, and on the way back we stopped in Columbus, Ohio, to visit my best friend and her family. Here is a layout from that overnight excursion:

Finally, here are the pages from the Colorado trip, which I didn't like as much as the other trip layouts because of the lack of content. But hey, at least it's done, right?

A simple lead-in page.

I actually liked this layout because of the paper (Stampin' Up!) 

and these were some of my favorite pictures from Colorado. 

My dad gets credit for the close-up of the deer on the left.

It was the late '80s, early '90s, so I decorated 

the page accordingly. :-)

The last page of Colorado and the last page of the book. 

(I decided not to do this one in chronological order.)

I'm still trying to decide what my next project will be. I'm thinking about doing the reunion trip I took to U of I back in April with my old roommates Sara and Heather and our friend Stephanie. But I also have prints for some smaller projects that I'm tempted to knock out before I start a larger one. (The reunion is enough to fill its own book.) I'm also planning to scrap the photos and memorabilia from our actual college years, but I'm searching for a scrapbook with the U of I seal on the cover. I've seen them, but I'm having trouble tracking one down for some reason. I'm excited to start that project, though. My college memories are some of my fondest, and I absolutely love reliving them.