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!

Cupcake crawl completion!

In a rush of energy (and time!) last night, I was able to finish the cupcake crawl album. I wrapped up the lemonade stand layout and the opening and closing pages, as well as the little window on the cover of the book.

I'm not thrilled with the opening page -- I didn't have a photo specially printed for that page, so I ended up using a leftover that wouldn't fit on my More Cupcakes layout. And I'm not sure I'm crazy about the overall design of it. I tried to take a risk and be different by angling the title, which I'm not sure worked. It adds character, I suppose. And it's done, which is the biggest thing.

The closing page is a pocket page that holds a couple copies of the piece I wrote for The State Journal-Register, along with clippings of a front-page promo and a stats box showing that the "guest column," as we called it, finished eighth for most-read stories on the SJ-R website the week it ran. I left some space just in case I get lucky and place in one of the contests we enter each year. I haven't entered it in anything yet, but I figure I might as well give it a try since these opportunities to write don't come up very often for me.

For the book cover window -- again, because I had no photo to use -- I wound up improvising with a dimensional cupcake sticker on a piece of cardstock trimmed to fit.

I'm more than ready to move on to the next project. I have a few more cupcake projects to work on, as well as a couple of favorite-things food pages -- my mom's strawberry shortcake and pumpkin cake. I think I need to break up my favorite things album into two books -- one for food and one for everything else! There's not a lot of "everything else" yet. I also really need to get back to focusing on my older projects, like family vacations, which would be the ideal project to start because I have a spare album that is thematically appropriate and I've already made the trip to Scrapbook Your Story to get paper and stickers. I also want to do an SJ-R book. And that's only the tip of the iceburg. It's a long to-do list!