happily blue

those kits are soooo worth it! twice now, whenever Mia sends me their wonderful kits, i get all excited and kilig. you get papers for different manufacturers and they are all coordinated with matching embellishments (buttons, ribbons, rubons chipboard, even thingamajigs yeyeyey!) and there is also an acrylic stamp monthly...how cool is that! it's definitely not hard to make LOs look yummy because you get most of what you need all matching and if you get the add -on kits...that makes it even better. plus, it may even CURB your scrap spending...you don't need to buy a whole set of papers or embellishments to get to that one that makes the LO in your head complete. here are my takes on the November kit.

i dream of...

you know me, i just very occasionally do intricate cutwork, but this paper was just ASKING to be cut! just look at it, practically NO flower design overlaps! how can i resist...

also, this layout is special to me. i had these 3 photos since SM Idol finals because we were asked to prepare for 3 themes. this was my prepared photos for the My Dream theme. i have been meaning to scrap them but fail to do so for some reason or another. so when my first Studio Azul kit came and it was called Passage to India, i took it as a sign! even the rich oranges and greens of this kit match the photo. Nita even points out, hey, wasn't it the Dalai Lama who literally did to a passage to India!

the Dalai Lama's picture was taken from this book i had: Stages of Meditation: Training the Mind for Wisdom (it's a great read...and would probably be even better if practiced!). i scanned the book and edited with Photoshop CS to remove the letters. that was fussy photoshopping and took me all of a day! then i asked bestfriend Nita to take my picture with a white sheet as a background. again, with some ps manipulation, i took the background of the HHDL's pic, flipped it and made it my background so it would look like we were at the same place. lastly, i added the same color overcast to both pictures so it would look more realistic.

they say creative visualization sometimes works to make wishes come true, i consider this is my effort at it. :-D

of friendships and scrapbooks
these pictures were taken by Jeff Lopez and i just love it! it is the culmination of one of the most grueling challenges i have taken on thus far in my scrapbooking world. i love it because it show the end result: a bonding between people who were otherwise living in separate worlds but who came together just because of a hobby turned passion.

when i first saw the Prima Paintables paper, i thought to myself, THIS would be an interesting challenge. and, my oh my, it was! i have always wanted to learn to use watercolors but except for small card projects, i have really very little experience in it. this is a 12x12. i was so afraid i'd ruin it but once i got warmed up, i couldn't put it down! it was totally freewheelin' but i loved the end result. now, i want more of it!

oh, brother...
our scrapbooking is a way not only to preserve memories but to also leave messages or reminders to our children. this is layout contains my short yet important message for them. the title and the journaling on the arrow are actually lyrics from an old song...


...but the arrow with the hinge flips to reveal the message inside:


-------the--stitch--itch-------

you might have noticed by now that i love stitching my LO's . i even have a Simply Scrappy product called the Deckler and Stitching Guide for some manual stitching. however, i find that stitching via a sewing machine makes this activity faster. it also gives me a good excuse to play with my new toy. so for the above layout, i did some experimenting with the decorative stitches of my Janome and here is the result before i used it on the above LO:

even without fancy stitching, simply using different color threads makes a lot of impact. below is another example of some cool effects done with sewing. this LO is from one of the SMIdol challenges which i did with just regular, straight stitches. it's really easy and very forgiving. no need for perfectly aligned stitches.

try it sometime. it's a cool way to learn a new skill if you're not stitching yet or a fine way to use an old sewing machine for more than just making clothes or curtains.