Yes, belated again. LOL!  I was too busy actually PLAYING on NSD too blog about my crafty projects (not to mention my laptop has died and needs a new motherboard so I didn’t bring it with me) so I’m going to blog about the day’s festivities today!  And how fitting that a post about National Scrapbooking Day on a crafty blog is my FIVE HUNDREDTH POST!!!! YAY ME!

A while back I went to an Archiver’s customer appreciation crop and met some neat people, including my friend, Terri.  Well, long story short Terri invited me to go to the Archiver’s NSD all day crop this past weekend and we had so much fun!  I’m really enjoying the Archiver’s crops and visiting with fellow crafters while we create our own little works of art.  Usually the “big” crop days at A’s include some sort of project in addition to the free make n takes in the store.  This crop included a neat little altered frame and the store had a two page 12×12 layout to make.

Here’s the super cool frame we made:

You can also turn it vertical!  Love my vintage doll peeking out from behind!

Those of you who know me know that I can’t seem to follow the instructions/sketch/sample of any project.. tee hee!  I traced the frame out onto the really cool My Mind’s eye paper and adhered it to the frame, mitering the corners on the inside of the frame to give it a nice finished edge.  I also traced the sides and used my fingertip craft knife to cut out strips from the reverse side of the MME paper for a nice contrast.

I made the flowers as they mostly suggested but laid it all out my own way.  I added some extra petals to the lily and used an additional rose in lieu of a lace/button flower.  I used the lace as an accent and gathered it while hot gluing it down to the frame.  (They had this super cool hot glue gun that did NOT burn me!  Gonna have to look into that and procure that little treasure! So if any of you reading this know what I’m talking about please leave me a comment on where I can find it!)  I also added some green Kaisercraft rhinestones and bits of ribbon (that was originally intended to hang the frame with) to the frame and some Kaisercraft pearls to the centers of the flowers. I used diamond Stickles on the stamens of the lily.

We also made a cool 2 page 12×12 layout.  I don’t do a lot of paper scrapping lately, but this was way cool and used a method of paper scrapping that I have been thinking about for a while now.

Here’s the first page… a traditional paper layout.

I left it in the plastic sheet, sorry for the glare.  I really like the notebook paper punch that we used on the green ledger/graph sheet and I love the big huge die cut “negative” frame.  I just need to find and resize some photos to put in there with a larger family pic.  I am thinking I might redo the large butterflies.. trace them onto some solid red paper and hand cut them. I’m not  digging the pattern on pattern… it’s almost too dizzying for me.

I do really love the funky ruffled button flower that we made using a new product called Glubers… which are basically a round, super sticky, giant glue dot.  I am hooked.

The second page of the layout was a super simple, “my kind of paper scrapping” layout.  I’ve been liking the idea of making a few really special “traditional” layouts with my digital stuff and then intermixing some “pocket pages” into the whole thing.   We made a “pocket page” layout at Archivers for the second page.  The idea is that you make some “mini” layouts/embellishments/journaling spots and drop them into pocket pages and fill the pockets with photos. I LOVE THIS.

Here’s what we made.  I dropped a few 4×6 photos that I had on my desk into the pockets just for the overall idea.

Here’s the page w/out photos. Fast little 4×6 mini pages for either journaling or extra photos…

And here it is with some photos dropped in.

This sure would be a great and fast way to  get caught up on all my photos… all the many THOUSANDS of them… especially old –pre digital – photos that are already printed and needing new permanent homes and a GREAT way to use up small scraps of paper!  I think I’m going to do it!

One of the highlights of the night was meeting a group of girls from Provo Craft.  I was chit chatting with them about some cool projects they were making.  One of them, Shannon, was showing me a couple of new Cricut cartridges, Damask Decor and Martha Stewart Cake.  Martha Stewart cake has all of the Martha Stewart punches as borders that you can cut with your Cricut.. how awesome is that?? And Damask Decor is choc full of gorgeous damask designs… and while I was standing there oogling and drooling over the Damask Designs… Shannon GAVE it to me…  I was floored!  So Miss Shannon, if you are reading this… THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart 🙂  I am cleaning up my desk so I can pull out my Cricut and play with this cartridge this week!

My National Scrapbooking Day was awesome and I had so much fun! I hope you all did something fun and scrappy, too!

Inky Smiles!

PS.. coming very soon (like in a couple of days) to celebrate 500 posts… a really fun giveaway! Stay tuned!