some artsy stuff

I realized that my blog has become less of a "scrap blog" and more of a "life blog" - which may really bore some of you - and I apologize for the lack of creativity in recent posts. I haven't been scrapping much these past few weeks and, even when I have completed layouts and projects, I've been plagued with camera problems which have made it difficult to take photos of my work to share with you. That being said, I DO still scrapbook. Here are two of my most recent works:

I finally made a layout about my precious fur baby who passed away in early December. I wanted to focus on the journaling, so I kept the page simple and only included one small embellishment on the top left-hand corner. The patterned paper and the green letter stickers are both by Heidi Grace. I wanted to write "I carry" by hand, but I couldn't get it to look nice because my handwriting is really tiny and it just looked ridiculous when I tried to over-size it. I ended up printing off "I carry" using a free font download by Ali Edwards. I then transferred it onto the cardstock using carbon tracing paper, and went over the words with a white gel pen. Voila! Easy as 1,2,3. On Saturday evening, I went to the Hero Arts stamp release party at Scrapbook Star, and got first dibs on their new releases. I fell in love with the little Japanese doll stamps and I just had to have them. I've been wanting to host a sushi night for some of my girlfriends for awhile now, and when I got my hands on these stamps I knew they'd be perfect for the invites.

Making invites using patterned paper can get pricey ... all those sheets add up quickly. Stamps are great because they're totally reusable and all you have to do is change the color of the ink to get a brand new look. To create these invites, I stamped the image of the doll onto white cardstock, using black Staz-On ink. Then I stamped the flowers on with pink Colorbox pigment ink. I wrote "you're invited" by hand, and then cut the cardstock in the shape of a circle using my Marvy circle punch. To create the pink scallop background, I used my circle scallop punch. I then outlined some of the stamped flowers with a pink Zig pen, stuck some bling in the doll's hair, outlined the circle using Stickles and glued everything together. Super cute invites with no patterned paper at all!