Last day of 2010

Last day of December, last day of the year... last day to take pictures for December Daily... last time used 2010 for the date. It's been a good year... lots of great memories... vacations, family time, everyday blessings... I always have mixed feelings on December 31 - a little sad to say goodbye and very happy because I love New Year's celebration! In my birth country it has always been THE BIGGEST holiday of the year!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

... from our family to yours. Best wishes to everyone! (This picture was in the Holiday cards we send out this year.)

 See you next year! :)

Just popped in to wish you

Merry Christmas!

or

С Рождеством Христовым!

Two more days...

When December just begun, I thought I'd post here every other day. And today is already December 22... Yes, we were busy here. Good busy. I was working on my December Daily today but didn't get a chance to photograph finished pages yet. Hopefully I can find a minute to do that tomorrow. But for now I'm leaving you with one of my favorite pictures:

Looking at these happy faces you can tell they had fun. Love to see them happy and smiling. Can't wait to develop them to use for DD.

Hope to see you at least one more time in December.

Day in December

I just love that, a desire to complete December Daily, makes you want grab that camera again and again. I know, I'll probably be glad when December will be over and I won't feel the pressure to take that many pictures every day, but I will be even more glad to have all of them. There are so many memories in everyday life that usually go unnoticed. 

My little one was playing "millioni" aka "Deal or No Deal". I don't know how she does that... but she was getting all the good numbers even though she pushed buttons with her fist!)) Yeah, needless to say that just a few minutes ago, I played with them and "won" 25 dollars...

No, it's not the numbers on the board that matter - their smiles do. I love seeing them play together. I know that there is quite a difference in age, but the little one doesn't suffer from lack of commending abilities.

Eleven days of December are gone. Twenty more to go. More pictures to take. More memories to treasure.

First Sunday of December

Busy is not always fun, but I love this kind of busy. We had an orchestra trip scheduled for this day. Planning to use one of these pictures for December Daily. Loving the project just as much as I did last year, but what it makes it even more fun is that I have my friends go along with me doing the same project. Love you girls!

Have a lot more pictures from that day, but will share only two more:


Will be back soon to hopefully share some of my finished December Daily pages.

See you!

Christmas Tree

I love that December is here, even though I will never get used to the speed it's approaching with each year. Yesterday we put our Christmas Tree up. We love to get it done early, so that we can enjoy longer, and for a change, it's a different color this year. Yes, it is pink. Well, with three girls in the house it was easy to guess.

I know it will not match perfectly the rest of our decor, but I gave up on perfect. Life isn't perfect, why should I stress out on something that supposed to bring JOY, not stress. So here we are with pink and silver Christmas Tree in our living room and burgundy with gold throughout the house. Welcome.

It was a little different to decorate the tree with these "not so little anymore" girls... They spent more time changing clothes and goofing around then actually hanging ornaments. But I love them just the way they are.

And this little one was so sweet wiping clean ornaments. We did have a few dusty ones that somehow got left out of the box for a year, but Suzanna took care of them. I guess she decided to do something she was good at, since ornaments she hung got rehung anyway (sorry, but we can't keep all the decoration on the bottom branches). We loved your effort sweetie, and your participation just made it so much more fun.

Going back to finish my journaling for DD day 2 now.

Have a great day!

December Daily updates

I know, people are posting their finished pages already, but I realized that I never shared my DD base. I kept the red cover (thought it won't show the dirt as much as white, since it's planned to be used a lot).

Few pictures from the album:

I love to add pretty mail and tags from clothes to DD...

It took me forever to glue this cutout page to transparency, but I love it!

I never thought these photo box dividers would make into almost every project I make...

I bought entire paper pad because of this red polka dot paper...

Two days into December... One thing I realized for sure - if you don't write down little notes from the day, you will forget. It happened last year, and this year I will try to take just a couple of minutes before bed to add anything I remember. It might come very handy later.

I know I can't complete a page everyday for December Daily but I :

- pick a story to tell for the day

- pick out picture or pictures from today

- add the date to a photo digitally

- plan how page will come together, draw a sketch if needed

- type my journaling.

And then when I get my photos, knowing exactly where they go, all I'll need to do is to adhere them. Can't wait to get my first set of photos developed.

See you soon!

Last day of November

Today is the last day of November. Tomorrow I get to do my first entry in my December Daily. I'm so happy to go for this journey, especially since I'm doing it with 5 more close to me people!

Well, I just could not wait to begin recording in DD, therefore I did my first page the last week of November. It's just a few pictures from our walk outside (weather was perfect for that) and a couple of sentences. Summary of fall... I will post it as soon as I get my photos.

Thanksgiving

We LOVE Thanksgiving, that's why we celebrate it a few times a year. We have a special Thanksgiving service at church around October with dinner after the service, and then celebrate together on Thanksgiving day.

What is the most important thing at Thanksgiving? Is it a turkey? Because at this house was definitely a laughter! Yes, tables were overflowing with abundance of food including turkey... but being able to gather together and just have fun was a blessing.


I am really thankful for a large family!

More scrapping and more lifting

I had so many thoughts in my head that I wanted to share while I was cleaning and doing the laundry, but when I finally got a chance to sit down, I couldn't think of anything.

Well, I did want to share a layout I made a few weeks ago. For some reason I just couldn't get the colors of these papers to look right on the photo. Anyway, here is a layout, using some Teresa Collins papers together with Making Memories.

This is a page about one of the best weeks of the year (and one of the best places too). Here we shared that perfect moment with my baby. I just enjoyed being with her, and observing how she acts, talks and grows so quickly. It was perfect to simply spend a day with her.

Next, is another one of those pages that I did last week when I was so busy with the wedding. Yeah, that totally doesn't make sense (scrapping while you are busy). But I just couldn't do anything else. This time I used Jana Eubank's layout for inspiration.

I don't think I will ever get tired of Teresa Collins Giving Thanks collection papers. They are so delicate and can work on any page.

Have one more page to share with you tomorrow, using the same collection. I had little pieces left and that's exactly how that page came together.

Hope to see you tomorrow!

Congratulations, sister!

Whew,... what a week! I believe it was the busiest week in years for all of us. This past Saturday we celebrated my baby sister's wedding and it was BEAUTIFUL! We were worried about many things, but our biggest concern was the weather, since we couldn't control it. And, by the grace of God, the weather turned out to be absolutely gorgeous!

There are four sisters in our family and we all love to work with flowers. I used to work as a flower designer at the local craft store. I truly enjoy working with fresh flowers and consider flower arranging as one of my hobbies. So, this week, the three of older sisters did flowers for our youngest sister's wedding.

I love to start with this:
To turn it into this:
And this:
So that the special day is surrounded with flowers from ceremony:

to bridal party...

to reception...
to make these happy:

and...

They truly deserve that. We love you sister! Congratulations!

Thanks for stopping by and I'll see you soon!

Mini Home Decor project

I love to surround myself with little inspirations, especially in my scraping corner. This week I made some pencil cups using paper and tags by Teresa Collins and some cardstock. Originally I was planning on using these tags on my layout, but I figured they will be hidden in the album and I wont be able to see them all the time, so I decided to use them here:

They add some decor and warmth and inspiration to this place... Here they are with supplies in them.

I also pinned a cutout page with an awesome quote to my cork board for the same reason. To be INSPIRED. To remember all the blessings in my life and to take time recording them.

You can find all kind of stuff around your home and using your favorite scrapbooking supplies turn these useless items into usable decorative stationary. And here are mine before they got a makeover:

I also wanted to share a layout I made, that I scraplifted Stefany Dagan's page. Sometimes I make myself scraplift someone else's work that I love, and today was a perfect day for a scraplift - a day when your head is spinning, worrying whether everything is done and ordered for the wedding, but a day when it's too early to do flowers and decorations just yet (will begin that on Thursday)... I needed a creative escape. So, having a piece of work you love to scraplift without thinking much about design is the way to go!

I even kept the colors pretty close to hers. Should say, I really enjoyed it. My hands were working with stuff that make me happy and my head had a break. Well, it wasn't missing completely, it enjoyed pictures and colors and being at my favorite spot.

Next time you are tired or don't feel very well oriented to design a masterpiece - just scraplift one that you like. Happy scraplifting!

Card for a Teacher

I made this card for my daughter's teacher using Teresa Collins products. Usually when I work on school related projects, orange is the first color choice I go to and this Giving Thanks paper collection was a perfect choice.

What I also like about Teresa Collins papers is that the name of the collection is in nice font and is big enough to use as a sentiment an a card or a little phrase on a page, as I did here: GIVING THANKS for the front of the card and THANKS for the back.

To give this book an open look, I used glue dots between the pages and under the cover too.

Thanks for looking.
 

December Daily 2010

Fall is usually full of things to celebrate - birthdays, anniversaries, Thanksgiving and now we can add another one - my sister's wedding. And the closer it gets the more nervous I become... Well, lots of things are on the list for the week before the wedding.

I have participated in making December Daily with Ali Edwards last year and can't wait to make another one this year. Here are the products I'm planning to use for it, actually these are already precut pages for DD.


I really loved this project and am trying to convince some other "nonscrapbooking" people to join this year. My sister is one of them. I even made one for her.

Same as Ali, I made two different covers for DD, and still deciding which one to use. The other one will become a cover for my sister's December Daily. Here are both of them:

Thanks for stopping by.

Layout

Why is it that when you are so busy and don't have a spare minute - is when you want to scrapbook the most. I had company coming over tonight, but in the midst of cleaning and getting things done for upcoming events, I still got a page done.

It wasn't super complicated or innovative, but it finally felt right to scrapbook these photos. I pulled them out of the box at least 10 times before...

I should mention that photos are at least 6 years old. That was before my SLR or even any digital point and shoot camera for me.

So much easier to make a page where I took time to write journaling before gluing everything down and then trying to find a spot to write something (did that before)...

My favorite part in completing a layout is when I can finally stitch something on it and get a box with embellishments trying to find that something that just brings everything together and makes it more fun. In this case it was Basic Grey's goodness (love their Offbeat collection) that made all the difference on this page.

I have more "almost finished" projects to share later.

Until next time!

Using older products

Hello friends! I have two pages to share today. I made this one using mostly older products. It was a wedding line by K&Co with soft colors in it. I only used it once or twice before, but now I'm ready to go back and use it again since I like how delicate it looks combined with few other products.

We were doing wedding invitations that week with my sister, and she left some extra registry cards. I didn't think I needed them. the next day I was working on this page and since these cards were still sitting on my table one of them made into my layout as a journaling card.
I love that Martha Steward butterfly stamp set and Basic Grey's alphabet stickers that fit here perfectly.

Another page has some of the same papers but is so different. It's a layout about my cousin's wedding. She was 2 when we came to US and now she is a bride... time flies...


I had so many pictures, but could fit only a certain amount on a page and for some reason I just can not do a two page spread right now. I guess I could for an assignment, but if it's my personal choice it will be a single page. It can change though (did before).

Have a great day and I'll see you next time!

Two layouts - same papers

I have been wanting to scrap these pictures for a very long time. I knew that I will be using this blue hydrangea paper for this page, but I guess finding other papers to go with it made it all come together so easy. I loved to work with this color palette.

At this wedding both of my girls were flower girls, and I realized I had too many pictures for just one page. So, I decided to make two separate ones. Staying with the same choice of papers and just changing the design saved some time a little .

More stitching and more tabs here.

Thanks for visiting!

10/10/10

Today is October tenth which makes this date in 2010 so special -10/10/10. And for that reason I decided to get myself a little present. Sharing some of my favorite products that are in the cart right now at Emmaspaperie. I think they have the largest selection of paper among all Internet stores.

I love all of the products by Teresa Collins but Giving Thanks is my very favorite. These are the papers I can not wait to hold and play with:

They are so classic and elegant...

Love text papers...

And text + pattern is totally speaking to my heart!

Awesome bracket shape mini book covers!

These tags are so adorable:

And this will be wonderful for a mini book I wanted to make for a long time now. I'm planning on doing a page a day in November about blessings in my life. Will be a great Thanksgiving project...

And how can you pass by her Holiday papers - my December Daily will be so happy with these! And me too...


Also in my cart are these mini classic die cut label papers by Jenny Bowlins. They are great for journaling or even to stand on their own...


But for my biggest disappointment Emmaspaperie didn't have this Travel Clock Transparency by Teresa Collins and it was hard to find it elsewhere. I just have to have it!
I'll see you soon with more projects.