PLAY TIME

With the release of the movie "Oz, the Great and Powerful" this week, RCS's challenge was "Yellow Brick Road."  Or make a layout using yellow as the primary color.  I have a soft spot in my heart for the color yellow.  It was the color of my girls' nurseries when they were babies.  I especially love pale yellows.  So when I found this Jillibean Soup paper that was softly printed yellow flowers, I had to buy it for this challenge.  I took this picture of my daughter on the first warm Spring day at our favorite park going down the slide.  I turned the picture into Sepia, and I thought the yellowish tint of the picture went well with this paper.

FOR TYLER

This RCS challenge was based on the movie "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas."  Definitely not a feel good movie but quite poignant.  In other words, we needed to use stripes in some way on our layout.  When I think of this movie, I think of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington DC.  We go there every year on our annual 8th grade DC trip.  It's a place that reminds me of how valuable life is and how fortunate I am to be an American.  This year's trip to DC was extremely bittersweet.  My student Tyler died in January after a brief, devastating illness.  He was a history buff who was looking so forward to our trip to DC.  What he was excited to see most was the Lincoln Memorial.  While he was in the hospital, the staff gave him a patriotic teddy bear to try to rally him to recover.  His parents told us this after he passed away.  Tyler's Mother asked if we could take the bear with us to Washington DC in memory of him.  So my colleagues, students, and I took different pictures of Tyler's bear all over Washington DC.  This particular picture is my favorite.  It was so crowded the day we went to Lincoln Memorial, but somehow I got this shot of Tyler's bear "posing" with Abe. So, in honor of the "Stars and Stripes," I created this layout to honor my student.  I used Doodlebug's "Stars and Stripes" collection (fitting for the theme of this challenge) and a sketch design featured by "Sketches in Thyme" to pull this layout together.  And although this layout was designed for RCS, it's also for Tyler.  God speed to my precious student.  Mrs. Johnson misses you dearly.

LOVE THIS MOMENT

This week's Red Carpet Studio challenge was to make a layout based on the movie The Girl with the Pearl Earring.  Now, I've heard of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," but I never heard of this movie.....So I decided to be very literal with this layout; my little girl with her freshly pierced earrings.  Although they are not pearl, they were earrings nevertheless!  I embellished the layout using pearl swirly gems and a Prima flower with a pearl in the middle.She was only four when she decided that she wanted her ears pierced. I love her sweet face in this picture showing me her new treasures.  I thought this paper from Little Yellow Bicycle's "Fern and Forest" line was perfect to capture her innocence in this picture.

THE WALKING DEAD

Hello, my name is Stephanie, and I"m addicted to The Walking Dead.....As is my daughter.  (I know...what kind of Mother am I for letting my tween watch this, trust me, I've given myself enough grief about it...)  It's bonding for us.... She loves the show so much, that she started making Walking Dead charm bracelets (as pictured in this layout).  Several of the cast members of The Walking Dead came to Cincinnati a month ago, and my co-worker and her daughter (the biggest fans of the show that I know) got to meet several of the stars including Sarah Wayne Callies (Lori) and Norman Reedus (Daryl).  Jesse, the girl pictured, wore Caitlin's charm bracelet to the event, and they LOVED them!  They were quite impressed that a 6th grader crafted these little people.  Being her Mom, of course I think they are adorable and tell her that often, but seeing celebrities that she made figures of admiring her art about made us both bust with pride.  So, why this layout?  Red Carpet Studios challenge this week was "black tie" or use "black" somehow on the layout.  I found this very creepy paper from Carta Bella called "All Hallow's Eve," and I thought it perfectly reflected the mood and the opening credits of The Walking Dead show.  It's hard to see, but the paper the pictures are on list all sorts of body parts.  (An old fashion anatomy book paper).  I wanted it to look creepy yet antique like at the same time.  And of course, use black!  I ripped the paper to make it look like it's gone through a rough time (like a Zombie apocalypse) and some found objects from Tim Holtz to give it that extra old fashioned look.

TIME TO DISCOVER

For this RCS challenge, we had to make a layout to honor Brad Pitt.  In other words, in some way, we had to incorporate brads into the layout.  I guess this layout is a double shout out to Brad Pitt with the fishing pictures.  (A River Runs Through It....get it?) :0)  Anyway, I decided to use the brads to anchor baker's twine to frame my layout.  It's like pseudo stitching on my layout which I thought was a nice finishing touch.

SKETCHES IN THYME DESIGN TEAM CALL

I love being on the RCS design team!  I love it so much, I'd really like to get involved in some more design teams as well.  So, the latest team I'm applying to become a member of is Sketches in Thyme; a sketch based design team.  I love working with sketches; I love having a pattern to go from and then tweak it in a way that reflects my style.  We were asked to create a layout based on one of the three sketches featured in the month of April.  I chose this sketch...

And I created this based on the sketch....

I love this picture of my daughter goofing around in a souvenir shop in Charleston, SC.  She put on these octopus fingers and acted like the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz with them.  I loved this sketch because it was a single picture sketch.  Slanting it a touch really helped set off the picture.

I so hope that Sketches in Thyme decides that I would be a good fit for them.  I feel like I'm a dependable team player when it comes to groups I'm involved in at work and within the scrapbooking world.  Plus with summer on the horizon, PLENTY of time to scrap and make all sorts of goodies!  Crossing my fingers and hoping for the best!

OLD, NEW, BORROWED, & BLUE BLOGHOP!

Welcome to Day 2 of the Old, New, Borrowed, and Blue Blog Hop!

Wedding bells will soon be ringing as the wedding season is almost here, and the design teams of Red Carpet Studio and The Paper Nest Dolls have teamed up to provide you with some beautiful wedding inspiration by creating projects using Paper Nest Dolls digital stamps! If you've just come across the hop and would like to start at the beginning, please visit Red Carpet Studio.

Red Carpet Studio is a movie-themed challenge blog that runs weekly challenges, alternating between layout and card challenges each week. All of their challenges are inspired by either a movie or aspect of Hollywood!

The Paper Nest Dolls is a brand new digital/rubber stamp shop that sells adorable stamps inspired by the designer's children. Their stamps are sold here and they just started a challenge blog as well!

For my project today, I made...

 

For this project, I decided to make a favor a bride-to-be could use at a wedding shower as a centerpiece for a table.  I used the digi stamp entitled "Wedding Couple" from Paper Nest to build this project.  First, I took a simple, inexpensive frame from the Hobby Lobby to give the "directions" for those attending the shower.  The poem inside the frame reads, "Because you are OLD pros at marraige and we are very NEW, we would like to BORROW words of wisdom so we are never BLUE."  Surrounding the frame are two envelopes where guests can write their messages to the bride to be.  I kind of wish I would have had something like this when I got married....something like this could have possibly made that first year with my husband a little more tolerable...Hee Hee!  Fourteen years, two kids, four pets later, we are still going strong!  Thank you for participating in our blog hop!  Enjoy checking out everyone's wedding theme projects!

The Paper Nest Dolls owner and artist, Christine, is very generously providing us with some blog candy from her online stamp shop and her brick and mortar scrapbooking store! To be eligible to win you must comment on every stop of both days of the hop. 

Two $20 Gift Certificates

Prima Flower Prize Pack

Ready for the next stop? It's Candice's blog! Red Carpet Studio
The Paper Nest Dolls
Ashley
Nikki
Rochelle
Katrina
Robin
Jasmina
Stephanie
Candice
Olga

Happy Hopping! :)