National Scrapbook Day - the recap

So this past Saturday was National Scrapbook Day.  Yes, for those non scrappers this is a real thing. It's usually a fun filled day where people gather together and scrap together and eat together and shop together, you get the idea. This year Studio Calico had quite the line up of challenges to get members scrapping and since I wasn't going to be with friends this year I signed up to be part of one of them. I even got Simone to come and play with me for a bit. She said National Scrapbooking Day was the best ever!

The challenge I signed up for was the Sketch Challenge. Three different sketches were presented and six of the Creative Team members picked a sketch and then interpreted it anyway they wanted to. The last sketch was actually from a Project Life® insert that I made and I didn't even realize it until after I had picked a different one.

I picked the first sketch and this is what I made. It's been awhile since I did full sized layouts so having a sketch to give me a jump start sure helped. I used a some previous Studio Calico kits to make this, Rock Candy and Gum Drop and the digital file I used was from Bluegrass Farms. I also used these adorable glittery vellum bags, gold stars, and a gold doily.

I even cut a little circle to cover the brown part of the shipping tag, I love how it matches the rest of the layout now.

I cut the digital element from the Silhouette Double Sided adhesive using my Cameo and added the glitter on top. Love how well it holds glitter down.

Because I was feeling extra ambitious I also made this layout to showcase some of my favorite Instagrams from 2013. I have not been able to get this layout out of my head since I saw it. Not because she used my cut file, but because of the tiny photos she used. I love how small and impactful they are so I thought about ways I could make something small and impactful.

Books, tiny books is what popped into my head so I made these little albums on my Cameo and cut the pages from 36lb. white vellum that I purchased here. When I made the cut file I added some dashed lines down the middle to help the vellum fold a bit better and it totally helped. I layered three of the cut vellum pages on top of the grey backgrounds and stitched with my sewing machine down the middle of each set. I also cut the tags after I used a Black Glitter Sketch Pen to write out the months.

The next big hurdle was the photos. I went thru all of my Instagram's from 2013 and picked my favorite 12 from each month. I set up a template in Photoshop Elements so that I could shrink the photos down to 3/4" it was set up to print on 4x6 sheets so I ended up getting two months worth of photos on each sheet. Then I had to cut them all apart. Oh boy! Because of the vellum pages I made sure to line them up on top of each other so the adhesive wouldn't show. I'm not going to lie, this part took awhile. I cut the perimeter off of the templates and then cut each row apart, then I had to cut down the middle of each photo. You can see a bit of that in this photo. I went one month at a time and by August I was having issues keeping it together!

I kept the title work fairly simple, the flair I used came in an older Studio Calico Kit but I can't remember which one. I made the circle piece under it with my Cameo as well. The alpha was from this kit and the yellow striped paper for the base of the layout is from this kit.

I'm pretty sure that this is my new favorite layout and will be pretty hard to top. I don't think this will go in an album just yet. I'm thinking of framing it without glass and hanging it up so people can flip thru the pages if they want to see all the pictures. Or maybe I'll mount it to foam core and lean it on an easel. We'll see, for now its just fun to turn the little pages and look back at all the photos.

I hope you all had a lovely National Scrapbook Day too. Remember there is still time to complete and enter the Challenges over at Studio Calico, you can find them all on the blog here. The special stamp set and kit they made for the day are also still available. You can find them here.

See you soon!