my other 12-hour crop pages

Here's photos of the other pages I worked on during the 12-hour crop on Saturday; I didn't think I had that many photos, till I started selecting them-- I'll try not to write so much to hopefully keep the post a bit shorter! 

Here's my Christmas 2013 collage page- we didn't put up any Christmas decorations to speak of, partly because of Zola (kittens + trees + glass ornaments = a disaster in the making!), and partly because there was so little time between Christmas and Thanksgiving. I did get out a couple small decorations, so this page is going to be titled 'a small Christmas.' (the crocheted tree reminds me of crocheted decorations my Grandma made, and the lighted ceramic tree is from Tom's Great-Aunt Marie, if I remember correctly.) The rest of the page is a mosaic composed of various pieces cut from the Christmas cards we received. (I always wonder what to do with the cards once Christmas is over, and this was a good way to keep them by saving 'parts' of them.) I did keep a couple cards whole; they'll get put into a regular 8.5x11 sleeve in the album next to this page.

a detail shot- hexagons are 'trendy' right now, so I thought it would be fun to use my hexagon punches to cut bits out of the card fronts. These particular ones are vellum (punched from part of my sister Judy's handmade card), and are attached using metal brads.

 Again, this layout was inspired by a scrapbook layout I came across on the internet and had pinned for safe-keeping. Mine turned out quite a bit different, but I love that I'm actually using some of them to make things from instead of just pinning more and more! (click here to see the inspiration layout, if you're interested.) 

This next layout was alot of fun to make, and turned out pretty much how I envisioned it would- do you know that feeling, when you know your project is working just like you wanted? I don't have that feeling very often when I craft (sometimes my projects seem to have a mind of their own and take a turn I don't expect), but I had that feeling when I made this one! 

the letters for this page were cut using my Cameo- the font is one I downloaded from the internet, called Airstream. (and yes, I can spell: I just need to cut another exclamation point,
because I lost the 'dot' that went with this one- lol!)

It's a fun, light-hearted subject, but one I knew I wanted to make a layout for. Tom and I both love authentic Chicago-style hot dogs, so when we heard they were building a Portillo's here in the Valley (finally!), we knew we had to go. The decor, the food, and the service were all top-notch, just like we remember from 'back home' in Illinois. I tried to capture that 'vintage diner' feeling of the place with the page layout (which is based on another Scrapbook Generation sketch). The journaling will go in the open space under the photo on the right-hand page, probably typed on a tag or on strips of white cardstock.

Somewhere along the way, I found a piece of scrapbook paper that I knew would be perfect for this layout; the paper design was all diner-style signs, which I cut out and put in that vertical area of embellishments. And the 'hot dog' is the Portillo's logo, which I cut from one of the paper bags our lunch came in! (They will ship their food all over the country, in case you're interested- lol!) 

The (somewhat obvious) page title is letters I cut with my Silhouette Cameo-
the font is one I purchased from their online store, called LD Brown Nose.
It's nice and casual, and I think I'll get a lot of use out of it. 

This layout is one I'm glad I finally got to work on- we did this hike back in early April, 2007!! I'm not a hiker at all (my idea of hiking is strolling through the preserve looking at birds, after all), so this is the first and only actual 'hike' I've been on since we've lived here. It was beautiful and impressive scenery, though, so I am glad we did it. (Only Tom managed the last bit to the very top; I wimped out right at the very end where you had to pull yourself up by cables using pretty much just your arm strength.) Oh, and I also got bitten by that cute squirrel you see, there, too- I need to add another page to this layout to explain that, and to add in the rest of the pictures I chose to include. (I also need to add some embellishments to this layout- with just paper, it looks a bit 'flat' to me, especially looking at it in a photograph.)

This shows the rest of the pictures I still want to include, along with scraps of the papers I used and a piece of coordinating cardstock. It's stored in a bag with the rest of the layout for now, till everything is finished. (I want to keep it all together so I don't accidentally use the patterned paper for some other project!)

And here's an example of a page kit I put together for some photos I didn't get to work on Saturday- but the papers and extras are all together in a gigantic zipper bag, so when I do have the time (and the inspiration) it will be a bit easier to get started. The photos are from a day I when visited the Arizona state Capitol in downtown Phoenix. I never got to visit the Illinois state capitol building when I lived there (Springfield isn't exactly next door to the Chicago suburbs, and I just never got around to traveling down there), so I really wanted to visit the Capitol here since we live so close. (It was pretty neat; I'll show some of the actual photos from the trip in a separate post.) 

Since it's the state capitol building (I'm not sure: are you supposed to capitalize 'Capitol' when you write it?), I chose some red, white, and blue papers, along with some more 'Western-type' papers like the denim patterned paper that I think is a photograph of real denim fabric, with actual sewing on the paper. Not sure which of these I'll use when I make the layouts, but they're all together, so they're easier to get to and part of the decision making is done already. 

One more photograph, that probably only another scrapbooker would 'get' my fascination with, lol! The dome of the Arizona Capitol building is covered in copper, and since copper- and mining in general- is an important part of Arizona state history, I included these two specialty papers in my page kit. It was tough to get a good picture of them, but both of these papers are metallic sheen to them, and the one has a brushed-metal feel to the actual texture of the paper. I don't know how I'll use them exactly, but I definitely will try to get at least one of them in there somehow! 

(apparently I don't know how NOT to be wordy... thanks for reading, if you made it this far- lol!)