Room with a View

Today I decided to spark my creative mood by looking through the digital page thumbnails that I download and put into my “design ideas” file.  These come from various digital scrapbooking sites.  Today I spotted this one, and liked the way the designer had put the photo into the postage stamp frame.  I opened up my photo files and spotted the photo of Larry and I taken on the balcony of our la-de-da apartment in Spain where we spent two weeks.  This is the inspiration:

This is my story:
To celebrate the ending of our time in Iceland and Larry’s stint in the Navy, we spent all our “savings” and booked a tour through Icelandair to the Costa del Sol, in Spain.  Ah, the warm sun! 
We had requested a room with a kitchenette; actually a tiny villa on the ground floor in a courtyard.  When we arrived at the hotel, all the Icelandic tourists mobbed the check-in desk and we just sat on a sofa and waited til the craziness ended.  We checked in; were taken to a tiny room with two twin beds.  We turned around and went back to the desk and showed them our reservations; they had overbooked and had no more villas.  We politely showed them our reservations again.  They sighed and gave us an apartment in the tower with a balcony and a wonderful view; that is the ocean behind us.  We were overjoyed.
This is the layout.

Some of the credits before I lost track:  Tempus Fugit travel wordart strips, frame from digitALE Sunsets kit, background paper by Bellabeluga Around the World kit, bottom border strips from Life Montage kit, flowers by Christine Smith,  butterfly stamp by Agnes Biro

Candid and Sweet

This was one of those pictures that captures such a silly/sweet moment between my (now grown) kids. 

It deserves to be kept someplace besides loose in a box.
So………
First for the layout:  I found this template called Tucked and Torn a freebie by Ariadna Wiczling on Happy to Create

The photo needed work, so I used a PSE Action by Rita of the  Coffeeshop Blog

Hmmmmmm………with some PSE magic, digi supplies, and a few hours of labor……(this is where all my time goes......)

I did my favorite designing method on this one....I just went to my digifiles of kits and chose this and that, trying to keep up with whose designs I was using. I went my usual route of muted colors and kind of old-fashioned. I find when I do brights I end up putting a lighter filter on them to tone them down.

Other designers to credit:  Whimsy Kit designs by jmdt, You are Loved Kit by Studio Charlize, essential wordbits by jds, jenwilsondesigns, Timeless kit by manudesigns  , Amanda Thorderson,  DS_LoveGrows
That bottom border of flowers is actually a scan from a page from a children's book a kindergarten teacher friend loaned me.  I did completely change the colors.  That is the fun part!

Fly Away... Redux

Remember Fly Away? I made this page and posted it awhile back.

In light of a future scrapbook, I try and make a double page layout.  I came across two more photos taken in Assmanhassen, so I could make another page. I save my pages in .TIFF layers so I can use the same layout, maybe with some tweaks, maybe not.  Here it is:

I decided to do some research on Assmanhassen and the monument to share with you.  And I found a lovely Youtube video that you can watch and go on that trip with us.  Enjoy. I found another video, this one of Rudesheim, near Assmanhassen.  The views on the mountain are even better.  I have not scrapped this town, yet.

Blog Explosion

I have often written about my brilliant daughter (hey, can’t a mother brag?) and here is another post about her accomplishments.  She started a blog about six weeks ago and it has exploded.  Tweets, likes, etc.  She writes really well (and, no I am not biased on this statement….she got the only A ever given by a really difficult English Comp teacher in high school who would tell each class at beginning of year that she did NOT EVER give out A’s…..)

But back to her Blog.  As a sporadic blogger for years, I can really appreciate the work she is putting into this; I never have put anything near that effort into mine.

So, back to the purpose of this post on my blog.  You know I mostly post digital layouts now and even changed the name on the header of my blog to NanScraps.  So, indeed, this is a layout posting.
I do random challenges on several Digiscrap sites.  Recently I joined OScraps, which is a very artsy type of blog.  This months web challenge was a photo the challenger found online of building blocks.

http://storiesbymeblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/letter-blocks.html?m=1

 Jenni is building a blog, these are building blocks, so that is where my thoughts went and this is my LO:

Take a Walk

When Jenni visited here in Charlotte last week, I introduced her to the section of Greenway near uptown.  She took her Dad’s new camera and got some wonderful shots.  You can see them on her blog, Spoonful At a Time.
Today I downloaded a template from OScraps  and clipped several of the photos to photo masks.  It was fun moving them around to get interesting effects.  That is my silhouette in the layout.  This was the photo that inspired the layout.
Thanks, Jen, for the lovely pics. And, yes, I used PSE magic to get rid of the totebag on my hip!

Mother’s Day

With my mother is no longer alive and my children and grandchildren far away, Mother’s Day is usually low-key with a call from Jason and a visit close around the date from Jenni.

This year the weekend was special, with a trip with Hubbie to the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. It was also his birthday weekend, so we had much to celebrate.  I had never been to this area before and it is beautiful.  Rolling hills, silos, and stately homes, even the farmhouses. 

With a new camera, our pictures were beautiful and I am enjoying scrapping them.  The photos on these two layouts were taken inside the Arboretum.  We visited this garden on Sunday and topped it off with a horse-drawn carriage ride. 

This first layout was inspired by a scraplift and template challenge from Hummies’ World.  Here is the template and Hummie’s version:

Here is my version

This second layout was inspired by a scraplift at ZigZag scraps and I used the kit Time Flies by Kokon, with liberal use of blending and desaturating tools, as always. 

These were draft horses, all polished up and dressed for the occasion.  They took us up a small mountain and back down; no view, just a thick forest.  We rode with a family who had a little girl and a baby.  The little girl kept us entertained and I thought it fitting for Mother’s Day to share the ride with these children.