China: Han Tombs & Great Wall

It's China Sunday!  All the layouts I'm sharing today are ones that I've shared before, but there are six of them in a row so we're just doing a rerun post today.  Hope you enjoy!

This was one of the earlier layouts I did for the China books (original blog post here).  The page base is Elegant Eggplant, and some of the photos are matted with Perfect Plum.  This was the very last thing we did in Xi'an before boarding the plane to Beijing.

And our first activity in Beijing was going to the Great Wall!  I will never say no to an opportunity to look at these pages :)  (original blog post here).

We had SO MANY pictures from the Great Wall and I just didn't want to leave any out if I could help it, ha!

This is one of my favorite layouts ever (original blog post here).  I need to look around online and see if I can find more Handsome Hunter cardstock in both 8.5x11 and 12x12.  It was the perfect Baylor green and I'm almost completely out.

We've been teasing Missy for years about her affinity for lots of stairs but I think the Great Wall will forever hold the record for most stairs in a single day (original blog post here).

And there's the last Great Wall layout (from this day, anyway).  Hope you enjoyed this scrappy flashback.  Have a great Sunday!

China: Drum & Bell Towers

China Sunday!!  We enjoyed our week's vacation to Tennessee for Thanksgiving.  We stayed in a cabin up in the mountains and had a grand ol' time.  I'll have to get all the pictures downloaded to the computer so I can have them printed to make more scrapbook pages, but for today we're back to China photos!

See my original blog post here.  On our last half-day in Xi'an, it was raining a bit so the Basic Gray page base seemed like a good idea.  We did the drum and bell towers (only went up in one) and then one more tomb before we headed to the airport to fly to Beijing.

This layout is just really super simple but I was looking for a way to scrap 7 horizontal photos so I'm okay with it.

Today's color palette includes Basic Gray, Emerald Envy, Marigold Morning, Basic Black, and Whisper White.  I really wish SU! had come out with more DSP with Emerald Envy, I loved that color!  Of course, I love greens as a matter of course, but there you go.  And also this is yet another color palette to include green and gold because Missy has infected my brain ;)

Cheers, y'all!

Supplies, mostly SU!
Stamps:  Rough Type, Circle Circus
Ink:  Emerald Envy, Memento Tuxedo Black, Basic Black marker
Paper:  Basic Gray, Basic Black, Marigold Morning, Whisper White, Naturally Eclectic DSP
Accessories:  letter template

China: City Walls Bike Ride, Part 2

Well, we got through Hurricane Florence just fine.  We had one tree come down, but it wasn't very large and it's been dead for a while.  It's still raining now, but our house is in no danger of flooding.  Our biggest challenge has been keeping the kiddo entertained :p

Anyway, on to China Sunday!  I've got more pages from the 8-mile bike ride we did in Xi'an.

I love that picture on the big green mat on the right page, with Bennet and Lee posing like the terra cotta warrior statues.  Hee!

Definitely a hazy day in Xi'an.

The color palette is the same as last week:  Groovy Guava, Ruby Red, Certainly Celery, Night of Navy, and Whisper White.  I like it.  The new Grapefruit Grove kinda reminds me of Groovy Guava.

I'm off to help the hubs entertain Ryan.  Cheers, y'all!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Circle Circus
Ink:  Night of Navy, Certainly Celery
Paper:  Groovy Guava, Night of Navy, Certainly Celery, Whisper White, Ginger Blossom DSP
Accessories:  circle punches

City Walls Bike Ride, Part 1

China Sunday again already!  Finally got the mouse recharged and the hubs is supervising bath time for the kiddo so I can write this :)

Our first activity in Xi'an was an eight-mile ride around the city walls on a bicycle built for two (pictures here).  Like LA, Xi'an is set in a bit of a hollow so air pollution tends to be an issue there; you can see all the haze some of the pictures.  Also if you look closely, you'll see that my seat on the bicycle was set way too low (I didn't realize how low at the time) so the day after we did this my knees were absolutely not happy with me.

Today's color palette includes Groovy Guava, which was a long-ago In Color, Ruby Red, Certainly Celery, Night of Navy, and Whisper White.  We took a lot of pictures during the bike ride so I'll share more scrapbook pages from this next week.  Cheers, y'all!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Rough Type, Circle Circus
Ink:  Night of Navy, Certainly Celery
Paper:  Groovy Guava, Night of Navy, Certainly Celery, Whisper White, Ginger Blossom DSP
Accessories:  circle punches

Kyoto Station

Scrappy Monday, y'all!  I ended up just skipping a scrap day on the blog last week, but that's okay.  I mean, we still had a China layout yesterday and I've got another scrapbook layout up today.

See the original pictures here. I think this was the last layout I did for our Kyoto pictures, and this one is all about a train station.  Yep, a train station.  The architecture of it was so cool.  These photos are dark though, I wish I'd edited them more before I printed them.

My title today is courtesy of the Empire Alphabet, and the circular motifs are from Circle Circus.  I hardly ever used that stamp set for cards, but it has come in quite handy for scrapbook pages because it's all circular motifs that don't have any particular theme.  I think of it as an architectural type stamp set.  Stampin' Up! hasn't come out with one like that for a while so I keep using this one.

Today's color palette is mainly two-toned yellow with Crushed Curry and So Saffron, and accents of Pacific Point with some Basic Black and Whisper White thrown in for good measure.

Hope you have a great Monday, folks.  We've got Ryan's first-ever swimming lesson this afternoon, so wish us luck!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Empire Alphabet, Circle Circus
Ink:  Basic Black
Paper:  Crushed Curry, So Saffron, Basic Black, Whisper White, Pacific Point DSP
Accessories:  Circle punches

China: Goodbye Shanghai

Mornin', y'all!  My parents are going to be here this afternoon and stay for a week, so I don't know how much stamping/blog posting I'll be doing.  But today it's time for another China layout!

We took a pic with Jessica, our Shanghai tour guide, when she dropped us off at the Shanghai airport.  We had a while to wait before our flight, so we explored the airport a bit and paid an exorbitant amount for ice cream and took these pictures.  Of the four cities we visited, we stayed the shortest time in Shanghai and thus I have the fewest scrapbook pages for there.  And it's taken this long to get through Shanghai...next Sunday we'll start Guilin!

Today's color palette includes Sahara Sand, Garden Green, Wild Wasabi, Ballet Blue, Almost Amethyst, and Basic Gray.  I like it.

The hubs has taken the tiny child to get his hair cut so I'm enjoying the peace and quiet for a little bit.  Cheers, y'all!

Supplies:
Stamps:  Rough Type, Circle Circus
Ink:  Basic Gray, Almost Amethyst
Paper:  Sahara Sand, Almost Amethyst, Ballet Blue, Woodland Walk DSP
Accessories:  lettering template, 1 1/2" circle punch

Yuyuan Gardens

Sunday means it's time for more China pages!  I have a couple of layouts I've shared before and then two never-before-seen ones today.

I shared this Giant Pandas layout about a year and a half ago.  I thought that bamboo pattern from the Ginger Blossom DSP was just perfect for this layout (and Baja Breeze is always a good idea!).

This was the very very first China layout I did FOUR YEARS ago!  I think I made it a little too busy with the shapes on the left page but done is better than perfect.

So here's the new pages!

Our next Shanghai stop was the Yuyuan Gardens, which are in the big fat middle of the city but through some sorcery once you step inside you can't even tell you're near the city.  And this layout once again uses my favoritest sketch which I've used I can't even remember how many times now.

We took a LOT of pictures here so this is just the first 2/3, tune back in next Sunday for the third layout.

Today's color palette:  Pear Pizzazz, Riding Hood Red, Pink Pirouette, Brilliant Blue, and a bit of Basic Gray for journaling (also featured a lot in the pictures).  I don't have much Brilliant Blue cardstock left because I love to use it in my scrapbooks, so here's hoping that Blueberry Bushel will be a good alternative for me :) Cheers, y'all!

Supplies:
Stamps:  Rough Type
Ink:  Basic Gray
Paper:  Pear Pizzazz, Riding Hood Red, Pink Pirouette, Brilliant Blue, Whisper White, Bella Rose DSP
Accessories:  Lettering Template

Our House (England)

Scrappy Monday, y'all!  How was your weekend?  We went to see Star Trek Beyond yesterday (I wanna go see it again already!) and other than that it was pretty quiet.  This afternoon we take Little Man in to get his leg brace, looking forward to that.

So on to this week's scrapbook layout!

Since hubs and I move around a lot, I try to take pictures of each house we live in--about six months ago I was scrapping some photos from North Carolina and I kept looking in the backgrounds of the pictures and thinking oh hey, we had a Harry Potter calendar! or I forgot we used to have that picture hanging in the dining room.  Hubs and I will have our 13th anniversary this October, and in that time we've lived in seven different houses.  So this is our England house, which was my favorite of all.  Oh, see the little Big Ben sticker next to the stairs on the right-hand page?  That was one of my address labels--I always try to include one of those on the scrapbook pages too.

I think I go in cycles with alphabet stamps for my scrapbook pages, and lately it's been all about the Letterpress Alphabet.  I have another layout sitting on my craft table right now, and the title on that one is done with Letterpress too.

Today's color palette:  Island Indigo, River Rock, Primrose Petals, Early Espresso, and Whisper White.  I chose Island Indigo because we painted a wall that color in the living room after we moved in this house; the Primrose was kinda taken from the curtains that were hanging up in the room that became my England craft room, and River Rock seemed to go with those two colors together.

I'm excited to get back to work in my craft room today.  It's so nice having a clean table that's dog hair-free!  And since I cleaned the table, I also finished updating my personal stamp catalog and rearranged my stamps, putting all the newly retired ones in with the older ones and making sure all my alphabets and current stamps are up front.  I have two five-foot-tall cabinets for stamps and I'm thinking I need to upgrade to some 6-foot-tall bookshelves because I'm double-stacked.  Guess I know what I should ask Santa for this Christmas!

Cheers, y'all!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Spencerian Alphabet, Letterpress Alphabet, Circle Circus
Ink:  Island Indigo, Early Espresso
Paper:  Island Indigo, River Rock, Primrose Petals, Thick Whisper White
Accessories:  Oval & scalloped oval punches

The Great Wall of China, Part 1

Scrappy Monday, y'all!  Hope your weekend was good.  Ours was pretty quiet, other than going to see Captain America:  Civil War on Friday night--that was loud ;)  I love movies where stuff blows up.

Anyway, I bring to you today some scrapbook pages from our trip to China, which will make Missy very happy.

See the original pics here.  I printed out SO MANY pictures that I ended up doing FIVE layouts from our first time on the Great Wall (we went back a couple days later for the marathon, though we only walked the 5K no matter what the other three try to tell you) but I'm only sharing two of them today.

You might have noticed that we're all wearing our Baylor shirts in the pictures, so I wanted to use Baylor's colors for the pages.  Luckily for me, green and gold worked pretty well with our Great Wall photos :)  I've been hoarding Handsome Hunter and now I know why--well, after five layouts I don't have a ton of it left but this was definitely the place to use it.  I have a ton of 12x12 Summer Sun though.  Anyway, that dragon might seem like an odd choice for the focal point photo since it's not of the wall, but it was the very first picture we took when we arrived at the Great Wall and I kinda got used to seeing it first every time I flipped through the pictures so I just had to put it there.

And here's the second layout:  absolutely no finesse involved here, it was all about getting in a bunch of landscape shots and some journaling.  I still wanted the green and gold on there, so the journaling is written in Handsome Hunter ink and I sponged some Summer Sun around the edges of the journaling block.

My color combo for all five Great Wall layouts:  Handsome Hunter, Summer Sun, Crumb Cake, Chocolate Chip, and Very Vanilla.  I'm not a huge fan of Crumb Cake, even though there's lots of people out there who love it like crazy, so I was a little surprised when I liked it so much for these layouts.  I wish SU! still sold 12x12 cardstock in single-color packs...even if they did the 3-color variety packs to match patterned paper like they do in the 8.5x11 size I'd still take it.  I use some colors a lot more than others and it sucks to have to buy a combo pack to only get two sheets of what color I want when I already have 20 sheets of the other colors :p

Anywha, it's not raining right this minute (minor miracle) so I think I'll go take my doglets for a walk.  Good thing Sadie can't read what I'm typing or she'd be all up and excited and trying to shove me out the door already.  TTFN, peeps!

Supplies, first layout:
Stamps:  Rough Type, Timeless Textures, Symbols of Solicitude
Ink:  Crumb Cake, Handsome Hunter, Chocolate Chip
Paper:  Crumb Cake, Handsome Hunter, Chocolate Chip, Summer Sun, Very Vanilla
Accessories:  Lettering template, circle punches

Supplies, second layout:
Stamps:  Circle Circus, Asian Art
Ink:  Crumb Cake, Handsome Hunter, Summer Sun
Paper:  Chocolate Chip, Crumb Cake, Very Vanilla
Accessories:  Circle punches

Climbing Fuji

Mornin' y'all!  I'm a little late with my blog post but that's because I was talking to Missy this morning on Skype.  (HI MISSY!)  I'd been teasing her for a couple of days that she'd really really like the layout I planned to post today.  I gave her a sneak peek on Skype but here it is for everyone else:

Missy loves it because a.) she and her husband are on it, b.) it's Mount Fuji and c.) it's green and gold.  Because she thinks everything should be Baylor colors.  This is actually the first layout of FOUR that I made for all our Fuji pics, which you can see here.

There's my title; I love the Lots of Labels Framelits but haven't used them a whole lot yet.  Actually I've made a couple of cards with them that will be posted in the next couple weeks.  It's a nice shape.

And here's today's Baylor-iffic color palette:  Garden Green, So Saffron, Marina Mist, Early Espresso, and Whisper White.  I carried over the Garden Green and that So Saffron patterned paper on the other Fuji layouts too so all of them are Baylor-iffic.  See Missy, I love you.

Anyway, I've got lots of things to do this afternoon.  Not as many as Missy does, but still things to do, so I'd better go get started.  Cheers, peeps!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Well-Worn Alphabet, Rough Type, Circle Circus
Ink:  Marina Mist, Early Espresso
Paper:  Garden Green, Marina Mist, Thick Whisper White, Haiku DSP
Accessories:  Lots of Labels Framelits

Friday Night Live

Well, it's scrappy Monday time again!  I really need to get on the ball making some new scrapbook pages; I'm running through all the ones I made before we left Alabama.  Well, I still have lots of baby book pages I haven't shared, but I like to share actual personal scrapbook pages (with pictures) on Mondays.  So anyway, here's what we have today....

These pics are from when we lived in Japan.  When my boss left for a new job, we had a really big hoopydoo party that was Saturday Night Live themed, so that's what these pictures are from.

I seriously love that patterned paper with the multicolored squares and I think this is the first time I've used it because I'm hoarding it.  Anyway, I embossed the accents with white EP because my Whisper White ink just wasn't showing up well enough on its own (you can see the polka dots on the Old Olive layer that are just the ink).

And there's my color palette:  Tempting Turquoise, Cool Caribbean, Old Olive, Basic Black, Regal Rose, and Pretty in Pink.  I like it :)

Hope you have a great day, peeps.  I'm off to make a to-do list so I can formulate a plan of attack!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Itty Bitty Backgrounds, Circle Circus
Ink:  Whisper White, Basic Black
Paper:  Tempting Turquoise, Old Olive, Regal Rose, Basic Black, Cool Caribbean, Georgia Peach DSP
Accessories:  1 3/8" circle punch, white EP

Nea Kameni

It's only been a couple of days since our house got packed up but I'm already tired of sitting on the floor to blog.  And also not having my craft room.  Well, I have the *room* but I don't have any of my supplies :p  Anyway, let's take a look at a scrapbook layout I made a while back.

This layout is a companion to the Santorini layout I shared a couple weeks ago; see the original pics here and here.  Nea Kameni is the tiny island next to Santorini that is the caldera of the huge and ancient volcano that formed the islands.

Closeup of the title.  I like those little Circle Circus stamps for accents on scrapbook pages, we need some new stamps like that.  I think I use them more for scrapping than I ever did for making cards, though.

And here's my color palette:  Almost Amethyst, Brilliant Blue (I'm almost out of BB cardstock, oh no!), Basic Gray, and Regal Rose.  All of those colors are retired except Basic Gray.  Well, even the Basic Gray ink pad is retired now...

So that's it for me today.  Cheers, peeps!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Empire Alphabet, Circle Circus
Ink:  Brilliant Blue, Regal Rose, Basic Gray marker
Paper:  Almost Amethyst, Brilliant Blue, Brilliant Blue DSP
Accessories:  circle punches

Shanghai Zoo

Just for funsies, I thought I'd share another scrapbook layout featuring Missy and Bennet today, this time from our 2010 trip to China.  I've had the photos printed out for probably a couple years now, but I hadn't scrapped any of them.

Until now.

YAY CHINA PICTURES!!  Oh sorry, that was loud : )  But I'm excited to have started my China scrapbooks!  You can see my original blog post for these pictures here and I wish I'd printed out the photo of the tigers snuggling after their fight, but I didn't.  But on the left page alone, I referenced the Wizard of Oz, one of the funnest songs ever, and Baylor University (all four of us are Baylor grads, though Missy and Bennet are more gung-ho fans with more school spirit than me and hubs).  Click on the photo to see it larger.  I'm so happy with how these pages turned out!  Can't wait to finish up this comprehensive exam so I can get back to creating more pages...until then, I'll be posting some older projects I hadn't gotten round to yet.

Thanks for stopping by today!

Supplies:
Stamps:  Rough Type Alphabet, Circle Circus
Ink:  Midnight Muse, Garden Green
Paper:  Marina Mist, Midnight Muse, Dusty Durango, Whisper White
Accessories:  Apothecary Accents Framelits, Pagerz lettering template

Taiko Drums

I am SO tired!  Today was the Mad Hatter tea party that I hosted, and now everyone is gone and it's over and I'm exhausted.  I made a couple of things for it which I will share at an unspecified point in the future, but for today let's go with a pic I'd already uploaded, shall we?  How 'bout a scrapbook layout!

Ok, so I've got like 6 pages to finish this album that I'm working on.  Maybe 8, I have a lot of pictures from the next bit.  But anyway, this page title is a bit redundant because "taiko" means drum in Japanese.  It's like saying chai tea or VIN number.  But whatever!  It took me a while to actually start on these pages because I wasn't sure where to go with the color combo, but once I had that sorted out it actually took very little time to make the pages.  I found a sketch I liked and BAM!  Done.

OCD alert!  I meant to take pictures of this so I could SHOW you how OCD I am but you'll just have to take my word for it.  So I knew I wanted a Basic Black patterned paper for this layout, but I didn't really want to use any of the ones in the current DSP stacks.  I've got all my retired DSP in these paper holders (ok, a *lot* of paper holders), and each holder has labels on it with the name of each DSP and all the colors in that particular DSP.  That's OCD enough, but I went even further:  I went through and made lists of all that information sorted by both DSP name and by color, so if I know I want to use a particular DSP, I can look up what colors are in it, and conversely, if I know I want to use a particular color, I can look up which DSPs it is in.  Because that's how I roll.

I'm off to bed, thanks for stopping by today!

Supplies:
Stamps:  Circle Circus
Ink:  Riding Hood Red, Basic Black marker
Paper:  Lucky Limeade, Riding Hood Red, Whisper White, Basic Black, Urban Oasis DSP (retired)
Accessories:  My favorite old Sizzix alphabet