Pretty Little Studio | Beautiful You

Hi everyone!

Here's another page I created for Pretty Little Studio.
I kind of like it. :)

If you don't know handsfreemama.com, I highly recommend you check it out today. To me, it is SO SO SO inspiring. In fact, It inspired me a whole mini-book last year when I participated to the scrapbooker of the year contest. This week I though I'd go get some inspiration over there once again.

As I opened it, I found this quote:

And I knew that this could totally be the beginning of a cute page with a great message to my daughter.

And there you have a very simple, but thoughtful page!

I hope you have a great day!

Marie

Art Impressions now available at Michaels

Hi everyone!

I am very excited to join the Art Impressions crew one more time today to help them announce a great news!!!

They have FIVE new stamps sets at Michaels Arts & Crafts stores! They are Art Impressions licensed designs that are manufactured and distributed by Hampton Art exclusively for Michaels stores. 

Here's the card I made with the "Retired" set that I love!!

This little camper is to die for!!!!

To see the whole 5 sets, join us in this blog hop. :) 

Here's the order of the hop.

Art Impressions

Piali Biswas

Cynthia Olheiser

Sharon Caudle

Tracy MacDonald

Karen Day

Angela Boutiller

Cheryl Valadez

Sandy Allnock

Kerry Kung

Melissa Oeters

Sherry Eckblad

Lezlye Lauterbach

Judith Gowdy

Summer Hills-Painter

Reneé Matarese

Crystal Lopez

Marie-Pierre Capistran --> YOU ARE HERE!

Linda Manto

If you have any questions, feel free to go the the Q&A page by clicking on the image below.

Thanks for celebrating with us!!!! 

Marie :)

Pretty Little Studio | Out of the box

Hi everyone!

I love it when I have a challenge as a starting point for a page.
This week I had to get my inspiration from a picture.

I started to look at what I loved about it: 1. The translucent colors reminding me of watercolor. 2. The three primary colors: blue, red and yellow. 3. The golden feel of the sun peeking behind the yellow balloon. 4. The round shapes.

Then I started to think about how I could translate that on a page.

I could have two big circles. One would contain my picture(s), the other, the journaling.
My circles could be stitched and filled with watercolor.
I could add gold accents.
I could use all round shaped embellishments.

Here's what I came up with:

As I was going through my stash in search of a background, I came across this watercolor background I had made months ago!!! It was not perfect for the project but it was fine. (Remember, with the upcoming move, half my scraproom is gone! And I didn't want to start making a mess.)

I traced two circles several times with a pencil and I stitched somewhat near the lines. I didn't erase them afterwards. It's gives dimension, fun and a feel of imperfection. I like that!

I used round shaped embellishments which I filled with gold accents.

I added round ephemera that I had brought back from our trip to Disney: a couple of flairs, a Mickey Mouse sticker and also some paper gold doubloons. Two of them are made of gold foil. PERFECT! :)

I added a couple touches of color (tabs) and some more hand written touches like the little heart up here.

Finally I added a trail of gold stars.

I decided not to write my journaling in one of the circles as I thought I would do at the beginning because I didn't want to fill up these nice breathing spaces.

I hope you like to read about my process.
Maybe you could try it too, to make a page with an image (this image?) as a starting point. If you do try it, please share it with me here, or on the Pretty Little Studio blog post for a chance to win a price.

Good luck! And HAVE FUN!!

Marie

Pretty Little Studio | Lucky us!

Hi everyone!

Yay for another page today!! :)

This page is about when my parents drove 3 hours to meet us in Orlando because Patrick had to leave for a 2 days business trip right in the middle of our vacations. They seems to be always there where and when they are needed!! I am so grateful for them.

Can you see that i embossed the velum? For a step by step tutorial on how I did this, head over to the Pretty Little Studio blog.

Marie

Pretty Little Studio | Meeting Sofia the First

Hi everyone!
I'm happy to be here today with a new page! It feels like it's been forever since I posted one. :)
You can find this layout and infos on the process and product at Pretty Little Studio.

Marie

Paperclipping Roundtable | MICRO scrapbooking vs. MACRO scrapbooking

Hi everyone!

If you've come from the Paperclipping Roundtable, WELCOME!! I'm happy to have you here. :)

If not, if you're a regular visitor, you'll have to know that I had the amazing chance to be on the Paperclipping Roundtable one more time!! I was very happy that Noell gave me this opportunity. Thank you, Noell! :)
And thank you to both Noell and Izzy to make me feel comfortable each time, even when my ideas don't always come out as quickly as I would like them to come out and not worded the way I would like them to be and when my french tongue get all twisted in my mouth when I have an "h" to pronounce!!!! :)

I LOVED the topic!!!!

Micro-Scrapbooking Vs. Macro-Scrapbooking


After the show, I gathered some pages together to show you what I (as we heard from Karen, Noell and Melissa, this can be different for everyone) believe to be the difference between Micro-scrapbooking and Macro-scrapbooking.

Micro Scrapbooking:

To me, Micro scrapbooking is all about the little things that are happening on a day to day basis (I put the majority of them in my Project Life album and this is one of my most cherished album). The little things that are just a little bit bigger, the ones that let me a bigger feeling inside, get a page of their own.

For example: Arielle's first dance with a boy.

 (you can find more details about this layout and more detailed pictures here: First dance)

Or when Arielle and Maya learned Ice skating together and helped each other:
(translation of the title: Hold on to my hand)

(you can find more infos about this layout and more detailed pictures here.)

Most of the time, the micro stories are about my girls.
And I scrapbook them as they happen, depending on when I sit down to make a layout. If a "micro" story that just happened is still in my memory (I don't make lists anymore, I take mental notes and I figure that if the mental note sticks in my head long enough, then it is good enough to be scrapbooked!) I'll make a page about it.

Sometimes the micro stories are older, or are about my husband and I. Here I documented on one single page a trip we took just the two of us. The page is full of little snippets that happened during the trip.

(you can find the details here)

I also scrapbook way older "micro" stories, like here, when we got my dog when I was 6 years old.

Sometimes I mix together a "micro" story from now with a "micro" story from then that has something in common.

(Here's a layout with almost the same picture of me, my brother and my mom at Santa's Village in 1980 and a picture of me and my two girls 24 years later at the same spot)

If I have no subject coming to mind for a micr-story when I get to scrapbook, then I turn to my bigger story and I ask myself which bigger story I should/could tell next. Which part of my story is still missing?

Macro Scrapbooking:

Macro scrapbooking tells the bigger picture of our lives. To me it's like giving a context to all the smaller stories.  Both the Macro and Micro-Scrapbooking are important and worth it, but without the macro-pages I felt like something was missing when I was only capturing the little moments of our lives when I first started scrapbooking.

1. It could be a small event that changed the direction of your life: a wedding, a birth.

(Find the details about this layout here)

(These are the details surrounding my birth and my family as when I was born. You can see more details here.)

 (These two pages are a perfect way of telling in short a huge event. Up here is when I met my husband in Vancouver. I used 15 speech bubbles to summarize our whole 3 months together in Vancouver. These 15 little snippets can remind us of many details and of the whole way we met each other. It's the Micro-scrapbooking inside the Macro-scrapbooking I was trying to explain. It's like many details in an event of a bigger importance on my personal timeline.)

(And this page is just my recent thoughts about us meeting 15 years ago and making it through 15 years despite the ocean that was deciding our families. The translation of the title: 15 years ago, we chose each other.)

(a timeline is a perfect way of doing Macro scrapbooking. Find the details of this layout here)

(a summary of my life from birth to now, told with numbers, is a perfect example of Macro scrapbooking. Find the details here.)

(scrapbooking general things about a loved one is another great way of building the bones of your storybook. Find more details about this layout here.)

I think that both micro and macro scrapbooking are an important part of a scrapbook, but I think that a scrapbook without the macro scrapbooking would be just a collections of short stories with no connections between them like a book without a main story. The Macro scrapbooking is the cement that glues all the other stories together, if that makes sense.

I hope you'll go listen to the show if you haven't already. Karen (Grunberg), Melissa (Stinson) and Noell (Hyman) had very good points and ideas to share!!

Thanks for stopping by and talk to you soon!

Marie