Pretty Little Studio | Make a wish

Hi everyone!

I am saddened today to tell you that this is the last page I made for Pretty Little Studio.

If you haven't have the chance yet to go check out the blog and shop over there, now would be a good time to do so before you forget that they exist and that they offer FABULOUS stuff!!!

Pretty Little Studio is a home based company, located here in the USA (South Carolina). Melissa is the owner and she does everything herself, in her home office: die cuts, flairs, patterned paper, journaling cards, you name it! I had so much fun working with all the collections, adding special touches and unique elements to my pages.

So now onto my page:

It's a page about my daughter's 6th birthday. I'm talking about her wish she made when she blew out the candle. :)

I used this little guy in the car die cut because her wish had to do with colorful cars. By layering it over a polaroid chipboard frame by Maggie Holmes, it makes it pop out.

These small labels can always be used on any project!! I never have enough of them.

And this small journaling card was the perfect match for my journaling.

Thank you so much Melissa for having me on the team. It's an experience that I will cherish for a very long time!! And now that we live so close to another, I'm very excited to come and meet you! :)

Thanks for coming by, everyone!! :)

Marie

Pretty Little Studio | You are amazing

Hi everyone!!

This week at Pretty Little Studio the Out Of The Box challenge is to make a page with as a starting point, this image:

What do you see when you look at this?

I see two large rectangles and in my head they could translate to two pictures.
I see nice large stripes on the right. Maybe labels or some sort of longish die cuts next to my pictures? Washi tape maybe?
I see wood texture. Dark wood.
I see hand writing. I see paperclips.
I see washi tape rolls. See, the stripes could really be washi tape!
I see thick buttons, or brads?? I see a wooden squirrel.
I see red and pinks, teal, bold yellow….

And from there, I plunge into my page! :)
First I need a story and two photos.
I gather my material that fits with the list I just made and I play! Looking at the reference picture from time to time. To refresh the feeling of it.
And here's the final result:

Do you see all the elements I listed? Most of them. :)

I so love the Pretty Little Studio's big die cuts titles!! Look at how special they are!
With some drops of black ink, it makes everything pop out! :)

Do you want to give it a try?
If you do, please make sure to link me up to your page. I'd love to see what you come up with. :)

Thanks for coming by!!

Marie :)

Get it Scrapped | Starting with the patterns and colors

Hi everyone!

Today I have a layout published at Get it Scrapped.
If you want to learn something about Starting your page with the patterns and the colors instead of with the story, I invite you to go over there and read the article. i bet you're going to get many may tricks from Debbie and the team. :)

Here's what you're going to see from me:

There you go guys!! :)
Thanks for looking. Hope you enjoyed and got your creative wheels spinning. ;)

Marie

Pretty Little Studio | Mrs Herlihy

Hi everyone!

This page is a strange one for me. The story is important, the picture is kind of cute, but the colors of the picture: yuk!! A burgundy/purple dress, and a yellow and navy outfit for my daughter. Does that go together? And what about the man in the background with his teal shirt? And the orange door? I was kind of desperate when I started. I thought a navy background would be the best way to go and I found this paper with lots of these colors…aqua, orange, gold, yellow… I was in luck, although it's a very busy paper. Anyway, I went with it and I blocked lots of it with a light yellow 8x8 background from the Marigold collection. It was a great way to start. :) After that, I placed the picture and started adding elements that where aqua and orange. At the end, it looked like this:

It's busy, but not too bad. What do you think?
And here is the page on a smaller scale so that your eyes are not so overwhelmed by everything and that you can enjoy the cute little elements on their own. ;)

AWESOME "sunshine" die cut!!!! I so love the colors!!!! And cute small vellum letters that let us see through.

Flair, wood veneer and enamel dot.

A crown paperclip for my little princess. And there again, a small wood veneer.

Mr Fox with it's bright color helps the viewer find an anchor on the page. Phew! :) Oh and my journaling, all squished in there but it's ok, As long as the words are there, i don't mind it too much. :)

Voilà!!
Have a nice day and thanks for coming by!!

Marie

Get it Scrapped | New and Trendy

Hi everyone!

Today I have a page over at Get it Scrapped.
The theme of the article is: Pile on the new and trendy. You should go check out what the creative team came up with. What do you think about when I say new and trendy? While I was making my page I came up with a long list. Here are some of my finds:

- watercolor background
- drops of ink
- brush script
- flairs
- wood veneer
- stitching
- embroidery
- gold
- vellum die cut shapes
- epoxy stickers

And as I was making my page, I was just having fun at the same time with almost all of these!!!
Here's my final page:

Hope you enjoyed!! :)
Thanks for looking.

Marie

There is NO Scrapbooking Police Blog Series

Hi everyone!

And welcome to day 9 of the blog series: 

There is NO Scrapbooking Police

I hope you could check out the other articles. If not, here's a list of all the articles/bloggers. 

August 4 - Paige Evans

A Scrapbooking page SHOULD always have a story and lots of journaling

August 5 - Ashli Oliver

Scrapbook pages SHOULD be fast and simple to just get them done

August 6 - Jen Gallacher

Scrapbook pages SHOULD look perfect

August 7 - Melissa Shanhun

Digital scrapbook pages should look as much like a paper page as possible 

August 8 - Ashley Calder

Scrapbooking SHOULD be done *this* way  

August 9 - Caroline Davis

A Scrapbooker SHOULD scrapbook FOR her family

August 10 - Lisa Harris

Scrapbooking SHOULD be a legacy for the scrapbooker's family

August 11 - Connie Hanks

A scrapbooker SHOULD follow the trends and be aware of what others think of her pages

August 12 - Marie-Pierre Capistran

A Scrapbooker SHOULD scrapbook chronologically

August 13 - Nancy Gaines

Scrapbooking SHOULD be 12x12 traditional paper pages

August 14 - Cara Vincens

A scrapbooker SHOULD always be caught up

Now, my "rule" is:

A Scrapbooker SHOULD scrapbook chronologically

Really? No way!  

Of course we can, if we want to, but we also surely can just use the next picture or story that inspires us. 

It's okay to scrapbook out of order, to mix photos from different time periods, and to scrapbook Halloween photo with a story that has nothing to do with Halloween...  It's fun to go over the what, where, when and to go a little bit further than where the picture is bringing us. :)

The way I scrapbook (and it's just ONE way of doing it, it doesn't mean it's the right way, or the only way) is that I let a story emerge into my head and my heart. Sometimes, yes, it's a current story that just happened and I scrapbook it "in order" so to say, but sometimes it's an older story that keeps popping into my head and that I catch myself telling over and over again. These stories have to get onto a page too!

Here are some examples of pages I made over time:
(excuse the lack of a new page, we are currently moving to a new State and I'm without scrapbooking studio since 3 weeks and living in a hotel since 2 weeks! Yikes!) 

Ok so here are the stories and ways I like to scrapbook my stories:

• Sometimes, I gather many stories of a time period and I put them all together on ONE page.  

Translation: Some things can only happen to me. When I was young... I would make people laugh, just by looking at them. I always needed to go to the bathroom. Especially when there was no toilet around! I tripping and falling down the stairs regularly. I almost fell out of the Thunder Mountain Train at Disney. I screamed so loud that the priestess had to stop his service because I found myself lost in the basement of the church.

On this page, I gathered a bunch of anecdotes that happened to me as a kid. The pictures are from the same time period, more or less. I don't really care if the photo is really what the story is about. Here, the stories happened between 1978 and 1982 (more or less) and all the pictures have also been taken between 1978 and 1982 (more or less).

• Sometimes, I'll experience something that I have already experienced in the past. I'll bring both events on the same page, focusing on the common ground between them:

Translation: Here I am at 3 years old with Louis Simon and mommy at Santa's Village and here I am 33 years later at the same place with Maya and Arielle. It was a funny feeling to see the giant rabbit again and to remember having seen it before.

On this page I have put together a picture of me and my daughters at Santa's Village in 2013 and a picture of my mom, my brother and I at the same exact spot in 1980.

It's fun to mix photos from different time periods, to compare one another, to highlight the resemblances or the differences, to document a tradition, a favorite activity, a favorite place to go, etc. It's funny how for this page I could have chosen many other photos. There was the one of my brother and I on the carousel that was just the same as the one of my daughters on the carousel. I'll probably make another page exactly like this one and possibly talk about how my brother and I ressemble my daughters!! :)

• Sometimes I'll scrapbook about an older event that I am very proud of, that had a big impact on my life and that I will never want to forget:

Here I made a double page about a Raid I participated to, in France. It was a race that was going on over 2 days. I survived! I did it with my husband. I was so very proud of myself because I never thought I could do something like this. I scrapbooked the event about 6 years after it happened. It's totally ok to go back 6 years behind. Or 20 years behind. Or one day behind. Scrapbook what makes you feel good!! 

• Sometimes I'll also use a picture of a person to talk about many little things that are related to that person:

This is a page about my grand-mother and every precious things I remember about her. I'm talking about the family gathering at her house, the little special things my cousins and I experienced at her house, the way she was, what I liked about her. It's a page about her that also tells a whole lot about me!

Here's another one about my grand-father and his love for flowers. The picture is very old and the quality is mediocre! LOL It was taken with a film camera and is all blurry and the exposure is just bad, but the picture is a perfect support to the story. Blurry or not, recent or not! A bad picture + a story is always better than no picture and no story at all! 

• Sometimes I'll use pictures that don't have very much to do with the journaling, just because they are related a little and because they inspire me and I want to put them on a page:

Here I used a headshot of my husband and one of myself on our wedding day and I mounted them on either side of a tree to talk about the "argument" we had when we had to decide the destination of our honeymoon.  The pictures are related to the wedding, and the honeymoon is also related to the wedding, that's the best link I find between the pictures and the story, but it works so well. :)

• It's also fun to make a time line or to put a bunch of stories together to get a bigger picture than just the small events that every picture represents on it's own: 

Translation: Crazy about cruises!

This page is grouping together all the cruises we have taken. It's fun to have them all illustrated on one page, to kind of have a bigger picture and a better overview. It doesn't mean I didn't scrapbook the cruises on their own. But it's another way of scrapbooking them.

And this is a timeline illustrating the big steps taken by my daughter.

There are so many other examples I could give you about how I choose the stories I want to scrapbook next. What I could tell you is to go with your heart and to scrapbook what you feel like scrapbooking at this very moment. I love the tips Ashli gave in her blog post. She said that if there's a story you don't want to forget, but that you're just not ready to scrapbook it just yet, write about it on a sheet of paper and put it in a page protector in your album. You can always come back to it later. This way, you won't forget the details. 

Scrapbooking this way (non chronological) helps me tell very profound stories, and to go way over the obvious. When I do this, the journaling comes out very easily and the stories are all precious! 

One last tip before I let you go: I store my pages in one album per person of the family. Not by years. It means that I don't have a 2014 album. This helps me to not feel like I am behind or that I have to scrapbook the next thing that happened. I skip from one album to another as the story hit my soul. :)

Voilà! I hope I could inspired you a little and I hope I could help you free yourself from the "you SHOULD scrapbook chronologically" false rule!! 

Have fun scrapbooking!! Marie

Pretty Little Studio | Love This

Hi everyone!

When I showed previews of this on Instagram, I got some good reactions of people who wanted to see the whole page. Unfortunately, the hard part about being on design teams is that I can't show my pages right away. So anyway, enough waiting, here's the whole page. :)

I started with a watercolor background where I mixed two shades of green. After that I backed up my picture on a mat, and on another layer, the purple one.

I sticked everything down and added other elements like the doily, small labels (i like to think of different ways to add them. This time I used a mini paperclip), butterflies, clouds, buttons, stars….

You can find this golden flair in the Marigold collection by Pretty little studio.

I also added some rub-ons from October Afternoon and Maggie Holmes. I LOVE rub-ons!!! I think that even if they don't add dimension, they are so sharp. Unlike a stamp. They are even, and bold and I like that. You can also apply them on anything. Finally I added some golden color shine drops from Heidi Swapp for some more shine. :)

There you go. :)
Hope you enjoyed!

Marie

We are moving - The process of moving

Hi everyone!
I'm coming to you today directly from our beautiful Hotel Room in Charlotte, North Carolina! It's our 4th day here now and I'm starting to adjust a little. This whole moving process is not easy, a little exciting, a little fun, but also very chaotic. It could be worse, it could have been better... I'm taking lots of pictures along the way and you can follow me on Instagram to see them coming up live if you'd like. My user name on Instagram is mpcapistran. Today I'm going to summ up the situation a bit.

Friday, July 25th.

Just to put you in context, this is when they took my car away to bring it to North Carolina. I was going to get a rental car anyway, but I preferred to have it in Avon, rather than in Charlotte. So on Friday we said goodbye to our Tiguan. The man who came to pick it up was VERY nice and let the girls climb in his big truck!!

 And then he drove away.

I didn't get my rental car right away, but since this was Friday, Patrick was going to be with us the whole weekend so we really didn't need a second car. And on Monday and Tuesday he was on a business trip so I had his car. Tuesday night, Patrick brought me my rental car. He was supposed to leave the next morning with his car to Charlotte and bring with him all our personal belonging that we didn't want to let the movers move.

Only, it didn't happen like that....
OK, so back to the big moving days. :)

Tuesday July 29th.

It all started last Tuesday, when the movers first came to our house to pack.

I was more or less ready. I had packed up the 8 boxes that I didn't want the movers to touch. 6 of them were full of scrapbooks (after hearing about Lain Ehman's story, and her moving truck not arriving for weeks and finally showing up with 50 boxes missing!, I didn't want to risk it!!) and the 2 others were filled with important paperworks, jewelry and chocolate. ;) I also had started to pack our luggages that we would need for 2 nights in Avon and 2 weeks in Charlotte.

While the movers would pack up the basement, I wanted to tidy up the rest of the house but that didn't happened. The morning the movers came, I had to go to swim lessons with Arielle and the plan was to bring my girls to my friend's house right after swimming so that they could play there while the movers were packing. When I arrived at my friend's house though, my husband's car (a brand new Acura!!) just didn't start anymore. What???! After several trials, I finally called the Acura vendor who sent me a technician, who brought me home to get the second key, who finally brought me to the garage and called a towing.

There you have it, my whole day worth of tidying the house went into taking care of this.
I arrived at the house at 4:50, just to see the movers coming out of the house. :(

(This is my scrap room. GASP!)

They had made good progress in the house and I didn't have anything to tidy up anymore: everything was packed! Even the breakfast from the morning that was still on the table! Luckily they hadn't touched my 8 boxes and my luggages! Phew!

So I went back to my friend's house where we had a last meal together.

Wednesday, July 30th.

Moving Day No.2 started with another swim lesson for Arielle. Followed by a MUCH NEEDED haircut for me (yay for daddy being back home! Since 3 months, he's on the road... it's more than time that the family gets reunited!) and by an afternoon of sitting around at the house, looking at the movers packing up and loading the truck. That didn't feel good at all. The kids were bored and I felt bad to do just nothing.... Ugh!

(Yay for my camera! It has been saving my sanity several times lately!)

And this brought us to our first night at the Residence Inn in Avon. With Patrick - who couldn't leave that day as it was planed, because his car still had to be fixed.

Thursday, July 31st.

Moving Day No.3. This was the last day of swim lessons and also our last time at our beloved pool. I was very sad to say goodbye to Arielle's teachers. We all loved them dearly and we are grateful for all they did for Arielle and for our whole family. I didn't even took a pictures that morning because I was too sad. I also figured that we already have some good pictures of the pool and of our friends.

A little before noon, Patrick got his car back and could leave! We would see him again the next day when he would pick us up at the airport.

The movers finished the packing and loading of the truck. I really didn't believe that it would take 3 days to pack our things. I feel like we really don't have that much. But I also saw that the movers weren't hanging around so, I guess this means that we really do have lots of stuff. Maybe another purge will happen when we get our boxes.

When the movers had left, it was time to clean the house and to say goodbye.

And to leave...

We ended up eating for the last time at our favorite place: Flatbread. It was sad. Thursday night is the night where they have singers at the restaurant. It made it funner.

And after dinner we met our beloved neighbors at the frozen yogourt place right next to Flatbread. The kids could play again one last time. It was a nice way to end our time in Avon. Although I have to say again that it was very sad.

(We love these kids!!)

Friday, August 1st.

Moving Day No.4. It was time to fly away. I was a bit afraid of how this would go. Bring back the rental car to Avis, take the shuttle to the airport, go through security. All this with the girls and our luggages. I had packed only two 2 small luggages that we wouldn't have to check in. One that Arielle could roll and one for me. And I had put some toys in the girl's school back packs. I thought it would work. I finished carrying 3 back packs, my luggage and the lunch that we bought at the airport. It was sporty but we made it.

(Waiting for the shuttle to the airport)

     (iPhone quality is better than no picture at all)

And just so, we were in Charlotte.
We all needed a little adjustment.
We were tired, and overwhelmed. And sad.

So we went to see the house. The girls hadn't seen the house yet, other than looking at pictures we had showed them.

It wasn't love at first sight.
But it was love at the first sight of the pool. Phew!

The day we arrived in Charlotte, there was a record temperature of 70 degrees F. They hadn't had an August 1st that cold since 1936! And there we were... it's probably because we arrived. But we won't tell them. It took 2 days for the sun and the warmer weather to show up and as soon as it did, Charlotte seemed already a little nicer.

I'll tell you the rest of our moving adventure later. The girls just woke up so we'll go get breakfast before it's too late. :)

Have a great day!
Marie