Laura Vegas

i have to be honest about something. those pictures of my studio? not usually what the place looks like. lol! truth is, it's usually got lots of piles going on. organized piles, but they're still piles.

 

i know what some of you are thinking. that my "piles" really aren't that bad. right? i can tell when i'm not organized enough for my liking. i get to where i can't think, and i can't be creative. this is what happened this weekend. i got so overwhelmed by all the stuff i had out. baggies all over. some for assignments and some just to be put away. a few packages to put together for giveaways. my project 365 album, that is calling my name. i had no clue where to start, what to work on first.

i decided to start by getting my pattern paper all put away and organized. but then, somehow, that turned into a big ordeal. i had some extra room on one of my paper shelves, so i moved some things. then i didn't have enough room and had to move the things back to the way it was in the first place. i'm SO organized, and everything has it's place. yet, on occasion, i have to re-work those places to fit what i'm doing at the time. i got so overwhemed, that at one point, i just sat on the floor totally lost. like i had no idea how i was going to work my way out. i got a little anxious, i'll admit it. which is crazy. it's paper, after all. lol! i finally forced myself to walk away from it and move on to something else. and in the morning, i had a fresh new approach to it and got it all worked out.

funny thing is, i saw some pictures the next day that made me realize that what i consider an "out of control mess" is actually nothing. my aunt is a professional organizer, and is currently working on this one job. let's just say that the owner of the house is a huge pack-rat, a hoarder of stuff. like, you can't even see the floor or counter tops. and my aunt and her co-workers are trying to gain some control and pack it all to be moved. she took pictures. those pictures made me sick to look at them. i felt like i couldn't breathe, like i was actually having an anxiety attack. and that's just looking at the pictures. i could not imagine working on something like that. as much as i love organizing, i think i have my limits. more power to you, aunt sandy 😉

so i guess my piles really aren't that bad after all. i will appreciate and love them for what they are. small piles of goodness, that i do have control over 🙂

i was so excited to see this finally come out. the august issue of creating keepsakes. featuring my studio in the "creative spaces" article. i worked on this a few months ago and spent a ton of time on it. it was hard to keep it a secret. and friday morning, i made the entire family come with me to hunt down a copy of it.

 

i will share more on it another day. but for now, i did upload some more recent photos into the "my studio" album on the sidebar. fun to see how i've changed things over the last few years. and this shot wasn't in the article, but it's one of my favorites.

so, i'm being told i don't blog about the daycare kids as much anymore. maybe they were just hiding out. looks like nikolas was 😉

 

doing a little catch up here. these are all photos from june. just got around to editing them a few days ago.

 

my sweet neighbor, ayana. she's so adorable. and super talkative. a nice mix of sweet and sassy.

 

and her equally sweet brother, zeke. he's giving me that look. like he forgot how it was to have me shove a camera in his face.

 

does nikolas not have the best eyes?!?!

 

you have to be very secure in your "boyhood" to pull off the beads and star glasses. nikolas totally makes it work!

 

haley and her crazy hair. i guess her dad believes that her hair should be put up cute each day. but mom doesn't worry about it much, knowing that she'll just pull it all down. and apparently, i don't worry about it much either 😉

 

haley and alyssa. they're the best of buds.

 

the girls have been playing a lot of rockband. and we've learned that nikolas LOVES the microphone. he sings it like he means it! but he also slobbered all over this one, since he feels the need to put the microphone IN his mouth to sing. he now has a plastic microphone that is all his own!

 

there may or may not have been an accident of some sort following this photo. that's all i'm saying. lifting up the front wheels on a cheap stroller, while going downhill on the walkway? not a good idea. but everyone was fine later!

 

i love when he wears this outfit. the shorts are so stinkin cute. but he wasn't letting me get a good photo of it.

 

i'm not sure if i took these photos on the same day. i mean, she IS wearing the same shirt in a lot of these photos. but she also loves to wear that shirt a lot. lol!

 

not the best picture. but i felt bad including a few with alyssa and the kids, and not sarah. this is the one photo that she was also in. nikolas loves to hop on sarah's scooter with her, and roll around the backyard.

think that's it for now. have to get back to my organizing. a bunch of product showed up at my door this week, and i'm trying to get everything put away and in the right spots. i'm losing track of what i should be working on right now. so i figure, if i can get organized, that will get me back on track. wish me luck!

i promised a photo-filled post today, and i'll do that later tonight. but i had to share this first. jillibean soup has been showing sneek peeks for the CHA summer releases over on their blog. here are the first 2 peeks.

 

 

 

how fun do these look! i just got my box a few days ago, and i cannot wait to dig into it and start creating. some super cute papers, i know you're all going to love them! make sure and keep checking the jillibean soup blog for more sneek peeks. and with every sneek peek, they're also doing giveaways. so you can win it before it even comes out 🙂

thanks to all of you for playing along with my blog-iversary party game! it has been fun reading all your comments, and i really appreciate how sweet everyone is. i printed them all out, cut them into strips, took out a few that posted more than once (yep, caught you!), and then finally found a use for this awesome red collander! 

 

although, i did think that guessing the thing that is different about my blog would have been easier. lol! i had one thing specifically in mind. something that has been different now for about 2 weeks. but when you get down to it, there are some other things that have changed around this joint. so before getting to the winners, bear with me while i think outloud about some of your guesses.

"you havn't been showing project 365 photos". this is true. i was doing good, and was even a week ahead. then i got behind. really behind. but i'm working on catching up. i just took a ton of photos over the last week, had about 30 photos printed, and am working on filling in the holes. will post the spreads when i get a few done.

"you've been using your blog for more scrappy related projects". this is true. i guess i always think you all come here for the projects first and foremost. maybe that's wrong of me to assume. and i think it's easier to post a layout, with simple thoughts on the process and a supply list. rather than type up meaningful or random thoughts, where i can never figure out where to stop talking. will have to remember that it's not all about the projects 😉

"you're not sharing the daycare kids photos as much". this is probably true. but not intentional in any way. in all honestly, i had something happen ages ago. and even though it was silly and childish and not even true, it did make me a little more cautious. i don't like that it made me that way. but it did. so maybe, without really meaning too, i stopped sharing quite so much about these little kiddos that mean the world to me. i do know that i got in the habit this year, of making one big post each month with photos of them. sadly, i had NO photos in the month of may. so maybe that's why it seems like it's been a while since i shared them. lol! but i have a ton to share from june tomorrow. they're already typed up in a post and ready to go.

"you're keeping it more scrap-related and less personal". this is probably true too. i know when i read my posts from a year or two ago, they're a lot different. i would literally type any thought that popped into my head. and my thoughts are VERY random, so i might have said some crazy things. i guess i really have made it less personal around here. just typing more of the facts and straight to the point things. which i shouldn't be doing. i don't want to be. will work on that.

"you've been scrapping your kids and not the daycare kids". this is true. and i'm ok with that. i certainly don't mean that to sound bad. but for a while there, i was scrapping the daycare kids more than my own girls. i wanted to get the focus back on my own family for the most part. but i still do plenty of layouts about the other kiddos in our life. i have the albums to prove it. lol! and they're still just as important to me 🙂

"you've been re-doing lots of pages and albums". so true. but not something i really planned or realized i was doing. lol! i think i've just been coming across some old projects or older photos. and it's just been so much fun to go back to them. it may also have something to do with the fact that i've been really slacking on taking any new photos around here. really need to work on that. in the meantime, i'm grabbing any photos i can find. lol!

"the sides of your blog are green, the links are different colors, the font is smaller, etc". yes, the green is pretty new. did that about a month or so ago. and believe me, it took me about 87 different greens to find one that i liked. i'm planning a new blog banner too. just havn't gotten to that part yet. lol! the links are all different colors. i just do them to match whatever layout or photos i'm posting. not anything too planned, but i do change that myself when i post. i have no idea what my default color is even set too. and sometimes i do change the color of some text, even if it's not a link. like on these quotes for this post. just my way of making it stand out. maybe that's wrong though. should i be keeping everything the same color? lol! and is my font smaller? no idea. i know i change my font from time to time, just to check out the options. maybe the font i have it on just appears smaller 😉

"you type everything in lowercase now". extremely true. i started doing that ages ago. it's how i type now. no upper case. i have no time for that extra step of hitting the shift key. lol! here's what i find funny. when i write by hand, i only write in capitals. comes from the days of my working in grocery. when i had to make signs with these huge markers. and we had to do them in all caps. just a quirk of mine.

"the twitter updates and fun links". well, i used to twitter. and then i quit. but i started back up again a few months back. i also facebook. and i just got around to learning how to link up my twitter updates with my facebook updates. so that i'm not trying to think of twice as many cool updates all the time. and then those of you NOT on facebook, can still see my random and ever-so-important updates on the twitter feeds. lol! and i've been trying to keep the "fun links" updated when i find great places to visit. and i've updated a lot of my blog lists on the side.

 

so we gave it a really good toss. all the girls took turns tossing. it needed a good mixing, since the girls had been actually drawing names for the past hour just for fun. lol! first up, we have the one main winner.

 

congrats valerie!!! you have a box of goodies coming your way. just email me your address. and now for what is actually different about my blog. the thing i was thinking people would pick up on. you ever notice that i use the "…" a lot when i type? saying something … saying something else … and maybe even something else. i stopped doing that. and stopped using the "…" in my titles. probably a small detail. or maybe it is a big detail, and you're all slapping your foreheads right now for not thinking of it. lol! it was a very concious decision to stop doing that when i type. although, if you email me, i will still do it a ton. now we have the lucky two ladies who picked up on this. and an extra one that made a pretty good guess too, about how i don't do bullet journaling anymore. that's somthing i have purposely not done too. 

 

 

 

yep, threw in an extra winner "just because". so congrats to fabienne, cathy, and cheryl. you all have a nice envelope of goodies coming your way. just email me your address. and thanks again to all of you for playing along with my self-declared special day!

i was vegging out on the computer tonight. going through old blog posts, reading old comments. basically, taking a trip down memory lane. and something dawned on me. i'm hitting my blogging anniversary. so i checked it out on my account. i started this blog on july 2nd, 2005. it will be officially four years ago on thursday. this was my first post:

i promised to show you my disneyland album re-do, and i'm here to do just that. just to be clear, it's NOT the mini album i just shared. i might not have made that clear, since a few of you thought i was re-doing that album. that one stays, it's one of my favorites. the one i'm re-doing is from a trip we took back in 2002. that was seven full years ago. and back then, i was using creative memories albums. and apparently, i had come up with a very simple plan for this trip's photos.

 

this was basically what all my pages looked like. a cardstock background (regular stuff, this was before textured cardtock). 2-3 photos mounted on white cardstock. and journaling, in a huge font. that was it. this album had at least 40 pages to it, maybe 45. i had a page for every disney character we met. a page for each ride (not EVERY ride in the park, but quite a few). and most of them were done, but a few pages still needed the photos added on. i had sticky notes on each page, since these pages had to be done directly on the album page. didn't want to get mixed up.

 

i've known that this album wasn't done. it's gotten moved around the shelves quite a bit. but for some reason, it caught my eye last week. i was looking through it, realizing that i would never be able to actually finish it now. not in the style i had started it. i gave it about 2 minutes of thought, and started tearing pages apart. yep, no looking back. just went for it. i tore off all the journaling blocks and put them aside, figuring i would re-type it and add it to my new plan.

 

the photos came off pretty easily. i have a lot of practice tearing photos off old pages. lol! about halfway through this process, i realized i had another envelope of photos put away from this trip. so i dug it out. and it actually had most of these photos in there. back then, i'd take my rolls of film in and get the duplicates. so a lot of the photos i was tearing off, i was able to just use the duplicates for and start fresh. i got organized and sorted the photos and thought up my game plan.

i was going to switch to an 8×8 album. crop down the photos, add them to cardstock, and hand journal. but that would be a lot of pages still. then i thought about mixing some of the characters together. like putting a few princesses on the same page. or putting mickey mouse and minnie mouse together. but that would still be a lot of pages. and then there wasn't quite enough room for anything else. then i got the idea to just stay with the 12×12 size, but really condense it down to just a few pages. so i started cropping photos and collaging the heck out of these photos. i got down to just 52 photos and 7 pages.

 

basically, my intro page for the trip. i'm not actually loving this page. i wanted to use red, but the pink matched what we were wearing better. lol! so my basic plan was to use all white cardstock, lots of photos, and simple embellishments. for the titles, i used chipboard or foam letters. used basics, like ribbons and buttons for quick embellishing. and i used a black pen to freehand draw lines around the edges of the pages. that's about it.

 

i love trimming photos down into collages. if these photos had been from my digial days, then i probably would have just cropped them smaller in photoshop. but i was working with regular, 4×6 photos. so it's just a matter of trimming them, and then trimming them some more, until they all fit together. when you have 16 photos out, it's sort of hard to know where to start. hard to imagine you can fit them all on just 2 pages. but i start cropping them little bits at a time. once they start fitting together and i know where they're going to go, it just sort of works out.

 

you see that photo of joe and sarah dancing on this page? i had that photo, and another matching one, taking up an entire page before. even though i cropped it quite a bit, it has all the important stuff still in the photo.

 

when i start cropping, i usually go in small amounts. then i go a quarter of an inch at a time. a little here, a little there. that way, i don't go too far and have something not fit. but occasionally, it DOES happen. like on that bottom photo of sarah at the fountain. once i got the photos pieced together like i wanted, i realized that photo needed to be a bit wider. so i just dug out the trimmed off piece of the photo from my garbage, and adhered it back together. if you look closely, you can tell. but i don't think most people would notice.

 

this is what i'm talking about people. 19 characters on 2 pages! before, this was 19 seperate pages in an album. i had a photo of the girls with the character, and then a photo of the character signing the girls autograph books. i do like that i have the journaling about each character and how we came to find them in the park. so i do plan on typing that back up. i'm thinking of printing my journaling onto 6×12 pieces of cardstock and adding them to the album with the 6×12 page protectors in between the pages.

 

having a page for each character was sort of cute. but putting them all together like this is kind of cool too.

 

 

we also had the autograph books for each of the girls. i had always planned on tearing out the pages and putting them into the album somehow. i realized the divided page protectors would be perfect for these. all the autographs fit into 2 page protectors (which is 4 pages front and back).

 

i think some of their autographs are super cool. i wish i could sign my name all fancy like that. lol!

 

photos from the rides. before, i think this was 5 seperate pages. now, it's just one page. and that third photo down on the right side just makes me laugh. you can see the girls fighting over who is working the controls. and you can see joe giving that look like "get me off of here". lol!

 

and of course, minnie mouse's house deserved a page of it's own. we waited forever to get in that house. and it was the girls favorite part of the park. that photo of them in her kitchen sink has always been one of my favorites.

so there you have it. 7 pages of photos, and 4 pages of autographs. that's all i needed to document this trip. like i said, i'll be adding some journaling from what i tore out of the old album. probably just using 6×12 journaling pages mixed it, or even 8.5×11 pages. we'll see. i really love how this turned out. so simple really. and i can add these directly into our vacation albums, right in the year 2002. no seperate album to dig out. just mixed in with all our other trips.

for some reason earlier this week, i decided to completely tear apart an older disney album that i had started about 7 years ago. it wasn't finished. and i didn't like it. so i've re-done that album into just a few pages. and i'll share that over the weekend. i even have "before" pictures (you can only see them, after promising NOT to laugh). but i figured this would be the perfect time to share the mini album i did from another disneyland trip.

 

this was from our trip to disneyland in 2005, a trip we took with my parents. i completed this album right after the trip, and even made a duplicate album for my parents to have. it's an 8×8 album and about 40 pages. these are just a few of them, to give you an idea of what i did. it was completely inspired by THIS album from cathy blackstone that i had seen in a magazine.

 

i love the simple look to the album. just cardstock for the pages. and lots of punched cardstock circles. cathy had stamped her titles with paint, but i knew that would take me forever in this album. so i used a chunky font, and printed them all out. i added the punched mickey ears at the last minute.

 

the photos were all trimmed very randomly. there was no measuring or planning. no trying to make them the same size on the page, or even. just trimmed them to fit and then worked the punched circles around the empty spaces. the journaling was all typed up to fit whatever space was left, and cut into strips.

 

i think the thing that actually took me the longest in this album, was the inking. i was really into inking the edges of papers back then. so i inked the circles, the pages, the titles, the journaling strips. lots of inking.

 

this is one of my favorite albums. it's simple and has a lot of journaling in it. i really loved how easily this came together.

 

i'll be sharing the other disney trip layouts probably saturday, or sunday at the latest. the girls recent trip to disneyland can be seen in THIS post that i did recently, using the divided page protectors. and i wasn't the only one with disneyland on the brain this week. nichol also did a post on this yesterday, and showed her recent plan for some of their trip photos. you can see her post HERE. i think we were on the same wavelength in our planning. white cardstock, simple embellishments, and lots of photos. you'll see mine later 🙂

had this layout go up on the jillibean soup blog today. a summertime, birthday layout.

 

a nice and easy layout, with photos from sarah's 9th birthday party. we just had her 10th birthday party a few weeks ago, and i havn't even looked though the pictures yet. lol! i printed all these photos individually, most of them about 2×3 inches. and then i just arranged them how i wanted on white cardstock, leaving a small space between each photo. quite simple.

supplies:
pattern paper – jillibean soup
notebook paper – creative cafe
letter stickers – jillibean soup
die cut letters – slice, by making memories
journaling spot – jillibean soup
chipboard accents – scenic route

kind of short on time today to post anything of substance. should have posted last night, i knew i'd regret not doing it by this morning. lol! anyways, i figured i'd just share a few samples i made earlier this year for making memories. 

 

these are all 6×6 layouts, that were focusing on using the slice. all product is from the animal crackers collection. the girl layouts feature haley when she was very little. makes me realize how much she's grown. and the boy layout features wes, a previous daycare boy that we just loved to death. miss him since he moved away.

 

 

back to the kids. i can hear them calling me. i have my neighbors here today, ziek and ayana. and they're being a huge help with the little ones. nice to have some entertainment for them, other than just me 😉