Happy Birthday! and Project Life

Today is blogger's challenge and while I have been absent the last few weeks, it's not for lacking of wanting to participating.  My mojo disappeared over the holidays and I've been trying to force it to return...it wasn't working, so I took a little break.  I finally feel like this week it's creeping back ever so slowly.

Our theme today at blogger's challenge is "Texturize It".  I won't lie, this card took me awhile to complete, but was so happy with the end results.  Do you ever start making a card, get side tracked doing something else, and then the card takes FOREVER to complete?  That's me almost all the time.  I'm easily sidetracked when I'm stamping.

For this card I texturized the edges of my cardstock using my Donna Salazar's Distrezz-it-All, which I've had for ages and barely use....now I'm wondering why I never use it...oh yeah, it's hidden under my desk where I forget about it (mental note: put OUT on desk, not UNDER it).  I sewed one of the strips of my cardstock and also used the polka dots embossing folder from Quickcutz.

My goal this year is to complete all the SFYTT sketches in 2012.  Last year I missed a month or two and gave up after that, but this year I would like to keep up with Jen's sketches.  I've been a fan of them for a LONG time!   I just had to give a HUGE laugh as I hadn't looked at Jen's post of her card closely until I just went to link and noticed we used the same designer paper.  

The balloon was paper pieced with a piece of some of my new favorite paper- Authentique Gathering. I originally bought this paper to work with my Project Life kit (see below) and love it so much, it's heavier and two-sided and I adore the blues/orange/brown combo.  Think I may need to invest in another pad of the paper.

So with Project Life mentioned above, I'm starting my 2nd year of doing this and am so happy about that.  There's a little break in my kids' lives where I stopped scrapbooking and I really wanted to get back into it, but it was always intimidating.  I've been trying the digital as well but have a LOT to learn in that regard.  I thought I would share bits and pieces of my Project Life album on here.  I'm keeping up pretty well so far in 2012, and while I got behind in 2011 I made it a goal to finish up by the first week in 2012, and I was able to do so.

I chose to work with the Clementine kit this year and while this shows the "A" style pages, I'm hoping to incorporate various pages this year.  I keep with the rounded corners on most of my stuff for it all to flow and also picked out 2 6 x 6 paper pads that would work with the colors of the album so I could cut filler spots and embellish as I wanted.  I do not usually go with the picture/day way of doing things, and more or less just photo/document when I feel like it.

The pages above document a few weeks ago, I had been traveling in PA when I saw this car off the road (bottom photo, top left), got an e-mail from Syd's teacher that she cut her hair during cut and paste centers, and our trip to Chattanooga for Syd's 2nd cheer leading competition.

Thank you if you have stuck with me through all my mumbo jumbo this post, I've been wanting to share more of my scrapbooking/Project Life so will probably do that occasionally.

Want to join us at Blogger's Challenge, link in on any of the blog hop blogs or at Lisa's blog here.

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Card details:

Stamps: Love in the Air by Our Craft Lounge

Cardstock: Chocolate Chip, Crumb Cake, Authentique Gathering

Inks: Dish All the Dirt Brown, copic markers

Embellishments: Memory Box Jewel Stickers-Halloween, dimensionals, Janome sewing, Quickcutz Polka Dot embossing Folder, Circle die from Spellbinders