I've moved!!!

So I know my blog has been very neglected in the past few months. Heck it has been neglected since the beginning of its existence. :) But I've always struggled with how it looks and is laid out. I found a great website builder in one of my technology courses and on a whim, I created a new blog. You can visit me at:

katiegordondesign.weebly.com

I hope to see you over there and I'm going to do my best to keep it updated!

You're a Treat!

Lately I've been on a card making binge. Seriously I didn't realize how much fun I could have getting inky and trying lots of techniques, but geez, I'm having a great time. Recently I discovered the Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge Blog & this week their challenge was right up my alley. I've been so inspired by summer colors and themes, so I'm here to share a card I made recently with some watercolor paper, distress inks and some Silhouette Studio cut files to match their recent challenge: Simon Says... Summer. They were so easy to make and I absolutely love them.
I decided to make a set of the cards, in a classic pairing of purple, red, and orange Popsicles (though you could make them in any color under the sun). I covered the sentiment in glitter from my sakura glitter pen and then covered them in glossy accents. The colors of distress ink that I used are Dusty Concord, Barn Door, Spiced Marmalade and Antique Linen. I love how they turned out and now all of my friends want a set. :)

Today I'm here to share one of my newest scrapbooking process videos. I'm finally getting my webcam to cooperate with Windows 8 after being forced to upgrade when my laptop HDD failed earlier this year.
I hope you enjoy.
Thanks for watching and visiting.

I'm back today after a couple days break to share some more of my Jekyll Island trip layouts. We were only on the island for a few days, but I have so many great photos & memories that I want in our albums. The trip photos also helped me get back into to 12x12 scrapbooking, rather than just focusing on Project Life.

I've been trying my best to step out of the comfort zone of pattern paper backgrounds & lots of layered papers, to quilty looking pages that I create with lots of small patterns & shapes. I love the look of my album now & I feel like each page has a different feel. I'm definitely sticking to this new style for a while.

Thanks for looking at my pages, if you have any questions about how I made something or where I got it, leave me a comment & I'll reply as soon as possible.  :)

I don't usually go to sketches for inspiration, but I'm going to start challenging myself to do so. This revelation all started when I saw this sketch on the Studio Calico blog based on a layout by Ali Edwards. 

I followed the sketch pretty closely, using photos from an Incubus concert a few years ago. I don't usually go back and scrapbook past events or stories, but since I was already doing things I don't usually do, I decided to go for gold. :) I really loved Ali's layout when I first saw it, so I wasn't surprised that I loved the outcome of my own version of the layout. 

I love scrapbooking. I love it when it's made with paper and glue, I love it when it's made on a computer, I love it when its a combo of the two. I'm just a fan, period. I like making pages and sharing stories no matter the format. Today I'm going to share a page I made recently about our kitty Mo. She's such a fun loving little girl and I've always got something to say about her (& all of our cats for that matter).

I used some new products from One Little Bird called Sunshine in my Soul. I use these types of products for so many digi made projects, including my blog header, titles, buttons, pages, e-vites, an so much more. I absolutely love to use them digitally, but did you know that if you have a Silhouette, you can use the digital elements as print & cut images. If you would like a tutorial on that leave me a comment and I will get to work on that. :)

Thanks for stopping by & checking out my Digi Made project!

When I finish up a layout I like to take all of the small scraps and put them in a drawer and if I have just a few embellishments left from a pack, I put them away with my color coordinated boxes. When I am not feeling motivated or inspired to scrapbook a layout, I grab the box of scraps, pick some papers that coordinate, then grab the color boxes of embellishments that match what I've already selected & I make as many cards as I can with what I've picked. Some of them are super simple, like the first one I'm sharing with you today, or elaborate and time consuming like the second. 

This first card is made with a card bask of slate colored cardstock, a Crate Paper frame from the Pier Collection, a piece of random yellow pattern paper, a chipboard butterfly from Studio Calico, Twine from Lawn Fawn, and a sentiment typed from my typewriter. It's very simple, but it's definitely one of my favorites. Now I just need the perfect person to send it to. 

The second card I made using a bunch of Dear Lizzy scraps, all of the pattern paper and the sentiment are from the Daydreamer line and the Gold Dot vellum is from a past release. I took the scraps from a quilt inspired layout, glued them to a sheet of thin paper, then die-cut out the circle using my Cuttlebug and Spellbinders circle dies, I added the vellum behind it and glued it down to a card base, then I used foam tape to glue down the sentiment which came from a cardstock diecut pack. I think I'm going to give this to my husband Ryan so I can show him some love, but still keep the card. ;)

Thanks for stopping by & checking out a couple of my favorite cards. 

For today's Traditional Tuesday I'm sharing a page from my 2014 album. Ryan and I went to Jekyll Island in January for a Health & P.E. Convention, so I have a ton of photos I want to scrapbook from the trip. It was Ryan's first time on the island, and it had been over a decade since I had visited it. So it was kind of a big deal. During January and February, the Jekyll Island Visitors Center holds a daily scavenger hunt for glass orbs created by local artists. They are some of the most beautiful pieces of glass art I've ever seen. Each one is hand made and unique. I REALLY wanted to find one, but unfortunately I never did. We spent a little bit of time each day on the hunt, so I wanted to make sure I created a page to remember the hours of walking and searching. Even though we never found one of those beauties it certainly gave us a chance to see a lot of the island. I'm already counting down the days until we can go back next January and I'm going to really make a greater effort to find a glass orb of my own. 

 For the background I used a Silhouette cut, Design ID #53723, its a Jillibean Soup cut file available in the store. I edited it so that only the circles were cut, not the outlines. Then I backed each circle with either a piece of pattern paper from the Dear Lizzy Daydreamer collection or my photo of Ryan keeping an eye on the rock wall on our walk down the beach before dinner one night. 

 I chose 2 circles to embellish, in order to create a triangle between them and the photo, as well as between them and my journaling. I used some pieces from a pack of Heidi Swapp ephemera I bought at Michael's on clearance along side some stickers from a variety of scrapbook colletions, including the Daydreamer collection.

 For the title, I wanted to ensure that my point of the journaling was made known. So I decided to call it on the hunt, I used letters from the Simple Stories Daily Grind collection and Bella Blvd Sophisticates, which is a couple of years old.

I have to say this is one of my favorite pages from those I've made using photos from our trip.
Thanks for stopping by & having a look. I'll be back in a few days with another traditional layout to share.

Packing for a Retreat

Here in Georgia, we are lucky to have a few different options for cabin retreats. My friends and I get together pretty regularly to crop at each others houses, but it is really nice to go away together to a beautiful cabin that is set up specially for scrapbooking. We plan who will be responsible for which main meal and once we're there we stay there. Last time we went it was so awesome!! We had a great time and I got a few pages done, which you can see in a post below.

This year we are going to a different cabin, & I'm going to try something different from what I usually do as far as packing. I'm trying out page kits. I have a bunch of zipper bags and plastic envelopes that I'm planning on using to put paper, photos, story ideas, and embellishments in. I have an example of one of my page kits looks like. 

For this kit, I have 1 photo & story to make a page about. So I put in one piece of minty colored cardstock that I love the look of next to my photo. I then chose a collection of papers that I felt would showcase the photo well. For this one I chose the Crate Paper Maggie Holmes Styleboard collection. I have a few sheets of 12x12 & 6x6 papers plus a few scraps from the 6x6 paper pad. 

For the embellishments I chose items that I know I love to use with photos of Ryan & I. I picked out a few ampersands, some hearts, icons like cameras, that also have hearts on them, plus a few tags from Elle's Studio that are in the same colors and motifs. 

Lastly I chose a couple of sticker sheets, the one that coordinates with Styleboard collection, plus an older border sticker sheet, also from Crate Paper, but from the Pretty Party collection and the leftovers from a sheet of silver glitter stickers from Heidi Swapp that I picked up on clearance at Michael's not too long ago. 

In addition to my page kits, I plan to bring some card bases, stamps & inks, my tool kit, and my Cameo + laptop. I use my Cameo for almost every layout and I've found that I have a harder time completing a layout without it, so it's a must. Plus I think all of my friends are excited that I'm bringing it along. I think I'll also pack a few extra photos, in case I finish the layouts I have set up in the page kits and have plenty of leftovers for a few more pages, which I'm sure will happen. So I think I will have plenty to work on, plus I'm sure I'll get plenty of socializing in too. :)

Here we are starting on the 6th month of the year and I'm finally sharing my 2014 Project Life. In 2013 I finished my PL album on the 31st of December. It really worked out for me to continue the project through December, instead of making a separate December Daily album. I'll probably do the same this year. 

I decided to make a fancier, more elaborate title page, because this year started in the middle of the week and I didn't need an entire 2 page spread for the few days. I decided that I wanted to make a page of 2x2 inch squares. I used a Design C page protector and hand stitched the small squares. I custom printed the photos at home, cut some of my favorite Project Life cards, threw in some awesome wood veneers from my Ohdeerme kits and studio calico, cut some images using my Cameo, added in some stamping, letters, and random embellishments. Everything I added in represents some part of us, in some way. I love every single bit of the title page and I think it was worth every second it took to make it. It's certainly unique and reflects me to a T. 

 Thanks for checking out my title page & I'll be back next week to share a few more pages from my book.