Scrapping Projects and a Bridal Shower

Well it has been a fabulous weekend! It began with heading to a local bar to hang out with some of my teacher friends on Friday afternoon. My drink of choice? Pepsi, of course. :)  I really enjoyed catching up with everyone and finding out how school was going for all of them and what fun and interesting things everyone was up to this summer. As I was sitting there, I realized that the one thing I miss the most about my job is seeing all of my friends and co-workers on a regular basis.  A job is not just the work you do, it is also the relationships/friendships that you form and the interactions that you have with these people every day that make a job worthwhile. Afterwards I came home and finally finished a layout that I had been struggling with for 2 days. I really love how it turned out. The colors are so bright and fun and I got to use my new blue glittery embossing powder from American Crafts which totally adds to the fun feeling of the page.

On Saturday,  I woke up later than usual (11:00 a.m.) and dad and I headed out to get gas for the mower and lunch too. It is a fun little ritual that we sometimes do to make Saturdays more fun. Then we headed home and I ended up beating him at a game of Skip-Bo pretty badly.  I really thought I was going to lose but all at once I went on a huge streak and played half of my pile of cards in one turn.  :)  Dad and I really love the game and play at least once a week.  We actually wore out our first deck of cards and are now breaking in our new deck. Then Renee came over and she and I ended up going shopping because her car was in the shop and she needed to run some errands. So we ended up in Archivers and I now have an interview on Tuesday morning to work there. I am still not 100% sure that I want to go back to working retail again, but I need a way to pay the bills and sustain my little "scrapping addiction", so here goes. I came home and worked on another layout and had a lot of fun pulling out tons of flowers and embellishments to add to this layout to make it really stand out. I also played with glimmer mist on the chipboard letters and love how it turned out.  The colors are so soothing and the embellishments frame the pictures perfectly too. :)

Then today we had Renee's bridal shower. I can't believe her wedding is just 34 days away! It has come so quickly. Anyways, the shower was fabulous. Maria and Amy put a lot of hard work into making this shower simply fabulous. Everyone said the food was fabulous and everyone felt welcome and at home too. We visited with friends and family, laughed at the trivia about Zach and Renee, and introduced ourselves with silly foods such as jello, dates, and "pam"cakes. :) Renee got a lot of great gifts, including a popcorn popper, kitchen gadgets, and a domino set from me so they can enjoy one of our family's favorite games, Mexican Train Dominoes.

I have also been working on some other scrapbooking projects over the past few weeks. These are some of my favorites. This top one was a quick and easy one for me and I had fun using these beach themed products from Making Memories "Great Escape" line.  The bright colors and bold patterns were perfect for these pictures of Emily and I enjoying the local cuisine in Daytona Beach. I also used a fun technique to create the orange scalloped circle.  See the instructions below to recreate the look on your next layout. :)

I used my medium-sized EK Success corner punch and my Cricut Expression to create this fun look. First I die-cut a circle out of cardstock that was 1/2 inch larger than I wanted the scalloped circle to be.

 I removed the corner guides from my punch and lined up the notches on the punch with the edge of the circle and punched my first scallop.

 I then slid the punch over and lined the left side of the punch and the right side of the punched scallop up and punched again to create the next scallop.

I continued this all the way around the circle to create my scalloped circle.

If your punches don't line up at the end like mine did, just take a pair of scissors and snip the paper in a scallop shape like I did or cover that part of the circle with an embellishment.

I completed the layout below with some of my beach pictures. I really loved the colors in the ride so I found patterned papers and accents that would compliment them. I found this great paper from Deja Views and some fabulous accents from Making Memories and K and Company to accent them.  I created these fun collages and used a variety of word stickers, tags and buttons to complete the look. :) Another fun punching technique I learned was that the border punches from Fiskars line up perfectly and can be overlapped to create fun new borders. Here I used the Effervescence and Scallop Sentiment punches to create this fun border. What other punch combinations can you create?