Perching-Basic Grey Max & Whiskers

In my mind Basic Grey's Max & Whiskers collection is the perfect pet collection.  The colors are fantastic and, like all Basic Grey collections, it's cute but not too cutesy or themey.

You will soon learn that I am obsessed with my cat Oliver, he's like a child to me. He's incredibly spoiled and I think he's the cutest animal on earth, besides Boo maybe. He has his own album on my facebook page, it's ridiculous really.  So he ends up in a lot of my layouts, this being the latest.  Ollie's favorite thing to do besides eat is perch in high places.  He somehow made it on top of the fridge, I'm still unsure how.

I hand did the small white dots around the edge, I love white ink.

Now That's An Owie

Last winter my nephew (then 6) attempted to do a karate kick off the kitchen counter.  What ensued was a scene that I (I'm kind of twisted) wish I witnessed. It started with him landing in a way that caused his glasses to puncture the skin right by his eye and cause an extreme amount of bleeding.  A loud scream filled the air and my brother-in-law Eric came running to his aid.  My sister followed soon after, the description I got was "spurting blood."  My niece, then 3, didn't know how to handle the scene and immediately panicked and started screaming as well. My sister went to call the paramedics while my brother-in-law attempted to stifle the bleeding.  Now the funniest thing about this whole story is that Eric doesn't do so well with blood.  So as he was trying to stop the bleeding on his son's head he started to pass out. So the paramedics showed up to a scene with a semi-conscious father laying on the floor, a little girl screaming in a corner, a mom trying to stifle blood flow and a little boy saying, "I'm OK guys, it really isn't that bad."

This is my contribution that fiasco:

Crate Paper-Season

I am on a buying kick right now.  But let's be honest, when am I not on a buying kick?  However my buying recently has been based on discovering older lines I like that may not be available in my favorite stores anymore so I've been finding what I want on Ebay.  Most recently I got my hands on the Crate Paper Season line.  It's cute but not too cutesy, I like the fun and funk to it. It was perfect for this layout, my niece and nephew with their new little sister at home.

Bonus Days

The one thing about my job that is cool is bonus days!  We are required to work a lot of weekends in the summer and they give us additional bonus days off during slow seasons.  Yesterday was a bonus day and I got to spend the entire day at home which is pretty much my favorite thing to do.  If I am not traveling the only place I want to be is home.  So on top of some complete laziness I got a couple layouts done.  As I mentioned, I'm getting a little tired of doing our wedding scrapbook so I started on my 2011 book as well (I'm a bit behind).

I find myself buying more and more Crate Paper lately, beautiful collections

I've had the Hopscotch line sitting around forever and didn't know what to use it for, perfect for the birth of my niece!

Big Sur Roadtrip-Reconnecting with Nature

I am catching up on posting and realized that I never wrote about my birthday trip to Big Sur with the hubs.  This was my back to nature trip where I reconnected with camping. I haven't really been camping since I was a kid when we took an annual trip to Forked Lake in the Adirondacks.  We attempted to camp last year on my birthday in San Onofre but that was a disaster as San Onofre is basically just a dirt strip next to a major freeway where you listen to your annoying neighbors conversations all night because their site is 2 feet away from you.  This year we decided to venture further up the coast since we now finally have a car that can do road trips.  We hopped in the car on a Thursday morning and drove past Santa Barbara to El Capitan State Beach.  While this campground is on the coast (and therefore has the noise from the 101) it was much nicer than San Onofre.  We managed to snag a corner spot with a view and while the sites were close to each other they did a good job of separating you from your neighbor.  Some photos from El Capitan:

View from our site, gloomy but pretty

Water fingers

Beach art

Some late afternoon sun

All you need for camping is a box of wine and a tent, right?

We stayed at El Capitan for one night and then drove up to Big Sur.  I've been raving for years about this coastal drive to my husband as he's never done it.  However I was a little disappointed this time as that famous blue Big Sur water wasn't showing due to the gloomy weather.  We stayed for 2 nights at a place called Fernwood Big Sur.  This is a combination campground/RV/cabin rental site right next to Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park.  Purists like my brother definitely wouldn't consider this real camping but come on, you're talking to a girl who wears stilettos at least 4 days of the week. So I loved the fact that they had a little store and a bar (that we actually never went and got drinks at). The site was a bit rowdy and noisy but everybody quieted down around 11 so this old lady could sleep. In our two days there we hiked in the national park next door, took a nap in our new tent when the temperature plummeted and drank around the campfire, because that's what I do when I camp, drink too much wine...from a box. Photos from Big Sur:

Ragged Point view

A Walk in the Woods

Our campsite at Fernwood

View from the top of our hike in the gloom

Happy Birthday to me! ♥ Chronic Cellars

There's a peek of that famous Big Sur water

More Wedding Layouts

The fruits of my labor from the last couple of nights. I'm honestly getting kind of tired of scrapping our wedding.  But then again when I was planning my wedding I got tired of it too, go figure.

K&Company's Poppyseed is one of my favorite lines, love the colors.  I recently found some new embellishments at Michael's that I had never seen before.

Love the new chipboard word embellishments

Torn & layered paper

Basic Grey's old Boxer collection is still an elegant favorite of mine.  Unfortunately I'm coming close to using up all my papers from that collection, time to hunt on Ebay for more.

Worked great for a wedding layout

Trying to start making my own dimensional embellishments

Basic Grey Hello Luscious

My newest layout using Basic Grey's Hello Luscious line:

A prolific weekend

This weekend was my first weekend at home in quite a few weeks, my first weekend where I was able to sit and scrapbook for more than an hour.  The free weekend allowed me to ponder and take more time on my layouts then I normally do and I am loving my results.  I wish these weekends happened more often. Here are my favorites.

These girls featuring American Crafts Garden Cafe

Ribbon flags

Father & Son featuring Basic Grey Oxford

Scott & his Groomsmen featuring Basic Grey Marjolaine

Beautiful embellishments

Echo Park Happy Days-Mr. & Mrs.

I found inspiration for this layout from here, there and everywhere.  I am learning that dimension adds so much to my layouts.  I love the new Echo Park line Happy Days.  It's an incredibly fun and surprisingly versatile line. Everything I used was from the collection with the exception of the black string and the red brads.

An attempt at Sketching

I was reading Kelly Goree's blog post on scrapbook.com yesterday outlining the main things she uses for inspiration. She is hands down my favorite scrapper so I took in every little detail.  Last night when I got home from work I decided to try sketching.  I have never approached scrapbooking that way.  I'm the kind of person who picks a photo or two for a layout and I will sit, sometimes for way too long, shuffling photos and paper around trying to make it all come together.  I even have a big "inspiration book" of layouts I admire from many other artists that I refer to often for help.  But sketching worked out for me pretty well.  I was able to get my idea down and execute it pretty quickly.  I definitely changed a couple little things and added elements as I went but the sketching really helped the main layout idea.  Here's my end piece, one of my favorites yet.

The photo of my husband and I kissing on our wedding day is one of my favorites.  My best friend said it "makes her heart happy."

Using Crate Paper's Random collection definitely helped.  I love contrast but often find that my layouts are a little too "matchy matchy."  I tend to stick to collections and have a hard time mixing things up.  But this collection mixed it up for me. Some of the details:

Pearls and Ruffles seem so wedding like.  The ruffled ribbon reminds me of my dress.

Heart/Flourish die cut made using the amazing Silhouette SD machine.

I had these brads forever and never can find the right layout to use them, here it is!

Good old American Crafts Thickers always add awesomeness to a layout

Kelly's post also gave 2 sites with ready made sketches. Page Maps seems particularly helpful as it shows a sketch and an end layout.  I'm loving this sketching thing more and more because even if you use a page map made by another artist your layout will reflect your personal taste and your tweaks on their idea. More to come with sketching.

A New Blog-A New Name

So I had this blog I started last year, I think out of boredom.  When I started it it was with the intention of it being a lifestyle sort of blog where I addressed all sorts of interesting topics.  I only posted a couple times and then went on hiatus for about 8 months.  When I came back (from nowhere really, the land of lazy I guess) I realized that I didn't really want it to be an everything blog, I wanted it to focus on the 2 things I am most passionate about: traveling and scrapbooking.  Kicking It Softly didn't really work for that so I've moved it over to this, The Wandering Scrapper.  This speaks not only to my wanderlust but the fact that my mind wanders pretty much 24/7. This is both a positive and negative thing in my life. The positive being that I am always open to new ideas, places and things.  The negative being I tend to lose focus on these things fairly quickly.

Anyway, I'm going to re-post all my posts from the last couple of months so all my work is on here.  At 32-years-young I think I have finally figured out what I want to do with my life.  I would like to somehow make a living being creative in the way I love most, scrapbooking.  Then I can travel more, and then scrapbook my travels, and an amazingly beautiful circle will begin.  Here we go...