It's Scrapbooking Week!

Or at least that's what I've officialy declared it at my house. I've been having all sorts of fun making cards, but this week I wanted to focus on scrapbooking. I started this layout last week and am just finishing it up.

This was a trip to Charlotte (pronounced with the emphasis on the last syllabal) Beach in August. I have a TON of pictures from this outing and have been wanting to scrap it for a while. This is the first of two layouts (plus) from our outing.



I had so much fun pulling this one together. That ledger paper that I used is from a retired CTMH kit called You & Me, but if you like the look of it, it's very similar to a print in the Typeset collection. I had thought about using the patterned paper for the background, but since I only have a few sheets of it, and I love it, I thought this was the better way to go.



The little penants are some old Creative Memories cardstock that I have (sorry I don't know the names of the colors, and I'm pretty sure they are retired). The CM cardstock is a little thinner than CTMH, so I thought they would work better since I knew I was going to do some sewing on this page, which I haven't done a ton of, so I didn't want to add any more complication than absolutely necessary.



To create the penants, I cut 5/8" strips of cardstock and then cut those down to 1 1/2", 1 3/4", and 2" pieces. Then I used the corner of my square punch to create the penant shape at the end....much quicker and easier than tracing/cutting or eyeballing. Once I had a bunch of those cut out, I laid them out on the paper to figure out approximate spacing/see how many I needed. I used a tiny, and I mean tiny, bit of bonding memories adhesive just on the edge of the patterned piece to tack each one in place. Again, in the hopes of avoiding unneeded complication I wanted to make sure I wasn't going to have to sew through much, if any, adhesive. Once they were all on, I just sewed across. Yes, it's a bit time consuming, but it's not HARD. I'm not a huge fan of hard things, monotonous is OK...you can always do that while you watch TV ;).

The little corner pieces were cut using the Cricut Art Philosphy cartridge, I only used them on the outside corners because to emphasize the whole of the two-page layout. The title was cut using the Wild Card cartridge (Thanks Nikki Sivlis!). Once I got the layout together, I decided I needed a little bit in the top corners between the two pages, so I added a few more of the penants there.

This layout makes me so happy. It was such a sweet trip to a special place with Ellie and Andrew, somewhere we're unlikely to go again for a while now that my parents have moved away from there. I'm so happy to have captured it on cardstock for Ellie.

Now I mentioned that I have a TON of pictures of this, right? Well it's true, I could have done a whole mini album with all the pictures I took, but instead, I'm cramming them into two two-page layouts. How? The answer is Flip Flaps. I just LOVE these, they are the indecisive, picture happy girl's answer to scrapbooking. **apologies that these next pictures aren't that great...it's hard to get good photos when the layouts are in the page protectors, not to mention complications in photographing flip flaps, but hopefully this gives you a good idea of how they work and how the layout looks**

Now there is a little bit of an art to using Flip Flaps. You do have to plan ahead. What you saw previously is the basic foundation page for my layouts. Flip Flap layouts are kind of like a sculpture. You need to be sure that it looks good from all angles/stages in the flipping process.







Above is what the layout looks like in the album, with the flaps all closed. It's still a great story, and here's what it looks like with the flaps open....story still intact, but even better, you can see a progression, there's action and movement in the flip/flap process. Like I said, you could easily take this layout and break it up into four or five individual layouts, but when you're pressed for time, and you have stacks and stacks of photos calling to you, this is an easy, economical way to include them.





I've started the second layout and hope to have that one done shortly. So stay tuned for Part 2.

Supplies Used
Paper: CMTH - Bamboo cardstock, You & Me Papers; CM - Maroon, Blue and Sand cardstock
Other: Cricut Art Philosophy and Wild Card cartridges; Sewing Machine; Flip Flaps