Making Memories

Great Spring Idea

What do you love most about spring? Besides the nice weather, I love seeing flowers start to appear. Walking outside and seeing flowers wherever I go, makes me happy. We have a local annual tulip festival that I attend so I can savor all the beautiful flowers.

Here is a great idea from Andrea Wiebe to help you enjoy beautiful flowers inside your home. Andrea took an empty can and covered it with paper, she used Making Memories Garden Party and 5th Avenue paper collections. She then decorated it with buttons and ribbon. This is a great project for you to create with your kids. They will have a blast creating their own little project.

 

For more project inspiration, visit Making Memories idea gallery.

Photo Swap

A great way to get inspired is to swap photos with a friend and scrap a layout for them. Sometimes just having a fresh face laying in front of you is enough to get your creative juices going. We challenged Wendy Anderson and Laura Vegas to a photo swap and this is what they came up with. They both used the New Noteworthy program by Making Memories.

This is what Wendy created for Laura:

 

This is what Laura created for Wendy:

 

 

Your challenge today is to team up with a friend and swap photo. You'll be amazed at how fun and inspiring it is.

For more inspiration check out the idea gallery on Making Memories website.

Response to Recent Concerns

As most of our fine readers know, when you multi-task, details can fall through the cracks.  The task of running and maintaining this blog belongs to two people at Making Memories, both of whom also handle many other activities within the company … and also at home.    Translated: we do not have the opportunity to conduct background checks on all of our guest participants – something that has obviously come back to haunt us in an embarrassing and startling way.

Please let us state outright: under no circumstances do we condone any illegal activities.  Had we been aware that last week’s guest designer had a criminal background, we obviously would not have featured her work.  If we could turn back time, we certainly would; unfortunately, we posted her submission based on the timing of its arrival, the nature of its design, and absolutely nothing more.  Our mistake.

We started inviting guest designers to our blog at the request of our readers.  In the multiple surveys we have hosted, in an effort to find out what you wanted to read, the response overwhelmingly favored putting the spotlight on other designers who rarely get acknowledged for their talent.    Our trusting nature, however, has proven flawed – it opens us up to submissions from people who do not deserve the spotlight. However, we do not have the resources or often the ability to conduct background checks on each participant.

We like to think that ours can be a forum where others’ work can shine. However, we can not imply that we sponsor them, or that they work for us, or that we are affiliated.  We just knew that we had a venue to share with others. Deep in our hearts, we would still rather operate as trusting people and feature submissions that we receive; sadly, however, until we can find a way to conduct said checks, we will likely have to discontinue that practice.

In the meantime, please know that the reason we were not able to address this problem over the weekend came from personal circumstances:  one of us has been out of town (and away from a computer) on vacation. The other one of us was celebrating her two children’s birthdays and had not been online – and instead hosting back-to-back events for an eight- and an eleven- year old.

Please do not let our oversight reflect on the entire company. We are sincerely sorry to have disappointed any of you.  We so enjoy working on this blog and hope that you will give us the opportunity to earn back your trust.  We also would sincerely appreciate any suggestions and insight, as always, as to how we could improve this site to make it more enjoyable for you to read.

Thank you for all of your time and understanding.  We are here to answer any questions you may have. 

Sincerely,

Jenny Weston and Kelly Mooney

Inspiration From Joey

 

I've noticed that flowers are a huge inspiration in the scrapbooking industry. You see papers, ribbons, stamps, and embellishments in every shape, color, and form. Flowers are happy and pleasing and extremely universal because they can be used all the time.

Making Memories has an incredible variety and assortment of flowers so this month's challenge focuses on them. I wanted to create something that did not use paper - just fabulous embellishments from several different programs.

My page is very simple here, with a line of colorful, layered flowers. Sometimes, that is all you need, a punch of color to make your page your own.

Joey

To see Making Memories collection of blossoms, visit our website.

Guest Designer - Joscelyne Cutchens

Today we are happy to have Joscelyne Cutchens as our guest designer. She joins us from the beautiful island of Honolulu, Hawaii.

This is how she created the page, "I used a ruler and paper piercing tool to pierce every other hole in a tic-tac-toe grid, leaving a space on the bottom-right side where the glitter chipboard bracket would create the line.   Since I had this picture of me with a black and white polka dot shirt, I chose two black and white polka dot paper flowers (5^th avenue blossoms and buttons) to create a visual triangle, with my picture being the third side.  I stitched the buttons with embroidery floss onto the flowers and used glue dots to adhere them to the page and then sewed the grid on to the paper with pink embroidery floss."

I used my computer to create my journaling. The font I used was “1942 Report.” I wanted the other pictures on the layout to be cohesive and not battle for attention, so I converted the three supporting pictures to black and white and printed them to fit the grid.  For the small pictures I printed them at 1” x 2” and trimmed them to look like Polaroid’s."

Make sure to check out Joscelyne's blog for more sample ideas.

Design Challenge - Music Lyrics

Music.  It can stir emotions that are deep down inside us.  It can make us laugh.  It can make us cry.  It can make us remember things we thought we’d forgotten.  It can transport us to a different time.  The influence music can have on our emotions is amazing. 

This morning I was listening to one of my favorite Pandora stations when I heard the song “Miracle” by Celine Dion.  As soon as I heard it, the image of each of my little babies came into my mind and I knew I had to create a scrapbook page.  This was one of those pages that actually came together pretty quickly – I know it’s fairly simple – but it’s exactly what I wanted.  The words are perfect – except that I have four little miracles, instead of just one. J 

I used lots of Noteworthy product on this page –  paper, chipboard letter stickers, flowers, trims, journaling book pages, and buttons.  Of course, I had to do a bit of machine stitching, and the buttons are stitched on by hand.  The lyrics are printed directly onto my background and the title is an older sticker from the Defined line.

So now, I challenge YOU to create a page that includes lyrics.  You don’t have to include the whole song as I did – it can be one line or even just a title…just include song lyrics somehow.  If you take my challenge, leave a comment and a link to your page – I’d love to see what you come up with!

To see more inspiring ideas visit Making Memories website.

Wendy