Pocket Life with Trina: Keeping It Simple

Hi, it's Trina here today sharing how I keep up and stay guilt-free with my 6" x 8" pocket page album using a simple approach, always working with a monthly Pocket Life kit and a scrapbooking kit and adding in a few extra embellishments either from my stash or from one of the monthly scrapbooking embellishment kits. My handy mists (love the new mini mist trios by Heidi Swapp!) are always within reach.

I have to say that I love how the Seven Paper holographic alphabet stickers from this month's pocket page kit pick up the colors that you place them by. You can see by the photos that the letters reflect the colors that I used for my pages.

Here is my newly finished spread for this week and I even made a small vertical shaker insert:

No. 1.
Have photos ready to print at home (or at a local pharmacy). I find myself shooting mostly with my smart phone these days and occasionally reaching for my Canon Rebel. I have 2 printers (my Canon and my Instax) so I can easily print my photos out when I sit down to scrapbook.

No. 2.
Print out only the photos you are going to use as you sit down to scrapbook. I only print out the photos I'm going to use. Piles of photos I haven't used make me feel guilty (and behind), so printing photos as I go keeps my Pocket Life fulfilling. A picture speaks a thousand words, so I tend to print out only the photos I love best. NOTE: I do not do one page per week, but work around fun outings, memories or events that run chronologically in my yearly pocket page album (except for my flashback page).

No. 3.
Focus on completing 1 (or 2) pages. When I sit down to scrapbook I focus on just 1 or 2 pocket pages that tie in around an event, a photo or a small group of photos. (For today's project I created a flashback page plus a page for a family outing last weekend. I do have a stack of my childhood photos that I know I will never make an album of. The flashbacks allow me to include older, unused photos and weave them in with current family life.)

No. 4.
Keep your scrapbooking time condensed. I keep my scrappy time short so I can work it into my life easily, typically finishing 1-2 pages within 1 hour and making a total of 2-6 pages per month.

No. 5.
Use PL cards for your layers. It's easy to use 3" x 4" journaling cards for layers. (In the "flying" page below I used two of the 3" x 4" cards from our February Pocket Page kit, then added in a piece of patterned paper and a tag to build more layers.)

Here are a few close-ups of my spread, including a homemade "silliness" shaker I made from cutting and folding a piece of vellum, tucking in colored card stock, filling the shaker portion with leftover sequins and stars (then stitching shut) and finally stitching a misted Heidi Swapp watercolor paper word on top:

Thank you for stopping by today. Have fun with your Pocket Life and remember to keep it simple and guilt free!

Trina

LET'S GET DIGITAL WITH JANINE, EMMA & TRINA

Hi everyone, it's Janine here with this month's edition of 'Let's Get Digital'!

I am always excited when I am doing a blog post, and this time I am even more so. Because we are going to show you three possibilities to use the files, I had the pleasure to create for this feature, as well as some additional journaling card cut files that Emma created!

I am going to start with the files and the layout that I created using them:

Normally the planning of my layouts starts with the photo and story I want to tell. This is one of the few layouts that started with an embellishment. And this embellishment was a sticker from this month's Embellishment Kit 'Little Old You'. Its colors are black and cream and it says 'Be kind and brave. That's all you'll ever need to be.' That's an amazing quote, isn't it?

It somehow led me to the thought that my son is going to go through a lot of moods in his life. Neutral, happy, sad, cheeky, angry - all these and a lot of more. So I decided to create a layout, maybe giving him some advice, with this sticker. But I also wanted to emphasize all the different moods that he will be going through. What to do? My idea was then to create some different emojis, that could be used as digital stamp brushes and/or could be easily transformed into cut files ...

Now I had the sticker and the emojis. But which photo to use?

I already knew the journaling was going to be an advice and wishes for him and his future life that says:" Life is an adventure. You will never know what is going to happen. I hope and pray that the laughter and happy times will outweigh the sad times."

So I decided to go with a photo of my son laughing. Well - he is 12 and on most of the recent photos he is not laughing, not even smiling. He is cool.

But then I found a photo I took about two weeks ago, when he asked me to take a picture of him sitting on his new couch in his room. And there he was smiling, yeah! I had to crop the photo, so only his face was showing, because I wanted his smile to be in focus, and not his room, and I really like the way it turned out. :)

The layout came together rather quickly, once I had the photo, the sticker and the emojis. The journaling I wanted to use led me to the journaling card of a cut apart patterned paper from this month's Main Kit that says 'Adventure' on it. That's a no brainer, it fit perfectly!

I turned the emojis into a cut file, cut them out of kraft cardstock and then again backed them up with another piece of kraft cardstock. 

As the layout is quite simple and needed a bit more interest and dimension, I folded the kraft cardstock (that I used for the background and for layering) a few times and then stuck them under a pile of books for an hour to get them really flat again.

I added some splatters, string, stitching and enamel dots … that's it!

But that's not it for today, because Trina also created a layout using the emoji files!

She also turned them into cut files and made a beautiful 6x8 layout, using this month's PL kit. 

Isn't it absolutely gorgeous with its paper strips, stitching, stamping and layering? Love it!

She also painted the emoji with Aladine iZink ink (yellow) and it really does pop! 

And - there's even more! I'm so excited to show you Emma's layout and the cut-files she created. 

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Hi everyone! Super excited to be joining Janine and Trina for today's blog post and working with the super cute emoji digital file Janine created!  How can you not love them?! :)  I thought it would be fun to try these in a couple ways; the first being the most obvious, a layout and the second, create some Pocket Life cards!

For my layout I wanted to have a bunch of them layered at the bottom of my page so I cut two of the faces at different sizes, think I ended up with around 10 of each - mostly cut out of white cardstock but a few out of vellum too.   

The title is also cut with the Cameo, it's a digital stamp (from Kellie Stamps) and I just traced it to create the cut file (super easy to do this in the Designer Edition with any PNG file).  For the top of my page I went with the "hello" talk bubble paper from the Pocket Life kit because with all those faces down the bottom, it seemed fitting :)

The Pocket Life cards were simple too - just drew up a couple rectangles (went with rounded corners but you can easily just draw your own square cornered rectangles if that's your preference!) - added the faces and set some joins so the faces didn't fall out of the cards once cut. 

There are so many other options for using these cute little faces on your cards; I can definitely see myself going back and using them again (and again..).

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Wow, isn't this great? Thanks so much for joining in with me, Trina and Emma! And I know I'm definitely going to use those adorable journaling cards on future projects. :)

To get your hands on the emojis and journaling card cut files, just join us on our Citrus Twist Kits Facebook Fan Page where you'll be able to find it as a download.

We hope you enjoy! And we would love to see how you use them, so be sure to link your project up in the gallery, in the comments or on the Fan FB page!

3 to Inspire with Trina

Hi everyone, it's Trina here today to share this week's 3 to Inspire challenge.

All you need to do is create a scrapbook layout, PL page or PL card using these 3 elements. I had lots of fun with this simple 6x8 Pocket Life page and was inspired by Chantal Philippe's crazy beautiful pattern paper alphabet letters. The thread I used is just frayed white fabric threads, bunched up and tucked under the puffy sticker. I used pieces of our June Pocket Life kit, Pattern Paper kits and the Embellishment kit. (June kits can be seen here beginning on June 2nd . . . or on May 31st beginning at 10 p.m. PST for our kit subscribers.)

1. Use thread.
2. Make your own alphabet letters from pattern paper.
3. Use one photo with two layers behind it.

Here is my take on the challenge:

Here are my close-ups:

Now it's your turn! Use the three prompts to create your own projects and share them with us in the CTK Gallery and/or on our Facebook Fan Page. You can also upload to Instagram and tag us @citrustwistkits. Your take on this challenge must be uploaded by Saturday, June 6th, to earn a chance to win. When you play along, you will be entered to win a bit of happy mail from us. We will pick one lucky winner.

Thanks for visiting.