Preparing for Holiday Documenting | Nathalie DeSousa

 Hi there!

Nathalie with you today to start documenting the jolliest of the seasons, Christmas!  While Trina finished designing the Sparkle and Joy Kit, we got thinking how it would be so nice to have different designers work with the kit, and shared ideas with you all.   Well, I get to kick off this new series that will inspire you to get your Holiday memories in your Life Crafted albums.

I started by creating the first cover for one of my albums.  For this, I used the Countdown cut file,  a bit of mixed media, and one of those beautiful gold puffy stickers.

My choice of an acetate sheet for the covers has two purposes, for one it is clear and let's you peek into the album, and also creates the illusion of the stars and numbers floating on the page.

One of the pages that is always included in my December albums is a sort of manifest /reasons why.   This time, I decided to encase the journal in a gate-fold style page for my album.

I used the Dividers cut file to create the card, then combined one of the papers and some vellum for the story.  Here I added a title and sentiment by combining the Sparkle and Joy  stamp set and the True Life Stamp set.  The following video will show you how this came together:

I hope this inspires you to document your December Stories with the Sparkle and Joy kit.   

XO

Sunday Sketch with Krystal

 

Hey everyone! This is Krystal and today I'm here to share this week's sketch challenge. Let's take a look at the sketch.

I loved all of the stitching and the pocket, and you know I love those layers! Here's my take on the sketch.

I stuck pretty close to the sketch for my layout, with only a couple changes. Instead of a second photo, I added a tag and some embellishments. I also decided to stamp on the tag and add my title below it on the pocket I made from one of the vintage book pages in the Scrapbook Add-On Kit.

The little ephemera piece with the house on it was perfect for this story! I added it and another ephemera piece from the Scrapbook Add-On to hold some hidden journaling inside the pocket. For my title, I mixed a word from the Marigold Thickers and the alphas from the kit. I love the way they nestle together. 

I created a little embellishment cluster on the tag I used in place of the second photo. I added a phrase sticker from the Life Crafted Kit to finish it off. I love this vellum and gold floral piece! 

At the bottom of the layout I layered a couple strips of paper and added some stitching. I used a label from the Digital Cutaparts to add my date, then finished off this cluster with a couple of puffy stickers and some stamping. 

I also added a little more stamping underneath my title. I used one of the stamps from the Flourish stamp set and only partially inked it so that I could stamp it in two lines to fit onto the pink dotted paper. 

And that's my layout done! I'm so glad that I was able to both document this story and create a beautiful page with this month's gorgeous Scrapbooking Add-On Kit! I hope you'll try this sketch out for yourself, and be sure to tag us if you do!

You can see my entire process in the video below.

Thanks for stopping by! I'll see all of you back here soon!

Please Welcome Our Sparkle & Joy Kit Designers

Hello Everybody!

I am super excited to announce these lovely ladies who will be playing with and inspiring you with their beautiful Sparkle & Joy kit creations from tomorrow through mid-December. I thought it would be fun to roll their names out with a little Q&A. Here are the questions they were asked:

1. If you could only eat one type of Christmas cookie this year, what would you choose?
2. What is your favorite Christmas song to listen to you while you craft?
3. What is the one embellishment you ALWAYS include on your Christmas pages?
4. What holiday movie do you watch over and over again?
5. What are three words that best describe Christmas for you? 

Sarah Bargo

1. GINGER SNAP!
2. ALL OF THEM LOL! I MAY OR MAY NOT LISTEN TO CHRISTMAS MUSIC ALL YEAR
3. LONG....
4. WHITE POM POM TRIM AND GLITTERY STARS!
5. SCROOGED!
6. MAGICAL, SA VIOR, HOME 

Krystal Becker

1. I'm all about the traditional iced sugar cookie at Christmas, just make sure mine's gluten free. ;)
2. I don't think I could pick a single song, but the album A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector is definitely on repeat at my house all season.
3. Christmas scrapbooking is pretty much the only time I use glitter on my pages, so I make sure to use a lot of it.
4. The Muppets Christmas Carol - my absolute favorite.
5. Joyous Family Fun

Loredana Bucaria

1. For sure I’d choose chocolate cookies! Me and my boys love them and I finally found the best recipe ever!
2. I love all the Michael buble Christmas album together Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald songs.
3. I always include stamps! I can’t consider a page completed without them!
4. The Holiday that in Italian is L’amore non va in vacanza - I looove it - and The Polar Express! Love them! Every December I watch them!
5. Family, Wonder, Joy

Nathalie DeSousa

1. Polvorones ( walnut shortbread)
2. This one is hard because I always return to classical Hispanic villancicos – Christmas folk songs
3. Vellum and anything shiny!!!
4. Elf, and – my kids are going to kill me because I say this - Arthur’s Christmas (PBS)
5. Faith, Family, Memories

Vania Fonseca

1. I would choose cinnamon cookies, they're definitely one of my favorites.
2. I don't have a favorite Christmas song, but to get myself in the Christmas spirit while I craft, I usually search for a Christmas Playlist on youtube and listen to it during my creative time.
3. I love die-cuts and stamps so I always try to include them on my pages.

4. Home Alone. It ]s a classic and probably the one I watch the most in the holiday 

   season.
5. Christmas for me is all about Family, Food and December Daily. 😉

Elizabeth Heinz

1. Sugar cookie with LOTS of frosting 
2. You Make It Feel Like Christmas by Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton 
3. Stars, stars and MORE stars
4. The Holiday with Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law and Jack Black 
5. Quality family time 

Ashley Horton

1. It's not a cookie, but it would definitely be Oreo Truffles, forme! 
2. I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas
3. Chipboard
4. Scrooged
5. Merry, Family, Food 

Danielle Menage-Jensen

1. Gingerbread cookies—I'm completely obsessed with them, they just smell and taste like Christmas
2. It's not Christmas unless I'm fussing cutting along to Wham! and Last Christmas. I have to watch the music video too, George Michael's massive 80's hair is a must-see
3. Sequins - Christmas pages ALWAYS need sparkle
4. The Muppet Christmas Carol - I have to see Rizzo the rat in his little top hat
5. Fun, Festive, Frolics 

Nadia Meyer

1. Hard to decide because I really love, love Christmas cookies. My favorites are the cinnamon stars (perhaps it is only known in Switzerland) or the ones my aunt always makes. She is Italian and I love her "Turdilli Calabresi". Delicious.
2. I do not listen to music while crafting, but I love the Christmas albums of Elvis Presley and Michael Bublé. Also Elvis Presley's Gospel songs are amazing.
3. Stars, I can't live without them.
4. I rarely watch movies, but if I had to choose it would be Three Wishes for Cinderella.
5. Family. Magic. Joy.

Lorilei Murphy

1. If I could only eat one type of cookie (what a sad thing) I would choose a sugar cookie with icing!
2. I don’t usually listen to music while crafting, but if I did it would be Michael Buble’s Christmas album on repeat!
3. I almost always include a snowflake, I just love the shape and the layer of white!!
4. We always watched The Sound of Music at Christmas when I was a kid!
5. The three words that best describe Christmas for me would be - lights, rest & family. 

Neela Nalam

1. Christmas M&M cookies 
2. Last Christmas by Wham! 
3. Sequins
4. Home Alone
5. Family, Holidays, Festive 

Patricia Roebuck

1. Grinch cookies with pistachios and cranberries!
2. Step Into Christmas by Elton John
3. Confetti type embellishments like wood veneers, sequins, punched pattern paper.
4. Elf
5. Joyous, Reflective, Magical 

Amy Jo Vanden Brink

1. Sugar cookies! I love sugar cookies with royal icing, and I would trade them (in cute designs of course) for almost any other cookie!
2. I don't usually listen to music while I craft as my job is teaching music, but guaranteed this December the song I will listen to most often is Jingle Bells! If I had to pick a favourite song though, I would pick The Christmas Song by The Raveonettes.
3. I LOVE chipboard, and this year's chipboard circles are awesome because they are all exactly the same size! So perfect on the front and the back of a transparent piece.
4. Too many to count! I usually start the season with The Holiday but will always watch Christmas Vacation as well.
5. Family, Joy, Fun 

Trina Craig

1. Snowball cookiess! We have been making these my entire life.
2. My favorite Christmas song is Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, by Frank Sinatra.
3. Cut files cut from white paper, especially stars!
4. It's our family tradition to watch Home Alone 2 each Christmas Eve, but my favorite Christmas movies is Love Actually.
5. Family. Traditions. Joy.

3-to-Inspire with Patricia

 

Hello CTK friends!  Hope you have enjoyed the October Flourish Life Crafted kit reveal!  So much to love as always,  so I have a 3-to-Inspire to get started.  My 3-to-Inspire is:  Use the Star stickers, the Labels on the 4x6 card, and use a pattern paper in a color you wouldn't expect to work!

I am documenting our family's love of watching the DC Comic series on Netflix.  I started by Googling and finding photos for the shows we have watched as well as the current one.  I downloaded one of the TN Page Basics to add my journaling to it.

And then for the right side, I printed my photos in a cluster on 4x6 with the largest one being the current show we watch together.  This story is calling for those wonderful puffy stars, so I sprinkled quite a few of them around the photo.  I also used the inside piece from the stars that forms a hexagon!  They make great confetti for your pages.  I added those to both pages.

Lavender is not a color I would think of for these shows, but it works so well with the photos because of the colors in the photos as well as the pattern paper from the kit not being too busy or too dark.  

The design on both pages is simple, but to add more texture, color, and layers, I fussy cut labels from the 4x6 label card to add to both of these pages.  Then to finish, I added the pink labels from the kit and stamping.  The stamps I used on this project are the Ready for This, and the October 2020 Traveler's Notebook Stamp Sets.

Hope you give these 3 ideas from the kit a try on your next project!

Life Crafted with Marsha

Hey, CTK friends!  Marsha here with a Life Crafted layout using the gorgeous new October kits.  For my layout today, I used mainly the Scrapbooking Add-on kit, along with a few ephemera pieces and the stamp set from the Life Crafted Flourish kit.  

Here's a look at the spread:

The Add-on kit this month is FULL of the Crate Paper Marigold collection.  It is beautiful!  To begin the layout, I trimmed a patterned paper to 5x8.25" to fit as a full page in the album.  This gave me more space for adding lots of layering.  I chose several pieces from the Marigold ephemera pack (included in the Add-on kit) to create a large embellishment cluster.  I love that the ephemera includes vellum and cardstock pieces for a bit variety.   I also added a few ephemera die cuts from the Life Crafted kit to the edges of the cluster.  A gold bow puffy sticker and a few other puffy stickers from the kit finished off this page. 

Because the left side of the spread was a patterned background, I chose to use white cardstock as the base for the right page.  I trimmed it to 5x8.25" to fit as a full page.  I layered a patterned paper and some ephemera pieces behind my photo.  I loved the green floral die cut and chose to use it to frame the photo.  I used a gold puffy phrase sticker as the title for my layout, layering it over the edge of the photo.  The Marigold puffy stickers were perfect little embellishments for this page.  

I cut out a tag from a patterned paper and added it to the bottom of the page.  I handwrote my journaling on a label and adhered it, along with a vellum floral ephemera piece and puffy butterfly sticker, to complete the cluster.  I trimmed a small piece of the lace trim, included in the Add-on kit, and added it to the tag.  To finish off the spread, I added some stamping using the LC kit stamp and did a bit of machine stitching with black thread on several areas of the page.  

I love how this Life Crafted layout turned out using these amazing kits!  

Thank you for stopping by today!  Be sure to head over to the Citrus Twist Kits shop to check out this month's kits!

xo,

Hybrid Layout with Ashley Horton

 

Happy October 1st friends!!  It's my favorite month and time to document my favorite holiday...Halloween!  I was super excited to see the Halloween Digitals that are available for October and knew I could combine them with some of the products in the October Flourish Life Crafted Kit, to create a fun, Halloween layout!

I started my layout in Adobe Illustrator.  I like to "design" my layout first in Illustrator and get a feel for what I want the finished project to look like.  And, that way I already have my Digitals set up and ready to print.  I used one of the designs from the TN Page Basics Collection for the background on the left side of my layout.  It was perfect for adding my photo and then a few embellishments to complete the page.

I decided to pair the Wood Grain paper from the Flourish Kit with the TN Page Basics page that I printed out, to add some contrast to the layout.  Then, I started working with the fun Halloween digitals.  I arranged them in Illustrator, to figure out where I wanted them placed on my finished layout.  I love using the digitals, because you can change the size or take bits and pieces from them that you want to use.

While I was working with the Halloween Digitals, I decided it would be fun to add some vellum elements to the layout, also.  I opened up the PNG version of the Halloween cut file and printed them out on a sheet of vellum.  Then I placed them over some of the printed digitals and attached them with my tiny attacher or with machine stitching.

I hope you'll pick up the Halloween Digitals from the Citrus Twist Shop, and that you've found some fun ideas today, for using them on your own projects.  You can combine them with the Puffy Stickers from the Flourish Kit, to bring some dimension and texture to your layout!