Nancy's Scraproom

I am pretty organized, but want to get nice shelves and cabinets for my space.


I have a large space with nice tables...you can see the tables are a bit messy.

I have all my paper sorted by color.

I love all of the space I have to scrap and I have organized all of my paper, embellishments, ribbon and albums. I can find everything easily and it is nice to spread out and be able to leave my stuff out to work on. I really want some pretty shelves but I am still deciding what I want and other things in the house seem to come first!

Heather's Scraproom

Here it is, as promised,Heather's scrapspace. I think the best way to discribe it is "a work in progress" These are the Before & After Pictures of my space. I say space because I don't really have a room. I share 1/2 of the back living room with my kids, 1/2 scrap space 1/2 kids TV, couch and whatever else they drag in there on a daily basis. Although I'd love a room all to myself, I kind of enjoy this set-up this way I can enjoy being with my kids while I'm working on the computer and scrapping away. But believe me I'm counting down the days to either a bigger house with a room to call my own or for one of those kids to grow-up and move away so I can take over their bedroom!

This is the "before" picture of my space. Although it dosn't look to bad here (these pictures were taken after we recently moved in, so its relatively clean) but belive me the clutter and large work area were recipe for disaster to keep clean! I really disliked how everything even when clean was not "pretty" to look at. Especially since I had to share my space with the livingroom.

This is my before desk and work area. I LOVED my old kitchen table. It was huge and had lots of room to spread out on, but that was the problem, it was too large for the room, and becasue I had lots of room to spread out I did, resulting in massive piles of stuff...

This is my new desk...well what it can look like when I allow it to get messy. (I told ya we'd share the good, bad & ugly didn't I?) The good thing, I have very little space and if its messy I can't scrap so it dosn't usally stay messy for long!

This is my new space. I started it last fall, it is most definatly not exactly where I want it, but like I said its a work in progress. One of the first steps to re-doing my space was purging. I realized I had so much stuff over the last 10 years of scrapping that there was just so much I wasn't using and didn't need. So I donated much of it to a local womens shelter, and then sold the rest on Craig's List. This was key to orginizing my space, although it was hard to get rid of so much stuff, it really helped me to see what I had and no I actually USE it!

I wanted my space to not only have function but also form. So items that were pleasing to look at were keept on display and the rest was filed away into boxes or drawers. I have my collection of Prima flowers at the top of my shelf along with baskets and jars holding my ribbons, idea books, pencils and such.

I reporposed an old entertainment Center to house the majority of my scrapping stuff and my laptop and such. With a new coat of paint (ok about 20 coats) my old entertaimnet center has become my favorite piece of scarpbook funiture. I loved that the shelves were deep enough for my 12x12 items and they didn't hang over the edge (a huge pet peve with my bookshelves). The top holds all my 12x12 albums, then my photo boxes with misc. supplies, tools and embellishments, my cardstock on the left and pattern paper on the right, two 12x12 drawer towers, and right in the middle my laptop, work station, printer, idea books, sillouette etc.

My scrap desk is directly across for my shelf, this makes it easy to go back and forth between my PC and my scrapbooking projects.

I found photo boxes on sale at Michales 3 for 5.oo, I'm still in the process of finishing them but I spraypainted the bottom 1/2 and recoverd the lid in a plaid paper (by Chatterbox) that matches the paint and mood of my room. These boxes hold everything from Punches, Paint, Flowers, Brads, & Eyelits. (I'm going to get them all labled as soon as I finish recovering the rest of the boxes!)

I house all of my cardstock & Pattern paper in Steralite totes. each tote hold well over 500 sheets of paper, I have 2 totes for cardstock & 2 for Pattern papers. I like to orginize my paper by color becasue that's how I scrap, and it works best for me.

On the bottom of each side I ahve 2 12x12 towers. These towers are made by Iris and each hold 6 drawers. On the left side the towers hold themed items such as Christmas, Fall, Spring, Summer, Boy's, &Girls. In each of those catagories I have sub catagories such as in Fall I have school, Thanksgiving, ect. On the Right side 3 drawers hold my huge chipbard collection (I know I'm addicted) 1 drawer each also holds, letters, words, and tags.

So there you have it, Heather's scrap Space...now I want to see YOURS! And don't forget the ICE challenge...

Its that time again, time to open the windows let the fresh air in and get that Spring Cleaning done! This months challenge will hopefully help you do just that. Maybe your pretty organized already, maybe your scrap area looks like a tornado hit, maybe your family would like to eat on the dining room table again, no matter what kind of space you have we want to see & hear about it. Simply take a photo of your space or great organization idea (we LOVE cheep stuff made scrappy and useful!) and email it to us at info@iceescape.net its that easy! We’ll post our favorite pictures to the blog. Make sure to check the blog for additional tips and details how to vote on your favorite spaces. We will have categories in messiest, most improved (before & after pics needed), prettiest/most organized, and best organization idea. And to make you all feel better we’ll go first, check out the blog for pictures on our scrap spaces-yep the good, the bad & the Ugly!

Easter 365

Yes, I know its Wednesday. Sorry guys, somehow Easter and Spring Break has me a bit turned upside down. I’m sure you other moms out there can easily relate! Anyhow I know you’re all on pins and needles for this weeks Tuesday Inspiration so without further a due…

Our albums not only house our priceless photos and memories, but also tell a story about us. Our albums will become the legacy of who we are. Not just our names, birthdates, and holiday traditions, but our dreams, our thoughts, our opinions, our struggles and our faith. If we only scrapbooked the happy good times that really wouldn’t leave the reader a very clear picture of who we are, don’t we want future generations to know what was really important to us, that we were real people with real lives and not just some picture of a stranger staring back at you?

With Easter on our heals, I thought it appropriate to do a IT on scrapbooking your Faith. For many, faith is something important in their lives, and it should be recorded. For me I want my children and my children’s children to have a glimpse in my soul to know where I stood in my Faith and the importance it is in my life. I have chosen to create a “Book of Faith” this is an album just for that, recording my thoughts about my faith and relationship with Christ. For you a whole album dedicated to the subject might not be appropriate, maybe consider just one layout, or maybe even a mini album.

Create LO’s without pictures… Here is a layout I did after I finished a several month long study on the book of Leviticus, I wanted to record what I learned through the study.

One of the great things about this album is I enjoy doing random pages about topics maybe not typical in my regular albums. I also enjoy trying different techniques and stepping out of my box when creating these pages. Since the page is usually more about the subject & journaling I find freedom to do unique things that I maybe wouldn’t try in my regular albums.

You may want to consider creating a layout or two, or maybe start your own Book of Faith documenting who you are, what is important to you ,and leave a legacy.

Winners!!

Congratulations to the winners of the St. Patty’s Day Games! I went with the unofficial, unbiased, unaffiliated, random number picker of a local ten year old. LOL

The winners of the Shamrock Find are…

Cindy and Lorrie!!

Great job ladies for playing along and finding the hidden shamrocks. You have won a darling stamp set by studio G, found at Archivers, and a Gift Certificate to Just Scrappin’!

Next we have the Lucky Comments Challenge, and the winner of a 50.00 ICE Gift Certificate to be used towards ICE registration is….

Trina!!

And Another 50.00 ICE Gift Certificate towards ICE registration, just for being great and joining the ICE newsletter goes to…

shaykessler!!!!

Congratulations to all of our big winners! Everyone please send us your snail mail addresses so we can get these prizes out to you! You can email them to info@iceescape.net

Keep watching the ICE Blog & Newsletter for more fun contests and prizes!! Thanks everyone for playing along!!

Holiday Traditions

I love holidays! I love the special things we do to celebrate that brings our families together, and help to build memories for our kids. Our family has a few traditions that we have incorporated over the years to make the holidays more special. Tonight we're doing our family tradition of dying Easter eggs. I think I love dying eggs as much as the kids do. I guess it's the creative side of me coming out to play. On Sunday many of those dyed eggs will be consumed and eaten at our annual family gathering at my husband's granmother's house. I'm in charge of the deviled eggs every year, and the family members are happy to eat the discolored eggs where the dye soaked through on a couple. This is also the annual grandkids egg hunt. As the grandkids are getting older, it ws discussed that this event might end this year, but we've decided to still keep it going strong - much to the delight of my almost twelve-year-old who insists she's not too old to hunt Easter Eggs, especially for the ones that have prizes inside!

So, we want to hear from you. What are your family traditions for the holidays? How will you be spending Easter this year? Or even tell us about other holiday's traditions. Do you think you'll keep these traditions as time goes on? How have your traditions changed over time? Oh - and if you have a cute scrapbook layout documenting a tradition - we'd love to see it!

Got Photos?

If you’re like me you take lots of photos. Especially now that I’ve gone digital, whew! It’s not hard to take 300 pictures at one birthday party when you have an empty camera card, full battery, and willing (or sometimes not willing!) subjects! But then when it’s time to sit down and scrap those photos I can easily get a bit overwhelmed. There once was a day that I felt I needed to scrap each and every photo, thank goodness I have let those reigns go! But it still can be a daunting task to figure what photos are page worthy and how to fit as many of those photos on one LO as possible; all the while still leaving room for journaling, papers and creative elements (I mean what is scrapbooking without all those elements but just a photo album right?).

One thing that I have learned to help me with this task is sketches. I Love, Love , Love sketches, and hardly can create a LO without at least consulting my “idea book” (watch for more info on my idea book coming to an Inspiration Tuesday soon!!) One thing I look for in a sketch if I have many photos to scrap is number of photos, orientation (vertical or horizontal photos) and a LO that fits the theme & mood of the look I’m going for.

I got thios great sketch from www.pagemaps.com in the Aug. 2006 Archives

I chose this sketch because it incorporated lots of photos, plus let me highlight a favorite photo and still had room to be creative. I wanted to create a 2 page LO so I used the original sketch for the left side of my LO and flipped it 90* for the right side. Now one thing about sketches is that you have creative license to alter the sketch in any way you choose, a sketch for me many times is just a jumping point for my LO to start, once I have photo placement then the real creative fun can begin!



This sketch uses several small cropped photos, this is a great way to incorporate lots of photos onto a LO without overpowering your page with pictures. You can of course manually crop your photos with a trimmer to get the correct size, but unfortunately this method will tend to cut away much of the photo. So the way I prefer to get the photos the exact size I want without losing much of the original is to digitally crop the photo in Photoshop. After I crop my photos I copy & paste them into a blank canvas sized 8x10 for printing. Don’t forget to set your canvas resolution at a min. of 300, flatten all your layers and change it to a JPG before printing. Then it’s all ready to send it off to your favorite developer!

After you print your collage 8x10 photo you’ll want to cut apart the photos and arrange them on your LO. In this case since I was doing a bock-pieced look, I just used some white cardstock for the bottom layer. This way I don’t waste my nice bazzil cardstock or pattern paper. (*tip* I like to save the white cardstock inserts from my 12x12 album page protectors for this)

After my pictures are laid out and adhered to my white background cardstock, the fun can be begin. Now I can finish the page using my Pattern papers, embellishments, title & journaling.

Top O' the Mornin' to Ya!

In honor of todays holiday the ICE chicks have a few fun things for you! There have been 3 shamrocks hidden in the blog, send us an email at info@iceescape.net when you find it and we'll randomly pick 2 names for a PRIZE! Whooo! Dont'cha just love FREE stuff??

Also as a fun little game we are giving away some GREEN! Tell us what makes you lucky and we'll randomly pick 1 winner to win a $50.00 ICE Gift Certicate! Yep you (or a friend if your already registerd) can get 50.00 off your ICE Registration!! All you need to do is just post how lucky you are right here in this posts comments (see link at bottom of post)

And last (but certanly not least!) if you haven't signed up for our great newsletter yet-make sure to do that TODAY! (go to http://www.iceescape.net/ and click on the newsletter button on the left side of the home page) Everyone who is signed up for the newsletter will go into a random drawing for yet another $50.00 ICE GIFT CERTIFICATE!! Again, if your already signed up pass it along to a friend, cropping is always more fun with another "chick".

Oh and watch out soon for our details on how to become a ICE VIP, "Cool Chick" Details will be announced in the upcoming newsletter along with the next ICE Challenge, enter and win an awesome prize from ICE!!

You only have till Friday 3/21 to enter, check back here on sturady to see who the LUCKY winner's are!!

You Must Have a Little Rain to Make a RAINBOW

Can you belive it? March is almost 1/2 over! Where does the time go? As most of you know, St. Pattys day is just around the corner (March 17th to be exact). And while looking for a unique cookie recipe for the school bake sale, I came across this fun recipe at http://www.allrecipes.com/ . I thought it was perfect with the upcoming holiday and the rainy gloomy days we have had as of late. I have to say my kids had a blast making these cookies, and so I thought I'd share with you. Maybe you too can make a batch to brighten up somones rainy day, or get out of that green shamrock rut for St. Patrick's Day and make some bright cheeful rainbows instead!

Rainbows
Submitted by: DARBYANNE
Yields: 30 servings
"A 4-colored cookie dough that is shaped into a log and sliced to form rainbows."

INGREDIENTS:
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup white sugar
3/4 cup butter, softened
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon almond extract
assorted colors of paste food
coloring
4 tablespoons prepared vanilla
frosting
1/4 cup yellow decorator sugar
DIRECTIONS:
1.
Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg, vanilla and almond extracts. Gradually add the flour and salt. Beat at low speed until well blended.
2.
Divide dough into 10 equal sections. Combine 4 sections of he dough with red paste-type coloring until smooth. Combine 3 sections of the dough with green coloring until smooth. Combine 2 sections of the dough with yellow coloring until smooth, and combine remaining dough with blue coloring. Wrap each section of dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
3.
Shape blue dough into an 8-inch log. Shape yellow dough into 8x3-inch rectangle; place on waxed paper. Place blue log in center of yellow rectangle and fold yellow edges up around blue log, pinching to form seal. Roll to form smooth log. Roll green dough into 8x5-inch rectangle. Place yellow log in center, pinch edges of green to seal; roll smooth. Roll red dough into 8x7-inch rectangle. Place green log in center, pinch edges of red to seal and roll smooth. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate 1 hour.
4.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Lightly grease or line baking sheets with parchment paper.
5.
Cut log in half length-wise. Cut each half into 1/4 inch slices. Place slices 1 inch apart on prepared baking sheets.
6.
Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 8 to 12 minutes. (Do not brown.) Cool on cookie sheets 1 minute. Remove to wire racks and let cool completely. Pipe small amount of white frosting on bottom corner of each cookie to resemble a cloud. Sprinkle with yellow decorating sugar. Let stand until frosting is set.





Enjoy!

Last year, my son came home from Kindergarten with an interesting assignment, build a Leprechaun trap. Now honestly I had never even considered trying to catch a Leprechaun, or building a trap to do it, so the challenge was on.

Legend has it that Leprechauns are elf like little old men who wear a top hat, and they are known to be pranksters and like to tick the unexpected. If you catch a Leprechaun he will offer you his pot of god as bribery to let him go.

After a little research we found a Leprechaun trap can be made any way you chose. Although the more creative the better, Leprechauns are attracted to the color green, rainbows, anything sparkly, money, & four leaf clovers.

After building our trap using a shoe box, lots of fun pattern paper (from moms scrap stash of course), a small bucket and pennies we were ready to set it and see what would happen.

The next morning (which just happened to be St. Patrick’s day of course) we all were quite surprised to find that we didn’t catch a Leprechaun but we came close! He left us some treats and some tricks too.

He turned our milk green and our muffins green too, but they sure tasted good with our Lucky Charms!

And maybe this year we’ll build a better trap and maybe just catch that sneaky Leprechaun!

Spring Forward

Just a friendly reminder to set your clocks ahead 1 hour tonight!

My sweet friend Gwennie made this darling clock. She hand made it using a plate, clock kit, brads & pattern paper, isn't she just clever??

February Layout Contest Winner!!

We got some super great entries for the layout contest last month. It was very hard for the judges to choose a winner. Congratulations to Angie Jackson from Nampa Idaho! Her adorable layout features two special someones!

Contratulations Angie!! As the winner of the monthly challenge, you win a fun package of spring time goodies: Chipboard embellishments and letters, matching brads, shimmery pink flowers, and some fun spring time paper. (by the way, we picked up these goodies at World Class Scrappers in Boise)

Due to other business focus, our March newsletter and challenge announcement is coming out a bit later this month. We have a great challenge idea in store for you though, so get ready and you can win a prize too! Thank you to everyone who entered!! All entries were fantastic. Here are our other two favorite entries submitted by Lorrie and Jessica:

And the winner is.....Drawing for Early Bird Registration's Free Spot to ICE

To make the drawing easy for us, and fair for all of you, we made a list of everyone who signed up during Early Bird Registration and. We then assigned each of you a number.

We then threw all the numbers into the "ICE Bucket" and drew a number.

And the winner is.....

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Are you ready.......

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Someone super lucky.....

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Someone getting a full refund back on their Early Bird Registration.....

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Congratulations to....

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STARR THOMPSON!!!! From Star Idaho!!!!

Favorite Photos

Ok I think I must have one of the cutest kids in the whole world (I’m not biased at all). Its lucky he’s so darn cute because on some days it’s his only saving grace. LOL When I saw this picture I knew it needed to be showcased, although it’s not the best photograph the expression is priceless, and just looking at it makes you smile.

When creating this LO, I wanted to keep simple lines and a lighthearted “boy” approach. I wanted the photo to be the main focus so I blew it up 8x10. By using several pattern papers the LO has a complicated look, but rest assured it’s really quite easy! Don’t have a boy? You can adapt this LO using any of your own pattern Papers and coordinating embellishments to showcase one of your own special photos.

Supplies:
Adhesive, Trimmer, scissors, 3 coordinating Pattern papers (Bo Bunny Shabby princess line used), 2 sheets of orange cardstock (bazzil ), 1 sheet of navy Blue Cardstock (bazzil) 1 sheet of green ric-rack edged cardstock (bazzil), red, yellow, & green cardstock (bazzil) –scraps are great, Ribbon, navy button,3 star chipboard shapes, Quickuts Revolution Diesel Alpha and swirl emboss folders, Azurite, Dark Moss, & Lipstick red chalk inks (colorbox).

Cut 3 1/4 off the striped pattern paper, you won’t be using this strip so discard to your scrap pile. Cut another 3 inch strip and Adhere it to the left edge on the right side of your LO. Use the remaining stripe paper and adhere to the right edge of the left side of you LO.

Next chalk the edges of your pre-cut rickrack edged green cardstock in dark Moss. Then adhere centerd on the right side of your LO.

Cut 2 strips 5 ½ x 12 out of the dot paper. chalk edges using Azurite


Cut your star paper 7 ¾ x 101/4 adhere to the right hand corner of the right page. Over that Adhere the dot pattern paper to both sides of LO, about 1/3 of the way up.

For the title we will be using a fun tool, the Quickuts Revolution. You can find the Revolution and its dies at World Class scrappers in Boise where Quickuts are always 30% off!!


First you will need to cut your carstock 4x4 to fit in the Revolution.

Place your magnetized letters on the plate. your cardstock and the shim, turn the crank and wala! A title-yep it’s that easy!


Next is the fun part. Using the swirl embossing folder, place your die cut letters inside the folder, and run it through the revolution..and wala…embossed swirls on your letters!

Arrange title to span across both sides of the LO. for a little extra fun I added a small button for the period.


Next cover your chipboard stars in cardstock & chalk

Tie a ribbon in the centers


Cut out a few extra stars out of the Pattern paper and then adhere along with your photo.

And there you have it, my Mr. personality. isn't he cute? Now go capture your Mr (or Miss) Personality and get a special page scrapped!