I had so much fun decorating for my daughter's Frozen inspired birthday party. I wanted to make her party unique and I also wanted to only create decorations that I could use again in my regular home decorating. This is when I came up with these "frosted" Christmas trees.



This was a total experiment for me to see if it would work and it worked perfectly so I wanted to share it with you because it's super easy!

I am asked all the time about how I photograph my scrapbook pages and what makes them so crisp and bright. I'm excited to finally bring this tutorial to you. I'm basically, just going to show you my workflow. I like quick and simple so don't worry, it's super easy and I hope it helps just a little bit on answering your questions.

With so much going on at the end of the week last week, I decided to post the rest of the week's photos in one day. Since Friday was the beginning of (i)DSD, I didn't want you to miss all the fun going on at The Lilypad.


I really slowed down with the photos this weekend. I don't even have any photos from Sunday. So, let's see what I've got for the rest of the week and weekend.

I knew I'd have a day that was so busy I'd forget to pull out the camera for most of it. I lost lots of photos today, but it's ok, I can still complete Ali Edwards' Week In The Life without them. I am considering setting an alarm for the top of the hour and taking a snapshot of each hour in our house. I think that would be tons of fun to see.

I'm impressed with myself, I'm still going strong on the photo taking and keeping up with Ali Edwards' Week In The Life. I suppose it's only day two but I'm sure Thursday's photos will be pretty slim pickin's. 

It's probably a good thing it's a holiday weekend so I'll get some Halloween photos on Friday at least. I think as long as I get 10 photos each day, I'll be happy. I need to remember on Thursday to take those photos of things like food we eat and other chores we do.

OUR TUESDAY IN PHOTOS

I called Tuesday our "Introvert Day"! With being so busy on Monday, I needed a day of just staying home to prepare for a busy Wednesday and coming weekend. I'm sure I'll have another one on Thursday before the busy weekend. Yes, I stayed in my yoga pants and t-shirt all day. I love days like this!

One of my favorite scrapbook albums I do every year is Ali Edwards' Week In The Life. I love everything about it. I love looking back each year and seeing how things have changed. This is my fourth year doing it and already I'm having a blast. I thought that this year I'd share the photos and everything on the blog. Then when I finish the album I'll share the whole album.

I was so excited to see on vacation that we hit 500 likes on my Facebook page, and so quickly after 250 likes. As promised I've made a new freebie! 

This freebie is completely inspired by our vacation. The 4"x6" card is actually a photo I took on our date night sunset cruise. I had fun playing with brushes and actions to give it a watercolor sketchy look. The anchor was inspired by my niece who I spent time practicing drawing an anchor to add to her ceramic bowl she painted at the art barn. I had such a great time with both my nieces at an art barn doing some painting and then browsing the art galleries in town.

I know it's a tad different for me, but I'm in love with how it turned out. I hope you like it too!

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I wanted to share another Photoshop editing tutorial with you this week. I've been doing a lot of project photo editing lately with the mixed media tutorials and for design teams and my weekly pocket scrapbook pages, so I thought I'd share some easy photography editing tips with you today.

This is something I feel very passionate about sharing with you as I've found so many stuck on feeling like they need to do a two-page spread every single week and struggling some weeks to fill those two pages up. 

Where do you print your photos for your weekly scrapbook pages? I get this question often. I've tried several places and finally found the place I like the best.

The Print Module, is the reason I upgraded from Lightroom 2 to Lightroom 5. This is my favorite feature of Lightroom and has shaved off hours of printing preparation time. After watching this video at 2 Peas in a Bucket, I knew I had to spend the money on upgrading my software.

Welcome back to our weekly edition of Workflow Wednesday. I've got a quick clean photo edit tutorial for Lightroom today. 

This Lightroom tutorial is really "quick" but it's important for later on in our process of editing and printing our photos for the week. I didn't want to skip this step just because it's so easy, but it's going to be very important when it comes to preparing our photos for printing.

Before I upgraded my Lightroom software, It was taking too many hours, that I didn't have, just prepping my photos for print each week. There were not enough hours in the day and I needed to figure out a way to add a few more hours to my day by speeding up my photo preparations routine. I wanted to get to the fun stuff, the creating and story telling. In this series, I'm going to show you how Adobe Lightroom added more hours to my day.

Welcome back to another addition to Workflow Wednesday! I sat down with a calendar and planned this whole series through the end of the year! I'm really excited about sharing my workflow with you through the year starting with taking the photos all the way to how to photograph your layouts and save for web for posting to the galleries and your own blogs!

Oh goodness... I can't tell you how much I LOVE LOVE LOVE the new BYOC at The Lilypad. The color scheme as the winner of the iDSD BYOC color scheme game we had back in early November and I LOVE all the different shades of greens in it and the pop of orange and yellow. I think this might be my most fave BYOC ever. It's such a great spring color scheme and I'm sooooo ready for Spring!!! I ended up doing three pages with it instead of squeezing it all onto 2 pages because I love it so much! Plus, the week splits between February and March so I found the three pages helped me to keep the two months separate in my album. 

I apparently had a ton to say this week and did lots of journaling and doodling on my pages.

Here are the two pages for the end of February...
This first page is mostly the regular everyday moments in our house, a little bit of homeschooling, chores, playing and just plain cuteness. I know I'm a bit biased, but these three are the most beautiful kiddos I know.

Last week we took advantage of the kids enter free in February deal at the Museum of Science and Industry. This is one of my favorite museums in the city and growing up in the suburbs I've been there many times. One of my favorite parts is seeing the little chicken hatchlings. They are just so stickin' adorable! Of all the many times I've been there, I've never actually seen a baby chick hatch and kick out of it's egg... until this last week. Isn't he/she adorable?

It's been awhile since I've shared some of my art journal pages. I've been really focusing on my One Little Word this year, and it seems my art journal pages reflect that. I've done a few pages with "focus" as my title, but they all are so very different, which I'm totally loving about them.
Here's one I did using a photo I took of some Thickers through my glasses! This was pretty fun to create using masks and also converting a copy of the photo to a pencil drawing. I LOVE how it turned out and can't wait to print it up and put it in my Project Life album!

I was trying to figure how how I was going to do monthly but still kind of keep to the weekly schedule, and decided to split week 5 into two pages. The left side is the rest of January and the right side is the first two days of February. I'm really like how this came out. Sweet Shoppe Designs had a really fun collaboration that week that was free with purchase and I had fun working with it, blending in doodles and still using my fave painterly styles to change it from clean and graphic to a more mixed media feel.
Pretty Amazing Project Cards by Sweet Shoppe Designs
Painterly Styles by Krystal Hartley
Becky Higgins Project Life Design A page protectors and journaling pens, Uni-Ball Signo White gel pen, Silhouette Portrait, white cardstock, Canon Pixma, Tombow adhesive, assorted alpha stickers, Photoshop CS5

This winter has been really hard on me and I needed something bright and rainbow-ish to cheer me up... Since I couldn't find anything, I decided to design my own... I'm having fun on Lynne-Marie's Design Team creating journal cards with her designs, so I found a color scheme I liked that was bright and rainbow-ish and used her mixed media brushes to create these cards... I'm sooo in LOVE with how they turned out and they were soooo perfect for what I was looking for!!! I also printed some of CD Muckosky's cards and elements and my fave label set from Amy Wolff. This is a really simple page compared to my normal pages but I just loved the cards so much I didn't feel the need to add anything else and wanted them to SHINE!!! I also created this for a challenge I was hosting at The Lilypad, to create a title using 5 or more different alphas (credits linked below)... it was soooo fun creating this title card and I really love how it turned out.

Oh... and before I forget to mention... I got these cool filters that turn your lens into a macro lens... and I had just gotten them and it was snowing out and I had to try it out... that's the photo in the top left using my 50mm 1.4... I think I'm gonna try to use my zoom lens next time and see how that works... but I'm totally excited to give these filters a try with snowflakes and other things!!!

Chalk It Up: Big Dreamer by CD Muckosky
A Blessed Life by CD Muckosky
Happy Chips: Bright + Beautiful by CD Muckosky
Mega Label Pack by Amy Wolff
Michelle Godin's Teeny Tiny Alphas
Jacque Larsen's Black Tie Affair
Valorie Wibben's Sassmouth alpha w/ Lauren Reid
Kate Hadfield's Snippets 2
Kaye Winiecki's Off Base
Kaye Winiecki's Hexies
Becky Higgins Project Life Design A page protector and journaling pens, Studio Calico gold stars and wood veneer arrows, Tim Holtz alpha stickers, Pebbles roller stamp, Tombow adhesive, Canon Pixma, white cardstock, Silhouette Portrait