A teacher is like a tree.

I did this page for some of my most favorite people in the world.  I worked with this bunch for, give or take, a couple of years.  I have a lot of love and respect for these people.  Some of us have already moved on, and of the original eight people in this pic, only half of us are left.  But even with the group we have now, it seems we are just one big happy family where we just keep adding people and nobody really leaves (at least in my heart).  The journaling is heartfelt, though probably riddled with mistakes, since I just winged it (and I haven't written anything like this in a long while).

 Journaling:  A teacher is like a tree.  It gives nourishment to flowers, fruits, & seeds, and provides them with what they need to thrive one day on their own.  And though the thought of it hurts, it knows it has to someday let go.  Its branches are extensive - because in order to teach, one must not only grow in one direction... one must branch out and grow in so many different ways.  Though what you see above ground, majestic it may be, is not all that it is - its roots are deep as well.  One must be grounded in one's values & beliefs.  It's important to remember that one teaches not only by what is said or done within the confines of the classroom, but by the way that one lives his life.  A tree continues to grow - the process of learning is a lifelong endeavor... it never stops.  A tree is strong and tough - able to withstand whatever challenges the world around it may throw from time to time.  It gives of itself with the purpose of allowing others to grow.

This layout is based on the sketch for challenge #4 on the Filipino Scrapbookers Challenge Blog.  This is my second entry.

Materials:  Cardstock (Mint Fancy Papers), patterned paper (All About Scrapbooking), die-cut cardstock (K & Company), stamps (Martha Stewart Crafts), ink pad (Fiskars), black brown pen (Dong-A), letter stickers, metallic glitter pen, & trim (All About Scrapbooking), Glossy Accents, others - heart punch and lace.

Flower Power

At last, I finally found a bit of time to work on a couple of pages for challenge #4 on the Filipino Scrapbookers Challenge Blog.  I woke up with a migraine yesterday morning, so I spent most of the day sleeping it off,  and it wasn't until yesterday evening that the headache was gone.  With the weekend just about to  start (we had Saturday classes this week), I thought it would be nice to take a craft break, since I haven't really done anything since last Sunday.

So here is the first entry - a page about my niece, Jillian.  The pictures were taken during her younger sister's birthday party last year.  They had a "Tangled"-themed party, so all the girls had flowers in their hair.  These pictures made me really happy just by looking at them.  It took a while to come up with a title, but once I decided on "Flower Power", I just had to pile on the blooms.

Materials:  cardstock (All About Scrapbooking), patterned paper (K & Company), flowers (Prima, Yellow Violet House), sentiment (Hallmark), pen (Faber-Castell), leaves, flower trim, brads, and gem stickers (All About Scrapbooking), others - lace, charm, safety pin, transparency.

Crafty Kids Project #1: What's in a name?

Not having posted anything for more than a week was deliberate on my part.  I, unfortunately, had a very busy week with exams and it only promises to get worse in the next couple of weeks with grades due soon.  But I did do something crafty this week and it had more to do with helping my nephew and nieces to get started scrapbooking.  A few weeks ago, my sister and I had talked about little crafty things the kids can do, instead of each one busy playing games with an iphone/ipad when they spend their Sundays afternoons together (such a waste!).  And we thought we'd start last Sunday, when we would also celebrate Jessica's birthday.
 
I thought it would be a little daunting ay first, and I guess it was right because it took me more than a whole day to prep for a couple hours' worth of craft time.  Earlier in the week, I did a little bit of research about how to teach kids how to scrapbook and I needed to think of a layout that can be done within on hour or so.  The kids' age range is from four to nine years old, so it shouldn't be so complicated that the youngest won't be able to follow, but challenging enough so that the bigger kids won't be bored.  I saw this video on youtube of a girl showing how she worked on a simple layout, and so I made a sketch loosely based on that.  I then made a list of materials that we would need and coordinated with my sister to get them ready so we can prepare individual kits for each kid.  On the day before, I made a sample page that the kids can easily refer to.

Sample layout

It's a layout entitled "What's in a name?" with the child's name as the title in big block letters and its meaning as the journaling.  Apart from the banner (which I've done in a few layouts and cards already), I kept the embellishments very simple.  Although after doing the sample page, I had to change it a bit... instead of cutting the names by hand (it just took too much time for me to do), I printed them (in outline format) right on the cardstock.  I also thought it would be fun for the kids to color them in.  What kid doesn't like to color, right?  Well, apparently, my youngest niece does not, and had her Mama (my sister) do most of the coloring :).  Anyway, I also printed out a curved line beneath the name as a guide for placing the little pennants for the banner.  The pennants are hand-cut pieces of adhesive patterned paper, this probably took me the longest to prep.  I printed out the journaling (my sister researched her children's names) and cut them out myself. I also cut the patterned paper to mat the journaling and the photo mat.  And finally, I just dug out a bunch of stickers from my stash that could be used to embellish their pages.  Here are the kids' finished pages:

Jessica, 8 years old

The birthday girl

 

Jillian, 6 years old

A little bit OC about her work 

(which is not a bad thing at all)

 Jasmine, 4 years old 

Had a lot of help from Mama

Jonas, 9 years old

The veteran, he's done this before, 

so he didn't need much help.

I also prepared kit for my sister, so she can also work on her own page while the kids are doing their thing.  Though she wasn't really able to finish it yet, since she was helping out her youngest.  I also made another kit for me to do a demo:

And as I was helping the kids, too, I wasn't able to concentrate on the page so the spacing (from top to bottom) is a bit off.  But that's okay. 

We all had a great time and the kids were proud of their work.  Hopefully, we can do this on a regular basis (once a month, perhaps?).  I already have a few ideas for next time. :-)

Horses are fun!

It was a long weekend we had been waiting for so we could go to Tagaytay for a bit of a break.  We planned on taking  the boys swimming, horseback riding, and maybe go to the zoo.  When that weekend came, the forecast wasn't all that good - it was supposed to rain.  So on the first bit of sunshine we did get (it was actually cloudy, but at least it wasn't raining), we headed outside and took advantage of the weather. 

I'm not one to follow trends or experiment much, but I must say, I did step out of my comfort zone a bit in this layout.  I found a super cute mini album in Echo Park's youtube channel that had some hexagons in them.  I thought that would be a fun element on this page.  After cutting out and placing all the little hexagons on a diagonal and positioning the pictures and journaling block (which I made again from scratch just like in Girly Girl), the top right part seemed to need something else.  I started considering adding paint to make it look less structured and more carefree.  Although I didn't like the idea of dripping all over the pics, so I used post-it notes and some scratch paper to mask the area I wanted to keep clean.  Next time, I probably should do the paint first before putting other things down (lesson learned). :)

This is most likely my last entry to the Filipino Scrapbookers Challenge Blog challenge #3.  Next week is our exam week so the next couple of weeks are sure to be busy.  Although I do hope I get some time to work on the next challenge.  I didn't expect to make as many pages as I did this week, but with school out the whole time because of the horrible weather, I had plenty of time to work on those pages. 

Materials:  Kraft cardstock (Sofun), white craft paint (Plaid), black brown gel pen (Dong-A), patterned paper and foam letter stickers (All About Scrapbooking), others - brads.

Sweet Sassy Baby

Sweet and sassy... that's our Jasmine!  We all still call her "Baby" because she is the youngest of four siblings, even though she's already 4 years old and that there are two younger cousins that we now also call "Baby" (as they are also the youngest among their own brood).  But I suppose Baby Jasmine has held on to the name the longest by far and nobody has yet decided to call her otherwise.  Perhaps when she starts school next year...

Although these are all group pictures, you can probably tell which one she is - the one with the sweetest smile in the pics on the left, and the one showing a bit of sass in the pics on the right.  She's a very sweet and thoughtful little girl most of the time, but she sometimes shows what a temper she's got when the other kids cross her.  I find it quite funny that the bigger kids are a bit scared of her - they definitely can not push this girl around.

Materials:  Patterned paper (Colorbok), alphabet stamps (Studio G), ink (Versafine Onyx Black), alphabet stickers (Making Memories), border punch (Fiskars), cardstock, and brads (All About Scrapbooking), others - thread.

Girly Girl

Here I have another entry for challenge #3 on the Filipino Scrapbookers Challenge Blog.  On this very wet and gloomy week, I wanted to do something cheery.  And I've been thinking of making a layout about the youngest member of our family - my niece, Danielle Sophia.  When I was planning this page, I was thinking to include a lot of flower embellishments, though I couldn't use anything too bright or bulky, lest they take away from the pictures.  I made the journaling block from a large circle and a bunch of smaller punched circle shapes from patterned paper.  I glued the little circles around the larger circle to create the scalloped border, a trick I've learned from Kristina Werner that she uses when she creates her cards.  I also used the same patterned paper to cover the tiny tags used to spell out "girl".  The last thing I did was some handwritten journaling to finish off this hopefully pretty layout for a pretty little baby.

Materials:  Patterned paper (K & Company), die-cut chipboard shapes (Yellow Violet House), felt flower sticker (Making Memories), ink (black brown Dong-A gel pen), eyelets, letter stickers, felt & glitter stickers, and die-cut flower stickers (All About Scrapbooking).

Rainbows (amidst all this rain!)

It has been raining non-stop today, and we've actually had this gloomy weather for many days now.  So when I unearthed this picture last week when I was looking for baby pics in my phone, it seemed quite appropriate to create a layout with it.  This was actually taken way back in March (when the weather was rainy even if it was already the beginning of summer).  And for the first time in my life, I saw a double rainbow. 

For the journaling, I included the lyrics from several songs about rainbows.  As for the design, I am still loving those chevrons, although I don't think it took me as long as the first time I made them (click here to see the layout). Used paper scraps again, this time from the Best Friends layout.  I like to hang on to scraps and I'm happy to use them for other pages/crafts.  For this particular set of scraps (6"x6" paper from the Nostalgia stack from All About Scrapbooking), I have another layout in the works, and I think there will still be some left over.  The only downside is that I have trouble organizing/storing them. :-P

Materials:  Cardstock (Mint Fancy Papers), flowers (Prima), patterned paper and pearl brad (All About Scrapbooking), ink (stamp pad-Fiskars, pen-Sharpie & Dong-A), alphabet stamps (Studio G), others - thread, pearl stickers.

XOXO Baby Boy

Last Sunday, for the first time ever, my nephew and I joined an All About Scrapbooking event that was held in Sta. Lucia East.  I think I will post a separate entry just for that, but all I wanted to say about it for now was that it was "Ready, Set, Scrap - Baby Edition", and that I spent most of last Saturday getting ready for it.  And that involved having pictures printed out at a nearby photo lab.  So I have a lot of baby pictures left over and I thought that it would be nice to take a break from re-doing pages from an old scrapbook.

So this is a brand new page that I made with the intention of joining challenge #3 at the Filipino Scrapbookers Challenge Blog.  Here is the layout that I'm building this page from:

I made this layout about my nephew (who is now a teenager and already in high school) when he was still a baby.  We were all so enamored by him, being the first apo and pamangkin in our family, on top of being such an adorable little baby. 

It took me a while to figure out what I would use as a large diagonal strip.  Then just this morning, I was inspired by this patterned paper I saw in a video on Kristina Werner's youtube channel.  It had a zigzag/chevron pattern that looked like a quilt.  And then in another video, she makes a card using strips of patterned paper to make a chevron pattern.  So I thought it would be fun to try, and the best part was that I had a bunch of scraps that was perfect for it.  I took me a while to finish the page... with the chevron pattern taking the longest to do.

And just when I thought I was done, I added one last embellishment - the paper flower that I had embossed with the Cuttlebug Swiss Dots embossing folder and attached with a pretty brad.  Still looks simple despite the busy looking patterned paper chevron strip. :)

Materials:  Patterned paper (DCWV), cardstock, paper flower, foam letters, die-cut bookplate (All About Scrapbooking), brad (Making Memories), black blue gel pen (Dong-A), white couache pen (Chaue).  Others - clear stickers.

Page Remake: Gateway Arch

A sequel of sorts of my previous post - another scrapbook page about our trip to MO back in 2000.  We drove from IL to St. Louis and headed straight to Six Flags (though I haven't remade the page with those pictures yet).  The next morning, we went to the Gateway Arch and the St. Louis zoo (to see that layout, click here).  Here are the pictures from the top and the bottom of the arch.  It was a bit cloudy that day, but we still had fun.  Included some ephemera here - the ticket and brochure.

Supplies:  Cardstock (All About Scrapbooking), flowers (Prima w/ Glimmer Mist), rhinestone flowers (Craft World).  Others - alpha rub-ons.

Page Remake: St. Louis Zoo

I meant to post this a while ago - it's been sitting as a draft for quite some time now (since June).  I actually made this back in May nearing the end of summer break, when I tried to do as much as I could before classes/work started again.  This is, once again, a remake of a page from my old US scrapbook.  The pictures were taken during our road trip to St. Louis, MO in the summer of 2000. The old page had the all the pictures laid out exactly like this on a bare scrapbook page, with no embellishments whatsoever.  Though I didn't add much to it either, just a sticker, some brads, ribbons, and animal die-cuts (that are super cute).  The title block is actually the top part of the map/brochure of the St. Louis Zoo peeping out of a hidden pocket.

Supplies:  Cardstock (DCWV), flower brads and grosgrain ribbon (All About Scrapbooking), die-cut animal shapes (Papemelroti), stickers (Hallmark/All About Scrapbooking), corrugated paper (DIY Toys).