A Scrappy New Year...

I wish everyone a very happy and scrappy 2011!! I've been slow on recovering from all the traveling and holiday busyness.  To be quite honest, I thought I had lost my inspiration!  For some reason I'm into minimalistic stuff right now, maybe I'm just lazy, but it poses an interesting challenge, to create something beautiful without much adornment.  Here's my latest batch of layouts.

I recently signed up to get the Limited Edition kit from My Creative Scrapbook and I'm smitten so far! The kit was very reasonably priced and had so many goodies! No add-ons and I got very very cool papers, flowers, embellishments and fibers.  I had already bought the Night Divine collection, but it's always good to have more than one of these incredibly beautiful papers. This is my baby during one of our holiday shopping trips.  The background is this beautiful store where they had such amazing Christmas decorations.  He was so excited about it!

I actually used the sketch that came with the kit.  Never actually followed a sketch before, and found it to be very useful when your imagination just doesn't work quite well at that moment.  Papers from Night Divine by CI, and Holly Jolly by MME.  The holly berries are Prima and came with the kit.  I used a lot of the chipboard from the MME collection Holly Jolly from my stash.

The next layout really did give me grief until I just let go.  The die cut flocked paper from CI was just so beautiful that nothing I added seemed right.  Except for the gold poinsettia and the leafy bead sprays.  So I left it at that.  The poinsettia is cut from a flower stem bought at Michaels and the golden beads are from the MCS kit. The pic was taken outside and my baby was so excited about the Santa hat!

The next layout is another first for me.  I made a two page layout using the beautiful Noel pps from Teresa Collins.  I had been saving that paper with all the numbers for a layout, but they did not all fit one page.  So I did a collage of sorts spanning over two pages.  

The embellishing is minimal here, I just added some 3D dots to all the numbers and then placed them on the cardstock.  

On the last page I added some Prima Poinsettias and a jingle bell, for a simple elegant look.  I actually like the minimalistic elegance look of Teresa Collins' papers.  I also used a lot of the wallet-sized prints I had gotten of these cute pictures of my baby.

The next layout is also following that minimalistic elegance style that I love from Teresa Collins.  I used a strip of numbers from the Noel cardstock and then used a half bracket layered over black and white flocked paper from Le Creme by MME.  The title is also cut from the TC Noel pps. 

The  last layout is not my favorite, but I did like the TC pps quote I used to embellish it.  To me, family is the most precious gift of all, and I got to do just that these holidays, as I got to visit my family in Mexico.  

The ribbon here is twisted and I actually sewed the twists so it would stay in place.  The rest is quite simple, just some paper layering and minor distressing.  

The original cut out from the TC papers was black & white, and I used my copic markers to fill in the roses and leaves and some of the flourishes.  TFL!!!