Jimmy Buffet, Labor Day, & MDS...Oh My!

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Hey y'all. Happy Friday! I hope you've all had a great week and are looking forward to an even better weekend. Don't you wish they could all be 3 day weekends? That would be so great!!!

Well, last weekend we all (there's about 15 of us) went to Jimmy Buffet's Labor Day Concert. This is an annual event for us and a way for us to officially close out the summer. It's always a great time and we spend a fun afternoon & evening enjoying Fabulous Food, Friends, of course Amazing Tunes, oh and there's usually some tasty liquid refreshment involved. I decided to jump on MDS and get the memories documented real quick so I could have them to show. Ok, so it wasn't "real quick" because you know me, I had to do something extra that wasn't a download and took some time but I'm real happy with how it turned out. Why don't you see what you think- (Note- I did try to put them side by side but for some reason couldn't make it happen)

I'm always worried if I don't put everything in my pages, I won't tell the whole story. I think I got just about everything covered here. Could have added a few more pics but, all in all I'm happy with the flow and how it pretty much conveys the feeling of the day. I tried to download the supply list at the bottom of this but am still trying to figure out my new lap-top and couldn't. Sorry. :( The photo layouts are from our photo spreads and not an additional download. They really made this much quicker and easier to do. I did mirror image the first page to make it work better for what I wanted to do.

We were out walking (ok, we were actually walking to the porta-johns, be glad there's no way to add scent to these pages or I'd have had to add it just for effect) and I saw the 5:00 Somewhere flag and had to take a picture...Classic Buffet! Those Gummy Bears, they're special bears. You didn't think I'd just add bears to be adding them, did you? Shannon (not me, the one in the picture below with the parrot) brought them. They're Drunk Gummies. Yep you heard me. They went for a swim in some Mango-Coconut Rum. Ooooohhhh, so tasty! Next year I'm making Jell-O Shots with drunk gummies swimming in them. Gonna be so good, I may not be able to wait until next Labor Day weekend! And how about those food pics? YUM!!! And those two pretty ladies! LOL!!!

I tried to get all creative with this second page. Not sure why, maybe I should just say "why not?" I love our new line feature that allows you to create lines in whatever shape you can image. I used this to make the line for the banners. I added the banners using my Pennant Parade Punches and filled them in with Summer Smooches DSP. I also used the Circles from the same Punch set to put 5:00 on the pennants. I love how the drop-shadow effect really adds to the look.

Please tell me that you get that the flowers in the Daffodil Delight box, in the center, are supposed to be a lei! Can I just tell you that creating that box and the banners, but mostly just that box, took me longer than the whole rest of both pages. I know it's hard to see but I used the same line feature to create an oval of "string" to string my flowers on. They're from the Blossom Builders set, and I had to size them so I could fit them all on the string and then space them and then do the same with the second layers on top. But, I think it's cool and my sis says she totally got it, so Woo-Hoo! :D My nephew Jake asked why we were so "shiny" in that pic. When Lisa told him it was because we were hot and sweaty he was totally grossed out. Of course most of it was just the way the flash hit us. I wonder if there's a way to "mattify" that picture. Hmmmm, something to look up.

Well, that's all I have for you today. I hope you liked my first stab at doing a 2-page spread. Would love to hear what you think. I read all of my comments and they really do make my day. If you'd like to +1 or Pin today's pages, I've put the buttons for both on my blog for your convenience. Friends and Followers are always welcome too! :)

Thanks so much for taking time out of your busy day to stop by my little corner of the world. You are very appreciated! I wish you an Amazing weekend filled with lots of time for Family, Friends and of course Creativity. Hope to see you back here real soon. Till next time-

Remember- Life is often more about the storms than the peace they seek to overwhelm. It's not about Waiting for the storms to pass, but Learning to Dance in the rain.

Be safe,
Shan

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MDS Day - Charlies Angels - A Scrapbook Page

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Hey y'all. Happy Friday. Woo-Hoo! Are you ready for a fabulous weekend. We're supposed to get heat and rain. Yea....not. :) My boyfriend in brown stopped by the house yesterday. Don't tell my darling S.O. (D.S.O.) I have a boyfriend on the side, kay? Anyways he brought me a big box of happiness. Since circumstances have changed and I'm not getting to go to convention next week *tear* *river of tears* I decided to still use that money towards my business and put in an order. I can't wait to get everything organized and get busy playing! I'm hoping to have a very productive weekend in between errands and household chores.

So, you know I changed MDS Mondays to just MDS Day, so I wouldn't feel like a failure if it didn't happen on Monday's and even now I am barely getting it posted. Sometimes it seems there is just not enough time or days in the week. Lol! I am definitely not complaining though about having felt extra creative this week. It would have been nice, however, if I had been able to store some of that up for next week. Oh well, glass half full and all that.

Mostly I do cards for my MDS projects. I'm really trying to do more scrapbook layouts. They're hard for me though. In fact I think I've only done 2 here. I tried regular scrapbooking years ago. I thought I'd do my daughter's baby pictures but, I always wanted to use all my pics. So. Hard. To. Choose. Do you ever feel that way? I guess I need to just have a "photo-album" for everything and then a "scrapbook" for special things. Maybe that will make it easier. You know what else makes it easier? My Digital Studio (MDS). If I decide I want to change the size of something I haven't wasted cardstock or messed up a picture. *Total Score!*

Here's today's MDS Scrapbook page-

MDS Scrapbook Page

Those two crazy ladies with me are my "sis-tahs". They are my best friends in the whole world! We've been friends for the last 16 years although it seems like "Forever". Penny moved to Richmond a few years back so we don't get to see each other as much as we'd like, but when we do it's always a blast. We do try to at least have one G.N.O. a year. Sometimes if we're lucky it's two. What do we do on that one night a year? Rock out to DMB, baby!!! I really wish we were able to get together more often. I may have to try and make us a DMB/GNO book to chronicle our fun times. You would not believe some of the adventures we've had. Two words for you... "Oh Lawdy". HAHAHAHAHA

I'm so happy with how this page turned out. I especially love how the "hologram-my" parts of the ticket showed up. Doesn't look too bad for having been folded up in my back pocket for hours, huh? I just realized  that you can't see our seating area on the ticket. I must have cropped it out accidentally. Well, actually, we weren't sitting at this show. That's right, we had "pit" tickets. Yep, up close and personal with my hubby Dave. I know I don't "believe" in the institution but you pick your battles. Oh, Don't tell my D.S.O. about this either. Thankfully, for us, he likes DMB too! No, really! As much as I love him, the reason he got to stay was cuz he answered the question right. What question, you may be asking? The "You do like DMB right?" question. It would have made me very sad to have kicked him to the curb if he had answered wrong. Lol! No seriously, to the curb, he would gone and quickly too.

I love this picture of us, all smiling and laughing. Why I didn't realize I was the only one with my shades still on is beyond me. Wish I had known. Whatcha gonna do? It's funny that we've always called ourselves Charlie's Angels when we do these pics. Why have we never thought of saying Dave's Angels? Things that make you go "Hmmmmm". I'm going to send this to my girls, hope they like it as much as I do!

Well, that's all I have for you today. I hope you liked today's project and another excuse to laugh at me, with me. : D

Thanks sooo much for taking the time out of your busy day to stop by. You are so appreciated! I love hearing from you, and read all of my comments and try to respond back as well. So, if you liked today's project and have a minute to drop me a line, you'd make my day! Friends and Followers are always welcome too! :)

I  hope you've enjoyed this week's offerings and will come back soon. I wish you a happy weekend filled with lots of quality time for Family, Friends, and of course Creativity! Till next time-

Remember- Life is often more about the storms than the peace they seek to overwhelm. It's not about the Waiting for the storms to pass, but Learning to Dance in the rain.

Be Safe,
Shan Pin It

MDS Monday- A Little "Spring" In My Afternoon

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Hey y'all. Happy Monday! I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend, especially all of you Fabulous Moms.

I've been inspired by my team-mates to try and do a little more with my MDS. They've been doing such Amazing scrapbook layouts I thought I'd try my hand at it too. Since my go-to MDS site over at Utah Diva's didn't give a heads-up as to what this weeks challenge would be, I decided to do a scrapbook page.

I work in Washington, D.C. and every afternoon I walk to the commuter line for a ride-home. (We call it the slug-line. Pretty weird name huh? Basically it's called that because you're supposed to sit there like a "slug" and not make yourself noticed.) I've been noticing all the beautiful flowers along my afternoon walk and have been stopping to take pictures of them. I'm sure I look like such a tourist and that people are wondering why I'm taking pictures of the flowers in front of the buildings, especially since I'm using my stoopid BB. :) On top of that it's just sooo nice to be outside, especially after hearing the birds who nest under my window A.C. unit talking all day about how Spring is finally here. No, seriously...they chirp for 8 1/2 hours straight talking to God and Mother Nature about the weather. I can almost hear the things they're saying. When it's sunny, they chirp about how nice and beautiful it is out. When it rains, I swear their tone changes, you can hear them "yelling" about how wet and yucky it is out. All day, chirp, chirp, chirp. And then I go outside to head home and I get to see the bright, little bits of God's love all around us that they've been chatting about.

Here's today's MDS Project-

MDS Scrapbook Page

I used a base of Garden Green and then added one of the Photo Layout Templates that comes standard with our MDS Program. All I did was drop in my pictures and add mats and drop shadows to them. For the text boxes I added two mats to give my text a background. The hardest part was picking the pictures I wanted to use.

This is only the second scrapbook page I've done and the first one where I've used a template. What do you think? I like it except now I think the tulips look too bright and crisp compared to the other flowers. Maybe I'm just being too OCD and too critical? Overall though, I think I'm pretty happy with it.

Well, that's all I have for today. I hope you liked today's MDS offering and it inspires you to step out of your comfort zone and try something that you're not real comfortable with. If you liked my page, I'd love to hear from you. Friends and Followers are always welcome too. :)

I hope to see you back real soon. If you'd like to do some Digital Crafting and don't already own our Amazing MDS product, you can get a FREE 30 day trial and try it out. Just head over to my ONLINE STORE and get your FREE TRIAL. As fabulous as our program already is, we're getting an upgraded version later this year. If you purchase it now, you'll get an automatic upgrade to the new program. That's a $19.95 value for Free.

Till next time-

Remember- Life is often more about the storms than the peace they seek to overwhelm. It's not about Waiting for the storm to pass, but Learning to Dance in the rain.

Be Safe,

Shan

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MDS Monday - DMB-AC 2011 My First Scrap-book Page

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Hey y'all. Happy Monday! I hope you had a good weekend. I'm still sick and spent most of the weekend laid up on the couch wheezing and coughing and waiting on my steroids to kick in. (Not a pretty sight, I assure you)  

Did you watch the Super Bowl last night? I'm sad my Patriots lost, but I have to say they did it to themselves. They lost it in the first quarter, really should have started out much stronger and I think it would have been a much different game. I'm very sad now, because there's no more football till August when college ball starts back up. :'( *tear* *Moment of Silence*
Did you like the commercials? I wasn't overly impressed this year. I liked the M&M one and the Doritos ones, especially the slingshot baby. Where were the great Budweiser Clydesdale commercials? The Coke Polar Bear commercials were good, but overall not impressive this year.
What about the halftime show? Not a big fan of Madonna to start with, but she did better than I expected, still not WOW'ed. And what was up with MIA pulling her little stunt? This is why we get old people like Madonna doing the half-time show in the first place. Grow-up! And speaking of that, could Madonna not try to look and act like she's in her 20's any more, just saying.
I did however think that Blake and Miranda did a bang up job at the beginning singing and that Kelly Clarkson looked very pretty and did an Amazing job singing the National Anthem. Way to go K.C. Too many people try to over-sing it and she left it pure and got the lyrics right.

So- on to today's project. How about our Fabulous new offer of a 30day FREE trial of our My Digital Studio? Isn't that Amazing? On the ride home Friday, I was talking to the lady driving me, she has a little girl and we got to talking about scrap-booking. I told her I wanted to do more scrap-booking but I always felt intimidated by the thought of doing 12 x 12 pages and felt like maybe others did too, and that's why I kind of leaned towards 6 x 6 albums instead. She told me she was intimidated by the thought of 12 x 12's too, and had once gone to a scrap event and spent a long time just staring at the page trying to figure out what she was going to do.

I told her about our MDS and our new FREE Trial offer and how one of the nicest things about MDS was the ability to not only make cards but to scrap-book. I told her that I did MDS Monday here and I hadn't actually done any scrap-book pages but maybe it was time and that I would try one for this week. She mentioned having lots of embellishments already and wanting to be able to use them as a concern for not getting a digital medium. When I told her how she could easily make hybrid projects I think she was a little intrigued. I also told her how easy it was to use our MDS embellishments and to alter the colors and even to color match. I actually used that feature on this weeks project. When I left I gave her the link to my site and hopefully she'll be able to drop by and get a free month of MDS and try it out.

Are you ready for today's project?  Here it is-

It's funny how you envision things one way and they end up a totally different way. I had planned to use this background picture as just a background, very light opacity, way in the background and layer other pictures on it. But as I started doing that I decided it was really too important of a picture to not include on it's own.

The really nice thing about MDS is if I was scrap-booking traditionally I wouldn't have the option of having a custom background DSP showing the layout of our "Girls-Weekend" This was the first time my sister and I had been away for a "Girls-Weekend" in 3 years. We'd only been away one other time, for an overnight "Road-Trip", during that time.

This background picture is a banner inside Bader Field, Atlantic City N.J., where we went to see DMB (Dave Matthews Band for the un-initiated of you) on his 5 City Caravan 2011 Tour. You can see the ripples in the material from the wind. Bader Field is an old Air Field. There were 3 nights and 2 days of DMB and other Amazingly Talented Artists on 3 stages. We had such a Blast!

The pictures are left to right Days 1-3.

I used the Mat feature to Mat each picture. Days 1 and 3 were matted in Baja Breeze. Looking at the picture I originally thought I would just be able to pick Lucky Limeade, or Pear Pizzazz, or Wild Wasabi, something simple, but nothing was coming out right so I color matched and scrolled around until I found this color that is in the grassy area on the picture. I don't have to worry about it matching, I pulled it straight from the picture, I know it matches. (: Pretty cool. And, I was able to try lots of different colors to see which match I liked the best. So Simple!

I used Cherry Cobbler for the Text at the top and lightened the opacity, just a little and I was done.

So, in the end, I started and finished with the same 4 elements I started with the background photo and the 3 snapshots and ended up using them in totally different ways than I had envisioned.

What do you think? Have I inspired you to try Digital scrap-booking? What about just Digital Crafting? If so, why don't you head on over to my ONLINE STORE where you can get a FREE one month trial of Stampin' Up's Fabulous My Digital Studio. I'd love to see what you create.

If you liked today's project, I would love it if you left me a comment. It's great when I get to hear from you! Also, if you liked today's card, please feel free to +1 or Pin it. I've added the buttons to my side-bar for your convenience. Friends and Followers are also welcome. :).

Till next time-

Remember- Life is not about Waiting for the storm to pass, It's about learning to Dance in the rain.

Be Safe,
Shan


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