Circlemania?

Happy New Year, everyone!  I've been busy "winter cleaning" and purging this week.  It is my last week of "vacation" and I wanted to feel like I accomplished a lot while I was off.  The result?  A cleaner house and TONS of things to donate to Goodwill!

I've also been busy scrapping.  I set my layout goal for the year as 52 again.  Even though it seemed as though I did a lot of scrapping and creating in 2013, I did not meet my goal. Enter sad face here.  However, there is no doubt in my mind that I will exceed my goal this year.  All I have to do is commit to doing a minimum of 1 layout a week and I am in there!  Now that I am on 2 design teams, that is going to be a breeze for me.

In the meantime, I've been sharpening my sketch skills.  Not creating sketches (which I must admit, I'm becoming more and more interested in that,) but following them to produce layouts like this:

Here is a layout of my son and I on my wedding day.  He is walking me down to the cart that whisked us away to the wedding destination.  I absolutely love this picture, so when I came across the perfect sketch, I jumped at the opportunity to use it...along with this paper from MAMBI.  It's perfect!

Then there is this one.  Aren't those pictures hillarious!  My husband had been drinking since early that day.  I didn't realize it until the reception.  He was definitely on "10!"

As you can see, I had a little bit of the circle fever this week.  LOL...banners as well, apparently.  I was too excited to be able to use my "old school" Creative Memories circle punches, blades, self healing mat and templates to make these circles!  That just goes to show, a combination of "old" and "new" techniques can definitely manifest into masterpieces!  OH, and a great sketch is just the beginning!  Like this one:

This is the starting sketch being used on Scrapbook.com for JusLyn's Round Robin Challenge.  We are supposed to take our inspiration from this sketch.  I interpreted that as not having to use the entire sketch, which I didn't want to do because I had already created a sketch using a lot of trees.  Instead I decided to use the top right hand corner of the sketch to create this:

This is my first layout for 2014.  It is a layout of my son and my husband's best friend at the reception.  He had obviously had enough!  He slept through the final 2 hours of the reception on two chair put together and a suit jacket over him.  That is one of the things I love about this child...when he is sleepy, he goes to sleep AND he can sleep through anything!  The sketch had just one circle and one banner, but as you see, I went nuts with it!  I also accidently tore my paper when I was distressing it, but fixed it easily by tearing it all the way out and adding little "peeks" of lighter color there.  I absolutely LOVE how it turned out.

Look for more circles and banners in my layouts as I follow more sketches to create.  It does seem to be the craze, doesn't it?  Be sure to catch on!

SMOOCHES!