I am an English major and have a very extensive personal collection of books.  The other day I was looking at a bunch of them and started noticing how much I enjoyed the pretty covers of a lot of them.  I decided that when I am not sure what to do for a scrapbook page I should look at some of them to get inspiration and so with that in mind, that is what I have done for this page.

This is the book cover I used for inspiration.  It's a collection of works by Edgar Allan Poe.

I really liked the way that the background was multicolored and had an interesting water color feel but more importantly I like the style of the black drawing.  I don't have many dark photos but I tried to mimic the style loosely to create this watercolor flower for my page:

I really like the way the page turned out overall and I'd say it was a success for my first book cover experiment!

I finally had a little bit of time to do a bit of scrapbooking today.   I did another page update.  It was my first time using stitching on a page and I like the way it turned out!  I am very pleased!

Old page:

New page:

I finally figured out what to do for the Scrap Our Stash January challenge.  It was pretty difficult since I operate with limited supplies and also have trouble finding words that start with "E" but I managed to do it!  the challenge was to make a page with an element that had each letter of the word "twine".  I used:

Tape (Scotch had a sale at my local Office Max and the tape was cute)

Watercolors (two of the butterflies)

Ink (the butterflies again)

Numbers

Entrada stickers and die cuts (I had a kit that my Aunt had sent me)

The layout features a photo of me on the last day of my senior year of high school.  It was tradition at the school that seniors dress in togas. It's hard to tell in the full photo how many shiny things I was able to use to my delight, but there are a lot!

This page should've only taken about a few minutes to complete but it ended up taking me more than a day because I tried to use a stamping mist I found in my stash to use on the page.  The large background sheet took the ink really well and dried within seconds, however, the smaller torn dark green part did not do so well.  It wasn't drying so I ended up leaving it for the night while I had some fun.  I came back to it later today, almost a full 24 hours later, but unfortunately a couple spots were STILL not dry.  Lesson learned: make sure that it will take to the kind of paper before I put it on.  I think the page turned out okay though and I got to use some more fun die cuts.  The pictures are from one of my few experiences camping and I had quite a bit of fun!

I decided to try a Challenge YOUrself challenge today.  For these challenges, you have to be in the photo/photos that you scrap.  The photos I chose to use were taken from one of my friend's birthdays when we went to a local Mexican restaurant (proud to say I'm one of the few who didn't get sick afterwards since I just had a margarita and some chips).  For this challenge as well you needed to feature a word that you want to focus on for the next year and I chose the word "celebrate".  I chose this word because I think that I don't always take enough time to appreciated and celebrate successes and good things in my life.  Sometimes I do something well but then immediately turn and focus on the things I don't do well.  My boyfriend has a silly word for that called "negatating" but it seems to fit.  I want to try and look on a more positive side this year and negatate less. As a side note, I like what I did with ribbon on this page.  I think it looks fun!

I decided to try and revamp an old page again today.  It's an old page from high school when one of my friends and I went to a minor league baseball game.  You could line up on the field afterwards and run the bases so of course we did!  It's amazing to me what adding just a couple more elements can do for a page.

This is what I started with:

Then I added a few embellishments leftover from a kit, some extra die-cuts my mom gave me, and some old font letters she bequeathed to me as well.

Today I worked on an 8 1/2" x 11" page for a challenge from Pixels and Paper.  The challenge was to use the following image as inspiration.

I felt mostly inspired by the bright pink and the way the sand looks and lays so I incorporated torn paper into my design to mimic the sand.  The photo also reminds me of the picture.  It was taken a couple summers ago at my town's Ribfest when my college roommate came down to visit and go to the carnival.  We clearly had a blast!  I don't think that the full photo is a good representation of the page since I take my photos on my phone and you can't see the textured papers I used so I tried to take some close ups of some of my favorite elements on the page.  I am quite pleased with how it turned out and I was able to use a bunch of scrap die-cuts my mom gave me over break.

In keeping with the sand theme I also saw this video a couple of days ago that I thought people might enjoy watching.  The art is beautiful and cool to watch being made so enjoy it as a little tidbit!

I made it back to school and finally had some time to scrap book.  I decided to revamp some pages that I had done a long time ago and make them more fabulous since I felt some were a bit bland.  I transformed this boring page:

Into this page, laden with more elements to make it pop:

It's still simple and keeps to a college budget but still has a bit more interest.  Hope you guys enjoy :)