Has it been a month already?!

Wow, I just went to crop the pictures of the pages that I made at the National Scrapbooking crop and realized that it has already been a whole month since I was at that crop!! Time flies, huh? I do want to share these pages with you. I wish the pictures were a little better, but I don't know how to get a great picture of a 12x12 double page layout so this is the best that I have!

All of the pictures on these pages are from my daughter's birthday party last summer. Yes, I'm working way, way behind on pictures. I don't worry about "getting caught up". I know that will never happen and I just kind of work on whatever event I'm inspired by at the time that I decide to scrap, which as I told you below isn't very often for myself. I enjoy scrapping much more this way -- not putting pressure on myself.

Here's the first page that I did that day. It was inspired by the picture on the top right of the second page where my daughter is sitting in a big plastic bin surrounded by the mini beach balls that we had at the party. I used paper from TAC's Kaleidascope Brites collection for these pages and also the Sizzlin' Summer stamp set, which I had used on her party invitation.

This page shows the cake that inspired the entire water theme to the party. My daughter spotted this cake on the cover of a Woman's Day magazine and asked me to recreate it for her. I'm telling you that I LOVE that kid to have spent all the time I did on that cake -- including decorating the teddy grahams with icing so they looked like they were wearing swim suits and sunglasses!

While I was working on this page, my friend asked me if the paper had been made to match the little girl's bathing suit! I love how they do look like they were meant to go together. And all of the fun colors in the pictures are in the paper too! (And no, I haven't done any of the journaling on these pages hence the big blank white spots.)

This is the one page that I went to the crop with some idea of how I wanted it to look. My husband, not being a scrapper, sees no need for zooming in when he's taking pictures. So we ended up with tons of pictures that once they were cropped in to show the details of the picture were very small (some less than 2x2). I wanted to include them because they all show different aspects of the kids playing in the water that day. So I had this stair step kind of layout in mind. After I finished the layout I wasn't sure what to do with the big blank white space on the top right. I decided to make a flower. I stamped the tag from the Label Words set on several parts of the cover sheet from the Kaleidascope paper pack, cut them out and stacked them together. Then I added a large brad that I borrowed from my friend (thanks, Tiff) for the center. I stamped the stem and leaves from the Artsy Elements flourish set that was a hostess reward during Jubilee and added the Fun in the Sun saying from Label Words.