The page I’m sharing today is a lift from Marcy Penner.  I love Marcy’s use of the grid design and how she was able to incorporate such a large piece of the beautiful map paper.  The map was too pretty to cut up so this is a great way to showcase it and allow it to shine.  Since the paper included the whole world, I wanted to highlight one of our more exotic adventures and mark the spot we visited.  I went through some old photos I already had printed and found one from an amazing trip we took to Egypt back in 2007.  We had a once-in-a-lifetime experience and I’m happy to capture that sentiment here on this page!

Living in Florida, we don’t get to experience winter much anymore.  So, when we had a chance to spend a long weekend in New York City last month, I was so excited to enjoy some cold weather during the holiday season.  While we were there, we went ice skating with friends at The Standard Hotel and it was so much fun.  It was Dhimant’s first time on the ice so we both decided to stick to the side rail most of the time but we still had a great time!

To document our little adventure, I scraplifted a layout designed by the fun and talented Gillian Nelson.  She has such a carefree, happy and whimsical style and I loved all of the wonky trees she created with the supplies from Studio Calico’s Park Ave kit.  I’ve made 7 layouts with this kit (I’ll share the last two later this week) and I think this one might just be my favorite.  Thanks, Gillian, for the awesome inspiration!  🙂

I’m determined to use every last bit of my December Park Ave kit from Studio Calico and I’m doing it by scraplifting a bunch of layouts from Studio Calico’s design team.  Today I’m sharing one that I lifted from Kelly Noel.  I love how she used my favorite paper with the buildings and also really like the interest she created on her page with the diagonal lines.

Of course, I wanted to use a photo taken in a big city to go along with the fun cityscape paper so this time I picked a photo taken in New York City.  I had the pleasure of meeting up with sweet Kelly Purkey in NYC last month and we had a great time having lunch and chatting at Carnegie Deli.  Afterwards, Dhimant snapped a few pics for us and this one is going in the books!  It just seems so fitting to include a picture of me and KP on page using this fun paper!  🙂

I’ve got another layout to share today using the Studio Calico Park Ave kit from December.  I scraplifted this one from a fun page by Geralyn Sy.  Geralyn always creates such bright and happy pages and designs awesome products too.  When I first saw  this layout in her December gallery, I knew it was a perfect fit for a photo we took in Chicago last summer at The Bean. I had never been there at night before and the view was amazing. I asked a random stranger to take our photo with my iPhone and I absolutely LOVE the results. Such a cool nighttime image that captures a fun day with family!

I’ve got another layout to share today using the December Studio Calico Park Ave. kit.  This one is a scraplift of a page created by Kim Stewart.  Her layout immediately caught my eye and I loved how she used all of the colorful transparencies as embellishments on the page.  I always struggle with those types of embellishments and her technique of clustering a lot of them down the page is great!  Thanks, Kim, for the awesome inspiration!

I’m back today with a layout I completed last year but never shared here on the blog (I’ve got quite a few of them so you’ll probably see some more soon).  This is a lift from one of Kelly Purkey’s Sketchbook classes and as soon as I saw her layout, I fell in love!  The colors were beautiful and I loved the design.  Even better, it got me to stamp (several times) which was so much fun.

The photo is from my 30th birthday over 10 years ago.  It was a rough couple of years before this milestone birthday and my Dad was so sweet and wanted to make this birthday special for me.  He threw a small party on a boat with my close friends and family and it was the perfect day.  We had lunch on the boat, did a little dancing and enjoyed the beautiful weather outside with loved ones.  Such a special memory!

I’m getting organized for 2015 this week.  I got a fun new pink A5 Filofax at WhimSoDoodle and printable planner pages from Marcy Penner and I’m ready to put it all together.  I plan to organize both my everyday life and creative endeavors in my planner and have a big list of goals I’d like to achieve this year.  At first glance, my list looks a little crazy but when I break it down into weekly goals, it’s really not too bad.  I intentionally created tangible, actionable goals so I can easily quantify my progress throughout the year and check things off my list.  Who knows if I’ll complete everything but my hope for this year is to make progress and get things done rather than just think about getting things done (which I do quite often!)

In case you can’t read them in the image above, here are my goals for 2015:

• Walk 250,000 steps
• Try 50 new recipes
• Read 25 books
• Write 150 blog posts
• Create 100 layouts
• Complete 2015 Project Life
• Complete AE Hello Story class
• Complete unfinished projects (2014 Project Life, 2014 Week in the Life, 2012 & 2014 December Daily)

I’m super excited to start working on these goals and check them off my list.  Hopefully by the end of the year, I will have stayed active throughout the year, made lots of great food, read some good books, used up my huge stash of scrapbook supplies and shared a lot of it with all of you right here on this blog.  It’s going to be a fun, creative year and I’m looking forward to the adventure.  Wish me luck!

What are your goals and what are you looking forward to this year?  I’d love to know if you’re willing to share!  🙂

Happy New Year!  I apparently took an unintentional break from my blog in December but we had a pretty busy month.  A visit from an old friend, a weekend in New York City, 16 houseguests for Christmas and all the regular stuff that goes along with the holiday season.  It was a wonderful month and we enjoyed every bit of it!  After all of that excitement throughout December, we decided to welcome the new year with a quiet night at my Dad’s. The three of us went out to dinner, watched several episodes of Homeland, saw midnight fireworks from my Dad’s balcony and took silly photos.  The perfect night!

Now that things are settling down, I’m ready to get back to my sweet little blog.  I’ll continue with my 4 series of 40, scrapbooking projects and add other bits of content too.  I hope you’ll stick around for what I hope will be more regular posting and a fantastic year!  I’m excited for a blank slate and all of the possibilities that a new year brings.  Here’s to a happy, healthy and memorable 2015!

This week, Dhimant and I will celebrate our 9 year anniversary.  9 years.  In my mind, 9 years seems like such a long time yet our time together has flown by so quickly.  In 9 years we’ve experienced so much together and we’ve grown closer and closer each year.  I feel so lucky that he is my husband, my partner and my best friend.  I know I can always count on him and he will always be there for me no matter what.  We’ve had many great times and have faced our share of challenges too.  But through each experience, we become stronger and our bond becomes stronger too.

Over the last 9 years, we’ve had many adventures and have documented lots of them along the way.  We like to say we’ve perfected the art of the selfie and have thousands of photos we’ve taken of ourselves.  We have selfies that were taken at home, in the car, in restaurants, in parks, on boats, on airplanes, in the mountains, in various cities across the US and several countries throughout the world.  We’ve documented it all through selfies.

When I signed up for Marcy Penner’s Mini Album Workshop at Studio Calico earlier this year, I knew exactly what I wanted the theme of my mini album to be:  SELFIES!  So here it is – my finished Instagram mini album that includes a collection of random selfies we’ve taken over the last 9 years.  This album is mostly photos with just a few words in the form of quotes.  The quotes were printables from Elise Blaha Cripe and seem to go perfectly with the theme of this book.

It was so much fun for Dhimant and I to look through this album when I finished it last week and reminisce about all the memories we created in each photo.  I love having all of these snapshots mixed up together in one place.  None of the photos are in chronological order.  They’re all placed randomly and I love that it’s just a fun collection of “us”.  It makes me so happy to look through this book and see the wonderful life we’ve created.  Happy 9th Anniversary, Dhimant!  I love you more today than yesterday but not as much as tomorrow!  xoxo

I can’t believe it!  I made it through an entire week of taking photos for Ali Edwards’ Week in the Life project AND I have officially blogged my photos from every single day of last week!  All this documenting has been pretty intense and I’m definitely taking a little break from my camera for the next few days.  While it’s been a ton of work to capture all of these photos over the last week, I’m so happy that I now have a snapshot of our lives right now.  There are so many photos of ordinary, mundane things and experiences but life might look very different years from now and it’ll be fun to look back on these photos.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been using this Week in the Life project to contribute material for my series of “40 PEEKS” since the content goes together perfectly.  I promised to share “peeks” into my heart and home as part of this series and this project does just that.  For the final day of Week in the Life, I’m sharing photos and images that represent what Sunday looked like for us.  You’ll notice that some of the items I’ve included are screenshots I found on the internet of of our favorite TV shows.  Right now, Sundays are my favorite TV nights and I look forward to them each week.  Therefore, I thought it was only fitting to include our Sunday night TV lineup in the images for today.

Stories from Sunday include:

• Golf for Dhimant.  Definitely a typical Sunday around here.  I’m so happy he has a hobby that he loves and that he’s so supportive of my hobbies too.  I’m also so thankful that he has friends who happily go along with my crazy photo-taking antics and take photos for me while they’re on the golf course.  I was especially grateful this week since I really wanted to include Dhimant golfing in my Week in the Life album and the photos I got from his friend on Sunday were perfect!
• Scrapbooking for me.  When Dhimant golfs, I usually spend the day at home doing stuff around the house and messing around in my scrapbook room.  I’ve been taking a ton of online classes lately and have been trying to keep up with all of them as best I can.  Yesterday afternoon I spent some time working on a layout from one of the classes I’m taking and am happy I was able to capture myself “in action”.
• The Sunday paper.  I’ll confess – I don’t actually read the newspaper.  I just like looking through the ads on Sundays to see what’s on sale.  Crazy – I know!
• Watching TV.  As I mentioned above, my favorite TV shows right now are on Sunday nights and I look forward to this night each week.  We record them on our DVR and then watch them back-to-back (with some breaks to catch up on football games that Dhimant watches).  If the Pittsburgh Steelers are playing (Dhimant’s favorite team), then those “breaks” in between shows are definitely longer!  😉

And that was Sunday.  Thank you for following my Week in the Life journey.  It’s been fun documenting this past week through my camera lens and I’m excited to take all of the images and put them in an album using the Week in the Life kit I purchased from Ali Edwards.  I’ll share the final album here when it’s complete.

If you missed my other Week in the Life posts from the past week, you can view them by clicking on the following links:  Monday photos, Tuesday photos, Wednesday photos, Thursday photos, Friday photos, Saturday photos.