Creative Scrappers

So happy together

September 17, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 2 Comments

Enjoying Tuesdays on the Patio at Weathervane at Southern Season with Phil and Mom, July 31, 2012.

I took a trip home to North Carolina in late July/early August to visit my mom and bro. This photo is just a nice one from our first full day together, after we had enjoyed a good meal, local wines and live music on the back patio of Weathervane restaurant at Southern Season in Chapel Hill.

Product/technique notes:
I used patterned papers from BasicGrey (the heart paper is from the Olivia collection), Fancy Pants (the background text) and My Mind’s Eye (everything else). I created the title (my own design) and the flowers (from Silhouette) using the Silhouette cutting machine, and I followed sketch #225 from Creative Scrappers:

Creative Scrappers blog hop

September 5, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 28 Comments

Thanks for visiting my stop along the
Creating With Sketches blog hop
The members of the Creative Scrappers design team are excited to show off some of our favorite CS sketches and layouts. To thank you for participating, we are offering a free copy of the Creative Scrappers’ ebook of sketches, Creating with Sketches by Kristine Davidson. Please leave a comment on this post for a chance to win.

For this hop I decided to show off this sketch from Kristine’s book:
Creating With Sketches page 18 sketch

I have found that when I really love a sketch, putting together a layout that I love is so easy. This sketch of Kristine’s inspired me to pull out this 1973 photo of me, my mom and my brother at Niagra Falls. Because it was August, I imagine that this was our family’s last little trip together before Phil and I started first grade. Aww! And the Echo Park Everyday Eclectic collection proved to be a perfect fit for the colors in my photo and the feel I wanted my layout to have:

Be sure to leave a comment for a chance to win the sketch book.

Here are a few other designs I love that I’ve created in the past using Creative Scrappers sketches:

This photo of Mom and me is from June 1989, right after Phil and I had graduated from college and moved back home.

I kept this page simple because I just wanted to highlight the photo and the papers.

Please hop to all the design team blogs for a chance to see great layouts and win more goodies. Please also leave a link to your blog on our main Creative Scrappers blog hop post.

Here is the full list of participating blogs:
1. Marilyn Rivera
2. Keren Tamir
3. Heather Leopard
4. Juliana Michaels
5. Kelly Shults

6. Nicole Nowosad
7. Elena Olinevich
8. Chiqui Gutierrez
9. Johanna Rol-Middelbos
10. Stacey Apps

11. Olga Heldwein
12. Rita Ribeiro
13. Deanna Misner
14. Jenny Evans
15. Shannon Morgan

16. Marie-Josée Hamel
17. Elisabeth Bakken
18. Helen Tilbury
19. Ana Castro
20. Janice Daquila-Pardo

21. Debbi Tehrani
22. Michelle Buijsman
23. Kristine Davidson

You have until September 8th to leave your comment, and winners will be announced on the blog September 10th. Now hop on over to Debbi Tehrani’s blog.

Good luck, thanks for stopping and happy hopping! 🙂
Janice

Strawberry jam

August 26, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 2 Comments

This photo of Mom and me is from June 1989, right after Phil and I had graduated from college and moved back home.

One summer we decided we wanted to go strawberry picking, so we found out about Patterson Fruit Farm. Oh my, what a great time we had there. Out in the early morning sun, squatting down in among the rows of strawberry plants and finding the best ones to throw in our baskets.

The problem was that we didn’t really know anything about how to handle our strawberries once we got them home. So, we washed them all, put them back in the cardboard trays we brought them home in and then sat them aside. We happily skipped away with visions of yummy treats to come.

Then disaster struck. Any strawberry-picking veteran knows that you only give the berries a quick rinse in cool water and a swift pat with a paper towel to dry them off when, and only when, you’re ready to eat or cook with them. But we were no strawberry-picking veterans. I’m not going to sugarcoat this: we lost a lot of good berries that day. A lot of good berries.

Fortunately, we did not give up on our strawberry dreams. The next year we went picking with a plan. We looked up a freezer jam recipe and bought the ingredients before ever heading to the farm. It was that year that our berry-picking tradition was really born. The picking was fun, the cleaning happened as soon as we got home with the berries and then the jam turned out to be ridiculously easy and tasty!

In the June 1989 photo on this layout, Phil and Mom and I had gone out for our yearly strawberry excursion, and Mom and I were on the swing in our back yard cleaning the fruits of our labor. It was a really good summer day, and we had delicious strawberry jam for months. Mmmm…

Product/technique notes:
I used Creative Scrappers sketch #107 for inspiration and Jillibean Soup patterned papers (Coconut Lime and Macho Nacho lines) to pull this layout together.

Under the shade of the old oak tree

August 23, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 2 Comments

There's not a lot better in August than hanging out in the shade.

We grew up in a house with two big, beautiful trees in the front yard—a maple and an oak. In the fall, when we had to rake, I cursed their deep roots, sturdy limbs and plentiful leaves. But in the summer, their canopies combined to shade almost every inch of our yard, and I adored them.

In this August 1979 photo, Phil and I are under the shade of those trees, on an Indian blanket, playing a game of UNO. We actually spent a lot of quality time on that blanket, under those trees. We ate picnic lunches Mom made for us, drew, read books out loud to each other, played games and talked each other’s ears off.

I particularly remember Phil forcing me to slog through the entire 222 pages with him of Me & The Spitter: An Autobiographical Confession by Gaylord Perry. It was the Cleveland Indians pitcher’s account of how he cheated, doctoring baseballs with spit and Vaseline. It was truly thrilling.

What I also love about this photo are details like how each of us is wearing a matching tank-top-and-shorts set. And how tan we are. And our cute little haircuts. You get the idea: I think we’re darling! So, here’s to late summer and hanging out under a tree with your bestie!

I used Creative Scrappers sketch #222 for inspiration and Pebbles and Simple Stories patterned papers to pull this layout together.

Fun and games

July 10, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 6 Comments

My first sketch for Creative Scrappers went live on their site on Sunday, and I was so excited to see how the design team used it. All their pages are just beautiful!

Here is a peak at the sketch, and I hope you’ll go grab the full-sized version at Creative Scrappers and use it to play along:

I decided to play along with my own sketch, so I created this page about a recent night out with some friends for BINGO! We were having a little going-away party for our friend, Sri (in the turquoise top), who was about to leave to spend the summer in the English countryside with her grandparents and then come back to the States to attend graduate school. Quite a nice new beginning, right?

The journaling reads, “If BINGO sounds like a game for geriatrics, try playing it at The Park Hotel with Sri, Deborah and Heather! They serve shots when certain numbers are called, hold dance-offs to break ties and give garden gnomes as prizes. What a good time.”

I’ll add this comment: This is not like the BINGO they played in the church I grew up in; in fact, it’s pretty irreverent. 😉

I was sorry to see my friend, Sri, leave, but I know she's starting a great new life.

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