Echo Park

Joy to the world!

December 30, 2011 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 6 Comments

Sketchabilities has revealed its latest sketch, #62! Be sure to head over to the site to grab the sketch, then create something and link it up!

Here’s my Design Team layout inspired by the sketch.

The vintage feel of this Echo Park collection were just right for the colors in these photos from 1978.

These are photos from Christmas 1978. Our Aunt Mary Lou (yawning in the middle photo) came from Pennsylvania to spend the holiday with us; we always had a great time when she visited. Of course, I received awesome gifts, including a sled, a Neil Diamond album, figure skates and…wait for it…an AM-FM digital clock radio! Now that was a cool gift in 1978, and as you can see from the photo, I was pretty excited. In fact, there is a photo of me with my mouth wide open in surprise from just about every Christmas through the years! I love surprises, and I’m not afraid to show it. 😉

I used paper from the Echo Park Season’s Greetings line because their vintage color scheme went well with the gold and red tones in my photos. The plaid scalloped circle was cut using a Silhouette cutting file.

This is my final layout as a member of the Sketchabilities design team. I can’t believe how quickly the time went! I really enjoyed being on the team and feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to lend inspiration to those using Karan Gerber’s beautiful sketches. They were a delight to create with, and I will miss the group. Best of luck to you in the new year, Karan, and thank you again for selecting me to showcase your sketches!

Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal

August 5, 2011 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 2 Comments

My husband doesn’t care about clothes…at all. If he ruled the world people would all wear clean but wrinkled shorts and t-shirts to everything. Fortunately, we live in low-key Austin, Texas, where “business casual” doesn’t mean very much, and a majority of people do wear shorts everywhere.

Matt and I own a technology company, which means occasionally we get swag from companies like Microsoft and Cisco, among others. For years Matt has been wearing those hideous t-shirts (no offense intended to the big tech companies, but they really are garish) around the house. However, when he goes out that front door, he makes sure he’s wearing one of his “special” shirts. Even though he doesn’t care a jot about good clothes, he does want to maintain a certain image in the world. And I would describe that image as “geek chick.”

He carefully selects his t-shirts from various online purveyors of fine geek clothing. In his closet are shirts with:

A Shakespearean quote spelled out as a mathematical equation (think “To be or not to be”)
The falling sperm whale from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with the thought bubble, “I wonder if it will be friends with me?”
The symbol Pi written in 4493 digits of Pi
My all-time favorite is the one he’s wearing in the large photo on the layout below. It’s inspired by the TV series Firefly and features two dinosaurs with a speech bubble between them that reads, “Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal.”

This illustrates yet another reason I love scrapbooking: memorializing the personality traits, quirks, habits and personal preferences of those we love. Whether it’s our 40-something husband’s corny t-shirt tastes or our 13-year-old daughter’s short-lived Bieber fever, it’s worth remembering. And celebrating. These are the little things that add up to make people lovable to us, and that’s a great layout topic in my book.

Be You captures my husband's love of corny t-shirts.

Note: Matt does not wear these t-shirts to work, even though he would dearly love to! 😉

My first try at misting

July 13, 2011 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 2 Comments

My dear mother’s birthday was yesterday, and of course I created a card to send with her gifts. But I didn’t want to post it here until she had received it (just in case she peeked in here). I have been plucking up my courage to try misting, and this card is my first attempt. See those clouds in the background? I punched out several clouds with my Fiskars punches and placed them randomly on a white card base. After misting the card with turquoise Tattered Angels Glimmer Mist I peeled away the masks to reveal my sky background. I really like it, don’t you?

I stamped and paper pieced this card for my mom's birthday.

PageMaps’ My Little Shoebox sketch contest

June 13, 2011 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 4 Comments

Every once in a while I run across a sketch that really makes me yearn to pull together some photos and products and get scrapping. This PageMaps sketch had that effect on me when I saw it on their blog. It’s their June contest sketch, and I knew I wanted to play along.

PageMaps June 2011 sketch for contest

A few of the reasons I like this sketch so much and can see using it again are that it features four photos (so you can really tell a story with them), calls for a few nice pops of patterned paper and still leaves a good amount of white space for the eyes to rest a bit while looking at it. It accomplishes a lot in a 12×12 canvas!

This is the layout I created based on the sketch. The photos are from Memorial Day weekend, just a few weeks ago. When Matt and I started talking about the kinds of things we could do during the holiday weekend, Matt suggested, “We could drive to Fredericksburg for the day so you can go to that scrapbook store you like.”

Here is my entry for the PageMaps June 2011 sketch contest.

Now if that’s not proof of love, I don’t know what is. 🙂

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