Verve Visual has launched!

I am so excited! Verve Visual has launched! What's even more exciting is that today is the day that you get to find out the woman behind this brand new line of rubber stamps....drum roll please....it's Julee Tilman (Poetic Artistry)! Woo-hoo! Our beloved Julee is launching her own on-line craft store AND releasing her own line of rubber stamps! I mean, come on....we all love Julee!!!! This girl's got some talent and we're about to see it in spades when she gets this new store rollin'! I am so proud of Julee and thrilled she asked me to be a part of her design team. I've seen some of her upcoming stamp designs and they are gonna rock our world! The "official" launch date of the Verve Visual store will be August 1st, but you can go over to the store right now and sign up for the mailing list so you won't miss out on any of the launch festivities! Be sure and stop by Julee's blog today and wish her HAPPY BIRTHDAY , and at the same time congratulate her on this exciting new venture!

Jeepers, I'm afraid my project for today's post isn't nearly as exciting as Julee's news! But it is exciting for me! Guess what I did last night? I jumped in, feet first, back into scrapbooking! I mentioned I wanted to do this in yesterday's post, so I decided I was just going to go for it. I needed to get started and there was no time like the present. As I said yesterday, I wanted to start a scrapbook that highlights all the fun photos I've taken over the last few months with my new Nikon D40. Before I started my first pages though, I made a promise to myself that this whole scrapbook will be made using scraps from my scrapbook drawer, ONLY. The album is only 8x8, so it's the perfect size to use up all these small pieces of designer paper I've got laying around.

Here's the first page I did. For the first page of the spread, I'm using a photo that I took of Scott this past winter, and the second page features the same photo only with a special effect applied to it in PSE 5.0. The special effect is called "posterize", and it looks UBER cool! For those of you hard core stampers, I even stamped on this layout! See the word "Scott" under the normal photo? I just bought those stamps a few days ago. They are clear acrylics by Hero Arts. Since I am such a Hero Arts fan, I wanted to give their acrylic line a try to see if they stamp as well as their rubber stamps. I can happily say they do! I was doubly impressed with them because I stamped on Bazzill paper, which isn't famous for taking stamp images very well! I am so glad I added some black to this page. It was a little boring with just the orange, olive green and red. It needed a little punch, so I found the black and white scraps and slapped them on. I did a little hand doodling around the picture to give it some more detail.

The second page came together a little quicker. I want this scrapbook to be very simple and not get each page gunked up with "stuff". Especially since many of the pages will feature boys! Again, I carried on the black feature to this page too, especially since there's so much black in the photo. I added a few photo corners for detail on this page, and thought I would carry on the arrow feature from the first page as well. The last thing I added to both pages was the journaling.

I am so glad I started this! It feels so good to get some of my pictures in a book again. I just hope I keep it up. Maybe one day each week I'll devote to making and posting a new scrapbook page on my blog. You like that idea? I'm hoping it will inspire and help you get started scrapbooking again too! Most of us got our start in the crafting world by scrapbooking, so I'm just going back to my roots here, nothing more! And I've learned so much from stamping that I know my pages are going to look MUCH better than my first foray in scrapbooking!

Hope you all have a great day. Muriel is doing fairly well. They are attempting to get her off the breathing tube. Her kidneys have NOT kicked in yet, but they are still hopeful. Some really bright news is that 3 blood tests in a row now have come back NEGATIVE for infection! Woo-hoo! That's what we're looking for!!! Oh yeah, I almost forgot to tell you....go check out Craft Critique today for my final CHA article! I've chosen my picks for both best new stamps and best designer paper of this years Summer CHA!

Hugs,
Amy