Two layouts - "Brown Bear" and "Birthday Lunch with Dad"

I haven't posted in over two weeks! We just returned from a fabulous family vacation in St. Augustine, Florida. If you've never been, you must go! It's the oldest city in the United States. Awesome beaches, quaint downtown shopping, all kinds of things to do. We rented a beach house for the first time ever, and it was such a great experience. We had the Atlantic Ocean in our backyard!! We took our two adult sons. Our oldest is married with the sweetest little baby girl in the world (our first grandchild), and our youngest son who is in college, brought his girlfriend. It was such a great time, and it's always hard to return to the reality of work and home....but also good in many ways.

So... on with my layouts. The first features pictures from our favorite restaurant in Pentwater, MI taken last summer.

I picked up this map paper from a warehouse here in Fort Wayne called Darlington Farms. They are only open at Christmas time, and oh what treasures you can find! They have a section of scrapbooking supplies including stamps and paper. The map cardstock (green design is on the back) came in a pack of about 20 heavy-duty, two-sided sheets and it was $1.49!! I love the distressed look. The ribbon which I've had stashed forever reminded me of a road. I stamped on each of the banners to add some detail.

 The road sign shape was cut with my Cricut. I saved the paper coaster from the restaurant (bottom right) and cut a couple of mats to frame it, leaving the frame wide enough to journal around.

As you can see from both pages side-by-side, I was able to use a total of eight pictures on this double layout.

This one pager is pretty special. My daughter-in-law took Scarlet to see her Daddy on his birthday last year. They had a picnic outside on his lunch break and a reporter from the local newspaper spotted them! They made the front page. =) Being the proud scrapbooking Mom and Grandma that I am, it had to be scrapped!

I am really not a huge fan of scrapbooking newspaper articles, but I like the way this one turned out. I cut down the front page newspaper article to just under 12x12 in order to frame it with red cardstock. Since I had two copies, I then cut out the actual picture, title, and captions from the 2nd copy and matted it on blue cardstock, and then popped it up over the same picture on the first copy. I had a set of vintage looking office stamps which I used on light blue cardstock as embellishments.

The coolest part of this story, is the follow up letter to the Editor that we spotted a few weeks later. People are apparently encouraged by seeing good news in the paper. It was very kind of her to take the time to write to the Editor and express her appreciation for the "good news" picture of my son and granddaughter!! I cut the 2nd article out, matted it on red, and popped it up over a bad news article about a drug bust....=)

Typically I'm a two page scrapper, but I had a one page 4th of July layout of Scarlet using these colors. Since my son's birthday is right around the same time, I decided to put them together in the scrapbook.

I hope this post will help you venture out and scrapbook a special newspaper article that you might be holding on to. Have a great weekend!!!