Goodbye Moorea...

Goodbye Moorea, and goodbye flash on the camera! After few different shots of us sitting on that coach, the gorilla pod lost its balance and grip on the opposite chair that the gorilla pod was gripping, the camera fell backward dropped onto the marble floor. The flash broke instantly. :(

I kept the page simple. I asked Tommy to participate in this layout as well. I decided to use a beige color cardstock as my background.

I decided to use 1 photo only for my layout. Because the hotel lobby was very opened, bright and green, I decided to stick with a theme in this layout with similar color to the picture. I found a pattern green & white paper. I decided to use it to cut the font from my Silhouette Digital Cutter. After cutting it out and removing the letters from the carrier sheet, I noticed that the fonts was too light if I decided to adhere them onto the cardstock. I decided to cut another set of the letters with brown cardstock to make the other pattern stand out on the page.

I decided to create use my digital cutter to cut out the photo corners. I used a different green pattern paper to cut out the corners. To keep it uniformed, I also cut out another set of photo corners to put behind the pattern paper.

I adhered the picture over the photo corner.




I asked Tommy to write about his Moorea experience. He kept his journal short, partially because he forgot most about his trip, other than how excited he was, looking forward to Bora Bora that day!






As for me, I also wrote a journal. I managed to squeeze so much in with so little space provided for myself. I retained a lot of detailed information in my mind (I called them... unnecessary information!) I usually write small, but I think I wrote even smaller in this.

I decided to cut 2 pieces of green cardstock to adhere behind the 2 journals. I had some small blue flowers and decided to use them. I added rhinestones the flowers to give a little bling to my page.

That's it for Moorea! Follow my travel blog on my travel experience!

Dinner @ Mahana'i

For the entire 4 nights stay in Moorea, Tommy ate at the resort for dinner, other than the dinner & show on our first night. Mahana'i is the main restaurant at the Moorea Pearl. I had scraped quite a bit of food pages in my Tahiti scrapbook. I probably had scraped at least 3 different layouts of my dining experience at Mahana'i. We dined there for 2 nights.

Tommy and I love to try a bit of everything, when possible. We made sure for all our dinners, we would not order the same thing on the menu so we could try different plates. We also made sure that we would not order the same thing as the other night we dined there.

This page was quite special to me because Tommy helped out in creating this double layout with me. He was recovering a minor surgery at his home. I wanted to spend more time with him and wanted to help him put his mind off the pain, so I decided to work on a layout together - from brainstorming how we wanted the page to look to the color coordination.

Although this is probably not the best page out of the entire Tahiti scrapbook, it's nice that Tommy was involved in it to help me out. After this page, I am pretty sure he won't be helping me much.

We decided to do a double page layout. One side consisted of the order that Tommy ordered, and the other side consisted of the order I ordered. We also wrote a little journal about our dining experience.


We decided to choose brown cardstock as our background of our double layout. The reason why we wanted to use the brown cardstock was because we wanted to resemble the background as the color of the table that we sat at.

We chose a silver metallic cardstock because there was a place mat on the table where we dined. The place mat was shimmery, metallic. The design of the place mat had a checkered design with 2 different colors -- brown/gold with green/silvery tone.

I used my silhouette cutter to cut out the letters. We decided to use black as the font on the left side of the layout.

To keep it a bit more interesting, Tommy wanted to use a yellow star epoxy sticker to replace the dot on the letter "i."

We arranged the pictures from top to bottom (appetizer- dinner- dessert). We also resized all 6 pictures .


With the way how we arranged the pictures on one side, it gave us enough space in the middle to write a small journal. I tripled layered the journal. I started with a black cardstock, which I used the round corner punch to punch out the 2 corners. Then, I layered a greenish metallic cardstock over the black cardstock.

I had Tommy wrote his experience on a small cardstock. After he was done, I layered his journal on top of the green metallic cardstock. I used a gold color brad as decoration.

The second side of the layout was basically the same as the one on the left. I put the pictures the same way like the other side, expect "mirrored."

I used a green metallic cardstock to cut out the font from my digital cutter.

The "@" sign, I actually it 2 times with the 2 different cardstock. Originally, I wanted to cut the "@" sign down the middle and adhere right at the edge of the page with 2 colors.

Tommy talked me out of it and decided that it would look better if we use the black font instead and adhere it completely onto one side of the page. Again, he decided to use epoxy sticker at the end.

Just like the other side, I wrote my dining experience. I tried to keep the two pages identical in design. It looked like a mirror reflection.

Pool

I love the pool at the resort. If the sky is the limit, and money is not an issue, I totally love to have a similar version in my own backyard! For now, I will continue to dream about my dream house and pool.

With the underwater case, we were able to take some cool videos and pictures in the water. I used some underwater pictures for some of my scrapbook pages. Stay tune for my blog! I am also writing in my travel blog, about my travel experiences, things that caught my eyes on the trip.

For this single layout, I used a light blue cardstock as my background. I used a blue ink chalk to chalk all four sides of the cardstock. I picked 2 pattern papers to compliment the colors for my layout. I kept it simple. I also used ink chalk to chalk all sides of each strip.

I overlapped part of the 2 strips of pattern papers. I resized and arranged all the pictures. I added 2 flowers and secured with a brad.

I used my digital cutter and cut out a corner flourish and the letters. I adhered the corner flourish with the runner tape. I used the Xyron X to create the sticker for the letters.

I used a white pen and wrote out the different types of activities we did by the pool side. Instead of writing a journal, I decided to use short phrases, single word adjectives and verbs instead. I had no other place to write them, other than along the side of the flourish. From far away, it looked like I was adding an additional color to the flourish design. When you look closely, it was actually words.

I enjoyed working this page. It was something different. It was my first time writing a different style of journaling. It was a bit of a challenge for me because I like to write alot of details. With such little space, I had to be straight to the point. I usually write very small, I was able to squeeze everything I wanted to write in there.

4x4 Safari Tour - Page 2

The thing about this scrapbook, I knew exactly what layouts I wanted to do. I would use a post it note and stick it on the album to remind myself of the events/ activities that I wanted to scrap about. I decided to create a collage of Tommy and me on the Safari Tour.



I decided to go with the green cardstock as background. It is the same background used for the layout next to it - 4x4 Safari Tour. I also used the same 2 pattern papers to create this page. I decided to tear the papers. In the center of the layout, I wrote down all the stops we had during the tour. I used 4 brads for each corner to make the center look like a "board."

Next week, if time permits, I will post another page. I am going on a vacation, and I need to start planning my trip and start thinking what to pack. :)

Around Town

There were some small shopping centers close to the resort. It was walking distance. However, with such heat under the sun, it got pretty difficult to walk. We went to the nearby market a couple times to pick up snacks, food, juice, and water to enjoy back in our hotel room. Every morning, at around 4 or 5 in the morning, we would be woken up by rooster with his wake up call. I guess the locals are early riser! While we were walking, we would see roosters around.

I decided to do a single layout. I used a green cardstock and used a lighter green pattern paper to overlay the cardstock. I used the digital cutter to cut out the title. There weren't many pictures taken around town by us.

I used a corner punch and rounded one corner for each picture. I also resized the pictures to fit all the pictures inside the pattern paper.

Lycee Agricole d' Opunohu

In Moorea, there is a agriculture school. The surrounding was beautiful, so green. We saw a lot of pineapples growing on the ground (Moorea is known to be the "Pineapple Island" after all), papaya trees, passion fruit trees, lime trees, and many more!

There, we were able to sample some of the jams that were made there. They tasted so good that we decided to buy some jams to take them home to enjoy. The day was pretty hot, so we decided to order a fruit juice to quench our thirst. After they made it, it looked really pretty in the glass. It was a two toned color- from orange to yellow. I regretted not buying a bag of vanilla beans. The vanilla beans had a very strong aroma. Our tour guide told us that if we put a strand of vanilla bean in a bottle of vodka and leave it there for a while, when you open the bottle of vodka, you will only be able to smell and taste vanilla, and not the alcohol. (Note: please don't take my advice for it. I only wrote what my tour guide told us. I didn't purchase any vanilla beans to experiment if it was true.)

I like to also point out that the time we were in Moorea, this place was giving us a better exchange rate compared to the bank. During the time we went, the bank gave us $1USD to about 80 CPF. However, at the school, they were giving us $1USD to 100 CPF. It had been about couple years since we were there. The exchange rate might had already changed. For those that are planning to travel to Moorea, I suggest not to exchange all your cash all at once in the bank at the airport. Save some cash, you may find better exchange rates from local stores.

I decided to do a double layout for this page. I used green and brown cardstock as background. I cut two 2-inch white strips to put across the top of the two pages. I cut out fonts from my digital cutter. I also added a dark green with white polka dots ribbon.



I kept this double layout really simple. I decided to choose the school name as the title for the pages. We took many different pictures.

I decided to keep the sizes of each picture uniformed. I had to cut down each picture to fit all 8 pictures on the layout.

This is the last layout for the 4x4 Safari Tour. I only took the highlights of the tour to put into my scrapbook. Our tour included a stop at the Pineapple Factory and Fruit Juice Distillery. We were able to sample some liquors and juice there. At the end of the trip, our tour guide took us to the pearl shop to shop for pearls.

It was a 4-5 hours trip. By the time when we finished the tour, most of the people in my group decided to stop by to nearby market, no more than 5 minutes walk from our hotel, to pick up some food or snacks. I forgot what we had, but I believed we bought ourselves a jambon baguette, and picked up a carton of pineapple juice to bring back to our room to enjoy lunch on our balcony.

Next time, a fancy dinner in the hotel. I was inspired by a scrapbook layout that I saw at a local scrapbook store, and decided to scrap-lift the page.

Belvedere Lookout

Oh, the mountain that sits in between the 2 bays! They called it as "Belvedere Lookout." The view was amazing! I love this picture.

This was a single layout page. I decided to use a green cardstock as background and use a blue, green pattern paper as a foreground of this layout. I kept the layering very simple. I cut the pattern paper into 11x11. I made mats for the photo and the journal.

I decided to type up my journal instead of writing it by hand. I don't have the best handwriting in the world. I know it gives a personal touch if I were to write it by hand. However, I just wanted to give a clean and neat look on my layout, so I typed it up instead.

The only embellishment that I added to the page was the flower brad. It was a green flower with purple accent in the middle. It drew the attention to the journal when I looked at the layout.

I love this page alot. It was a very simple looking layout. I wouldn't do anything to change the layout of this page. I believed I had trouble lining things up in the middle. If you look closely at the layout, you will see that it panned to the left.

Next time, another single layout, almost similar to this one.

Have a great day! :)

Cooks Bay, Opunohu Bay

It is a single layout for each of the two bays, but it's also a double layout for me. I intended to put the two bays layouts next to each other because when I was on the tour, I learned that the bays were separated by the mountain, Mt. Rotui. With that in mind, I wanted to put both of them next each other.

For the Cook's Bay layout, I decided to use blue cardstock as a background. I used a lighter blue pattern paper to layer on top of the cardstock. I cut out letters with my digital cutter and layered it over the blue pattern paper. I adhered the pictures onto the page and added a ribbon to the layout.
The ribbon matched the color of the 2 papers near perfectly. The ribbon helped blend the 2 papers together. I absolutely loved this ribbon! :)

For this layout, I decided to stick with a green theme. It was mainly because the pictures had alot green colors. I decided to do a similar layout to match with the Cook's Bay layout. I decided to layer a pattern green paper over the green cardstock. I also cropped the bottom 2 pictures so they could fit inside the pattern paper.

I used my digital cutter to cut out the fonts. I used a different font from the layout because the name, Opunohu Bay, was much longer than Cook's Bay. I wanted to use the same font, but it turned out I couldn't fit the entire title to my layout, I had to decide on a next plan.

Pao Pao

Pao Pao is a small village in Moorea. It was our first stop of the Safari Tour. The tour guide drove off the main road to go to Pao Pao. He also gave a bit of history about the island, and talked about the volcano and crater. We saw pineapples grew along the road. (I love their Moorea pineapples and their pineapple juice!)

I decided to do a double layout. I chose to use the Citrus stack from DCWV. When I buy papers, if there is a matching paper stack with the cardstock, I would buy them both at the same time. That way, I don't have to frustrate myself with complimenting the colors.

I printed out letters from my silhouette digital cutter. I used a green pattern cardstock as background. The white flower patterns were in glitters! I decided to round the center picture with the corner punch.

For some odd reason, when I worked with cardstocks with glitters, my photo tape would not adhere to the back. It kept on falling off. I had to use runner tape to tape the corners.

Because the page was so bright with the lime green, that completely overpowered my letters. I thought about using another color to put behind the white letters to make it stand out. I decided not to.

One the other side of the layout, I kept the page really simple. I purchased a flower design from the digital cutter's website.

This was my first time cutting out a design which I needed to use more than one color to complete a design. I had to also do a little layering to create the flower. I kept the flower white to compliment the layout on the left.

I cut out a small frame with my digital cutter to give an illusion of a "journal" tag. I used stickers to spell out "Pao Pao" and wrote a few small facts about the village. I have a problem writing straight. It tends to move upward from left to right! I did eventually invest in an invisible ink pen to help me "eye" my lines to keep my work straight.

I was a bit disappointed me this page. This was one of the pages that I did went back and added more elements to make the page look better. Watch out for the post in the future!

LAX - PPT

I gave some thought on how to blog about my first album. I decided that I would blog according to the date I completed each layout.

I started this layout when Tommy left on a 3 day Mexico cruise with his friend's bachelor's party. Since I had free time to myself, I decided that it was the best time for me to start working my first album.

In this album, I really wanted to document as much as possible on everything we did. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity to go to Tahiti! I definitely needed to make sure I could preserve all my memories so when I am 90 years old, I could relive my vacation through my scrapbook!

I decided to do a double layout for the departure of LAX (LA International airport) to the arrival at PPT (Tahiti International Airport).

I kept the layout quite simple. I used 2 different shades of blue, that resembled the color of chairs on the Air Tahiti Nui's plane. I cut out all letters with the silhouette cutter. The difficult part of putting the letters on the layout was trying to center them!

We took alot of food pictures in Tahiti, even airline foods! Since I never get to enjoy my food on the plane, it was kind of nice to remember what kind of food they were offering. It was a red-eye flight to Tahiti, I also made a small note on the layout to indicate what time we flew out from LAX. I could only remember falling asleep while the plane was in line to take off the runway. It felt as if I slept for over an hour!

When we got to Tahiti, it was 4AM! I definately had to document that because when we got off the plane, there were 3 guys playing Tahitian music and airport staffs passing out tiare flowers at the crack of dawn to welcome us right when we entered the airport to go through customs & immgrations! That was pretty cool.

I didn't do much to this page. I kept the page really simple for my first layout as I was still trying to figure things out.

Descanso Gardens

During Thanksgiving day in 2008, we spent couple hours at Descanso Gardens before Tommy went home to celebrate Thanksgiving with his family, while I spent my Thanksgiving at my aunt's house. I have to say, it gets pretty frustrating when it comes to Thanksgiving every year. I like Tommy to attend my family's Thanksgiving and every year, he refuses. I suggested to him one year that we should attend both dinners - hang out at one house for a little while and run off to the other one, he still refuses! I guess his perfect excuse which he never dare say in front of my face is, "we are not married yet, so I am not attending to your family's Thanksgiving!"

Because both of us didn't have to do any food preparation (not like any one would trust me in the kitchen with a big bird anyway), we decided to take a small outing to Descanso Gardens. I always wanted to check out this garden. It is located at La Canada Flintridge. There were a lot to see, but so little time. I wished I had more time and hope to return some day!

I decided to do a double layout for this page. The left side of the layout, I decided to put pictures of us and the right side of the layout, I put pictures of the surroundings around the garden. Again, I kept the page simple and didn't do alot of paper layering. I used one of the Fall Stacks by DCWV. There's some pattern on it if you look closely to the picture. I rounded the corners of the pictures with a corner punch. (The rounded corner punch is one of the best investments I have ever purchased for scrapbooking!)

I used my silhouette digital cutter to cut out the fonts. Instead of using plain paper, I decided to cut the fonts with a pattern paper to create some design on the letters to give a different look to the fonts.

I also used the matching pattern paper as a background for journaling. I used a tiny hole puncher to punch the white and pattern paper and added a green brad to it. I then adhered the journal to the cardstock.

For the second page, the layout on the right side, I incorporated different scenery pictures taken at the garden. I kept the page simple, and only added a strip of the same green pattern paper on the side. There were so many pictures, I didn't know how to layer papers and put pictures over it, and yet not to make the page looking busy. I also made small tags. On there, I wrote the name of the gardens or places we visited there.

I love how the green pattern paper matches the entire layout. It made the page not so boring. If I were to fix this page, I like to layer a some pattern papers to the layout. I would not use blue ink to write out the garden names. I would use black instead to make the entire page "flow."

This is the last random layout that I had done in the last year and a half. Since August 2009, I have been working on my vacation pictures to create my travel albums. My passion is travel and scrapbook. They just complement each other very well. You see the world with your eyes, capture your memories with a camera and transfer everything you remembered in a scrapbook to tell a story. That's what life is about! :)

Wine Tasting @ Santa Ynez Valley

Santa Ynez was my first wine tasting trip with Tommy. Believe it or not, after this trip, we fell in love of doing wine tasting tours and had to go to Napa Valley a month after. After we left Ojai, we drove up to Santa Ynez Valley for wine tasting. We watched the movie, "Sideways," and we picked two wineries off their list to visit.

This was a simple layout. I used only one sheet of cardstock as the background. I chose brown as the background because of the pictures in the background. Not only that, we went to visit in September, the beginning of Fall season. I wanted to use "earthy" tones for my layout.

I cut out fonts from my Silhouette cutter. Some of the fonts were smaller and they were difficult to put on the page because I didn't have the right tools to adhere them. When it comes to scrapbooking, I don't like to use glue unless it is absolutely necessary. I use runner tapes to tape everything down on the page. Not until I was 1/3 way into working on my first travel album, I decided to pick up the Xyron X to make my life easier.

For the smaller fonts, I had to pick out tiny stripes off the runner tapes and add the tapes to the font one by one by hand. I had to carefully place the tapes on each letter and had to make sure the tapes were not showing on the edges of each font.

The problem about this page was the printout of the wine map. I tri-folded the map, added a ribbon to wrap around the map, and taped the back of map to the layout. If the page doesn't have a protector cover, this would work. However, all my albums have protector covers for each sheet. I will have to cut a hole on the protector cover so I can access the map. When I have time, I will put try to figure out what to do.

As for embellishment, I decided to use rub-on to keep the page simple. The great thing about rub-ons is how simple it is to transfer designs to the project. All I need is a popsicle stick and continue to rub the design off the sheet. If done correctly, the entire design gets transferred to the project!

If I were to fix this layout, I would add frames to the pictures and round the corners with the corner punch. I would probably shrink the map to keep the entire map flat on the layout without the need to fold and write out the places we went on a tag.

Happy Monday!

Ojai, CA

Ojai, a small little town in Ventura County, won my heart. I cannot forget how nice and peaceful the place was. I keep wanting to return for a longer stay on the weekend to spend more time in town. Ojai is known for the "Pink Moment." I tried to capture the moment on camera, but didn't seem to do too well.

I chose to use orange as a background and used pink and green pattern papers to put this single layout together. I kept the layout simple by alternating the pattern papers. This was my first scrapbook page that I used my Silhouette Cutter. I decided to do something simple, and cut letters with it. I also decided to overlap part of the pictures.

I decided to print out a google map to show the hotel we stayed, the restaurant we dined at to add a little extra touch to my layout. This way, I would never forget where I went when I visited Ojai back in 2008.

I liked the color of the page. I totally loved the cutter as I didn't have to spend hours to cut each letter out by hand! If I were to redo this page, I would give this page a new title, other than calling it as, "Ojai, CA."

Looks like this is my last entry for the month of March. Hopefully, I will continue to post just as much in April. I am doing my best to balance my time of posting and scrapbooking.