So Cal Shop Hop

My So Cal Shop Hop package- passport, chain necklace, bottle cap pendant, a pen, a small tube of lotion and a really cool package to hold everything in there!

I decided to participate in the So Cal Shop Hop this year. The theme for this year is: "Destinations Around the World." This event is from July 29 - August 14, 2011.

I purchased the So Cal Shop Hop pass about a month ago, and they were finally ready for pick up. On Saturday, I dropped by to Scrap n' Yap to pick up by Shop Hop pass! I was pretty excited when they handed me the little package! I think I acted like a 5 year old, opening her Christmas present! Of course, I was in the car, and no one saw my expression other than Tommy. My excitement must had shown because he kept asking me if the little girl of me was happy and excited. (Oh my dear boyfriend... OF COURSE I WAS!!)

This is my first time participating the shop hop, so I am not sure what to expect and not sure what I am doing. Well, I will learn and figure it out along the way!

Continue to follow my blog. I will be posting the goodies I purchase and my shop hop experience!

A closer look at the packaging. The theme destination at Scrap N' Yap is Southern France! It reminds me when Tommy and I were in Southern France (Villefranche- Monaco- Nice) last year on a Disney Cruise.

A closer look of what was inside the package. :)

Looking forward to do some shopping after work today, if I am not too tired. :)

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.

On a Break

Ever since I returned from my 2 weeks vacation on the Pacific Northwest, I had been very busy. I did not neglect my scrap blog and my travel blog. I was just too tired. I work all day at work, come home to work out, have dinner and shower. I was so sleepy that I ended up jumping in the bed around 11 at the latest!

I hadn't been scrapbooking either. Since coming home, I only got 2 single layouts and 1 double layout completed.

Not to worry though, I will be blogging my layouts soon. Stay tune!