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.

San Francisco

Last time I went to San Francisco, I was probably 10 years old. Time surely flew by quickly! Nevertheless, it brought back some good memories, and created some new memories with Tommy. There were places in San Francisco that I had never been to, and was able to visit the second time.

The double layout didn't take too long to put together, but I surely had a difficult time putting it together because I didn't know what I wanted to do, and how I wanted to put the page together. There were quite a bit of pictures that I wanted to use, but didn't know how to incorporate it in a double layout. I believe this was my first time to use many different pictures for a layout and my first time to create a pocket.

I bought the Jolee's Boutique Title Wave of San Francisco and decided to use it as a title for my page. I used a blue pattern as background. During the time I was putting this page together, I still had not really figured out how to mix and match different papers. I used 5 different pictures for this layout. I should cut all the pictures to the same size to keep it uniformed.

Besides the title wave sticker, I also used Jolee's Boutique Themed Destination Stickers of San Francisco to add embellishments to my page.

A pocket for the collection of brochures & memorabilia picked up in San Francisco!

The hardest part of this page was creating the pocket. I thought the pocket was simple to put together. I thought I only needed to tape down 3 sides, and leave a little space, and I created a pocket! I didn't take into account of putting a bunch of brochures which the sides kept detaching on its own.

I really liked the title wave and the pocket. Of the two pages, I enjoyed the left side. If I could redo my layout, I would definitely fix the pocket so it would not detach on its own. I would completely redo the entire layout on the right side! It felt too empty to me.

Next time, a post for the single layout that I used my Silhouette digital cutter for the first time.

Napa Valley

My first weekend trip with Tommy, and we decided to take a road trip up to San Francisco and Napa Valley. We took my dad's BMW (which I paid lease on, and besides, his car was way under mileage! Totally took advantage of it.) We drove to San Francisco on Friday night and didn't arrive there until past midnight. We woke up early on Saturday morning to head to Napa Valley for our wine tasting adventure for the day. I am not going to be blogging about my wine tasting adventure in this blog. I will eventually blog about it in my travel blog, if I ever get to it.

We picked out 4 wineries we wanted to visit, but during our adventure, we took some advices from local wineries to visit some "must-visit" places. We ended up with 5 wineries for wine tastings, 1 winery for lunch, 1 winery for picture perfect view (winery closed by the time we got there!) and 1 winery that we couldn't tour because their tour was fully booked. We visited a total of 8 wineries!



I decided to do a double layout to showcase the wineries we went to. I decided to use a orange background because we went to Napa in October. Orange color reminds me of Fall season. I drew dotted lines on the layout to represent how we toured Napa Valley. I used a journal tag to list out the wineries we went to by order. I used Jolee's dimensional stickers as my embellishments for my layout.

What I like about this layout is the color. Everything seemed to match really well. I really like how I position each picture. It gave a playful, uplifting feel to the layout. I tried to do some stamping and embossing, unfortunately, it failed because I didn't have the right tool at that moment to emboss. I eventually gave up on the idea of stamping and embossing on this layout. Nonetheless, this page became one of my favorite.

Have a great weekend! :)