True Friendship

Sometimes, I get so caught up in scrapping about my family and what is going on in our lives that I don't think to record my friendships.  

In the layout I'm sharing today, I wanted to highlight a very special friendship I have with a woman I truly consider to be my sister.  No, we're not blood sisters, but we are certainly as close as sister's might expect to be.

I love that good friends walk together through life. And since I used a gridded paper for the background, I was able to easily write my about our 'walk' together directly on the background paper.

I'm a big fan of having tabs that stick up above the top edge of my page.  They look great, add a little unexpected dimension and still fit nicely inside my albums. Here, I used the Victoria Park Journal Cards to add the effect of tabs.

I love using the 6x6 pads to create my own embellishments.  For the flower below, I simply punched a couple of shapes out of the small-scale patterned papers and added a brad.

Overall, you'll see there are a lot of details added to the page but it still retains the feeling of having white space to allow the eye to rest.  Clustering makes it possible.

Lily Bee Supplies Used:

 Pattern Paper: Victoria Park, Handmade, Buttercup

ABC Stickers: Handmade

Journal Cards: Victoria Park, Handmade

Bag O Bits: Handmade

Mixed Cardstock Stickers: Handmade, Victoria Park

6x6 Paper Pads: Memorandum, Victoria Park
Stamps: Handmade

Other Supplies Used:

Punches: EK Success, Fiskars

Silhouette SD Die Cut Machine

Wood Veneer: Studio Calico

Scarlet Bird Designs Button Badge, Die Cuts

Brad: My Mind's Eye

Button Maker: Epiphanie Crafts

Mist's: Maya Road

Ink: Jenni Bowlin Studios

Have a beautiful Lily Bee Design kind of day and make something lovely!

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Eat Well

As a woman with a family and a home, I don't very often get to eat at what I'd call a 'fine dining' establishment. Of course, it's not because I don't want to, but one can only afford so many $25+ plates in a given year before the bankers come calling.  At least that is the reality for our family.


Given that, when I do get the opportunity, I want it to be memorable.  That involves things like planning the right place and the right time and the right occasions. I can do that is to take extra care with my appearance and preparations.  But all of that will still allow the memory to fade.


Photos, however, will help keep it alive.  A well photographed location or plate of food can evoke so many things in people.  Why do you think they spend so much on marketing photos for all the major restaurant chains?  Because it evokes a certain 'something' when you see a mouth-wateringly juicy burger topped with the freshest, greenest lettuce and the ripest, reddest tomatoes and veritably dripping with secret sauce!!!


With all of that in mind, I decided to take out the big guns when my husband and I recently visited a local restaurant for our 20th anniversary.  I brought my big ole Canon DSLR to dinner with me and took time to shoot the food as soon as it arrived at our table.


I admit, I was a little embarrassed to do it, but the waitress even came by on one of my shooting occasions and gave me a thumbs up for being brave enough. 'Yeah!' I thought, 'I'm not so weird after all am I?!'  Well, maybe I am, but I did get some great shots and we'll not soon forget this occasion of Eating Well!

The rich, warm colors of my photos led me to the Buttercup Collection. That yellow damask pattern seemed the perfect compliment to our fine dining adventures and helped bring out the warm tones in my photos.

I also played with the round frame stamp from the Handmade collection to add a little extra color and texture.

I dug out my turquoise and grey washi tapes which blend so beautifully with the colors of Buttercup and created a bit of extra texture behind the bank of photos on the right side of the page.  The mini cardstock alphas make perfect photo captions.

And I couldn't resist creating another brad from the cardstock stickers and my Epiphany Crafts tool.


Give dining out photography a try and let us know how you like it!  I'd love to see what you come up with!


Lily Bee Supplies Used:

Patterned Paper: Buttercup (Queen Bee, Rain
ABC Cardstock Stickers: Buttercup
Mixed Cardstock Stickers: Buttercup
Journal Cards:Buttercup,  Double Dutch
Bag of Bits: Buttercup
Stamps: Handmade

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Blog Hop Day 3 with Epiphany Crafts and Glue Arts

Happy Wednesday and Welcome to Day 3 of our blog hop. Today's post features our Sketch for May's Sketch Challenge by Ursula Schneider. Let's take a look at her layout she created with the sketch.


I love that she has mixed our older paper from This & That along with Double Dutch and Buttercup. Our papers are so easy to mix and match from line to line.





Here is Maisa's take on the sketch:


I adore how she has cut the doily shapes from our Double Dutch Croquet Paper and embellished them with the Epiphany Crafts Circle Accessory. Maisa also used the Glue Arts 3D Foam Pac to give dimension to our Bag of Bits Banner.




Now we'd love to see YOUR take on this sketch! (And we'll pick one of your pages to win a lovely collection of Lily Bee goodies!) Here's the rules to keep in mind:

*Your layout must use at least two Lily Bee products.
*Post your layout to any gallery or your blog and link the post in the comment section of this post. OR post your layout on our Facebook page. (But not both, please.)
*Be sure and title your post "Lily Bee Sketch Challenge #9" so we can find it easily.
*The deadline for entries is Thursday, May 31st at 9:00 pm PST.
*And of course, be creative and have fun!

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Focus On: Travel!

Happy Monday, friends! Can't believe we are halfway through April already! Here in the Northern Hemisphere, most of us have had our Spring Breaks. Even if you don't have kids, it's fun to think back when we had that week off. Lots of people use that week to take a family trip, visit friends, go to a warmer place (or colder, if you are a ski person.) So we asked our designers to create travel focused layouts to share with you today. (click on layouts for a bigger view)

Layout by Ursula Schneider

Layout by Summer Fullerton

This is making me want to go on a trip right now! Luckily summer vacation will be here soon enough. I hope!

Also, please remember that you have a little more time to enter our Sketch Challenge! Have a great day!

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Bingo -- A Winning Combination

Sometimes, if I intend to use certain supplies I have on hand, I have to make a project centered around those supplies. I like to shop ( I am a woman after all ) but sometimes I take quite a while to get around to using the amazing goodies I bring home.

With the project I'm sharing today, that was the case.  I picked up a Silhouette file called 'bingo card' but I had yet to come up with an idea for how to use it.  Every time I browsed through my Silhouette library I admired this shape but passed it by since I didn't have a plan for it.

It was one of those files that I love the look of but I had no earthly idea how to fit it into a project.  This is where challenging myself comes in.

I decided to enlarge the design and made some adjustments to the size of the windows to accommodate my photos.  The result is a layout that makes me happy and another product from my 'stash' used!  Two birds with one stone!

Since the design of the cut-out is relatively complex, I didn't want to add a ton of embellishments but I did want to fill all of the windows with lots of Lily Bee goodness.

It was a simple matter of choosing patterns to tuck behind the openings and adding some punched shapes and homemade baubles and buttons from my collection.  I added the journaling around the die-cut shape, both telling my story and creating a visual frame accented with tiny punched triangles.

I do like adding just part of a punched shape to create visual interest (see the partial heart frame and heart).  I also decided to outline the shapes in fine black marker in order to emphasize the cut-outs.

Lily Bee Supplies used:

Handmade:  Papers - Patchwork, Sky Blue / ABC Cardstock Stickers / 6x6 Tiny tablet

Buttercup: 6x6 Tiny Tablet / Bag of Bits / Index Journal Cards

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