Finally Friday and a Freebie

Hello and happy Friday friends! It's been awhile since I posted and for good reason. You may recall in my last post that I was eagerly anticipating the graduation of my son from Marine Corps Boot Camp. It was an exciting time and I was thrilled to see him again and share in his accomplishment with family and friends.

I took lots of photo's and now I'm in the process of documenting the experience. In this first layout I captured our first day to arrive in San Diego. We traveled with our own little crew and made a fun day after hours of driving in a car. We played on the beach and had some delicious tacos.

The layout design came from a free pattern shared on the Make it From Your Heart Blog. You can get the printable design for your self. Mix it up with any papers you desire, I used the So Much Happy papers and embellishments from both the cut-apart paper and Complements. Here is what the layout looks like before adding pictures. {I flipped the photo's on the right page to be horizontal rather than vertical.}

Don't be afraid to cut-apart sentiments even further to curve it around your cut circle. You can also bend your border stamps to outline the circular shape!

Be sure to visit the CTMH Blog for your free pattern. It is lots of fun to create!

Adventure with Mini State Stamps

Have you seen the M-sized state stamps in the new Idea Book. You can find a couple examples on page103, however you can see all of the United States and the Canadian provinces and territories online. I knew immediately which states I wanted to collect first and what I would use them for!

Our family embarked on a pretty epic vacation this Summer! We traveled through three states making multiple destinations. This was also the furthest North we have ever traveled on the West coast. At the end of our almost 4 week adventure I brought back plenty of photographs to fill an entire album. From the moment I saw the new state stamps in the Idea Book I knew exactly how I wanted to design the introduction layout.

 This layout will be at the start of our Summer Vacation album. It really introduces the journey showing where we started and giving just a glimpse of the entire trip to the last destination.

I also used lots of brand new Artistry Cricut cuts which were a ton of fun to cut and add into the layout!

Just look at those cute little state stamps!

 Here is a collage of some close-ups of the stamped images throughout the layout!

 Now those adorable mini-stamps can all be contained in the mini organizer! This newest organizer is found on page 155 in the Annual Inspirations. It holds up to 28 My Acrylix M-size stamp sets or use it for those smaller embellishment packages, they fit great in here too!

I had a customer tell me that she wanted to collect all 50 of the United States stamps and if she got anything for such a purchase. Well I suppose if you got all 50, I would have to throw in a mini stamp organizer for free!!

What would you use these mini state stamps for?!! See them all online here.