Smash it!

Hello again.

Just wanted to share with you a couple pages from my Smashbook, and some of my usual go-to products and techniques. 

March Starts.

When I Smash, I tend to do it in loosely chronological order. I start each month with a tab and a calendar pocket that I fill with odds and ends from the month that are too big to just glue down: cards, notes from my hubby, big pictures the kids have drawn, shopping lists, the worship folder from church, even just extra pictures with little notes on them. I think these pockets are really awesome, and I've gone through several packages of them by now. They are where I store all that stuff that I want to remember but never have a place for. Before I started Smashbooking, I had tons of boxes filled with all kinds of little things that I never looked at but couldn't bear to get rid of. But now I know exactly where that stuff should go, and where I can find whatever I'm looking for later.

I like to fill my calendar in with all kinds of things that are going on for us. Sometimes if things are busy, it is just events: birthdays, parties, date nights, etc. But when I am regularly adding to my Smashbook, I like to leave little notes about the boring stuff that makes up our life, like what days it rained, or what my son said one afternoon, or something that made me happy. You can see that this one is only half full- I'll keep adding to it as the month goes on.

As you can see on this page, and pretty much all my others, I am obsessed with washi tape, which is just patterned tape. I had a friend ask me once why I loved it so much, and I had a hard time explaining exactly why it was so wonderful. I use it to tape stuff down in my book, but I also use it just to decorate anything and everything. My sewing machine is covered in little strips of washi tape. There are three different ones on here, but I've got at least twenty five now.

This page shows a couple of other things that I habitually use in my Smashbook. I am constantly using paint chips for journaling blocks and photo mats and anchoring all the junk that a Smashbook is meant to keep. Any time I go to Walmart or Lowes, I stick a new handful of paint chips in my purse all guiltily. I don't know why I always feel bad about this since they are FREE, but I do. I'm always sneaking around in the paint section, peeking around corners and blushing. I'm pretty sure the Walmart paint guy is on to me. No one paints that frequently. These are solid color ones, but I like the strips of several colors too.

I also like to make my pictures into two inch squares in photoshop before printing them. I think this started with wanting to keep instagram pictures, but I've since abandoned instagram and just kept making the tiny pictures. I like them this way because they are small enough to get a bunch on there (I always have waaay to many pictures to scrap them all), but still big enough to be bright and dynamic. Plus it is cheaper than printing a thousand full size pictures.

Okay, here's the page that is really cute (if I do say so myself).

Look at my hubby all scowling while I kissed him in that second pic in the photo strip. He is lame.

I'm super pleased with how this page turned out, because I think it is a nice mix of just getting your stuff down and more traditional fancy scrapbooking. I mean, it's still pretty random, but look at how much pretty stuff is on here! I love the gorgeous pages that you see in magazines, but I get anxiety over making them myself. I get all stressed about perfect layouts and never being caught up, and I can't make myself put anything down on the page. Hence, my love of Smashbook. No stress, just glue your junk in there! But I do still like to make pages scrapbooky sometimes. 

I recently discovered a bunch of products by Basic Grey 70% off at my local JoAnns, and I bought that shit up! The striped background paper on the left, the star pin, the banner, and the noteworthy tag on the bottom right are all from this collection. The pages in the Smashbook are always cute, but for some reason I always end up completely covering them with other paper. I have been accused of having a paper fetish though, so that might explain it. In any case, I love the six by six inch paper pads for my Smashing because they are the perfect size for photo mats and journaling squares and covering up the frequent pictures of horses that seem to appear in all the Smashbooks.

Here you can also see one of my very favorite Smashbook products ever, the label maker. I love this and use it all the time. I like to add a title to my pages and labels are such a cool way to do that. Plus, I am a nerd and like to organize shit. Don't judge. I dug out a bunch of things from my kids my stash for this page. Bits of ribbon and flowers and buttons and a metal tag. The journaling spot on the left is actually just the packaging from some chipboard tags. Because I am also a bit of a hoarder (at least I'm an organized one). And of course all the washi tape. I can't seem to help myself.

I don't know why I had like six paragraphs of stuff to say about that first page, which I don't even like that much and I can't come up with much to say about this one that I really like a lot. But there it is. Are you sold on Smashing yet?