oh baby, the places you have gone.....

well - it's been an interesting ride for the month of july..... and it's already half way gone!! First day of July, I woke up a little bit closer to the big "40".....(yikes) On July 2 we headed off to our "fammathon" trip to Mammoth..... aka Mammathon (which was a fabulous time) then of course, we had a bittersweet home coming with the unexpected and sudden death of our first born dog, Enzo..... There was some goodness to be found in all of it.... which I have not yet share with you.... I was asked to be a guest designer (for July) over at Your Scrapbook Stash. I am super nervous about it..... because if you go over to their gallery.... there are some really amazing works of art there! So I made my first project for them... and I thought I would share it with you!

It's a mini album.... a la Anna...... so very surprising...... (i'm a mini album queen)

First of all, I was given a very generous kit to play with..... lots of Making Memories product (great escape).... there was also some maya road goodies and two potential mini album makings. (and just lost of other fun things..... a mini mask, buttons, ribbons, flowers..on and on....) When I first saw the paper - I was trying to think what photos would go best with it..... so I sent off a bunch of pictures to the printer (costco) and I did not use any of them for this project.... (go figure....)
I started off by covering the 8" circle album with patterned paper..... I am sooooo NOT a planner and it's just how I approach things. As I was getting a better feel for the paper... it came to me...... the title..... "Oh baby, the places you have gone!" (Yes, a play on Dr. Suess) and what better person in my world to feature.... my guy... Mr. Matt. He's been to lots of lovely places on this big green earth and I have never made anything that ties it all together for him.

Egypt and Russia appropriately place together for the mosque like buildings... of those two countries.... I was not able to dig deep enough into our photos, so the Moscow pictures are yet to be added.

Mexico and London..... (not sure why I placed those together - but I really felt Mexico need the BIG red background..... the picture is not your ordinary trip to Cozumel or Ensenada.... It's deep in the jungle mountains of Jalisco, Mexico. He took a beautiful photo of some children playing on a cliff. London well - it's the typical Big Ben shot..... tucked neatly in a "clock" tag.

Turks and P.R. (puerto rico) The turks and caycos shot is him scuba diving (at surface level) He was there on "business" checking out all the cool reefs. Puerto Rico was a trip I was actually on...... we needed some time for just us... to decide if we were going to make the BIG move back to california...... The beaches were amazing all ours on the island of Vieques.... it's an old naval base for the U.S. (missile testing area) If I were in the Navy back in the 50"s or 70"s I would have like to be stationed there.

Doha - Qatar. He has been the middle east lots of times..... but I think he really like Doha best. Cool building - went perfectly with my paper.... :)

the page with the glassine envelope is for money.... he always brings home a few dollars in currency of the countries he has been to and I thought that would be a fun place to store some. The other page is Quebec, Quebec. Ironically, while in Quebec we went to the northern most fort in North America...... a few years later in Puerto Rico.... we went to the Southern most fort in North America . Maybe I should do a book on forts?
Fun little book to put together- yet it is far from over... I love that it's not bound together.... I can still add more pages... when I am able to dig deep enough for some of those trips he took in the 90's..... and future trips that he is yet to take.
xo,
anna