National Scrapbook Day Observance 2016

National Scrapbook Day is the first Saturday in May. This year that falls on the day before Mother's Day. In celebration of National Scrapbook Day, I joined my friend Maggie at an all day scrapbooking/crafting event on April 30.

Here we are having a blast at attempting a selfie (No, I don't take them often and am just now learning to look at the right spot while taking them):

I was not as productive as I would have liked, but I made a few cards, experimented with new embossing powder, troubleshot a Cricut issue I was having, became more comfortable with using my new Cricut Explore Air, and, of course, made new friends.

Toward the end of the day, I made a Cricut free card design for mother's day. I whipped up that card on Mother's Day and gave it to my boyfriend's mom. It was rather pretty, but I forgot to take a picture of it.

I also decided on using some patterned paper from my stash.
My daddy's birthday is coming up and I chose to make him a birthday card. This will be posted at a later time so that he doesn't come across it before I give it to him.

The second card I made is for my man. I make cards for him randomly.
I didn't even use a sketch for this one. I found the stamps I wanted to use and put the pieces together. I have determined that this layout could easily be turned so that the shape surrounding the camera resembles a Polaroid picture.
The cross-stitched lines is an image from the CTMH Typeset stamp set.
The camera image and sentiment stamps are from the Captured my Heart set by Unity.
The blue papers are from Recollections.
On the camera image, there is a tiny heart. I colored that with a borrowed red pen, just for a little pop of a different color.

Maggie had some new embossing powder so I had to open it and give it a try. I had this wonderful new stamp from Unity that I was dying to try and I thought it would be beautiful heat embossed. I was right. :)
I used kraft paper from Recollections.
I stamped the Dream Tree image by Unity in Versa Mark ink, sprinkled the embossing powder over the image, and then hit it with my heat gun.

This is what came out:

I added that to a cream card base. This card was give to a previous teammate for her supervisor who had the same surgery I did. The team was going to each individually sign the card so I left the inside blank.

I have several of the embossed trees to use on other cards. I think they would be great for many occasions!