House of 3

I want to share a little more ‘behind the scenes’ stuff ; this time  reveal a closer look at janet’s stuff! Janet Hopkins lives in TX  (Dallas area) w/ her husband and three kids… and is expecting #4! (gasp, we love the inspiration that a new baby brings). She is a passionate scrapbooker; loves photography and decorating her house. Her style is clean with a hint of vintage chic. She has been working with me developing products and education in the Heidi Swapp brand, with Advantus. She has done teaching all over the world, and has a special gift for creating classes, and especially kits. Her style is so universal and replicate-able, but continues to be fresh and innovative. I admire her consistency and organization.
For several years now, Janet has been learning the ins and outs in the scrapbooking industry, working at trade shows, teaching on local and national levels, contributing to magazines and books and coordinating education and marketing.  The ‘house of 3’ combines all that Janet loves: creating, educating, inspiring, playing and of course…now designing. You can read more, and follow her blog at janethopkins.typepad.com

The day after we had our fabulous photo shoot in the snow, we met together to just create…it’s such a fun way to bond, and get to know each other better.

Rhonna had printed a bunch of the images from our photo shoot  already… all different sizes and with different frames, flourishes etc… they were all ready to go. Some were printed and cut out in strips, others were enlarged a bit, some were small… (ok, don’t you just LOVE having great photos to scrapbook?).
We headed to the scrapbook store to get the stuff that we needed to spend the day scrapbooking. I hadn’t REALLY scrapbooked with anyone else in a long time, and what a treat to be doing it w/ Rhonna and Janet.
We started out with cardstock (love the bazzill)… we picked colors that coordinated with our photos- the hot pink, turquoise and yellow. Ok, what a fab combo! It’s funny how much we enjoyed the color palette.
We then picked pattern papers… I love My Mind’s Eye… has to be one of my favorites… consistently. I also love to have transparency-overlays…love the Hambly. We chose backgrounds that are lined as well, for journaling… some lace papers, and lots of die cut strips-the frills from Doodlebug and the lace tape from K&Co (Amy Butler line).
And then all the colors in the ‘color box’ inks and MM paints. Yummy.
Last, and NEVER least was buying all kinds of embellishments: brads (loved the MM decorative brads); buttons (we LOVED the Chatterbox collection of buttons, bling etc)
Once we made it back to Rhonna’s studio, we all jumped right into action!
Janet loves patterned paper, and started with the pattern piece and selected cardstock to match.  She chose a mix of color and black and white images, in different sizes. She wanted the background paper to be the focus of the layout, and so added a simple light blue photo mat to the main photo, and nothing to the little ones. Rhonna had printed that cute photo of Janet out w/ a negative frame from the House of 3 collection, and Janet used a hole punch to punch some decorative chunks out of the frame. She sanded and inked the mat and grouped all the images together, along with the journaling spots.  (I always like her clusters.)

She inked a 2” stip of lace paper with some distress ink, and created a layer under the journaling spots… Janet found a really cool stamp at the SB store, and stamped it onto the square journaling spot-not centered… just to create a frame for her initials. She inked those up a big too.  She then trimmed the whole page down about ½ on the top and left so she could center it on a 12” yellow cardstock backer. She used an edge distresser and some ink to give it some dimension.
I love how this layout turned out… so ‘janet’.

Janet whipped  together another layout, again, she chose photos of different sizes. She picked a yellow cardstock background, and coupled it with a large houndstooth print. She cut it so that it was centered, but not touching the left, right or bottom… it had a 3 sided border.  She took that cool stamp, and w/ brown staz-on stamped right on the photo for a frame now around the layered flowers she created from felt, paper and a button. I LOVED how the strip of photos became the bottom border. She cut up a spiral page pulled out of one of those MM journaling pads…and embellished with the bracket edge, and also the spiral portion. Simple, and so cool.

(a little fuzzy… sorry!)

Janet: you ROCK the house!

Check back to see Rhonna’s creations!