Look what showed up in the Sweet Pea Scraps newsletter!

Spotlight on Guest SweetPea Elizabeth Wickland

Hi! My name is Elizabeth Wickland and I am excited to be the guest designer for Sweet Pea Scraps this month! I started out stamping and cardmaking 17 years ago and transitioned into scrapbooking when I got married in December 2000. Scrapbooking is my creative outlet. It keeps me sane! I have a wonderfully supportive husband and beautiful 19 month old daughter who are the subjects of most of my scrapbooking. As a stay at home mom, I try to scrapbook whenever I have the chance, in the evenings or during naptime. I feel blessed to to live in the beautiful state of Montana and draw a lot of inspiration from the colors and patterns in the natural landscape here. All of the seasons are so beautiful and lend themselves to outdoor activities and a proliferation of pictures! Both my husband and I love to take pictures, so there is never a shortage of material to scrapbook. My scrapbooking style is always changing, as I love trying new techniques and learning new things.

Do you have any layouts that you would like to do over? Or are you a scrap and leave it kind of girl?? I definitely have layouts I would love to do over! But I rarely get around to redoing them after I'm done. There are just too many layouts to do and too little time! If it's not *perfect* by the time I call it done, it's just not perfect and that's all there is to it!

Describe your scrap space as it is RIGHT NOW! *Embarrassed blush* Couldn't you have asked me that a month ago? Or in a week? You know... when my craft room is clean? Right now it is a COMPLETE mess. I have 3 tables to work on and all three are covered with paper, embellishments, new products, half-done projects. The floor is pretty messy, too... It's bad.

What is your absolute can't-live-without-must-have item when you scrap?
My computer. Whether it's finding ideas online, looking up events on our family blog (since there's no way I can remember details like when things happened or what we did if I didn't blog!), editing photos, or printing out journaling, there's no way I could scrap without my computer.

Are you a chronological scrapper or whatever strikes your fancy scrapper??
I am most definitely a "whatever strikes my fancy" scrapper! I'm glad, too, or else it would be terribly obvious what struck my fancy and for how long! "Oh... that was the butterfly phase, and here she was into machine stitching, and these six months must have been all about glitter... whoa." By scrapping out of order all of my phases get mixed together and it makes for a more balanced book overall, I think. I usually scrap my favorite pictures first, then go back through and print the pictures I need to finish "event" pages that I need to complete the album. Those are usually the ones that I end up wanting to redo, but don't because the album is finally finished...

They asked me to be....

... a GUEST DESIGNER!! I am so excited, and have been wanting to spread the word since I found out a few weeks ago, LOL! Sweet Pea Scraps asked me to be their March guest designer! So here's the kit (more pictures of it up on the blog)...


... and here's some of what I did with it (journaling under each layout):

All of my life I have made up songs. I've done it since I was a little girl. They're usually silly, nonsensical songs, too. What I never would have guessed is that these songs would have such a calming effect on my baby girl. When Eliana is crying inconsolably, I start to sing. Anything. And when she hears my voice, she starts to calm. The longer I sing, the calmer she gets, until she finally falls asleep. All I have to do is sing.

The first time they saw you.

Robert and I are almost 4 years apart in age. Growing up, that was a pretty significant gap. Now that we are both adults, though, we get along great and love to spend time together whenever we can. It's not often enough.

At 28 years old I feel like I am on top of the world. I have been happily married for 7 years. I have a wonderful husband and a beautiful daughter and I am happy. We live in a beautiful valley surrounded by mountains and have a beautiful house with a big back yard. We have been blessed with so many things and sometimes I just have to stand back and take it all in. Life has valleys and hills, and right now I am on top of the world!

Some days Ellie needs cookies. And on those days she lets me know by pulling the giant Costco-sized container of animal crackers off the pantry shelf and carrying it into whichever room I happen to be in. Then she sits down near me, making sure that I can see her, and unscrews the lid, then reaches in and takes a cookie. She shoves it inter her mouth and makes and exaggerated "MMMMMM!" sound. Usually she puts the lid on the cookie container until she wants another, then opens it up and the process starts over. It is pretty funny to watch. First because the container is half the size that she is, yet she can carry it all over the house. Second because she knows how to get them for herself, yet feels that she MUST eat them in my presence. And third because she has yet to make a mess in this whole cookie process. That is pretty much the only reason she gets away with it. That and because she is so cute when she does it.

You would never guess by looking at this picture that it was 50 degrees out. But it was. It was teh perfect day to build your first snowman, so we did. Well, Daddy did. I took pictures. You just sat around, pointed, and told Daddy where to put the snowballs. You liked sitting in the snow, but not standing in it, and certainly not walking in it. In fact, if you wad to walk in the snow, you would just stand still and say, "Stuck! Stuck!" until I came to get you. And then you would give me this look. It was not cold, and you were not stuck, but there was nothing we could do to convince you otherwise.

This cracks me up! Every time she rides her horse she says, "Doodleloo doodleloo doodleloo". It's hilarious and took me a while to figure out that she was trying to sing the finale to the William Tell Overture since that's what I hummed the first time I showed her how to ride a stick horse!

This is the first time I ever held you.

I'm pretty unhappy about how badly the photos turned out - there is so much texture and sparkle to these photos that just doesn't come through the camera lens. But I had SO MUCH fun with this kit! And I actually scrapped some of Ellie's hospital pictures... something I hadn't been able to do yet! And I'm happy with how the layouts turned out. No, I LOVE how the layouts turned out. Mine, and everyone else's I've seen done with this kit. Well, okay, that is only one other person, but check out Jana's layouts and tell me they don't blow you away! They're awesome, and if I had a second kit I would scraplift every single one of them. I did find it amusing, though, that Jana thought it was a very soft kit, while I thought it was one of the brighter ones. How she got so many soft and subtle layouts from the same papers I got funky layouts from I'll never know! Oh yeah... another note... I got to use my Copic markers from the kit club on the Doodleloo layout! Woohoo! With all the things I needed to accomplish by the end of the month I haven't played much with the markers yet, but I'm in the process of cleaning my scraproom right now (says the lady who is still typing away on her blog...) and once it is clean I'll be playing with Copics! Anyone know where to get a cheap blender pen?