Dango Girls' Blog Hop

Welcome to the Dango Girls' Blog Hop. I'm so glad you hopped on over to my pad. We've got a lot of fun coming your way for the weekend and through the week. If you just happened to hop on over here and didn't know about this blog hop, then hop on over to the Scrapdango Blog where you can get all the info and should start this hopping good time. Okay, enough with all the hopping. Let's get down to scrappiness.

We have a brand new DT over at Scrapdango, and this blog hop is a way to introduce them. You will learn a little about each of them, and they will each post a challenge. You have until next Friday the 20th at midnight EST to post comments on each blog and to complete the DT challenges. There will also be other ways to earn draws, and one lucky person is going to win a fantastic prize of one of Scrapdango's fabulous kits chock full of scrappy goodness. To see a breakdown of how you can earn draws and where you need to post your draw totals, hop back over to the Scrapdango Blog.

So this blog hop is to get to know the new Design Team. I am not part of the Design Team but am the owner of Scrapdango and had the incredibly hard job of just having to choose the new Design Team from so many wonderful applicants. That really is the hardest part of my job, but I think I picked a fabulous team, and I am very excited to be working with them and to see what they do for their first reveal coming up in a couple days.

So I guess I am supposed to share a little bit about myself. I have been saving memorobilia and taking photos and making scrapbooks ever since I was a kid, but I have been scrapping as I know it now for about 11 years. As it seems with a lot of people, my scrappy obsession really began when I was pregnant with my first child. I became even more obsessed with scrapping, though, once I found online sites like Scrapdango where I could share with so many other ladies who understand my obsession. Scrapdango has been my scrappy home since July of 2008 when I was chosen to be on the Design Team and then I ended up purchasing Scrapdango just over a year ago. Besides being a full-time mom and small business owner, I also teach aerobic classes 4 x per week and have just currently been hired as a photographer for a wedding photography company. I am very excited about this because I have always wanted to be a professional photographer but just wasn't sure how to take that step on my own.

So here are a few random things about me that even those who've been on Scrapdango for years may not know about me.

• I have actually had amnesia. In 5th grade, we were sliding on a patch of ice on a concrete floor during recess, and I slipped and knocked myself out. A classmate carried me into the office and they called my mom to come get me, but I was out cold. I remember briefly waking up in the office but have no recollection of what happened other than that and when I woke up at home, I didn't know who my mom was or where I was for awhile. Apparently they weren't too concerned because they didn't even take me to the dr.


• I had a 4.0 GPA all through school and was the high school valedictorian. In college, I almost maintained my 4.0 GPA all the way through getting a Master's in Environmental Engineering. I got one B+, which I still don't think I deserved. ;)


• I cannot stand to eat anything with a slimy or squishy texture so no mushrooms, scallops, oysters, clams, or anything else with a funky texture.


• I love the sk8er look and would so dress like a sk8er if I were younger.

Okay, that's enough about me. Now onto my challenge for you. This challenge came about as part of my mission over this week to get my piles of layouts organized and into scrapbooks. Sadly over my 11 years of scrapping, I've only actually put together one complete album--my oldest child's first year. But I have been piling up layouts for about 4 years now and decided it was time they get put into albums. One album in particular that I started to organize was Christmas. I currently have all the Christmas pages I've done put into the album and I know where I need to fill in. So besides just organizing the layouts, I also started scrapping a lot of old Christmas photos to fill in some of those blank spaces. I actually did 9 pages this week and made a good dent in those photos. One problem that so many of us have with Christmas and other holiday and big event photos is that there are soooooo many of them and we feel like we need to include them all. Over this week, I found that by putting a bunch of photos into a grid collage pattern in Photoshop and then printing them out as one photo made it so much easier. I also found that keeping the layout simple and using minimal embellishments was helpful in getting those photos scrapped. So my challenge to you is:

• Scrap holiday or big event photos


• Use at least 5 photos and put them in a grid collage pattern--they don't have to all be printed out together but even individual photos must be in a grid collage pattern.


• Pick one embellishment and use at least 5 of that embellishment--in my example, I used a lot of tags to make a quick and easy border.

The photo of my example is not great because it's in the album, and with all my work to get it in there, I didn not want to take it out to lay it flat to photograph, but you get the gist.

Heather's Pad <===You Are Here
Laura's Pad <===You Go Here Next
Celeste's Pad
Megan's Pad
Ellen's Pad
Vanessa's Pad