Hello there! My name is Tara. I reside in a tiny touristy town in Arizona called Cave Creek. I'm a wife to Peter, and a mommy to 2 wonderfully cute little kids, Alaina 4, and Chase 11 months. They are my best photo subjects!Things I find inspiring right now are, pretty desserts, old books, the smell of tuberose and gardenias, blank canvases and summer rain storms. I also have a love affair with vintage office papers at the moment!
I love staying up really late to scrapbook, when my house is still and quiet. The process of creating each new page is exciting! I really enjoy using lots of new papers and embellishments and mixing in a little vintage. The textures and colors of vintage items are truly charming!!
Thanks so much for having me as this months JBS guest!
A photo of my desk. I found an old silver stand at a thrift store, painted it white, and now I use it to hold all of the extra embellishments that I want to use whenever I'm creating something new. It's always full of random pretty things that I've collected! 
I adore this photo! I was dusting some of my tea cups, and starting to think about the color combination. I've never been a fan of purple, lavender, lilac, until this summer. It's definitely been growing on me! I love the combination of white and lilac mixed with apple green and pink. pretty-pretty.
I saved the little paper strip from one of the Amanda Johnson papers, and used it as my title inspiration for a new journal. The Housewife. I wanted to use alot of the scraps that I had left over from creating all of the projects and pages for this month. I ended up making 10 atc's (artist trading cards), and added them to each page. This was my favorite page from the journal! Junk-Art-Life, I love that quote, it's so appropriate for my style of scrapbooking! Maybe I'll fill my little book with the daily ramblings of a work-at-home-mom!
Project Kit . . . 
And don't miss out on Jenni featured this week on 
Step One: Wrap the lid of your candy box as you would wrap a present. Use clear tape or adhesive to hold down the edges.
Step Two: Choose from any of the wonderful Jenni Bowlin rubons to decorate the box. Cut out the rub on you choose, and position it on the box. Using a stylus, rub the design onto the box, and lift away the backing.
Step Three: Fill the box with chocolates, wrap it up with twine, and make someone's day extra special!
Amanda Johnson papers plus Etsy tags by Ormolu!
I use my 1 1/2 inch circle punch ALL THE TIME. It is currently one of my favorite scrapbooking tools to use. I decided on this particular layout to cut the circles in half and create my own scalloped border under the picture. Very easy to do and gets near perfect results. To add to the curvy theme throughout the page, I used some of the new JBS chipboard buttons that are absolutely adorable! 
I also used my circle punch to create 'embellishments' out of paper for my layout entitled "She has big dreams". I punched out the stars in the star patterned paper and randomly added them to my page.
Lindsey
Before . . .
And after! Gorgeous!
Email me your address at 
This is the page that I made that is actually a pretty literal translation. Some designs end up looking nothing like my pages, they are just a starting point, or it may just be colors that inspire me, or maybe one small detail.
On a sidenote, my inspiration books aren’t just about crafting, some ideas are home décor, cooking, baking, organizational and anything else that interests me. I hope that if you don’t keep inspiration journals, that this may encourage you to give it a try! 
Serrated Steak Knife: My favorite tool to use to distress edges of paper, by far, happens to not even be a scrapbooking tool! I discovered one day that a serrated steak knife from your kitchen drawer works almost flawlessly to get that random, torn, distressed look to your edges. I will admit it does take some practice to get used to it, but once you have mastered the knife distressing, you will rarely use anything else. First off I just found an older serrated steak knife from my kitchen. A non serrated knife will not really work, as the serrated edge gives the paper a more fuzzy, worn look and the smooth knife seems to just make cuts in the paper. Holding the paper in my left hand and the knife in my right, I go along the edge of the paper, only dragging the knife in one direction. If you try and go back and forth with the knife you won't achieve the real distressing look you want. Going in one general direction keeps your distressing more consistent. LIGHTLY dragging the knife across the paper edge will give you a fuzzy worn look to your edges. The more pressure you use with the knife, the more worn and the more rips in the paper you will get. So just remember if you want more distressing, use more pressure. 
Sandpaper: Another one of my favorite tools is the sandpaper that you can buy from any local hardware store. Just cut off a piece of sandpaper about 3 inches by 3 inches and run that down the sides of your paper. Any grit sandpaper will work for this technique. The more coarse the sandpaper, the fuzzier the edges will be. 
A Ruler: Another way to give the edges of your paper some distressing but having it be barely noticeable is using a 12 inch ruler and ripping your paper. Just line up the ruler on the paper and tear the paper TOWARDS YOU. This will give the remaining edge a more torn look, but if you use your fingernails to turn up the edges, it will be a very subtle distressing technique to try. One other technique I use before I distress is sewing along the edge of the paper BEFORE you use any of the above techniques. That sewing line will make sure that you don't rip deeply into your paper and kind of acts like a 'border' for the distressing as well. Just practice on some scrap paper, and soon you will be an old pro at distressing!
In this page by 
I can't think of a better occasion for the Grow bingo card than graduation! This clever card by 
I found this fabulous page by 
And here's another great use of that Adore card! 
On this sweet and simple page by 
For my page, I roughly traced flower shapes on the back of both the mini and large Birthday bingo cards and cut them out. I stitched around the edges of each in various colors of thread and used them as a funky background for the photos of my daughter.
This is an old photo of my boys. They will be a senior and junior in high school in the fall, so these old film photos mean so much to me these days. I love this one of them just fooling around together. I treasure these old photos now!
Since my husband and I are both pharmacists, we've got some apothecary type stuff in the house. This was used to store prescription files. There are 24 cubby holes in total and I found the mesh boxes that fit perfectly at the Container Store. Each section holds a particular kind of embellishment and is labeled with a wire rimmed tag.
Thanks Betsy! 
When I saw this adorable image on the book page included in the kit, I knew I had to find a fun way to use it. Luckily, it fit perfectly on the stack of Creative Imagination blocks so I was able to use it to make a simple puzzle on one side. I covered the reverse side with one of the gorgeous vintage wallpaper pieces. I intended to display this side in my craft room but after completing the project, I'm torn as to which side I like better!
Here’s an example taken at sunset with a partly cloudy custom white balance setting:
The colors are true and flattering. Skin tones don’t look too blue or too yellow.