Sweethaven Summer- Inspiration in a Book

I am a person who looks for the beauty and magic in everyday life.  Sometimes it just happens out of the blue and sometimes I have to search.    I did not have to search very hard for beauty and magic when I read A Sweethaven Summer by Courtney Walsh.    I love to read and have since I was a little girl.  Reading a book that combined several of my personal passions was so fun and exciting that I read the book in less than a day.   This was at the detriment of everything else I had to do at the time but it was worth it.   The book incorporates scrapbooking, faith, photography, friendships, and many other inspirational themes.  All of that plus a little bit of mystery and suspense into who is the main character's father.  Needless to say,  I adored the book.    It is available here at Amazon.  A Sweethaven Summer

The book and Courtney's blog Telling Stories  inspired me to examine why I scrapbook.  I created this layout to better tell my story.     The journaling reads:

Moments fade and new ones are created almost instantly.   I scrapbook to capture the important, crazy, silly, lovely, romantic, meaningful, traditional, life changing, everyday, funny, sweet, beautiful moments. 

My hope is to have my children look at their books whenever they need a reminder of who they are, where they came from, and how much they are loved and adored. 

I enjoy the feeling of sticky fingers, textured paper, and cut photos.   I love the look of the gorgeous patterned paper, embellishments, ribbon, buttons, and bling.  

 The pages of the scrapbook show that the moment was important enough to be captured and that a piece of art was created solely for the purpose of celebrating that moment.    

Blooper Reel--Do you see what is wrong.? 
Hint:  The A is Capture is backwards. 
Chris of course caught this and made fun of me:)

Friendship is a very huge theme in the book.   I have already expressed how important my friends are to me in a previous blog.   This past week I talked to one of my "forever friends"... since third grade anyway.  She helped me put some stuff in perspective and as usual we picked up where we left off like we always do.   Thanks, Brooke Derry.  Here is a page I created about us.  The bottom says, " Friends are Flowers in the Garden of Life"  Proverbs. 

Love--  I would not like a novel if love was not a significant theme.    Here are couple of layouts I created inspired by my true love. 

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Sorry for the quality of the pictures.  We were taking pictures of the layouts because we do not have a 12x12 scanner.  I think I need a tutorial on how other people get their work online.  The pages are so much cuter in person. 

I hope you all read A Sweethaven Summer, even if you are not a scrapbooker, it truly is an amazing, sweet, fun read.