Puppy love.

One of the really great things about being on a design team is that you have to scrap.  When you don't feel like it.  When you feel like you don't have time.  When you don't think you have a story to tell. And sometimes when you get finished you think "I'm glad I did that."  

This picture is 7 or 8 years old.  Reba, the dog, had just been adopted by my kids and every time I got down on the floor to play with her she'd go after my hair.  I am a sucker for puppies and I couldn't bring myself to make her stop.  Many a days I headed to work with hair smelling like puppy breath.  The good news is, puppy breath isn't all that offensive.  

Reba has since passed.  Last spring she developed a tumor in her stomach.  I do miss her every day, and it was great to take a minute to celebrate her puppihood.

I want to go on the record with: I really hate shooting layouts.  This is not crooked.  The cardstock is white. The border on the bubbly part is even all the way around.

If you want links to the Silhouette cuts, or read about the (cute) puppy prints, head over to the Silhouette blog for the rest of the story.

Hope you're staying warm!  Only 50 days til Spring! Yee ha!

...and in other news:

I feel like my entire personality has been taken over by student teaching.  It's pretty much all I've been thinking about, so it's pretty much all I've been talking about, too.  However, school has been cancelled for today AND tomorrow due to the "extreme weather" so I've decided that I need to spend time today working on "Caroline" instead of my "Ms. Davis" alter-ego.

First up: Blog post!

Last week I had a layout up on the Silhouette blog that I never shared here, and now seems like a good time to rectify that:

I really like the concept of the two matching pictures (taken three years apart) but I'm not going to sugar coat it: the difference in the tonal qualities really bugs the heck out of me.  Blech.

I really don't have a whole lot to say about the layout, but I did want to mention the rhinestones.  Silhouette sent me their rhinestone setting tool and a variety pack of gems and I'm in love.  First of all, I'm sucker for gadgets, but I'm also a sucker for things that work.  Compared to the tradition gemstone set up with the line of adhesive that needs to be broken and always has an awkward tail, these are AMAZING.  There's no tail.  You put the singular, tailless gem where you want it and apply heat using the setting tool.  It melts the adhesive on the gemback and the gem STAYS PUT.  I put that in caps because with the traditional kind I feel like a week later they're all going to be pooled in the bottom of the page protector, whereas these feel really firmly stuck down.  This is a good thing!

Moving on to other news:

• I hardly think that 2 denotes a trend, but I seem to have taken up baking.  Last Sunday I made soft pretzels and yesterday I made Parker House rolls.  The pretzels were mainly because I had a weird but incredibly strong hankering for them.  The rolls were mostly because I had two more packets of yeast that need to be used before May.  And, honestly, I think I wanted something to really concentrate on.  I feel like my brain slips back to school every couple of minutes no matter what I'm doing.  But if I'm really focused, I can escape for a little while.  So doing something that's a little out of my comfort zone is a great distraction.  Plus: rolls.  So I guess it's win/win.  And I still have a packet of yeast left to use up.  I wonder what's next?  Maybe more pretzels, because there were amazeballs. (I don't even say amazeballs, that's how amazeballs there were.)

• I decided that I needed to go on a mini shopping spree to add some teacher clothes to my wardrobe.  LLBean sent an email offering 20% off my entire order, but I couldn't find anything I like.  Which is odd, because I really do like LLBean.  But here's the deal (and I'm talking directly to you, LLBean): as a plus sized woman, I don't want to dress like I've given up.  Or that I bought all my clothes 15 years ago.  Waistlines have moved down, and for good reason.  But the ONLY lower-than-the-natural-waist offering they had was corduroys.  Now, if you're plus sized and look good in corduroys, then God bless you and more power to ya!  But I'm not going to wear pants that not only add volume but also make weird noises when I walk.

Okay, rant over.  At any rate, I took my business to Lands End, where I found a bunch of lower waist options and they were on sale.  Yay! I love a sale!  And yeah...I bought two pairs of pants in colors that I never would have considered had they not been the only option in my size, but seriously, when they arrived I fell in love.  And then there are these lovelies:

Now, I'm considerably taller than the model, so my 27 inch inseam does not (unfortunately) come down that far (oh, the heaven I would be in if they did!) but I LOVE THESE LEGGINGS.  First, I can't believe that I bought leggings: no one needs to see all my lumps and bumps.  But here's the thing: there AREN'T any lumps and bumps to see.  And that's not because my body miraculously changed, it's because the fabric is wonderful: thick and comfy and stretchy and MATTE. None of that icky spandex sheen. Blech.  By the way, I bought that top, too.  I'm not wearing this to school obviously, but it's adorable and I will happily wear it on the weekends.  Probably both days.  ;)

• Last Monday was President's Day and Kerig and I both had the day off.  For most people I'm sure this sounds like no big deal.  But for the last gazillion years we've both worked retail, so we've rarely had a day off together.  But now that we're both "working" in the schools (in quotes because it's not like it's an actual job.  This is technically a class for me.) we have a weekends-and-holidays-off schedule that jives up.  So anyway, we took advantage of $5 Mondays and saw August: Osage County.  It was more serious than I had expected, but it was a great story.  Meryl Streep always blows me away, and this was no exception.  I can take or leave Julia Roberts, but I must admit that she did a great job here as well.  I love a movie that doesn't tie up every loose end, and Kerig and I had lots to discuss about the characters and what happened next over dinner.  I love that we can watch the same movie and interpret things differently.  I constantly have "Huh, I never thought about it that way" moments when we talk after a good movie.

Okay! Thanks for allowing me this ramble.  I think the rest of the day involves scrapbooking and CAMEO'ing and otherwise not obsessing about graphing systems of linear inequalities and composition of functions.  Yeah. Good luck with that.  Me. Not you.  I'm pretty sure you're not going to be too worried about either of those things... :P

Thanks for stopping by!  

Speed blogging!

I'm downloading a software update and it says I have 25 minutes...oh, wait, 19...oh, wait...27 minutes...er, something like that until it's done. So, I could walk into the kitchen and eat another one of the treats that Aunt Dorothy sent home with us on Sunday - or- I could see if I can squeak in a whole blog post.

Today is my turn up on the Silhouette blog which means I get to get to share here.  I don't love all my pages.  Truth be told, I don't even like a fair amount. :P  But this definitely gets a strong LIKE from me:

As is seems the case about 90% of the time, I end up with these pictures that aren't pre-made embellishment friendly.  In this photo Maggie is playing a game called Headbandz that we got for Christmas.  In the game, you wear a headband and insert a card with a word on it.  Everyone else can see the card, but the wearer can't.  The person wearing the headband then asks a series of yes/no questions to figure out what does the card say.

Is it a person? No.
Is it a place? No.
So it's a thing.
Is it something you wear? No.
Can you buy it at Target? Yes.
Would it cost less than $10? Could be.
Do you find inside a house? Sure.
Is it made of metal? No.
Wood? Could be.

I can't remember all the questions that were asked (and let me tell you, asking yes/no questions is far more challenging than you might think) but she narrowed it down to something very close to a bottle, but WHO THINKS OF A BOTTLE AS BEING MADE OUT OF WOOD? :P

Hence Maggie's adorable, very confused expressions.

And yet, how do you scrap this with conventional embellishments.  Well, as luck would have it, I have a CAMEO. ;)  So I started scrolling through my library, not really sure what I was looking for but hopeful that I'd find something relatively generic.  I figured I'd just have to do a lot of journaling to explain what's going on here.  But when I came across the light bulbs I was thrilled.  Right? Because it the game she's waiting for that A-HA moment when all the yes/no questions result in the right answer.  And I loved the outline style of the bulbs.  And after I found a couple of bulbs to work with I decided to see if there was a bottle that might have a similar vibe to match.  I'm pretty happy with what I found!

So when I started, all I had was the background with all the circles, but I didn't quite no what was going to go on over on the border part.  All things considering, I'm really pleased with how that worked out.

And I was going to talk about the stacked title and show you a quick peak:

but it turns out my download is finished, so I can go back to 'work'. Yay! :)

Thanks for stopping by for a quickie!

Full Cycle

I started this blog a little more than 4 years ago.  I had just moved and I was on the verge of leaving a job that made me miserable.  Even though I wasn't happy with where I was, I was scared of the unknown.

Well, four years (and a couple of months) later, I've recently moved and I'm about to change jobs again.  Unlike four years ago, I feel blessed in my job and my personal life is  fulfilling. So I've come full circle, back where I started, but somehow on a whole new level.  I'm still a little scared about the future, but there's butterflies of excitement in there, too.  It's good.

But my blog isn't really supposed to be about that.  It's supposed to be about scrapbooking, the Silhouette and other crafty goodness.  So without further ado:

I really need to tweak a thing or two about this layout. I'm not satisfied with the word "short" and it's bugging me.  That said, I love that I got this picture out there with that statement.  For a solid year, every time I talked to Ted I would catch him looking at the top of my head.  Hey, buddy, my eyes are down here! (har har har)  He finally passed me up in early 2013, and he's not as fixated on my part anymore.  Somehow it just didn't sink in that he had gotten this much taller than me already.  And "When did I get so short??" was my true gut reaction to seeing this picture.

And in other housekeeping:  I was on The Paperclipping Roundtable this week.  Yeah. That happened.  For real.  Such an incredibly fun experience.

Apparently it was so amazing that it rendered me incapable of writing sentences like a grown up.  The good news is that during the podcast I don't trip over my words and I sound like I have an intelligent opinion.  On the other hand, you could play a drinking came for every time I called Noell "Nicole".  You wouldn't get drunk or anything, but it did happen.  Fortunately it only happened once, and in the pre-show I apologized in advance because I had a feeling I would do it.  Very embarrassing.  But hey, I didn't cuss, so there's that.

That's about it.  Today is my very last day at Dodd Camera.   I start my student teaching stint with an orientation on Tuesday evening and I'll be in the classroom to observe starting Wednesday at 7:45.  Not sure when I'll actually get to take over the classroom, but I'll be sure to mention it here.  I'm working with two cooperating teachers and teaching 2 Algebra II classes and and 3 Algebra I classes.  Yay!

Enjoy the rest of your weekend and thanks (as always) for stopping by!