Pouring Over Pictures

Slow and steady wins the race.

2012-03-16T17:39:00.000-04:00

Or so I've been told.

I cannot believe that I'm still chugging away on this mini book from our trip to RIT last August. The last time I posted about this book was October 14th, and even that was the most boring thing ever written about scrapbooking. No, seriously, go look for yourself. At least it's short. And the funny thing is, it actually relates to what I'm sharing today.

This is embarrassing. I sell cameras for a living. I *know* photography. Grrrr. The beautiful matte finish of the pictures does not capture well. Sadly, my lovely pizza shot looks dull and grainy. Alas, it's just the paper finish.

See that library card? See how it's mounted on the black index file folder tabbed whichamajig? That was the subject of the most boring post ever. But you know what? I dig it. The book is still a work in progress and as such it isn't on the book rings yet. Once it's all put together it'll be its own little page. What's shown here is the journaling for the next page.

Here's the other side, (the journaling about lunch) shown with the next page.

That is not my favorite picture of Maggie, but it was a HOT weekend. We all looked a little wilted. She just documented. Sorry Maggie. :P

The weekend we went my camera was off in repair. I had decided while it was gone that I was going to sell it when it came back and, knowing that, I had ordered the D7000. I had the highest of hopes that my new camera would arrive in time for our trip. You know when it showed up? Literally as we were walking into the registration area. That's when I got a text from my boss saying it had arrived. GAH! For the trip I had a little Fuji Instax Mini camera. Maggie had the Fuji I had given her for Christmas and Kerig had his camera. These are the pictures that Maggie took when she was roaming around the campus on her own on Friday evening. I was really surprised at how similar a lot of our shots were - the campus is huge and I thought I had gotten the "behind the scenes" tour with my former-RIT student/personal tour guide. These are the pictures that Maggie took.

And these are the pictures I took. :P One really neat thing about the Fuji Instax camera is the cute little photos. One really frustrating thing about the Fuji Instax is that the cute little photos aren't very flexible when trying to cram five on a mini book page. So I made me a pocket! Take that, cute little Fuji Instax photos! Besides, turns out my film got a little heat damaged and all the colors are somewhat muted. But I like the pocket. Right?

Right?

The first "spread."

And the second.

I am not patting myself on the back.
But that's so dern cute.

I'm really close to being done this project and I'm so happy that I can end it on a happy note.

Thanks for stopping by!

Change paper size is code for "Shape up...OR ELSE."

2012-03-11T16:05:00.002-04:00

I've never hidden my love for my Silhouettes, and now my Cameo. But as with all true love, there occasionally exists some strife, dare I say turmoil. Oh heck let's call it what it was: sheer, outright, hair-pulling frustration.

A week ago Thursday I was working on a project in which I was cutting a word out multiple times so that they could be stacked one upon the next to create quite a bit of height. Only problem was it wasn't coming out right. It seemed that the cut wasn't going all the way through the cardstock. The word was quite small - about 2 inches long and a half inch high - I wondered if it was just too small? But no, I've done this before with great success. I slowed down the machine's speed to 1 and turned my blade from 5 to 7. I tried again with the new settings and the paper was shredded. Hmm. Well, maybe seven was too deep, so I changed the blade to 6. Same results. It was towards the end of the day and I had been using it heavily, so I decided to shut everything down and let it rest. I seem to remember that this kind of end-of-a-hard-work-day the machine gets funky but after some time off it works fine. I liken it to all the times the computer is being weird and rebooting it solves the problems.

And so I let it rest until Tuesday. But I have a deadline, so it kind of NEEDS to work. Sadly, my Cameo really didn't care about my deadline. The same kinds of problems persisted. The good news is, I had just gotten a back up blade and mat. Not because I thought I needed them just yet, but because when you need a new one, you NEED a new one and I wanted to have one ready. It didn't seem that the blade or the mat was the issue, but a brand new blade and mat would take out some variables - maybe, with luck, that's all it would take. Only, no luck. I spent literally six hours methodically changing the blade depth, the speed (I don't think that running the machine at 1 will actually cause the paper to shred or not cut through, but I tried it just in case), double cut on and off, I changed the size of my word, I tried white cardstock instead of the black, I uninstalled and re-installed the software three times...to no avail. I wrote to the customer service email and outlined my problem and they suggested that perhaps my new blade was defective and I could send it back and they'd send me a new one. The problem with that was, I was swapped the old blade back in and they were both doing the same thing. And worse yet, the machine had begun making "errant cuts" - with every "send cut" I did, there would be some random cut, either inside the word or outside, that wasn't part of the design. At the end of six hours I had less hair and less cardstock, but I didn't have a Cameo that was working properly.

I'll be honest: I was exhausted and irritated, frustrated, mad, and because it was a gift, I was also sad. I reached out to some folks and it was suggested that I call Silhouette America's customer support number. I couldn't imagine what they'd be able to do over the phone, but it was worth a try. I wasn't home again during the hours that the customer service people were in until Friday so the call would have to wait a bit.

One thing that I can say about myself is that I can be a little bit of a pit bull if there's a problem I want to solve. I will bite ahold and not let go until I'm satisfied that I've tried everything. That said, I decided to sit down with the machine again on Thursday night. Once again I uninstalled and re-installed the software. I unplugged the Cameo entirely and let it sit while I rebooted my computer. Once everything was up and running again I reset my preferences to what I had previously called "normal" and tried making a cut. Hmm. Modified success. The cut was clean (for the most part - I was back to using the original bade, which now definitely needs to be replaced) and there were no errant cuts, but the entire thing was shifted to the right by one inch. I suppose I should be happy with that and just accept it. But truly, that's NOT right. That's not what my software sent to the machine - or at least, that shouldn't be what the software sent. But I cut what I needed for the project and would call customer service in the morning.

On Friday I made the call. I explained my issue and the rep began the infuriating process of asking inane questions. I know why they do this, in fact, I have to do it too when someone presents me with a broken camera. I'm certain I've offended many a camera user by testing their batteries, but it needs to be done. And yet, my patience had long since left the building and I am embarrassed to admit that I wasn't especially pleasant with the woman. She asked how I was lining up the mat when inserting it into the machine. I told her it was a solid inch off and that I wasn't loading the mat an inch wrong. AND, I had been using the machine pretty heavily since I got it for Christmas and I hadn't had this issue before. (snotty!) She asked if I was using 12x12 inch cardstock. I told her sometimes, but not now. She asked if I had told the software what size paper I was using. I told her that I didn't even know how to do that. And -again- snottily pointed out that I had been putting small pieces of paper through with no issues prior to this. I then heard my tone of voice and I was pretty much mortified. This woman was trying to help me. And it certainly wasn't her fault that the machine was acting up. And of course she had to start at the beginning - she doesn't know what I've tried. I apologized for being so defensive (because really, I wasn't blaming her for the issue, I was feeling like I was being called a moron for not knowing how to work the machine) and I asked her to walk me through the process.

Just in case you're interested, this is what she's talking about. I've circled the icon on top that gets you into the page setting and the big oval is the paper setting size (even though it's not really marked as such). The oval has the presets, but just under that is where you can tell it what odd-ball size you're using. And as long as my mat is new, I'll sent even inch by inch size scraps in there. I'm cheap, and I'm not cutting into full size sheets unless I really need to.

Having walked me through that I told her I'd give it a try and call back if it didn't work. From her response, I think that she was thinking she'd wait with me while I tried it, but honestly, I *knew* this wasn't the issue and I recognized that even thought I'd apologized I was still carrying my snotty attitude and I needed to calm down.

So I got off the phone, set the paper size to 5x7 and sent a design to cut.

And that gosh darn cut was perfectly crisp and EXACTLY where it was supposed to be with no errant cuts or other issues. And THAT, my friends, is how Silhouette America keeps its machines in check "change paper size" is code for "You'd better shape up OR ELSE."

I spent the rest of the day trying to stump the machine, to no avail. Unless *I* did something wrong (like send patterned paper through with the blade set to 5) everything came out perfectly.

(I should note that one of the things that I did to try to stump it was set the paper size back to 12x12 and sent a smaller sheet through. It worked without a hitch.)

I realize that this is a hideously long post, but believe me I tried to keep it short. Heck, I didn't even tell you about how I tried to hook up my Silhouette SD (which was in fine working order when I set it aside in favor of the Cameo) and the display was showing what looked like Hebrew characters. But I will say this: I learned a lesson. Don't write. Call. Don't wait. Call. There's someone there whose entire job is to iron out our frustrations. But it's my job to not let those frustrations grow into an unmanageable emotional mess.

Oh. You know what else I didn't mention? That I caved in and bought a sewing machine. Damn that Karen Grunberg. ;)

Washi goes practical

2012-02-25T21:06:00.000-05:00

"We need volunteers." Every mother's favorite sentence. ;)

Instead of going through the whole back story I will just say:

Washi tape is the perfect stuff to hold down die cuts for sending through the printer. Yes, I still used some Dotto to hold it down. But since I was making 35 copies of these I had to run the template through 7 times. And Hello. I'm cheap and didn't want to reapply that much Dotto. To me, Dotto is sticky gold - I don't mind the investment, but I'm going to be careful how I use it. ;) And it's not like Washi tape is cheap, but I think it's unlikely I'm going to burn through that roll any time soon. I think I've only used like 3 inches so far, so I figured using another inch and a half would be okay. Plus, I found out that it's just the right amount of tacky - I could tape down the banner pieces, run it through the printer, easily remove the die cuts and then stick the next set down. Made the process super easy.

Here's what it looks like after those 5 are removed:

And I have to admit, seeing the Washi tape cut all tiny like that inspires me to want to use it. I've mostly seen it in larger chunks, and I've tried that but somehow it feels forced on my pages. I think these tiny snippets look like something I could pull off. I'll let you know...

Eeeeeeeeeeeeee! (that's my excited noise)

2012-02-16T10:56:00.001-05:00

But I'll be honest, I only make that noise on the inside. But my insides have been squealing "Eeeeeeeeeeee" since Monday afternoon when I got the email saying that I had been chosen to be on Scrapbook Studio's inaugural Design Team. I think that's so cool and I can hardly wait to get started!

Given this news, I might be around a little more often. I'm filled with good intentions, so I have high hopes for creating more and sharing more. And definitely blathering more. But probably with cleaner language. ;)

And while I'm here I wanted to share the army of owl Valentine treats that Molly and I made for her class:

I showed the empty box prototype a while back and said I was going to frou-frou it up. I don't think I managed "frou-frou", but I am pleased with the addition of the conversation bubble, which is adhered to a Tootsie Pop. And heck, to 5th graders, the candy is the critical embellishment. By the way, if you ever want to make these, they're readily available in the Silhouette store, but my advice is cut and assemble and FILL one before committing to the whole project. I would have gone broke had I gone with the original size box. It wasn't that much bigger, but somehow filling it took a lot more candy.

Speaking of candy, if you're ever in the Cleveland area, carve out an hour to visit b.a.Sweeties. It's not pretty by any means, but it sure is fun to walk through the store and see all the candy from our childhood. Because they sell a lot of candy loose, I was able to buy just what I needed - lots of pre-wrapped pink, purple and red candies. I put Zotts in there. Remember those? They were the hard candies with the fizzy center? I hope the kids enjoyed those, they're my favorite!

Alrighty. To tell the truth, I really need to get going. I have an oral presentation tomorrow in my modern geometry class, and I've been procrastinating preparing the PowerPoint. I will be so happy tomorrow at 10:30 when this whole massive project is done!

Thanks for stopping by! And don't forget to add Cord's Scrapbook Studio Blog to your bookmarks. It's always been a good read, but I think it just got even more exciting.

And now it's PERMANANT

2012-01-16T23:55:00.004-05:00

I think my mojo is backpacking across Europe. It seems to have been gone for an awfully long time. Today I decided that I was going to scrap something, ANYTHING, with or without it. I printed out some pictures. That only ~~sucked away~~ took about two hours.

Aside: I cannot say enough good things about Inkpress PhotoChrome Luster paper. Fantastic stuff. Professional looking, the same weight and feel as traditional photofinishing paper. Gorgeous. And as an added bonus, it's less expensive than Epson paper.

Which leads me to: I recently picked up some fancy Epson paper. It was heavy weight with a lovely luster finish. And maybe if I weren't a scrapbooker I'd think it was perfect. Certainly it wouldn't sag and buckle in a frame like lighter weight paper would. But I am a scrapbooker and it was a barrel-full frustration and it looked like poo when I cut it. I'm sticking with my Inkpress from here on out.

So anyway, I spent a better part of the day sitting at my scraptable doing a whole lot of nothing. Ted came in and out several times and when I finally had something going we had a little exchange:

Ted: "Oh no. You're scrapping Shoreline Singers?"
Me: "Uh. Yeah. What's the matter with that?"
Ted: "Now it'll be permanent."

So there you have it.

Nothing amazing. But like I said, my mojo is on a drinking spree in Dusseldorf, so this was the best I could really expect. And I'll let you in on a little secret. This is actually Shoreline Singers v2.0. The first time around I worked from the top down and decided to do the journalling on the bottom after the big picture, the title and the borders were down. But I'm an adventurous gal. So I wrote it up, did a couple of test prints to make sure everything was lined up correctly and then crammed 3 to 4 layers of cardstock and photopaper back into the printer. Yeah. Not my wisest move. But in fairness, I've had Epson printers that I could shove all kinds of things into. Apparently my R1900 is a little more delicate. And what happened was that it pulled it in a little and then spun its wheels a bit, then laid the print down right at the top across the hounds tooth and the the title. It actually looked kinda cool, and I was able to send it through so that it printed on the bottom. But *I* knew that it was a mistake. So I redid it.

The fonts are Katfish LET and Impact for the title and AvantGarde BK for the journalling.

Thanks for stopping by. And if you see my mojo, tell it I'm missing it...

Hello again old friend!

2012-01-05T22:02:00.002-05:00

Been a while, huh? I'd say I missed you, but honestly? No time for that! December in retail is rough. December in retail while finishing up my first math class in over 20 years? Even more fun! But in reality, as busy as it was, it was the best December I've had in eons.

So I shared that bird ornament that I made. I wanted to show the final product. Ted is selling Malley's chocolate bars for his Shoreline Singers trip. I have literally cases of these chocolate bars so I figured I'd use the opportunity to unload a few. Or 26. ;) So here's the what Ted and Molly handed off to their teachers for Christmas:

I don't know what my problem was the night I took the picture (although, the fact that it was like 1 a.m. might explain it), but that is one crappy ass picture! Ugh. Very uneven exposure. But it'll have to do, because it's the only thing left of this project. So it's two Malley's bars (Crunch, to be specific, because the pink labels of the Pretzel bars would have been just wretched), wrapped in a little kraft paper, a wide satin ribbon tied in a simple knot, and the ornament tied to that.

Look at all those birdies!

Riddle me this: Why didn't I make one for myself?? Silly me!

So moving right along! What's up next? Two things: Valentines Day and Layout A Day. These two concepts don't really jive together all that well. While I haven't actually signed up for LOAD yet, if I do I need to kick out any Valentine's goodies sooner rather than later.

Oh! And guess what? The World's Most Wonderful Boyfriend (it's in all caps because it's official) got his lucky girlfriend a BRAND. NEW. CAMEO. Did you hear the Bob Barker Price is Right announcer voice? If you don't you should reread that last sentence with the proper inflection. Go ahead. I'll wait.

So yeah. New Cameo. Woo Hoo! But I have to admit - sort of feeling a little pressure. Like "here's this amazing tool! Make AMAZING THINGS! HURRY! NOW!" Only wow, I think that pressure is sitting on my creative mojo. It'll come back, but I probably have to stop yelling at it and wait for it to ease back into the room.

In the meantime, I'm kinda jazzed about this:

There's nothing actually creative about this. It's even done in the same color scheme shown in the Silhouette library. And - shhhh, don't tell the manfriend, but it didn't even require the larger format of the Cameo. It's not finished yet, I need to add a tag with a Valentine greeting to it, and maybe a handle. BUT, I think it's adorable. I asked Molly what she thought of it and she liked it, so I'm going to make a ton of them for Valentine's. I'll stop at b.a.Sweeties and pick up pink and red and white candies to fill it. I think it'll be great. I'm excited about it... Stay tuned. This is just the first draft, I'm hoping to tweak it a bit to bring on full on adorable.

Hoping to see you again soon.

"I feel..."

2011-11-16T23:00:00.001-05:00

To say that I'm participating in Your Story Matters would be a gross overstatement. However, the prompts are coming in and they make me want to scrap, to tell my story. And maybe after the holidays, maybe during semester break I'll add it to the piles of stuff that I want to do.

But the first prompt came in a couple days ago around midnight and I read it before heading to bed. "I feel..." And I could barely sleep for thinking about the way "I feel." I tried to sum up what I feel and I couldn't. I feel happy. And excited. And focused. I feel hopeful, and excited, and blessed. I feel optimistic. I feel loved, and I am oozing love back at my family. It's weird, really, for me. I'm not generally a "happy" person. I consider myself a realist. But all this good stuff is real, and there's nothing wrong with appreciating it. And I am. I am filled with wonder and amazement at my good fortune.

I started thinking about how to finish the sentence. And I decided that I am 'over flowing" - over flowing with happiness and hopefulness and direction and love. So then I thought about what that might look like. An explosion? A rainbow of colors? Hearts (for love), stars (for the bright future), butterflies (for the change)? Yes.

That's probably not the best picture of me, but I like it. It's mock irritation at my headset, which mooshes my ears and makes me cranky. I wear them when I take my online classes. The headset makes me cranky, but the classes make me happy. I thought it was a good place to start my excitement explosion.

Clear out of nowhere.

2011-10-27T22:57:00.001-04:00

So for the past couple of days I've been stewing on Christmas card design, and then today, clear out of nowhere, I decide that I wanted to try my hand at papercrafting a Christmas tree ornament. Why not take that paper layering technique apply it to a Christmas shape and color scheme and add a whole for a ribbon?

Well, DUH!

And that's what I came up with. ☻

Did I mention that I did True Scrap this past weekend? It was really fantastic - and that really means something coming from me. I don't spend money easily, and it's hard to 'wow' me with regard to scrapping education. But the variety of classes, the caliber of the presentations, the amount of inspiration? AMAZING.

I mention this because the card I shared yesterday was fairly me-ish: that color palette, the circles, the "joy" title (that I've used several times before) are all very me.

This bird? Maybe a little less me and a little more True Scrap inspired. And that's a-ok. Otherwise, woo-wee, that was a lot of money to stay in my own little box. ;)

But there was some serious distressing and Glimmer Mist flinging going on and it made me want to get in on the action. That would be Nic Howard, Erin Bassett, Francine Cloudin and Jen McGuire all crowding my brain with messy goodness.

This back end that's curling up? That's Nicole Magouirk's influence. She's been doing this thing lately where instead of adhering things down nice and tidy and flat, she's letting some edges ride up in a little. Love that. The back side of the bird's tail has some white paper flakes that I didn't notice until I saw them huge on the photo. That's been fixed. ;)

Oh. That's juicy.

So I really dig the way this came out. When the Ted and Molly came home I asked them if they'd want to give this ornament to their teachers as Christmas gifts and they both gave an enthusiastic yes. So after dinner I cut out pieces parts for 13 more. Dang those middle schools with different teachers in every subject area. :P

Not sure about the glitter smears. I'm not in love. Molly says that it looks weird because it's just in the three spots. Not sure that's going to make the final cut. But I have a couple of days to decide since that's the very last step. If you want to cast a vote one way or the other to shove me off the fence, I will happily listen to your opinions!

As always, thanks for stopping by and taking the time to look. I love sharing and I hope something here spoke to you.

The prototype

2011-10-26T18:05:00.001-04:00

You know you're a crafting nerd when your working on your Christmas cards and while you're settling on what the final design will be you happily refer to it as the prototype.

I have only the faintest idea where this will end up, but I like the beginnings. For whatever reason, I ♥♥♥ the Dr. Suess color schemes for Christmas - real red with a lime-yish green and even light blues. I don't know if I associate those colors with watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas but that color scheme makes me happy.

Check it out:

Not exactly the best shot, but you get the inspiration hopefully.

Clearly this isn't "it". Still just playing around with color choices, placement, dies...and the jury's still out on the baker's twine bow. I'm not sold on it and while I can see myself stacking 7 layers of the word "Joy", tying that bow on every card might push me over the edge.

I have to shop for paper. Wish I had come up with this a month ago, before Archivers had that big sale - I would have bought more of that light blue ledger paper.

Also contemplating this combo:

That background paper is from SEI, and while it's new-to-me, I don't know if I'll be able to still get it in any quantity. Plus, I'm not sold on whether it's "blue" enough. Maybe I need to break down and find some actual blue holiday themed paper? Crazy talk!

I'm positively giddy that I'm making cards this year. I haven't made cards in literally ten years. This year I'm starting early and keeping it realistic. Eeeeeeee!

The light at the end of the tunnel...

2011-10-14T00:51:00.001-04:00

I take two classes every semester, but this semester one class is online and one is on campus. What's the big difference? The online class is only 8 weeks long, whereas the on-campus class is 16 weeks long. Lest you think that the 8 week class is easier: no no no. Let me repeat: NO! They cram 16 week's worth of material into 8 weeks, and that means multiple assignments a week, reading out the wazoo, and writing. God Almighty, I hate writing. (at least academically)

But: HOORAY! Today was my last day of my online class. I still have two assignments to turn in, due next Wednesday, but the big stuff is behind me. And I simply could not be happier about this.

At any rate, tonight I had my headset on and I was watching the power point while sitting at my scrap table and something in my Making Memories desktop carousel caught my eye. It was the enormous Sharpie marker I bought a while back, used once for its intended purpose and then forgotten about. In online learning you're watching a power point, and usually it moves at a snail pace. One of the things that I've found is that I need to have some mindless activity to do, because if my eyes aren't engaged on something mindless, they'll find something mind-full to focus on and take my brain with it. I mentioned shopping at Hollo's Papercraft in a recent post. In a more recent trip to Hollo's I picked up what I think are dividers for an index card file box. They're super think, and frankly, I'm not fond of the color. The stack I bought was about 3 and a half inches think and I think $3.99...so yeah, crazy huge quantity of something I'm "eh" about.

Enter the gigantic Sharpie marker:

So yeah. It's not super black, but it's better than it was before. And I'm suddenly looking at this stack of dividers wondering how many that marker can color before dying.

So what will I do with this? I'm thinking I'll punch holes in them and use them as mini-pages in my RIT mini-book.

And yes, I WILL finish that project. I've lost a lot of steam because of the forced school break I've been on, but I've invested too much money into this to abandon it. That said, I am excited to get back to the table.

As always, thanks for stopping by.

I am soooo green.

2011-09-28T22:04:00.003-04:00

Look familiar?

(I'm all about recycle/reuse!)

This is actually my third version of this super hero boy. But you know what? Why do we need to reinvent the wheel? Tonight I actually thought to save the Silhouette cuts as one, sized right file so that next time I don't reinvent the wheel I can do it even faster. If I were really smart I'd just sit down and make 5 of these and file them away. I think it's a really fun thank you card for guys.

So maybe you're wondering why I needed to make a guy-friendly thank you card? Yeah, I figured, but I'm going to write about it anyway. :P

So today I was VERY excited to go to the eye doctor. My right eye has been wonky and my near vision has been making me nuts. I guess my excitement made me leave a little earlier than I needed to. My eye doctor is in the next town over, and just after I got off the highway my car started to drive funny. I decided to hobble through the intersection and pull into a gas station. I parked, got out and heading around the back side of the car knowing already what I'd see: a flat tire. Only it wasn't standard flat it was a FLAT flat. I'm not going to lie. I did the girl thing: I called the boy. Who basically said "You're going to have to change the tire." Which is kinda funny, since up until he said it, it hadn't occurred to me that I would be doing the dirty work. Prior to that I was thinking tow trucks and magic fairies. So I get off the phone and start digging through my trunk for my doughnut and my jack. I set to work and made about every mistake possible, not the least of which was not pushing the jack far enough back. So I'm cranking and cranking and cranking and basically the jack is just smooshing the fiberglass cosmetic underside of my car instead of actually lifting it up. Eventually - but not before somehow ripping the skin off my ring finger and bleeding all over the place - I realized my error and started the crank it back down.

A little aside: Most of you don't know me on a day to day basis. Here's a ditty for you: I dress like it's imperative that I'm ready for game of frisbee at any given time. So here I am, short hair, polo shirt, knee shorts, and skater shoes. And sitting there trying to change that tire my prevailing thought was "I wish I were wearing a dress."

Just as I had the jack cranked back down I hear a man say "Do you need any help?" Turns out he and his twin brother were having lunch at the Burger King across the street. He confessed that they had questioned each other about whether I was a man or a woman. (Fair enough - they were inside and across five lanes of traffic and - well - it's not like I was wearing a dress.)

So the card is for Phillip (who did most of the work) and his brother Patrick. Because I wanted to say:

"Gosh, I just don't have time to scrapbook..."

2011-09-22T22:49:00.002-04:00

I don't know about any one else, but that is the one statement that grates my nerves more than any other when it comes to our hobby. I would respect you more if you said, flat out "Really? Cutting and pasting stuff? How fifth grade." I guess because I chalk that statement up to the fact that everyone is allowed their opinion (and maybe, sadly, because I kind of agree. But screw it. Fifth grade was FUN.) But saying that you don't have time for it sort of implies that I must be rolling in free time. I'm not. We all chose how to "spend" our time, we "budget" it carefully the less we have. We understand what a commodity time is. If you wanted to go to the beach for a week and money was tight, you'd start spending less in other areas - if you save $20 a week by clipping coupons, you can put $20 towards your vacation fund. Time is the same way - you carve out little niches of time from other activities. Maybe you get up earlier. Check. I'm doing that. Maybe you watch less t.v. Yup, doing that, too. Maybe you try to use every "free" moment wisely? YES. Becoming a master at that.

Today I took an hour of time that I probably would have spent dragging out a homework assignment and spent that hour scrapbooking. Did I skimp on my homework? No. I just decided to NOT check Facebook or email incessantly.

I hate to be all preachy about the time thing. While I was doing the page I had this nagging voice in the back of my head saying "You don't have time to doing this!" But it occurred to me that I did. I earned that time. I deserved that time. Hell, I needed that time.

And fortunately, a hour working on a mini book goes a long way.

Two things:
1. Holy cow. Still in love with my new lens!
2. Not happy with the way the pictures printed out for this page. (The ones actually on the page) I don't know why, they were all bright and vibrant, but some reason the bottom two kept coming out super dingy. I don't like it, but I'm moving on.

I dig the multiple layers of butterflies. I've been using pop dots on previous pages, but it feels kinda flimsy, and on the smaller punches it's hard to get them positioned perfectly. Not certain, however, about the twine and the banner pieces. But it's all glued down, so we're moving on. Nothing to see here, people. Keep it moving.

I have this running joke that there's always at least one typo/dropped word per anything I write. I privately refer to it as my "Where's Waldo?" As in, every page has one, see if you can find it. This time is no different. I missed half a word - "even" should read "evening". Whoops. Oh well. Moving on.

So hey. Here's a ditty for you. That notebook paper is from Basic Grey. If you do your journalling in Word you can go into "paragraph" and change the "Line spacing" to "Exactly" at "17 pt" and the text will be spaced perfectly to sit on the lines.

I'm tempted to assume that you know how to do the rest, but just in case:
Once you type up your journalling, you print it on regular printer paper. Apply a little repositional adhesive to the top line of text. Hold the paper up to a light, position the lined paper so that the words "rest" on the lines and adhere the papers together. Put the paper back into the printer in the right orientation so that when you hit "print" again (and you will), the text will print in the exact same spot...only this time, it'll go on the patterned paper that's now adhered to your original text. Voila: you've now printed your journalling on lined paper and the text is nice and lined up. :) And of course you already know that you can use this same technique to print on tags, journalling spots, heck, you could even print on ribbon if you were so inclined.

Thanks for stopping by. I appreciate that you all are humoring me through this very long process.

Now, if you'll do me a favor: Journaling? Or journalling? I'm thinking two Ls to keep the "a" short. I wish they'd just give in and make it a word already! Anyway, please let me know which way you think...I'm starting to go a little nuts on this one!

Happy Birthday Manfriend!

2011-09-18T21:34:00.003-04:00

I am not really a card maker. Hell, I'm not really a card giver. (Sad to say, but it's true.) However, Kerig seems to think that they're a sign of his specialness. So I humor him with one every so often.

Without further ado:

And a peek inside:

Sadly, this took me about 2 hours. No lie. How is that? So I'm wondering: Does this happen to anyone else? I'm not saying I'm a speeding scrapbooker, but when I spend 2 hours on a scrapbooker on a page at least I feel like I've done something. This? If I had know I was going to do this I could have whipped it together in 10 minutes rather than fretting over it for so long.

But he said it was sweet. And he actually peeked into the envelope to see if it was handmade or not, and that made me happy.

Happy Birthday, Kerig.

The Circle Journal: The final chapter

2011-09-15T23:31:00.001-04:00

I did it. I bought Nikon's brand-spankin'-new 40mm micro-Nikkor lens.

Isn't she beautiful?
A: SHE IS!

So with my index finger itching to play, the question became: What can I shoot?
A: My circle journal page from EONS ago.

Remember the Circle Journal project? We started passing around our books almost exactly two years ago. I had the presence of mind to take pictures of my book, showing the cover, the sign in page and the welcome page. But when it came time to make my first page on the theme I forgot to take a picture before passing it on. So out it went and it didn't come back to me for a solid year and a half. And I still forgot to take a picture of it.

Today I rectified that.

Yeah. I guess I kinda got carried away there. Who cares. I love the way the colors pop and the way the lens made taking these pictures so much fun instead of so much frustration. Very pleased with my purchase. :)

Squeezing it in.

2011-09-14T00:23:00.001-04:00

I joked with Maggie tonight that it was going to take 6 years to finish this minibook. Lordy, I hope that was just a joke. I'm not going to whine about life getting in the way, but I am going to whine about my printer getting in the way. I busted my patootie yesterday thinking that if I got all kinds of stuff done yesterday I could sneak in maybe 2 hours of scrapping during the day and another 3 hours at night. And that sounds like oodles of time, but it's really nothing when you're as slow a scrapper as I am. But I figured I could print (actually reprint) some photos, but I really had issues. My laptop monitor desperately needs to be calibrated. Everything I print comes out super dark. I decided to switch to my desktop and try it from there. What a nightmare. First of all, I've got PhotoShop Elements 6 on that machine and PSE9 on the laptop. It's funny how quickly you assimilate to later versions of software. I really had to think about how to do it the old way. Then when it came time to actually send it to print I found I had I hadn't installed the print drivers for my new(er) printer on my old(er) computer. If I weren't so lazy I could find the CD, but that seemed like a lot of work since I have no clue where that CD might be, but I suspect in the printer box...down in the basement...in a weird closet that requires moving a sofa to get into. So I decided to download the driver. THREE. HOURS. LATER. I was able to start printing...except at that point I had to get back to real life.

So yeah. That's a glimpse into how "scrapping" went today. Bleh. The unfun, chore-y side of scrapbooking.

I think that tomorrow is the big day. The day when I plunk down cold hard cash for the 40mm. Hopefully that'll help me stop bitching about the photo process. :P Or maybe not. I have pictures of the whole page, but I don't love them, so I'm just going to share two details:

Old meets new. New BoBunny metal butterfly. Very, very old little weird waxy clear balls. They're not beads, they're not glass, they're not perfectly round. They're weird, and aside from telling you what they're not, I really can't describe them. And they could be interpreted as butterfly poo, but I'm thinking more of the trail of motion. Work with me here.

Hmmm. I need to master making the messy little roses from the Die-namic die I bought from SimonSaysStamp. Mine aren't nearly as cute as the samples they show! That's ok, it's gonna be crushed in 2 weeks anyway. I love the teal and orange combo.

So yeah. Got one page of the minibook done today - and by page I mean the left side. Doesn't seem like much, but I'm happy with it. I'm sneaking it where I can. And that makes me happy, too.

Progress

2011-09-06T00:57:00.000-04:00

So today was a monumental day in these parts. Turns out things got ironed out which made approaching my scrap table doable. And after a day of wrestling with school stuff I really needed to have a chance to play.

So here's what I came up with today:

It's funny how things happen in scrapbooking. I only had the one photo that I wanted to use on this page. Later pages will have tons of photos and collages of photos, but for this one, I just wanted to highlight Maggie. I also wanted to lay the basic groundwork on the journaling, which meant I needed a bigger space. Boy, everything felt awkward, and I had already cut and mentally committed to the grunge argyle strip. ("Mentally committed to"? I'm keeping that!) No matter where I placed my journaling block (or the rectangle of paper used to represent my journaling block - does anyone else do that?) it was awkward. At first my block was horizontal, which meant that it had to be placed high or low on the page, or else it was going to completely cover the argyle strip. Then I remembered that on my last trip to Hollo's I picked up these glassine envelops. I can't for the life of me remember if I had some purpose in mind for them, so if I can't remember then I think they're fair game. I loved that adding them and slipping the journalin card into the pocket so seamlessly solved my problems. The flow works, I'm not covering my argyle strip. It's functional AND cool. And I *think* I have enough envelops to get through the book, although at this point I don't feel like I have to use them on every page.

Some detail shots. I am really frustrated by these. I pulled out my point and shoot to take these shots only to find my battery was exhausted. Well poop. The one really nice thing about a point and shoot camera is built in macro capability. But that's okay, I can deal - it's not like I don't have a shiny new D7000 to use! So I pull that out and then kind of make faces at my camera bag. Do I use my 105mm macro? It has close focusing capabilities, but it's slow to focus, kinda hard to hand hold, and the working distance is about 5 miles. At one point in time, I L♥VED that lens. But that was on my film camera. It's just not the same with digital. Here's a secret: in the very near future, I am going to splurge and buy this 40mm Micro-Nikkor lens. Hopefully it'll bring the joy back to macro photography. The detail shots above aren't macro, just tightly cropped parts of much bigger pictures. I suppose it doesn't really matter to others, but it kinda bugs me.

What else am I frustrated with? Getting adhesive on those teeny-tiny butterflies! Trying to figure out what ribbon-y type stuff to put in the metal word tag! The way the green star looks - I should have stopped before dumping a third later of glitter on it.

What do I like so far? That I haven't used plain cardstock at all yet (Oh, except for the layers under the titles - but that doesn't count.) I like the way the page looks with the clear title pages on top (the way it will be when it's all done.) I like the envelops and the vertical journaling - I think that's going to work out well. I like that I'm using flowers and butterflies, and that it feels "authentic" - I feel like a poser using that word, but in the past, trying to use them felt forced. But in this case they feel more natural. I think the difference is that this time they really mean something to me - beauty and changes that are taking place.

So that's where I am today. I probably won't have a chance to play again until next week. But it's nice to know it's there where I need it.

Emotional ties

2011-08-31T23:38:00.002-04:00

I am not sunshine and light. I am reality, cold and harsh. It kind of sucks, and I'd change it if I could, but it seems that after 43 years I can say with a considerable amount of certainty: This is who I am. So it's not like I sit around thinking "I think today I'll air my dirty laundry on my blog!" However, I am going to be more open than maybe I would if I were one of those sunshine and unicorn types. Why? Because we all go through crappy times, and whether it's because of pride or discretion we don't typically talk about it, and the result is that every time we hit a hard patch, we feel more alone than we should. We feel that we're up against something that no one else has to deal with. It makes us a little pity-party-ish. Bring on the cupcakes.

I mentioned in the pig card post that we recently took a trip to RIT for Maggie to visit the campus. I'm sure you've put 2 and 2 together, but this mini-album is about that trip. I took about 20 photos on my little Fuji Instax camera, and I have pictures that both Maggie and Kerig took during our visit. One of the things that I was so excited about was how this was really a collaboration with all our efforts and all our points of view. And it will be.

But scrapbooking is emotional. When I was a mother of young children, sitting down at my scrap table after putting the kids to bed was therapeutic. Looking at those sweet faces reminded me just how much I loved my kids. Yes, chasing them, cleaning up after them, feeding them, bathing them, laundering their clothes was exhausting, but when you catch your breath you realize there's so much joy in there. For the past 7 days Maggie and I have been butting heads. She did something wrong and she did it willfully. As a mother I can't look away and act like it's didn't happen. There are plenty of worse things that kids can do. But until she's ready to have a mature discussion about what she did, accept some responsibility, express some regret and sincerely apologize, until then she's grounded. It's really eating me up, because I know she knows better. She thinks she's right, but she's not seeing the bigger picture. At any rate, the point is this: It's slowed down my desire to work on this book. I've kind of busied myself with the title pages, because I'm not really ready to tackle pictures and journaling. And that's a real shame. This is going to be a really fun project when it's all finished, I just hate that the process has been sullied. Hopefully it's just temporary.

At any rate, this is a really crappy picture of a very potential-filled project. I don't know what it is about mini-albums, but I my normally clean and cardstock-based style takes a backseat to a cluttered, funky and (hopefully) fun approach.

So that's what I've got to share today. I promise that when this is all done I'll take decent photos so you can actually see it. For now, I hope the glimpse works for you.

Can you believe August is done? Hello September! I'm happy to see you! I brought #2 pencils to the party. ☻ I even have some cupcakes left over from my pity party... ;)

GAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!

2011-08-23T21:19:00.001-04:00

Let me say this:

SILHOUETTE BLADES ARE THE

BANE OF MY EXISTENCE!!

Translation: My project is on hold until I track down new blades. And maybe the money to pay for them. ;)

Pssst: Part 2

2011-08-19T00:50:00.001-04:00

So I thought to myself, "Self, what if, instead of waiting until this is all done, what if you showed a little at a time?" Now, it's not that I really think that you all (all, what? 2 of you?) are hanging on my every creation. But I am intrigued by people's process, so what if someone else is?

And here's the thing. I'm a painfully slow scrap usually. But when it comes to mini-books, I don't care. It's not a page. It's a proooooject. I don't even want to finish it too quickly, because then I'll be back to square one. You know square one: What picture should I scrap? What story should I tell? What papers/colors/fonts/die cuts will support that story. Oh, I am not friends with square one. Too many friggen decisions. I already have to make decisions all day long, I don't want them assaulting me in my hobby. That's why I'm in no rush. The pictures - well, to be honest, they're not all picked yet, but I know basically what I'm using. I know the story. I know the papers and the colors. Not every decision is made, but all the big ones are - now it's just floating along with lots of direction and playing. This is the good stuff.

So this is what I did today. Sprayed down six layers of "RIT" so that it has some nice beefy height to it. Plus the little butterflies. They're one of the reoccurring themes. Why? Because my new scrap lady crush (Karen Grunberg) has shown me the way. With two sons she uses them all the time and it totally works. And in this case they make sense...but you'll have to take my word on that since I haven't really talked about what I'm doing. ANYWAY, I also did the funky 1970s style VW bus, because the other theme of the album is road trip. Can't wait to see the headights once they dry. ;)

But yeah. I actually sat at my scrap table from 8 to midnight and that's all I got done. Oh. I also took in about 5 episodes of Pawn Stars. :P

I'm away again for the weekend, so I'm looking at Tuesday before I can play again. If I make any progress I'll share again...

Thanks for stopping by!

Pssst

2011-08-17T23:38:00.002-04:00

I'm workin' on something. Don't say anything to anyone though. It's kind of a secret. Only the two of us really know about this....I don't want to make a big deal about it or anything.

I'm not making any promises as to the timeline. But check back in a coupla days. Or next week.

Hopefully by the 29th...since that's when I'm really back to the old grind. In fact, just got my text books today. I'm excited to be back in a math classroom, but I don't think I'm ready to let go of the freedom I've had this summer. Yikes. I'm scared! At any rate, I'm trying to squeeze in as much fun - scrappy and otherwise - into these last days of summer. Hope you are, too!

Little Pig, Little Pig...

2011-08-12T12:03:00.000-04:00

So last weekend we - my daughter Maggie, Kerig and I - went to the Rochester Institute of Technology for their "College and Careers" event for high school seniors who are considering attending. It was really an amazing experience to be able to see the campus, have Maggie participate in academic sessions geared toward helping her make a more educated decision about her future and see the school in action (sort of). The facility is huge compared to what I'm used to, very modern, very eco-conscious, very forward thinking. The tuition is an eye-opener, but you get the sense that it's an investment that will pay itself back sooner rather than later. God, I hope so!

We got there around noon. We were able to check in, get Maggie's things settled in the dorm (since she got to stay over night there) and take a campus tour with her. Then we were sent on our merry way while she started her campus visit in earnest. We didn't see her again until we had a brief "Hey! How's it going??" at Gracie's the next day at lunch.

So "our merry way" consisted of checking in at a nearby hotel, showering off the sweat of walking for 4 hours in the hot sun and then heading over to Kerig's friends' house for an honest-to-goodness BBQ. I've heard it said that people use the term BBQ wrong, subbing it in for "cook out" without respect for tradition, culture and actual recipes. Nope. This was a real BBQ, with the main course being Joann's award-winning ribs. The evening was a great success. Our hosts Joann and Adam were warm and friendly. The food was fantastic. I haven't laughed that many hours straight in eons. Just a wonderful evening.

On the way back to the hotel Kerig told me I needed to make a card with a pig. So here it is, a card with a pig. I have to wonder how many cards with pigs there are floating around out there. And yet, this time, it seems perfectly appropriate.

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you're milking every bit of enjoyment you can from the Summer.

200 things: the final countdown

2011-08-02T00:12:00.001-04:00

20. That I somehow managed to have a bonding moment with my kid while teaching basic plumbing tricks.
19. Americas Funniest Home Videos. (I have laughed until cried countless times)
18. Gay Marriage finally starting to get somewhere.
17. They Might Be Giants.
16. Reveal light bulbs. (I know, sounds weird, but when you're trained to look at light, better light makes that much of a difference.)
15. Comments on my blog posts. (Fishing? Hell yes! *wink*)
14. Eating outside.
13. Crawling into bed after a long day.
12. Hugs and kisses goodnight.
11. My cutie-mccute-cute Android keychain. (Love the happy little green robot guy!)
10. Paperclipping Roundtable. (If you're not a listener, you should turn it on while you scrap - such great discussions)
9. My birthday.
8. QuicKutz. (Yep, that's not their name, but I'm keeping it old skool.)
7. Speedways loyalty program.
6. Reba.
5. Ian.
4. Maggie.
3. Ted.
2. Molly.
1. Kerig.

I saved the best for last. Thanks for popping in. If you decide to do your own 200 things (or 300 or 45) please pop over and leave me a link. I'd love to read what makes YOU happy.

200 things: part 9

2011-07-31T23:22:00.001-04:00

40. The word "penultimate". (It means second to last. How cool is that?)
39. Getting lots of green lights on the way to work.
38. Getting a red light when I need to read or send a text.
37. Getting the whole text in before the light changes.
36. Baby's feet.
35. Dr. Suess books. (Yertle the Turtle? The Sneetches? So many life lessons for kids!)
34. The Peanuts.
33. Baker's twine.
32. The movie 1776.
31. Sarah Vowell talking about history.
30. Toy Story. (especially II)
29. Being in my groove. (Happens about 4 times a year. :P)
28. The Google machine.
27. Peanut butter straight out of the jar.
26. Peonies!
25. Watching planes land at Cleveland International.
24. Coloring.
23. My bed.
22. Carved pumpkins.
21. A-ha moments.

And so concludes this penultimate installment of 200 things. Tomorrow is the big day. Ok, not really. It's just the last day. And then we'll find something new to talk about. Maybe 200 things that piss me off. :P Just kidding. But don't think I couldn't do it. ;)

200 things: part 8

2011-07-30T23:41:00.002-04:00

Went out to dinner tonight with my manfriend, to one of our favorite local burger joints (so refreshing to have a favorite spot that isn't a chain) and we're talking about our days. He's telling me a story and suddenly it occurs to me that his face looks funny. Funny, but a familiar funny. About three years ago he had a bout of bells palsy that left the left side of his face paralyzed for about 4 months. It didn't hurt, per se, but the paralysis means that the affected eye doesn't close properly, which makes it hard to sleep and causes the eye to become very dry and uncomfortable. He actually had to tape his eye shut for a couple of weeks when it was at its worst. There's also issues that crop up with eating, since it's hard to control the lips. At any rate, sitting there trying to enjoy my burger, the implications washed over me. It's already been a really rough year for him health wise, and this is so minor, and yet still such a pain in the ass. The recurrence isn't a huge surprise - everyone I know that has dealt with bells palsy once has had to deal with twice. But still. Back off. Find someone else, okay?

So here we are. Day 8 of the 200 Things project, finding myself really needing this opportunity to focus on the happiness.

60. Brown Bag Burgers.
59. diet Pepsi, over crushed ice.
58. Today. (Not including the whole BP realization.)
57. Really good coupons.
56. Punches. (I know I love my Silhouette, but damned if I'm not semi-addicted to buying craft punches.)
55. The Cuyahoga County Public Library system. (Amazing. They have everything, the website ROCKS, there are DOZENS of branches...and free entertainment when money is tight? Hell yes!)
54. January 7th. (The first day after the Christmas return period, when we can finally breath a sigh of relief.)
53. October.
52. June.
51. CUPCAKES!
50. Laptops. (Like portable joy!)
49. Cleveland's Museum of Contemporary Art.
48. Scarves.
47. Swinging. (Actual swings at the park. Get your mind out of the gutter.)
46. Photo walks.
45. Discovering new music.
44. An unexpected compliment that is believable.
43. My memories of living in Indiana.
42. NOT having a mother-in-law!
41. Having a vocabulary buddy. (Her eyes lit up when I used "lugubrious" in casual conversation...and that's how it started.)

200 things: part 7

2011-07-29T22:38:00.001-04:00

I had about 7 things that popped into my head after I finished yesterday's entry, and now... Oops. Should've written them down.

80. Big Love.
79. Just about anything to do with polygamy and/or FLDS.
78. The Help. (If you haven't read it yet, now is the time.)
77. Funny typos. (I recently texted that I let a customer get a way with something because I was a "pullover". Push, pull...same diff, right?)
76. Damnyouautocorrect.com. (OMG, this is an instant bad mood lifter for me. I will giggle until I turn red. Not pretty.)
75. Random interesting things I learn through work. (Today I talked to a guy who's taking part in the 48 Hour Film Festival here in Cleveland. Really very cool.)
74. Banana snowballs with marshmallow topping. (apparently "snowballs" are really regional to Maryland. I'd kill for a trip to The Original Snowball Stand in Woodstock, MD, where were used to go 3 or 4 times a month growing up.
73. While we're talking food, I'll admit that a real Philly Cheesesteak is my all time favorite food, and when I take that first bite I close my eyes and thank Jesus for cheese. And cheap meat products. And, apparently, grease. :P
72. Summer break. (You don't appreciate time until you hardly have any to yourself.)
71. Cable.
70. Talking in the dark.
69. 69? Hee hee hee.
68. Have I mentioned IM yet??
67. Hard crabs. Picnic tables. Bottles of beer on ice. Old Bay seasoning.
66. Angry Birds.
65. Gray hair. (Ok, not on me, but there are people I know who rock the salt'n'peppa and it's hot.)
64. Gift cards.
63. Watching my kids play Dance Party on the Wii.
62. Printed pictures.
61. Back to school sales.

It's funny, but 20 things no longer seems like enough...I want to keep going. But we're going to stretch out the goodness. :)

200 things: part 6

2011-07-28T18:57:00.001-04:00

I'm impressed with my sticktoitiveness on this. But actually find myself mentally bookmarking things to put on the list throughout the day.

100. That I'm signed up for a my first math class in 21 years. So exciting!
99. That I've already come up with a hundred things that I love or make me smile. Yay me!
98. Movies that are made for kids, but have humor that goes over the kids' heads and right to mom and dad. Awesome.
97. Echo Park.
96. Little letter stickers. (Even though I did say that I didn't like them. I lied. Or changed my mind. Or something.)
95. Thinking about my new camera. (That still hasn't arrived. I'm so frustrated, but so very excited!)
94. Tim Gunn.
93. Easy A.
92. Footie socks. (How odd, and yet opening my sock drawer and seeing them all lined up waiting to make my feet cozy: aaaaah.)
91. Golden hour.
90. Right after a storm, when it's cooled down and the humidity lifts and the sun comes out.
89. Messenger bags.
88. Breakfast Hot Pockets. (And every time I think about them I sing Hooot Poooockets, a la Jim Gaffigan)
87. Christmas lights.
86. The white party/string lights in the screened-in porch.
85. Watching the snow fall. (But only if I don't have to drive in it.)
84. Funky silver jewelry. (This is headed my way.)
83. The library.
82. Snickerdoodles. (Even the name of them is fun.)
81. Watching the dog watch me as I spread peanut butter on her rawhide bone. (It's all just anticipation, but I like to think of it as love.)

Another easy-breezy installment of 200 things that make me happy. Tune in next time.

p.s. Did you know that the correct spelling of "pouring" in the context of "pouring over pictures" is actually "poring"? True story. Too bad I didn't know that little factoid the week I signed up for Shimelle's blogging for scrapbookers class a year and a half ago...

200 things: part 5

2011-07-27T23:10:00.000-04:00

120. Sharpie markers. (The fine point ones, that are actually kind fat...love my handwriting with these.)
119. The smell of Pec 12. (It smells like artificial banana, only better.)
118. Pintrest.com.
117. Friendship bracelets.
116. The Maryland flag.
115. Sex. (Oh, hell, no one's actually reading this anyway)
114. Modern furniture.
113. Speaking of which, Crate and Barrel.
112. Legacy Village.
111. Etsy.com.
110. Lewis Black.
109. My sofa!!
108. Autumn leaves.
107. Woodwick candles.
106. Whip it!
105. Bagels and cream cheese.
104. Tide detergent.
103. The color orange.
102. Going to the pool.
101. Craig Ferguson.

It's funny how much easier these lists are after a happy day. :)

200 things: part 4

2011-07-26T21:14:00.005-04:00

140. Finding someone else who's read the same good book as you and actually wants to discuss it. (Maybe I should join a book club?)
139. Crossing that nagging thing off the to-do list.
138. Getting that important email or phone call you were waiting for.
137. Getting that totally unimportant email that makes your day.
136. Freshly cut grass.
135. A new Scrapbooks, Etc in the mail.
134. Dinner with the whole family.
133. The sound of waves crashing. (especially at an honest-to-goodness beach. The lake pales in comparison)
132. Air conditioning.
131. Baby Ruth bars.
130. Zooey Deschanel. (Is that creepy??)
129. Grey's Anatomy.
128. Solving math problems.
127. Watermelon.
126. Sleeping with the windows open.
125. zappos.com.
124. Wristlet purses.
123. Winning the gas game.
122. Funky silver jewelry.
121. Graph paper. (How nerdy is that? And yet, every time I see it I get a little googly-eyed.)

I've really had a rough couple of days. Nothing major, stupid stuff that's just added up and worn me down. It's been kinda cool to make this is part of my day. It's neat to focus on what brings a smile to my face.

200 things: part 3

2011-07-25T11:28:00.002-04:00

160. Seeing bird's nests built into storefront signs.
159. Cozying up to another body whose skin is either warm or cool, depending upon what you need.
158. Red Bull.
157. The Real Housewives of New Jersey. (they make me so grateful for my drama-free life)
156. This blog. (Lest it sound conceited, it is it's own little walk down memory lane for me)
155. Being able to wear (long) shorts to work. (I ♥ my casual work environment!)
154. My road to teaching.
153. School supplies.
152. My EVO phone. (Nerdy, I know, but it keeps me entertained.)
151. The end of laundry day, when it's all folded and put away and drawers are bursting with fresh footies and t-shirts.
150. Puns and word play.
149. Angry Birds Rio.
148. Being able to check my account balance online. (Although, I'm not gonna lie, I'm usually grimacing and praying as it loads.)
147. Maggie's artwork.
146. My space heater. (Man! That's hard to admit with the weather we've been having this last week!)
145. Scrapbooking.
144. Target.
143. Time alone.
142. Realizing that the headache is gone.
141. Finally figuring out where my numbering on this went askew!

I really needed this today. It's funny how this just helped me pull out of a funk. Yay for thinking about happy things. ☻

200 things: part 2

2011-07-24T14:46:00.000-04:00

179. Texting.
178. Fans on a hot day. (but not hot days.)
177. 76º and 20% humidity.
176. 92.3fm.
175. That first day that you realize that the trees are really all the way covered in leaves.
174. Reading a book at the pool, especially if you're lucky enough to score a lawn chair.
173. Ice. (how did this not make it in the top 20?)
172. Reading blogs.
171. Facebook.
170. A really good photo, especially of someone I love that really captures what I see in them.
169. Colorful Melamine plates. (I hope they never link Melamine to cancer, because I'll be a goner.)
168. BIC Roundstick pens
167. Tulips. Pink and purple, especially. (and odd that I would specifically list purple...in general that's my least favorite color, but in tulips, it's so beautiful.)
166. Laughing.
165. Thunderstorms. (even though they scare me a little, too)
164. Watching Ted play baseball.
163. Bejeweled.
162. Cotton t-shirts.
161. Short hair.

(I realized after the fact that yesterday I did 21 things. Boy, you can't stop me when I'm on a roll! :P So today I'm "only" doing 19 to get myself back on track. Yes. I'm a dork.)

See you tomorrow!

200 things

2011-07-23T16:48:00.001-04:00

I don't have anything to complain about. Like so many, my needs are met and I'm fortunate beyond measure. But sometimes it's easy to lose sight of that fortune and mire, instead, in the less-than-perfect aspect of life.

Enter: 200 things. Things I'm grateful for. Things I love. Things that make me smile. Things I couldn't live without. Things that aren't even things. (well, some, anyway) I don't know that I can come up with 200 today. How about twenty as a good start?

200. The internet. (I love that there is so much interesting stuff out there and so many fun ways to waste time.)
199. Being a mother. (Are my priorities askew? Possibly. But the internet doesn't walk around outside in white socks or throw up. nuff said)
198. My manfriend. (Now I'm just running through the obligatory stuff. :P No, seriously, he's a wonderful friend, funny and supportive and I'd argue that he's handsome, too)
197. Sausage. (OMG. Grateful for doesn't even begin to cover my appreciation for sausage)
196. Clean cotton sheets.
195. Sleeping past 8:30 on clean cotton sheets.
194. Documentaries.
193. A really meaty discussion.
192. Project Runway.
191. Secure Digital cards. (No, I'm not making this up.)
190. Rolling Rock. And now, Select 55.
189. Dinner out.
188. Closing time.
187. Shorts.
186. AvantGarde font.
185. Routine.
184. Watermelon.
183. My Silhouette (how did I not mention this sooner??)
182. Cuticurra soap. (It is, in fact, top 20 good)
181. Keen sneakers
180. Days off!

That's a good start.

Summer 2011 ♥ mini book

2011-07-17T19:00:00.001-04:00

I think it's funny when people say "I carry a little notebook to write down my ideas so I won't forget them!"
Since my head, at any given time, is filled with thoughts like:
•How many people will be home for dinner tonight?
•Who has a game today, which uniform do they need, and is it clean?
•Have I had any vegetables or water today?
•Why are there Chewy bar wrappers in the wash? Why can't I teach them to empty their pockets?
And the like. There's no room for ideas, much less the quantity or quality that would merit a dedicated notebook. Oh, how I envy those who can look at freshly laundered Chewy bar wrappers and have an a-ha! moment. I'm not one of them.

Soooo, you can only imagine how thrilled I am that I not only had an a-ha! moment but that I actually made it happen...even without the benefit of having written it down in a notebook. Yay me!

A little back story:
I've been shooting a Nikon D300 for the last 3½ years and I've loved it, but in the last year or two I've been noticing these weird, oily looking spots appearing on pictures. At first it was just one or two, and they weren't always there. But as time went by the number of spots rose as did their size. It got to the point that I couldn't ignore them or just quick-fix them in PhotoShop. So I packed it up and sent it off for repair. But repairs take forever, and it's summer. So when I saw this cute little Fuji 7s that instantly spits out wallet size pictures, I decided that it could help me through the summer.

Not even a week into my new love affair with the Fuji Kerig and I went on a mini adventure that included a trip to Hollo's Paper in Brunswick. Now, at the risk of offending the owners of Hollo's: this place is a dump. However, it is the exact kind of dump that any papercrafter secretly enjoys. It's like a giant garage sale of office and restaurant supplies, they have envelopes of all sizes and room full of the super inexpensive, good quality card stock in basic colors. After my recent LOAD, I needed to restock my pile of white cardstock and $1.75 got me a stack that would have cost $15.99 at Archiver's: SCORE. While there I came across these cute little coin envelopes (they may not be the exact same size), only sold individually for something crazy like 3¢ a piece. Even I can afford 10 or 15 of those! And it occurred to me that they were just the right size for the little wallet sized photos the Fuji makes. Hmmm. Wheels-a-turnin'! I see a mini-book. Another thing that caught my eye was a stack of old fashioned ledger paper. I tried to find something like it to show you online, but apparently this has been sitting at Hollo's since roughly 1957 and they're the only ones who still have it. At any rate: $1.50 for one hundred sheet? Yes, please! Do I care if it's acid free? Like I care if this shit holds up after I'm dead... ;) But maybe it is? I would think that paper meant for accounting documents would be made to last. Maybe.

After we went to Hollo's we headed to Fairlawn, where I got to shop at Archiver's. As luck would have it, I am dating one of the few men who understands the notion of scrapbooking. He's also very patient with me, because it's not like shopping for scrapbooking stuff is quick. After probably an hour of hemming and hawing I headed to the register and we were on our way.

And the Fuji 7s + Hollo's envelopes and ledger paper + misc scrap supplies = Summer 2011 ♥ mini book.

See how perfectly sized these envelopes are to work with these photos? Love it! And the Fuji 7s has a little itty-bitty mirror on the ring around the lens, which is super wide - perfect for arms-length self portraits for two. :)

Here is where I point out that the camera is not, by any means, perfect. That is one very underexposed manfriend. But the ice cream looks yummy, no? ;) Oh, and I'm going to roll my eyes at that flower every time I look at this page. I had one that was green, blue and red plaid that really went with the colors, only I grabbed the wrong one. Didn't notice my error until long after I had stuck it down with Magic Tape, and we all know that stuff doesn't just peel up for a quick change. Oops.

Ok. And this is where I confess that I was watching the mini-series "The Kennedys" on Netflix while I was doing this. And I wasn't paying 100% attention to either. Which is why the left page sports a little pocket. When I did the other side of this envelope (the picture of the ice cream), I didn't realize that I was adhering everything to an upside down envelope. Oops. So the pocket is two-fold: it serves to cover up my massive Oopsy! and it also holds this page's journaling. Each page has a little note writen on that ledger paper I talked about tucked side the envelope. That really doesn't work if it's going to fall out of the bottom every time it's picked up. So yeah...major drop back and punt going on here. And yet, if I didn't tell you my secret you'd just think I was shakin' things up a bit. Maybe.

One of the interesting things that I found out about this camera is that it turns over-exposed parts of the picture black. And that is SUPER weird, because standard film and digital just makes it white. So my head is strategically placed in front of the sun, because the black circle that appeared for the sun in our first try was really disconcerting.

I think if I were to do this again, I would take more care in the whole placement for the rings. I had to go through and cut a notch out so the envelopes can be opened. Doh. Obviously attention to detail and thinking things all the way through are not my strong suits. Oh well, live and learn.

And this is why the pockets need to be accessible. Each one contains some journaling, as well as extra pictures. The ones that I used on the outside are all I need to tell the story, but at a $1 a pop, I'm not throwing the decent duds away. (The bad duds? They get tossed. But the others stayed)

I love the freedom of mini-books. You pick some colors, you pick a shape, a theme and the rest is just barreling through and creative play. I like that you can make things as fat as you want them because straining page protectors aren't an issue. I love that journaling tucked in pockets can still be read without a major hoo-ha. I love that I can step away from my usual clean style and try something new.

And that's my visual supply list, minus the can of ancient American Craft plastic flowers I forgot to take out of my pocket for the picture.

I'm proud that:
•I had an idea and I actually made it happen.
•I used so much stuff from recent shopping trips. with the exception of the envelopes, nothing was purchased with this (or for that matter, ANY) project in mind.
•I dug into my stash of old stuff and used things that I've had for years and years.

Thanks for stopping by. If you read all of this: holy hell. Sorry! I hope you at least enjoyed the pictures!
☺ Caroline

Earworms and other things I can't get out of my head

2011-06-26T15:10:00.012-04:00

Seems like everybody's got a price tag
I wonder how they sleep at night
When the sale comes first and the truth comes second

So the lyrics that open the song drew me in and compelled me to look up the video just to see what she looks like. The reason I'm sharing the video though is that in certain spots she flashes this smile that makes her look exactly like Cameron Diaz.

2.

You can't hear this song without involuntarily reaching for the volume knob and simultaneously starting to head bob. By the way, this blog post will be the most productive thing I do all day. So I'm totally embracing the lazy philosophy today.

3. Pintrest.com
Dear sweet baby Jesus, please let me get over this obsession soon. At any given point in time in the last three weeks, if I'm sitting with my laptop the answer to "Whatcha doin'?" is a sheepish "Pintrest."

But where else can I find:

The tricked out laundry room of my dreams?

Great ideas for posters in my (future) classroom?

A scraptable that makes my knees weak?

Photo inspiration that's beautiful AND doable?

4. Friendship Bracelets
It's not that I set out to recreate the summer of my junior year... Frankly, we're going to blame this one on Pintrest, too. First, for me, Pintrest is all about collecting things you want to make or do or ways to decorate. It's got my creative juices all cracked out. And I'm spending the week at the manfriend's apartment, so my creative outlets are generally limited to digital stuff, but alas, my camera's in the shop and I'm totally in the mood to paper scrapbook, but digital scrapbooking really doesn't satisfy that itch. So when I saw the super easy tutorial on creating friendship bracelets I decided that it was cheap, easy to haul the supplies up three flights of stairs and wouldn't create an enormous mess. So for the last couple of days I've been cranking out these babies:

I made one for Molly, then tweaked the way I did it a little, made one for Maggie, tweaked it again, made one for me. Then another ~~one~~ two for me. Then more for Molly and Maggie. I think I need to go back and buy red and grey and black floss and make one or two for Ted. If I do them in his team's colors maybe he'll wear it and think it's "cool"...originally I thought he might think it was "girly" so I only bought girly colors. Well, we'll see what he thinks and make him 2 or 3 if wants any. In the meantime, they make me happy - the ones I'm wearing just make me feel beachy and tan and young. None of that actually applies, but I like the mental lift it's giving.

5. INSTAX MINI
I just mentioned that my camera is out for repair. Because the woman in charge of our repair department hates me I probably won't get it back until sometime in January. (I'm not lying about how much this woman feels about me, and I swear, my blood pressure is spiking as I think about how long I'll have to wait for my camera to come back because of it) HOWEVER, in the meantime, I've been playing with this little beauty:

Isn't she pretty? I just want to cover her with Hello Kitty stickers and keep her in my Hello Kitty purse.

So you may or may not know that Polaroid stopped making film several years ago. Having never really been a huge Polaroid lover this hasn't really affected me, except at work. As the old saying goes, when one door closes, another one opens. Once Polaroid was "out of the picture" (ba da dum!) Fuji jumped in and saved the crappy-instant-picture day. Breakfast with Santa and the Easter Bunny is back on!

But this isn't the Breakfast with Santa camera. Oh no. This is so much cooler than that. (A) Look how cute it is. Do you see that? CUTE! and (B) It doesn't spit out ginormous ugly pictures. It spits out adorable little 2ish by 3ish inch photos that are only moderately crappy. So moderately crappy that this photo snob feels justified in calling them kitschily-imperfect. I made that up. Especially the variation on kitschy, but damn if it isn't an accurate representation of the what this camera does.

I am upset to say the least that I have all these creative juices flowing AND it's summer and I have no camera. But playing with this is salvaging my attitude. And probably keeping me from marching downtown and telling Nancyanne what I think of her. ;)

By the way, if you're interested, this is a GREAT offer. The film is hard to find to say the least and you'll want to have a stash saved up, because once you start it's hard to stop pushing the shutter button on this thing.

So that's where I am and what I'm thinking about this lovely summer Sunday. Later I'm grabbing Chipotle and taking it to the local beach park with my honey. I ♥♥♥ summer!

Conversation starter

2011-06-20T18:44:00.003-04:00

No doubt I live an odd life. Without getting into details because it would take a long, long time to type out the entire explanation, I live in my ex-husband's house in a long-term temporary arrangement at his request. It has to do with kids, travel, business, money, real estate markets bottoming out. You know, the usual. Everyone who hears the story thinks I'm a little nuts, but in time they realize that the arrangement is beneficial for everyone.

Well, almost everyone. When this plan was presented to me, I somehow thought that my boyfriend would enjoy seeing less of me. As a lifelong bachelor he's doesn't really "need" to see me every day. He lives alone and is one of those people who rarely suffers from boredom. I, on the other hand, went from a house with 4 kids to college with a roommate and dozens of other girls on the hall, to marriage with 4 kids coming in rapid succession. Being by myself is a luxury in the small increments that it comes, but for long periods...I'm not proud it, and I'm not going to say I was lonely per se, but...I like a little bit of company.

As it turns out, my boyfriend has not been thrilled about the "space" this has created.
Learning this came as a bit of shock.

We've since had little conversations - actually more like passing comments - that when this arrangement comes to its conclusion, we'll live together. Looking back on our conversations I have to admit that it's been assumption on my part - not something explicitly discussed, much less actually agreed upon.

One day in mid-May we went to the movies and on the way home I was pointing out different bungalows I liked along the way. Parma is riddled with cute, tiny bungalows with small, quaint yards. I think I told him that I liked the front porches and the idea of spending evenings sitting out there. I may have mentioned that lawn maintenance isn't something I want to have to spend lots of time on. He asked what made a bungalow a bungalow, and I think I stumbled through some general qualities. That evening I did a Google search to show him more definitively what's so neat about a bungalow. I found myself drooling over floor plans and I was thrown back in time to when I would pore over home plans the way other girls would dream about weddings.

Several days later we were given the prompt

Make a wish list layout today, or pick one goal or and create a page about it.

Having gone back and peaked at one particular house plan a half dozen time in the course of those 3 or 4 days, I knew what list I wanted to make. My wish list is about home. And my future. And the peace and contentment that I see there.

Again. Not in love with the design. The scale is off. I like the colors, but the picture needs to be bigger, the tilt is gratuitous (isn't all scrapbooking bordering on gratuitous??) and it needs just a little extra punch.

But that's not the point of this post. What I love about this layout is the fact that it started a conversation between my boyfriend and I. I don't know if he knew that owning a home was anything that would interest me. I have long put it out of my head as something that I could never afford, and since I couldn't afford it I wasn't going to "waste time" day dreaming about the possibility.

Coincidentally, a week or so after this layout was made one of our semi-regular customers was telling me a story about a Chinese exchange student staying at his home. She asked him, if he didn't mind, to tell her how much his house would cost. He said it was hard to know, as they had purchased it in the late 1970s, and the real estate market is still highly unpredictable, but he would guess around $140,000. I think my mouth may have dropped a bit. I don't know what his house is like, but I know the area he lives in, and it's nice. Older homes, mature trees, good schools... I had expected more. A lot more. That night I started looking at real estate websites and was pleasantly surprised at what homes are now going for. There are beautiful, established homes that really are priced at $130-$140K.

While I was looking at these houses I decided to show one to Kerig. More "Hey, did you know you could get a house like this for this price??" than "Hey, let's buy a house!" We were instant messaging at the time, so he was off doing his own thing and I was pretty much window shopping all evening, with little bits of conversation thrown in here and there. At one point I was talking about something and he answered with something like "Pretty much anything that has to do with house decisions is going to be your call." I was confused by the statement, and assumed initially that he meant "If you're going to buy a house, you should decide what you want and get it." But that's not what he meant. He meant that he wasn't the one who had big opinions and so he would defer to me. He was telling me that I could pick.

This turned into a very cursory conversation about home ownership, mortgages, living arrangements, the future in general. Its not that we haven't talked about the future in general, but we haven't started to get specific about it. I'm not crediting my layout 100% for this conversation. And certainly the fortuitous comment from my customer helped, but ultimately I will say this: It opened a door. It allowed me to say what my dreams are.

Reflecting on my dreams and scrapbooking them? Therapeutic.
The conversation that it helped start? Wonderful.

Therapeutic

2011-06-11T19:55:00.003-04:00

So in my last post I mentioned that I wanted to talk about a couple more layouts that I did for LOAD. These are not layouts that I love, in fact, design-wise I think they both leave a lot to be desired. My thought for wanting to share them is to highlight how oddly therapeutic scrapbooking can be.

When I was a younger mother of younger children, there were...days. Most mothers of small children will know what I'm talking about. The day that I ran upstairs to brush my teeth before heading to the grocery store only to come back downstairs three minutes later to find Ted, ready to go in his navy blue pea coat, standing in front of the open refrigerator chucking eggs into the dining room - a half dozen or so broken eggs floating on the carpet? This was not one of those days. I had to stifle my laughter at this creative mess but there was something gleeful about how proud and fascinated about this fun discovery he was. But the days of overtired toddlers, the he's-touching-me's, the days of two steps forward three steps back with cleaning/laundry/food prep, the 2 a.m. sheet changes for whatever accident that occurred, ear infections upon ear infections....THOSE are the days. The days that when you finally get everyone to bed and you don't have the energy but rather the NEED to indulge in some "me" time - when you sit down to scrap and look at pictures of these sweet, innocent, funny, rambunctious, smart, loving, BEAUTIFUL faces and thank God you have a hobby that puts these amazing pictures in your hands at moment when you need to be reminded that he's-touching-me is normal and temporary and sign of healthy, happy kids.

Yes. Scrapbooking is therapeutic. I've known that for 13 years now.

But, like most scrapbookers, I've traditionally documented happy stories and memories, largely revolving around the kids or our family activities. My children are older now, they're all in school full time except the oldest who has recently left home to work full time. We don't have the luxury of time to spend lollygagging at the park, the pool, the museum, the beach. There are part time jobs, baseball tournaments, softball games, concerts, field trips, work and school to attend to. I don't take pictures as much as I used to. And I don't have "those days" like I used to. I have fewer pictures to scrap, fewer stories that I can document, but still a desire to sit and play with paper.

As I said in my last post, one of the neat thing about LOAD is that creating a page daily sometimes puts you in the position of not having a family/kid story to tell. Or maybe you do, but something else fits the prompt a bit better, and since you'll be creating again tomorrow, there's no guilt in taking a day to create something that's not about the kids.

One of the prompts this month was to scrapbook something hard. She didn't say we had to name names and put all the dirty laundry out there. We could a vague as we needed to be, if that's what the situation called for. I suppose I could have been more vague. That would have been the tactful way of handling my difficult subject, especially seeing as how it was going into the LOAD gallery where 270+ women would have the opportunity to scrutinize my situation and the pain that emanates from it. But there was no sense, to me, at addressing this subject in an anything less than an honest way. I guess I should just let you see what I'm talking about:

The title has been redone in a more fitting font, the "e" is no longer sitting on the bird's head. And yet, design-wise, I don't like it.

I'm pretty certain that if you click on the layout it'll enlarge it enough to struggle through the journalling. I'm not so eager to throw my parents under the bus that I'm going to post the journalling in an easy-to-read format.

I hope that one day, when my kids are a little older and more mature, that this will help explain why their grandparents don't talk to their mother. I'll be honest: I felt shitty making this page, like I was airing my dirty secret. But then something happened: another LOAD participant commented, thanking me for sharing my story and she told me that it had inspired her to document her story. Her's was a story of parental control - similar, but not exactly the same, but enough that we could really relate.

And in reading her story a weight was lifted. I know there are lots of stories like mine out there, but I don't personally know anyone who is going through the same type of abandonment as I am. People close to me know my story. They understand what's going on, and they know that it affects me. But they don't know how it feels, and among other things, it feels LONELY. So to know that there's someone out there - someone that I know - who is going through this same sense of loneliness and abandonment makes me feel less isolated. That I know that she isn't a bad person, isn't deserving of this treatment allows me to see myself in the same light. I love that this story wouldn't have been told if it weren't for LOAD, and I love that in telling it I found someone else with the same pain. I hope that reading my story brought her some peace, as reading hers brought to me.

Ironically, my mother had a cross stitch piece in the kitchen that read "A joy that's shared is a joy made double, a sorrow shared is but half the trouble."

I was going to talk about a second layout with therapeutic value, but I think I'll save that for another day...

LOAD Blog Hop!

2011-06-09T01:59:00.011-04:00

Hellllo LOADies and Gentlemen!
(Ouch. That was sooo bad!)

Welcome to the LOAD blog hop! I hope you've enjoyed visiting all the blogs before me and that you have enough energy left for this entry and Mama Du's.

By now, everyone who happens by this blog knows that LOAD stands for LayOut A Day. Think scrapbooking meets Iron Chef meets busy life. Sheer insanity that's good for the creative soul. As one who tends to back-burner my creative outlets when life gets busy (when is it not??), signing up for LOAD is a way to remind me what I believe in my core to be true: women are creative beasts, and we NEED some kind of outlet for that. Denying that for long stretches is bad for us...and those within a 25 foot radius.

Since blogging is something that I only do when time allows AND I have something to say, I didn't blog during May. I had plenty to say and enough layouts to share (this blog is, after all, an excuse to share layouts), but not enough time to write meaningful posts. Rather than try to show every layout I created during the month, I thought I'd once again pick my favorite five layouts, share them, the prompts that inspired them and explain what it is that makes me drawn to them.

Working in the order in which they were created:

From Day 1. The prompt was to strip down to the basics and create a layout using just cardstock, patterned papers, journaling and a title. This one is in the top five because it's true. The pictures are rough, but real and "us". The sentiment is exactly what you'd get it you sat down and listened to everything I had to say about us and had to boil it down to two words. The simplicity of the design is true to me, yet fun and a little funky. Even the little monsters are true: we are both a little rough around the edges and we're lucky that we each see beyond those rough edges and into the beautiful parts on the inside.

(size: 5½x8½)

Day 7. The prompt was to scraplift. Simple as that. Since I think the sun rises and sets on Nichol Magouirk, I decided to copy her. I'm certain there was one singular layout that I started with, but I also attempted to channel her general approach. She frequently layers her titles like that, uses the fun borders and she's a master at mixing and matching patterned papers. While I love the way it looks, it's not something I do with ease. I love the way this came out and I loved that I was able use an extremely old photo and combine it with my very current emotions about my oldest son.

(size: 8½x11)

Day 16. The prompt was embellishments...blah blah blah...something about using a plain photo and a plain background and adding embellishments to convey what you want to say. Hmmm. As with all things embellishy, I think I failed miserably. But that doesn't mean I don't like the layout. I do. What I like is that I finally documented the meaning behind my tattoo. It's something I've meant to do for a long time, but it seems superfluous. At least within the context of LOAD I can say "I couldn't come up with a better story/photo that day!"

I do love that about LOAD. Sometimes you tell stories/document things that you wouldn't otherwise address, solely because you need to create daily and your mind gets pushed in new and different directions.

Interesting aside (sort of, anyway): People rarely ask about my tattoo. Maybe 5 or 6 times in the 6 years I've had it. But not three days later another mother at Ted's baseball game asked me - loudly and in front of many other parents - what the meaning was behind the tattoo. I've always struggled with bottom lining what it means, so I was grateful that I had finally organized my complex thoughts that lead up to its design.

Day 21. The prompt was to start with the design and then move into the story and photos. That's not really how I work. I start with the photo(s) and/or the story in mind and then the design follows, dependent upon the space needs. I think I tried to switch it up, but ultimately, my focus on the story and photos is too far ingrained to abandon just for the challenge. On this one, I love the title, the map paper (especially that it has both our starting and ending destination cities) and the way the text actually really lines up with the notebook paper lines. :) It's the little things that please me. I also love that I was able to put another little dent in these photos from almost three years ago.

(size: 8½x11)

Day 30. The prompt was to do your own thing, make your heart sing. Because I was away from home, I had to try to make my heart sing digitally. This isn't my strong suit, but I kind of fell into a kinda-sorta-albeit-made-up digital style this month. Why is this in my top five? Two things: I am passionate about being in my books. Not for me, but because it will mean something to my kids one day. Also, I like what I wrote. Some of it stuff that I absolutely embrace and have successfully put into practice on a daily basis (the karma thing, the thing about exercising the brain, the get what you give philosophy) and others are things that I know to be true, but have to keep reminding myself to actually do. I'm also pleased that the photo, while crappy, is actually current. I think we're all guilty of trying to hide behind younger, skinnier, prettier pictures of ourselves. I know I do - just check out the picture of me at the bottom of the blog. It's four years old and gaining. That I used a current picture makes me feel strong that I can put myself out there/in there.

So those are my favorite five layouts from the month. In the next couple of days I'd like to talk about a couple of more that had special meaning to me. If you're so inclined, I'd love to have you back early next week.

I hope you enjoyed this. I hope I didn't wear you out with all the words, words, words. Please take a couple more minutes and visit my friend Kathleen, aka "Mama Du". She's a wonderful photographer and talented scrapper. Definitely worth the visit!

Thanks for stopping by!

By the way, if you're stopping here first, here's the complete blog hop list. Warning: at the end of viewing these amazing ladies' blogs you'll be chomping at the bit to sign up for the next LOAD!

Ecoscrapbook
At the Blue Barn
Capture Your 365
Happie By Abbie
Trista Hertz
Goes Turbo Creative
She's a Crafty Pumpkin
Pouring Over Pictures <=== you are here. :)
Taking Pictures. Enjoying Life.

Photography Contest.

2011-06-05T00:42:00.006-04:00

So...I work for a camera store and Tamron sponsored a employee photo contest. Not mandatory, but strongly encouraged. We had to use five specific lenses from their current line up, with photos falling into one of the following themes: People, Nature, Abstract, Close Focus and HDR.

I do not call myself a photographer. I'm really not that good. And frankly, I used to love it a lot more than I do now. But every once in a while I take a shot that rekindles the love. And sometimes that spurs a new interest. I am grateful for the contest for relighting a fire that had faded out for a while.

Two twists to the contest: you had to submit one picture using each of the five lenses. And the pictures being submitted had to fit one of the categories. I guess that doesn't sound much like a twist, until you think that any pictures of people will require a model release. Pictures of nature generally require good light. HDR requires special software, know how...and you have to shoot in RAW, which I'm practically allergic to. Yeah, I realize it sounds like I'm whining. And, oh, did I. I went out shooting a bunch of times, only to realize later that nothing I shot fit the categories. Oh! The frustration!

But here's what I got. And since there's rarely such a thing as "no particular order", these are presented in the order in which they were taken.

Super Moon over Legacy

Taken with the Tamron 10-24. And...uh...the 70-300. It's a composite shot, the moon wasn't really *that* big. Do I think it'll win? Hell no. But it was the only thing I had for that lens. (remember: we had to enter a picture using each lens)

Ted Goes Golfing

I think we all had or favorites from this contest. Mine was definitely the 70-300. That thing is so tack sharp and so fast focusing, I couldn't help but to fall in love with it. I have a Nikon 80-200 f/2.8. A fantastic lens to be sure. But I still covet the 70-300. In comparison, the Tamron is way faster and lighter and it's easier to deal with it because of the size difference. I'm not giving up my Nikon lens, but I wouldn't mind having the Tamron to keep it company.

Ted's Lucky Day

Two things: the version I printed out and turned in had better skin tones. Also, don't love this, but again, I needed something using this lens - the 17-50 f/2.8. Fantastic lens, but again, forgot to take pictures that really fit into the categories. I don't think it's a winner - I'm sure we'll see some really terrific portraits, but this is Ted and that's a genuine smile. On this day Ted hit two out of the park home runs, had 2 RBIs, threw a kid out at second, got the game ball...and as if all that wasn't enough, he found a $50 bill on the field.

Walking on Sunshine

Hmmm. When it comes to lenses, I'm a little bit of a snob. I've been "raised" to believe that anything that offers this much versatility can't possibly be as good as shorter ranged lenses. But this was taken with the new 18-270 PZD lens, which is fast, quiet and tiny. I'm not in love, but I'm definitely in like!

Bee

60mm. I literally had to blink back tears several times at work on Thursday. Contest entries were due on Friday and I didn't have a shot to submit for this lens. And remember: it's all five or none. We don't own these lenses, we borrowed them from the store. In my store, we're all Nikon shooters, so we were all vying for the same five lenses. This is - no doubt - a sweet and fun lens to shoot. Because of it's close focusing capabilities the possibilities with it are endless. I walked to the bank on Thursday morning and noticed these beautiful irises at McDonald's. I didn't immediately think to come back and shoot them. 3 hours later it finally occurred to be to grab a camera and go shoot it. I think this might be the definition of serendipity. I didn't go looking for a bee, I just figured the purple and orange would look cool - heck, I didn't even notice that the stamen was so fuzzy. I got really lucky with this one - this petal happened to have the best light on it and along came this bee. I'm crossing my fingers that this one gets recognized.

We'll see what happens with this. Frankly, I'm hoping that our store can get the store recognition prize. With a small store I'm hoping we get some props for 100% participation.

Day 4 AL*

2011-06-04T21:52:00.002-04:00

*AL= After LOAD

(blah blah blah, skip ahead if you know this already: LOAD is a layout challenge hosted by Lain Ehmann in which participants create a LayOut A Day for every day in a designated month. Since we're all busy, this is part challenge, part exercise in insanity. But the sense of accomplishment at the end of the month is amazing.)

So one would think that after creating 31 layouts in the month of May that I would have that particular bug worked out of my system and I wouldn't want to touch a photograph for months. Apparently there's something wrong with me. When I was young people would say "Oh, I'll bet you get so sick of McDonald's food, working there all the time." Uh, hello? No. Give me a plain double cheeseburger and watch me smile while I chew. Nope, it never happened. And while I find the need to move on to move onto other activities post-LOAD, I do so because I have to, not because I'm sick of scrapbooking.

Here is the abridged version of my weekend: Laundry. Baseball. (beer!) Baseball. Baseball. (pizza!) (scrapbook!) Baseball. Softball. Laundry. Items in parentheses represent treats along the way, as opposed to the obligatory nature of the other items. I don't know if you noticed, but that's A SHIT TON of baseball! And for someone who's not - by any means - a sports fan, that's a full on metric shit ton.

Today Ted had two games in a tournament. The first game was painful. We had lost by the end of the second inning. First, the other team was enormous - 75% of the team was bigger than Ted, and Ted is by far the biggest kid on our team. But they weren't just big, they were good. They hit well, they pitched well, and, on the rare occasion we made contact, they fielded well. Add to that: we just didn't play well. We were run-ruled in the 5th inning. I didn't even pick up my camera.

The kids took a break for lunch and I had a nice chat with the coach. Every time I go to one of Ted's games (which isn't often enough unfortunately) people tell me how great Ted is. Today it was the coach. He told me that the team unanimously voted for Ted for team captain. He said he loved having Ted on the team. And then he said "You did a really great job with him." Wow. Typically I don't run around taking credit for Ted. I am pleasantly surprised by him nearly every day. But I suppose that wasn't entirely an accident. Maybe his father and I have helped fine tune his already good character. At any rate, what an awesome compliment.

Game two was a better match up, so it seemed worth while to pick up my camera. Ted was pitching (38 throws with 31 strikes) for the first couple of innings, but my favorite shots came from an exchange on first base. Ted is not small. He's 5'8" and probably 160 pounds. He looks like he can hit. (He can) He doesn't look like he can sprint. So he was walked. Once there he was immediately taking the lead, looking to steal second. I don't know if they really thought that they'd get him out or if the goal was to wear him out because he was the pitcher. Considering the first inning was three up three down, it wasn't a bad strategy.

So here's how the exchange went:
Ted takes a couple big steps towards second.
Pitcher whips the ball to the first baseman.
Ted dives back to safety at first.
Ted gets up, first baseman throws the ball back to the pitcher.

Ted takes a couple big steps towards second.

Pitcher whips the ball to the first baseman.

Ted dives back to safety at first.

Ted gets up, first baseman throws the ball back to the pitcher.

Ted takes a couple big steps towards second.

Pitcher whips the ball to the first baseman.

Ted dives back to safety at first.

Ted gets up, first baseman throws the ball back to the pitcher.

Ted takes a couple big steps towards second.

Pitcher whips the ball to the first baseman.

Ted dives back to safety at first.

Ted gets up, first baseman throws the ball back to the pitcher.

No lie. FOUR times that pitcher forced Ted back to first. But the fifth time Ted made it, sliding into second. By the end of the exchange Ted was covered in dirt - face, arms, hands and both sides of his uniform.

I have about 20 pictures from the exchange, and I wish that I could use them all to tell the story, but there isn't space, so it gets boiled down to this:

LOAD fallout

2011-05-24T20:14:00.000-04:00

Seriously. The place is a mess.

I have nice jugs.

2011-04-30T15:32:00.004-04:00

I love a little double entendre.

A coupe of weeks ago I was out shopping for a cute, professional outfit to wear to do some teacher observation at the local high school. I was surprised at how expensive relatively shoddy apparel has gotten. To make matters worse, I've gained a fair amount of weight in the last two years. I could sit here and list a hundred excuses for why, but it all boils down to: I have been putting too much of the wrong kinds of foods (and drinks) into my mouth for far too long and it caught up to me in a big way.

This whole teaching thing... I feel like a torch has been lit under my butt - I haven't been this motivated to do something in a long time. And, while I'm focused on learning everything I need to that will make me a good teacher, I realize that my physical appearance affects me, my self-esteem, my confidence, my physical endurance, and last but not least, how others perceive me. Standing in front of a room full of high schoolers is going to be one of the bravest things I'll ever do. And I'm not going to lie - the idea of student teaching scares me half to death. I'm thinking Depends might be appropriate for that first week or so. (kidding)(I hope)

Do you see where I'm going here?

On the way home from shopping I had this moment of clarity concerning something I had been mulling around for a couple of months. With my current body, I would require a whole new wardrobe of teacher-appropriate clothing for student teaching and long term teaching position. OR, I could get serious about finally losing all this weight I've gained. I could feel better about myself, and avoid buying new clothes for a body I was really unhappy with. I'd been eying up NutriSystem, but the price: OY. And yes, it will cost me more than buying new clothes. And I'm not promising that I won't buy new clothes when this is done. At least I'll have the option. Right now, I don't.

So now I'm 2½ weeks into it. Just far enough into to assess whether it's long term doable. So far so good. I've always thought of NutriSystem as just eating their pre-packaged food, and there is prepackaged food, only supplemented with LOTS of fresh fruits, vegetables, protein and dairy. And did I mention the jugs? Holy cow: I start every day with filling the two jugs shown with filtered water (I ♥ my Brita water pitcher!) and end every day by making my 97th trip to the potty. It's about portion control, eating healthy foods and drinking more water than I previously thought possible. All good habits to make and keep. Here's hoping.

Winning the Mother LOAD

2011-03-11T15:12:00.005-05:00

In my last post I mentioned that I was doing Lain Ehmann's Layout A Day (to be referred as "LOAD" from here on out...that's how all the cool kids say it). I had this pie in the sky notion that as I completed layouts I'd post them over here, too. There's even a handy-dandy post-to-your-blog button on Flickr, but I quickly found out that it made little teeny tiny images over here, and what's the point of sharing a layout (or a photo, for that matter) if no one can appreciate its juicy goodness. So I did one day and then stopped. And really, I didn't have time to post here and there anyway.

But I thought I'd share share some of my favorites. I was really surprised at how much true-to-me scrapping I did this month. I thought that given my time crunches I'd be reduced to slapping a photo on some cardstock and throwing down some meaningless journaling and call it a day. I'm not saying that I didn't have my fair share of simple pages, or pages with meaningless journaling, but I also had a fair number of pages that I might have created on a day without the time constraints that LOAD provides.

Without further ado:

I'm nor gonna lie. This is a total, complete and nearly exact scraplift of Jen Gallacher's page, I'm not even going to take creative credit. But good Lord. Is that not the cutest thing EVER? The reason I did such an exact copy was, well...duh...because it's the cutest thing EVER, but also because I *thought* that by not having to make ANY decisions this would be quick. HA HA hahaha ha. Boy. Was I wrong. Granted, if I had come up with the entire concept it would have taken me four times as long, but as it was, it still took roughly 2 ½ hours. Not quick. But cute! Cutest thing ever, in fact. Did I mention??

The prompt for this one was to find a digital page that you liked and convert it to paper (if you're a paper scrapper), or a paper layout and convert it to digital if you're a digital scrapper. The inspiration layout was 12x12, a boy layout with browns and blues. I liked the flow of the page and the circular photo. I usually don't do super girly (contrary to what this post looks like so far), but I really like how it came out.

On the far opposite end of the spectrum... This was a super fast layout for me. It came together in roughly 45 minutes, start to finish. Usually it takes me that long to figure out what photo I'm going to use. Before load I *never* used stickers. No way, never gonna happen, don't care how boring you think my pages are: NO STICKERS! But I have to say...sometimes you just have to give in to what's easier. And I really like the school colors on this - usually I find that color scheme and theme...kind of...overwhelming? cheesy? uber juvenile? I don't know, but it's rare that I see a back to school layout that I like. By the way, the journaling on this is just about how back in the day we needed spiral notebooks and #2 pencils, and now kids need multiple boxes of Kleenex and jump drives. How things have changed.

Some one recently asked if I liked myself. My gut reaction was "No." First, I was raised in an extreme "Don't brag. No one likes a bragger!" household. But you know, I DO like myself. I'm not perfect, I've got my faults and things that I work on almost daily. But you know...I have some darn fine qualities, too. There's nothing wrong (Mom!) with recognizing that you're a decent person. I like so much about this layout. The way the arrow colors pop, the way the colors of the "good" qualities are happy and the colors of the "not good" arrows are a little more muted. I like the serendipity that the word "perfectly" ends right at the edge of the picture. I like the simplicity of the layout and the title. I need to add another arrow that says "damn fine scrapbooker!" :P

This one was done on the second to last day of the challenge. Each day Lain would send out a short but inspiration email with a prompt at the end. Some were wacky, some were challenging, some were fun, but they all worked... I read the prompt and my mind started stumbling over itself coming up with ideas for ways to creativity (and me-ly) follow the prompt. On this day she said she was giving us a freebie day. She said we deserved it. I have to say. I was a little devastated. I had made 26 layouts already and my creativity was running dry and I was hitting a VERY big wall. And my own personal cheerleader was doing his thing: "Are you done yet? Are you done yet?" Which really wasn't helping too much. :P I was dang near throwing in my towel. I didn't even have anymore recent photos to work with. Cue the old pics. These were taken in 2008 on a trip to Colorado with Kerig. I've had them printed for ages, but I don't really scrap that much and I just didn't know what to say about them. Somehow, on this day, I figured out what to say. There's still more from that trip, I hope to tackle them soon. Just in case you're interested in what the journaling says:

TODAY is the day that I found out that not only am I afraid of heights, but -SURPRISE- the higher the height the greater the anxiety.
Kerig’s mom took us to Rocky Mountain National Park, which boasts the highest paved road in the continental United States. No biggie, right? Only to get to this point, we drove for roughly an hour up an UNpaved road. I guess maybe I knew what a switchback was, but now I’m intimately aware of them. The road was only wide enough for one car – maybe a foot or so to spare on either side, but once you were on the path, you were going up. Oh. And there was no guardrail. And as a pretty diehard flatlander I wasn’t accustomed to the way the air changed. About half way up the anxiety was really kicking in, and I put my hoodie over my face so I couldn’t see how high up we were getting, but that made it harder to breathe. So I’d take it off, catch my breath a little…get scared again, go back under the hoodie…and then I started tearing up. At the top there was a park and when we got out I pretty much burst into tears. Poor Judy either thought I was nuts or horribly ungrateful. She was sooo nice about it though, and asked why I hadn’t told them I was so afraid of heights, to which I pretty much blubbered “I didn’t know it was this bad!” Eventually my knees stopped shaking and my heart stopped racing and I could take in the incredibleness of the scenery before me.
I am only familiar with east coast mountains. Kerig is fond of saying that east coast mountains aren’t real mountains, and I had always been a tad bit offended by this. But east coast mountains don’t have snow on them in August. AUGUST!! See that thermometer pointing at 98ºF? That was taken the same day an hour away. It’s crazy to me to think that snow can exist when it’s that hot at the base of the mountain.
I may be afraid of heights, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the wonder of what an entirely different world it is up there.

Nothing super spectacular design wise here, but I *really* liked doing this challenge, and I got a lot out of it. I think the journaling really sums up my feelings about what I gained from it:

No. It’s not going to rhyme. I haven’t the desire nor the ability. But I will reflect glowingly. This has been quite a journey. To be honest, I don’t think I really had any intentions of actually doing 28 pages. I figured I’d see how long I could go before I felt I had to stop. I knew school would be an issue. But I have always felt that the more I had on my plate, the better I become at managing both my time and my priorities. One of the amazing things that came from this craziness is the idea of balance. When it comes to school I can drag out assignments, obsess about things. I aim for perfection and beat myself up for putting in too much time. I’ve found that LOAD has given me a reason to motor through assignments – not do them half-ass, but not to waste precious time second guessing every decision, every word, every answer. I’ve found that LOAD has rekindled my love of scrapbooking. It’s always there, but I’ve viewed as a treat – the reward for having everything else done. An indulgence. But does it have to be? If it’s this cathartic, should I really relegate it to a couple of hours every other month? And LOAD hasn’t made me a fast scrapper, but it’s made it easier to avoid becoming mired down in indecision. Sleeping on a button’s placement is a luxury that one doesn’t have during LOAD. So here I am. 28 days, 28 pages richer. Memories, stories, pictures, love, every day moments as well as a-ha moments recorded.

Yay me.

I really can't say enough about the LOAD challenge. It's competitive like golf: not me against anyone else, but me wanting to be the best, me-est me I can be. (And by me-est: I mean true to my design aesthetic, writing style, etc...not merely trying to be someone else...although clearly, scraplifting is a-ok on occasion). If you're a scrappy friend, I'd highly encourage you to check it out at LayoutADay.com. It costs $30, but we are allowed to share our alum discount, so if you're interested in signing up and would rather pay $25...let me know. ;) The next LOAD challenge is in May...and yes, I am insane enough that I've signed up again.

The $25 primary gets you daily prompts, but it also gives you a place to upload your pages, the community is SUPER nice, comments and compliments abound. There are periodic prizes involved and at the end...there's a GRAND PRIZE. I'll let you know how juicy that grand prize is....cause...guess what? I WON! It was strictly drawn at random of all the people who completed the challenge, but still! Box'o'goodies is a BOX'O'GOODIES...and I'm super excited about it!

And if you want to check out the duds that didn't make it to this post... :P Check out my LOAD 211 Flickr gallery here.

Memories

2011-02-01T18:24:00.003-05:00

Doing Lain Ehman's Layout-A-Day during the month of February. I'm a little skeptical that I can actually do 28 layouts in 28 days, but for day one: so far so good. I don't know that I'll actually bother putting them all here...some might be rather rushed, some might be kind of boring, and some might be rather amateurish. Because I will be spending some weekends away from my scrap-goodies, I've decided to dabble in digital for those days that I'm not home. I'm not claiming to be a good digital scrapbooker, but I'll probably learn a couple of things along the way, and that would be really cool!

On a roll.

2011-01-04T20:36:00.001-05:00

Seriously. I haven't done 3 layouts in a week since...well, a REALLY long time. And I guarantee there was some sort of deadline involved and I ended up hating them. So three, no deadline and liking them seems like crazy talk.

The journalling reads:

Year End 16 Review:
1. Major Art Award @ Lakeland
2. Enrolled in Driver's Ed
3. Inducted into the National Honor Society
4. Passed Driver's Test on the first try. (Yay, Maggie!)
5. Landed 1st boyfriend
6. Gold Medalist in the Molympics
(who could forget the Molympics!)
7. Attended Portfolio Show at MICA
8. Landed first job at the big BK

I'm not gonna blather on about it. I like it. So does Maggie. And that's all that really matters.

(Look at me, getting all Zen in my old age...)

I will say this. I'm getting increasingly frustrated at trying to digitize layouts for sharing. The sheer lack of light is making it difficult to get a good photo. I got so frustrated today that I scanned this in four parts and stitched it together. That's so old skool. And the results seem just as cruddy. If anyone has some great suggestions that don't involve dragging out my studio lights, I'm all ears...

Mini Vacation

2011-01-02T14:45:00.001-05:00

Fresh from the craziness of the Christmas season and a huge project and a final, I am perfectly content - verging on deliriously happy - to have four days off in a row and spend them in pajama pants and a fleece hoodie. Especially since the first two were spent in my scrap room channeling Nichol Magouirk.

If you don't know Nichol, take a minute to follow the link. I think she's a goddess, and she's easily the one scrapper I'd like to be when I grow up. She has a way with patterned paper that is somehow both whimsical and delightful AND clean and uncluttered. Plus, she has the innate ability to just pile on all sorts of doo dads, and they look completely effortless. Every staple, every mini paperclip - they all look like they're exactly where they're supposed to be. There's nothing forced or "trying too hard" in her layouts.

Nicole first hit my radar as a Silhouette design team contributor. Since I'm all Silhouette, all the time (or so it seems, even to me) I quickly started to realize that she has a way of putting unrelated things together in a way that just plain works. She takes shapes that someone else designed and uses them in a way that you're just sure the original designer must have intended for them. One of the things that I love most about the Silhouette is how easy it is to customize shapes, and Nichol does that...only at the next level up from everyone else, mixing and matching titles and shapes and using all sorts of patterned papers resulting in pages that are pure eye candy.

I know there are avid scrapbookers out there who are very organized about saving layouts that inspire them. I have not been one of those women. First, I have it ingrained in me from God knows where that "copying" is cheating. Really? Where are the scrapping Refs? Do they wearing polka dots and Pima flowers? Are their whistles covered in bling?? It's silly. I know. And oddly, I don't think less of someone else who scraplifts - heck, I even admire them for their ability to let go and not get mired down in not reinventing the wheel. Anyway, as someone who's always felt it was taboo to borrow too heavily from one source at a time, I've never felt the need to have an inspiration folder on my desktop. But then, as magazines go belly up, and then fill their pages with designs that really don't make me excited, I find myself turning to web more and more for inspiration. And finally it occurred to me. Right click/New folder/"Nichol Magouirk". Right click/Save picture as...and voila: a year and a half's worth of very inspiring layouts, all in one place, with no interruption.

So that's the first one. Clearly, Nicole has nothing to worry about, but I'm pleased, to say the least. I love the fun title, the collage of pictures (I've done this before, but this time it's all about channeling Nichol), the fun number border (and how it relates to my typical December, which is about counting down, money, time, balancing gifts for 4 kids...numbers swirl in my head all month long), I even like the way I handled a mess up. I made the white border just a smidge too short. I was tempted to recut it, but decided that putting it down and covering the one end with a cluster of embellishments would work just fine. You can still see that the white border doesn't go across all the way, but now I say "Who cares? Looks great!" I am NOT one to embrace that kind of imperfection, so this feels like quite the accomplishment!

I can't tell you how much these photos have troubled me. I've really wanted to get Ted's football recorded, but look at those uniforms!! All that hideous red! Don't get me wrong. I like red. It's one of my favorites. But that red...it GLOWS. Pre-Nicole, I would have tackled the red challenge but using grey and black cardstock with red pieces thrown in here and there...but not too close to the photos. It would have been boring, and a little non-sequitur. After all, the only grey in the photos is the stands in the background, and the only black is Ted's UnderAmour. Not exactly the kind of stuff that dictates a color scheme, right? After Nichole, I went to my patterned paper box first. Granted, I got REALLY lucky, but still...I wouldn't have even looked before. I love the Game Day title, it's rugged looking...not cartoony or juvenille. I used black ink and a stippling brush to dirty it down. It was just to perfect looking at first, but the black ink grunged it up and made it gritty enough for the page. I used that same technique on the football lace border, and on the journalling block. Both were far too pretty and pristine to start with.

I'm really pleased with how both of these came out. And more than that, I'm pleased with how quickly they came together and that I finally feel more comfortable using the patterned paper I've been amassing for YEARS. I also like that by thinking about what it is that appeals to me about Nicol's style allowed me to break it down to very concrete ideas that were easy to incorporate. I'm a decent scrapper in my own rite. I won't deny that. But it doesn't hurt to be truly inspired. Or to get out the ruts I find myself in occasionally.

I :heart: easy

2010-12-12T14:41:00.001-05:00

My son has a friend who practically lives at our house. And he's just a really nice kid. For a while I wrestled with the notion of him being a bit Eddie Haskell-ish, but after a while it just sunk in that he's one of those rare, honestly nice, kind people. Because Ian (my son) can be sarcastic and has been prone to pushing the limits, I am very grateful for Jared's good influence.

Last night my other son Ted came to me and asked he he could borrow one of my "tall" candles. After some confusion and a "What the hey ho are you talking about?!", it finally occurred to me that he wanted one of the super tall birthday candles that I had gotten at Crate and Barrel a couple of years ago. When I asked him why, he said it was Jared's birthday and they were going to put it in a Little Debbie strawberry shortcake roll and sing happy birthday to him. One of the things that I like about Jared is that he has an infinite amount of patience for Ian's younger brother and sisters. And they all adore him as well.

I decided to make Jared a card, and at the risk of looking like a really creepy old lady, when I came across this one in my Silhouette library I thought it pretty much said it all. This was thrown together in about 15 minutes flat, which absolutely never happens, so it is, indeed, simple. But I glue dotted a $10 Taco Bell gift card to the inside and signed it "Ian's Mom" and I was happy to have been able to do something for him...

Let Go.

2010-12-05T17:27:00.001-05:00

From Reverb10

What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why?(Author: Alice Bradley)

This has been a year with so many changes. It's funny, looking back, at the things that were easy to let go of, the things that I clung to until the bitter end, the things I subbed in for those that were going, at the grumbling that occurred at times, and the silent gratitude that happened as a result.

I let go of my apartment, and the idea of living quietly and alone. That was hard. I love my kids and I truly welcome this chance to live with them again. But I never had a chance to be truly autonomous until my divorce. After 15 years of putting myself at dead last, it was nice to have a chance to be concerned with just me. I know that sounds so selfish, and I can't even begin to justify it. But it's the truth. And now I am loving coming home to a full house and talking to my kids every day and helping them and being part of their lives. They're wonderful people and this won't last forever, so I will be present and grateful for being able to finally let go and really enjoy this.

I have let go of feeling powerless to control my direction. Since my divorce, money has been a HUGE issue and driving force in every aspect of my life. This whole goofy circumstance has freed me from paying rent, utilities, and internet access. That's no small amount of money. That, in turn, allowed me to go to a four day work week. I'm still full time, but I do make less than I would if I were there 5 days a week. The four day work week empowered me to the think that I do, in fact, have PLENTY of time for school. Ha. I don't know if I have "PLENTY" of time - there are lots of times when I feel overwhelmed and stressed, but for the most part, I've got enough time to get it done, and get it done to my standards. For the first time since I left I have this peaceful "I'm gonna be okay" feeling. I have direction, a goal, really attainable dreams, a concrete road map... It really would have been difficult to juggle work and my school when I was at my previous job. But I think that it was easier to say "I can't", than "I don't want to work that hard." I'm glad that things have changed to where I'm working hard, but it feels manageable.

There are other things/people that I need to let go of. But it's not easy, right? It's a process. And frankly, it happens organically, and even though know I need to let go of something doesn't mean I can just make it happen. Would that it were so.

Wonder

2010-12-04T01:27:00.002-05:00

So, because I'm a sheep, and what sheep do best is follow, I decided to follow Ali Edwards' lead again and try this whole weird Reverb10 thing. I like the way I call it a thing...that's totally somebody's mother being all judge-y there, right?

I hope, over the next couple of days, to catch up on the three days I missed, but for now, I'm going to start on the 4th prompt:

December 4 – Wonder. How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year? (Author: Jeffrey Davis)

Hmmm.

I think I cultivated a sense of wonder by signing up for the TEEL program at Notre Dame College. Since I've been working towards my teacher licensure I haven't stopped wondering... Long parts of my days are spent wondering:

Am I doing the right thing?
Was this a wise investment?
Will I be a good teacher?
Will I actually get a job when this is all said and done?
Am I actually smart enough for this?
What the hell are Grade Level Indicators?
SPA standards?? Huh?!
How much money will I make? Will it be enough to support me?
How long will this take?
Will I be able to get a job in a district I want to work in?
Am I doing this assignment right??
WHY do we have to upload stuff to Tk20?

And on, and on, and on...

Anyone that knows me will tell you I'm a worrier. But it's not just worrying. It's wondering, daydreaming, hoping... wishing. I am so very excited about the changes I'm making for myself. I am so grateful for the goofy circumstances I'm in that have afforded me this opportunity. I'm so happy that the people affected by this are willing to stand by me and support me. I'm eternally indebted to the people who have made concessions to my schedule, who have listened to me whine, who have given my children rides to sports practices... I am fully aware that I'm not doing this alone, and I have not stopped wondering how this "chance" happened into my lap all these years after I thought that "chance" was gone.

There are lots of ways to wonder, and I realize mine may not be the most romantic, or touching, but to me it is the happiest bunch of questions that I could be asking myself right now.

October Joy Mini Album

2010-11-04T15:57:00.002-04:00

blah blah blah, insert paragraph about absentee blogger here...

One of the things I'm coming to realize about my picture taking habits is: I LIKE OCTOBER. I mean, REALLY like it. There's something about putting on a sweatshirt and dragging the kids out, the crisp air, the excuse for hot chocolate afterwards. Everywhere you look the world is putting on a show. The perfect background for portraits is all around. Who doesn't glow when shot against those beautiful yellows, oranges and reds?

This day was supposed to be about hunting for pine cones. Why? Because this summer I bought big bottles of brown and copper glitter on deep discount, with the pie-in-the-sky thought that we'd find some cool pine cones, paint some glue on them, sprinkle them with glitter and voila, we'd have a cheap and easy craft and cheap and easy fall decorations.

Ha.

I'm certain that there are plenty of pine cones laying around just waiting to be picked up for glittering, but very few existed at Squire's Castle on this particular Tuesday. But that's quite alright - I'll take the pictures I got on this particular Tuesday over pine cones any day. Besides.... You can buy pine cones from etsy.com - really cool pictures of my kids leaping out of a castle window are much harder to come by.

I'm sure it goes without saying that the shapes are all cut from my Silhouette. The album was purchased from TwoPeas last year, it's by Maya Road, and I'm fairly certain that this particular book is long gone. Shame, really. Turns out I love the visual cacophony that it creates.

Journaling reads:

Eleven months of the year, the answer to the question "What's your favorite month?" is, without hesitation, "June!" After all, it is a month of birthday cake, long days, trips to the pool, flowering Bradford pears, and sleeping with the windows open. That's the total package, if you ask me.

But then, October shows up and it, too, has birthday cake (thanks, Ted!), and it often offers the opportunity to sleep with the windows open. Add in ghost stories and changing leaves, and suddenly I realize that it's wrong of me to hate a month just because it got assigned a space on the calendar too close to December for my liking.

So for one month of the year, October is my favorite month.

For one month of the year, I drive to work with a smile plastered on my face because the world is so crazy beautiful.

And if I play my cards right I get an afternoon with the kids to enjoy it.

Just a point of note, the page on the right is acrylic. I like the way it allows what's behind it to show through, but I have to admit, sometimes it's intimidating to work with. The control freak in me has to really let go.

Left page Journaling:

It was a lovely day, and I had my camera. The children were clean... It was a good day for a portrait.

Right page Journaling:

I like that they just know how to pose in a way that captures their individual personalities.

Two points of note:
I really dig the picture of Maggie. Need to remember this for senior portrait time.
I really dig the leaves scattered under the tree on the right page. I think I'm so clever because I folded the leaves in half and ran them through the Xyron so only half would be covered by adhesive, and therefore they're a little more three dimensional. They're also falling off, so so much for my creative genius. :P

See? 3D GENIUS!

I want credit for including that picture of me with the kids. I practice what I preach, as PAINFUL as that may be.

Journaling reads:

They set themselves up this way, they knew I'd fall for it and shoot it.

But what's not to love? The serenity, tranquility, the beautiful colors, the scale of the trees... Beautiful.

The journaling for the three pages simply reads:

Molly is a timid jumper.

Ted is a fearless jumper.

Maggie is a showy jumper.

I'm not crazy about the extraneous journaling. But then, I also don't care. As Maggie said when she was looking through the finished book last night "It doesn't need to talk about how much fun we had. The pictures show that we had a blast." Fair enough.

And now, back to my regular absenteeism. At least until after Christmas. I've got a pretty big assignment due at school soon, and then right into the dreaded holidays. One of the many things that drive me to getting this school thing done and getting certified to teach is finally being able to relax during the holidays - or, if not "relax", at least be able to enjoy them to some degree...

Thanks for looking. :)

Five

2010-08-19T23:44:00.005-04:00

Holy cow. I just glanced over at the calendar and realized that I have only 5 more days until my next semester starts. I have so been enjoying the last two weeks of slacking that it's going to take a little effort to get psyched up again for buckling down and being all school-y. Of course, I could mention that last semester was barely over before I was out buying new sprial notebooks, #2 pencils (which I don't need) and a CUTE Harajuku Lovers pencil case from Target to keep them in. Always thinkin'... Now, if I could only remember exactly what courses I'm signed up for. Seriously, can't remember and I can't find any confirmation emails or anything. Am I panicked? No, but I guess I have some work ahead of me.

So, in honor of my FIVE days of remaining freedom, things that I've been obsessing about:

ONE:

Hyperbole: I haven't wanted anything this badly since my 4th grade birthday when I was getting a new bike.
Reality: I haven't wanted anything this badly since my last camera purchase. And this is reallyreallyreally close.

Too bad they're sold out EVERYWHERE. Did you even watch that video? So cool!

TWO:

I am not certain what it is about this that so has my attention. His prison tattoos? Her Hellen Keller bang job? The total lack of underwear? The fact that DJ Hi Tech rocks it on a PC computah? Or maybe that this guy, who reminds me so much of Vanilla Ice, thinks he's "gangsta". I'm willing to wager that South Africaan gansters are quite a bit different than those we think of in Jersey and LA. The lyrics are foul at best, but there's something infectious about it. I think I've watched this ten times in the last week.

THREE:

Just picked up the Jeremy Fisher CD from the library the other day. Some really good folksy/acoustic stuff, but I keep playing this track over and over. I can't sing to save my life, but I've been having great fun hollering along with the chorus.

FOUR:

Actually, THE ENTIRE "WHIP IT" SOUNDTRACK ROCKS. The movie was incredible, a coming of age movie with so many layers, not the least of which is the mother-daughter relationship... If I were a movie-buying kind of person, I'd plunk down money for it, but I'm not so I'll just settle for putting it on my library queue over and over and over again. And in the meantime, my commutes are a less stressful as I rock out and try not to look stupid to other drivers. Try. Mostly unsuccessfully.

FIVE:

I can't believe I'm even admitting to this one. But when I was taking my classes this summer, I "hated" my one class so much that watching this show was the carrot that I had to dangle in order to get my homework done. "Just finish the stupid (&#$@&!!) assignment by 10 and you can watch RHNJ!" That's what the cool people call it....the cool, procrastinating, perfectionist, chip-on-their-shoulders people. You know them. They go by Caroline. And talk about themselves in the third person. And plural. Sheesh. Anyway, season finale's on this Monday, so I better find another carrot...

This is by no means a complete list. A complete list would include Bella Blvd, Silhouette, The Next Food Network Star, Rolling Rock, Keen sneakers, magic bananas, tattoos, money, and my bed. But in the interest of "celebrating" (she says while making sarcastic air quotes and rolling her eyes) we'll keep the list to just five.

Here's to five more days without homework.

Molly's Birthday

2010-08-13T13:45:00.002-04:00

Molly's birthday is July 15th. I think we always have the most fun on her birthday. Everyone is out of school and it ends up being a whole day celebration for her, instead of just an evening thing. This year we celebrated by going out to lunch at Steak'n'Shake (because she wanted chicken fingers), went to the Southpark Mall in Strongsville where we played Firefly Golf, saw a movie and then headed to Legacy Village to have dinner at California Pizza Kitchen.

Sadly, the layout only showcases pictures from lunch at Steak'n'Shake. I can't quite figure out how to incorporate the rest of the day in a cohesive manner...so that stuff is just going on a separate page. At least theoretically. At this pace those pictures may never see cardstock.

The die cuts are all Silhouette. The striped paper is Fancy Pants, the blue and yellow paper is Heidi Swapp - I love those papers, I've used them again and again and again. The little tag-y thing is Creative Imaginations - just snagged at 50% off at 2Peas. There's a Basic Gray covered brad, and the rub-ons are BG and Doodlebug.

I have to say...not loving this. I don't know exactly why. Is it because I really prefer single photo layouts? Is it because the green mat ended up cut wonky and I had to place the tag on it to make it less obvious? Is it the total discordance of papers? Is it the overall flow? I don't know... But not every page is going to be a winner right? So we'll just accept that this is a B layout and not an A layout. We'll live.

Boy's Birthdays

2010-08-08T00:54:00.003-04:00

Ted springs on me that he's going to a birthday party on Sunday. Not "Hey mom, I got invited to a party. Can I go?" but rather "I'm going to a party on Sunday afternoon." He cleared with his dad and arranged his own ride, so it's not like I'm upset, but as The Mom, I spiral into what-to-buy-yet-another-12-year-old-who-has-everything mode. I ask Ted for input, and he says "I don't know...they have everything...how about a gift card to WalMart?" Um. How about not. I don't mean to sound snotty, but working in a small shop whose biggest competor is (sadly) WalMart and knowing that WalMart's stated business objective is to undercut the local business....like I said....Um. No.

Now, because Target has had the good sense to keep their animosity of local small businesses to themselves, I'm all for a Target gift card. So off I go to pick one up. But of course, I enter the store...and get SUCKED into the dollar spot. And worse, into the $2.50 spot. :P Black handled bucket? For $2.50? I'll take it!! I'll fill it with Twinkies! I'll put a skull sticker on it! I'll be the most hated mother on Bama (this kid plays on Ted's football team)! Ok. Pause. Rethink. But I'm still taking the bucket!

Aside: what is it about scrapbookers that make us so stubborn about just putting a gift card in a greeting card and handing it over? I feel like everytime I give a gift card I'm challenged to engineer some presentation device...

Today is no different.

In an attempt to not bring on the hate from Tyler's mother, the bucket is filled with Rice Krispie Treats (c'mon! At least they're better than Twinkies!), Trident Gum, Target fruit snacks and a bag of Goldfish snacks. When I got home I asked Ted if he was okay with my doing the monster and even let him pick which monster. And I asked him "Are you sure this is ok?" about 6 times, and he enthusiastically said "I'd love to get this! I'd take it downstairs and play video games with it all day." Um. Yeah. Feeling the hate. (In my defense, at least it doesn't make noise or come apart to 200 tiny pieces that hurt when stepped on)

And then there's the gift card holder. Cute, no? I love the skinny monster, and I'm glad I finally had an excuse to use the talk bubble....kinda cute. The googly eyes? Yeah. I dig 'em.

And I want to take a minute to talk about flash.

Poor, maligned flash. Everyone hates him. Especially everyone in the scrapbook world. Heavy hitters like Karen Russell, Erin Terrell Clarkson, Maggie Holmes, Erin Cobb, Tara Whitney...etc, etc, etc... they ALL say FLASH IS BAD. Most even go so far as to say they don't even own a flash. Seriously?

And I am NOT saying that I am a better photographer or know more than the aforementioned heavy hitters. They're ALL amazing shooters, and I wish I had half the talent any one of them has.

But I just want to stick up for the poor, maligned flash. He's not all bad. He's just misunderstood. You can't just use the one on your camera and expect it to do a good job. Because aside from using it outside on a sunny day to fill in shadows, the on-camera flash just can't do a great job. Why is it even there then? Well, near as I can tell, it ads enough light to boost shutter speeds in order to avoid blurry shots. Hopefully we can all agree that blurry shots are decidedly worse than shots with flash. And really, if you're shooting with a point and shoot camera, your only option is flash on or flash off. (Mostly...there are a couple of excpetions, but I'm not going there right now)

But if you're using an SLR you have another option. A dedicated flash that slides into your hot shoe solves a myriad of problems: No red eye. No harsh shadows. No blurry pictures. No whacked out color shifts. The joy of the dedicated flash is that 9 times out of 10, the flash head can be aimed at the ceiling, and in so doing, the light bounces off the large white plane of the ceiling where it gets diffused, and rains back down on the subject. It wraps around the subject - so the harsh shadows are eliminated. The light is softer, which is really pleasing. You can still set your camera to a very low f-stop so if you want a shallow depth of feild, you don't have give that up. And it's not like you have be some tech-no whiz. You put it on, aim it at the ceiling and fire. The camera pretty much takes care of the rest. Yeah, if you turn the camera sideways to get a portrait shot, you do have to have a flash that both swivels and bounces, but most flashes do that anyway. (Let's say 7 out of 10 flashes can both swivel and bounce) As an added point, bouncing the flash keeps you from having that harsh shadow that just plain yucky, but it also prevents the flash glare that happens on shiney, reflective surfaces. For instance, shooting the metal bucket with the flash aimed right at it would have giant white spot, totally devoid of detail. Not. Good. Bring on the bounce.

At any rate, the shots above were taken at 10 o'clock at night. No way could I have taken those without flash. Even if I had boosted my ISO to 3200 and turned on the room lights, it still would have been iffy. And I'd have to have made a custom white balance reading - there's no way that the three light sources in my kitchen would have come across cleanly in any of the pre-set white balance settings. The joy of flash is that the camera knows EXACTLY what the flash is doing, and knows exactly how to deal with the white balance when you're using it (unless, you, the user, set the white balance to something funky - but under Auto or Flash, the light will be pure and whites will be white).

Blah blah blah. Too much lecturing. Maybe I should do some before and after/good and bad shots to really illustrate why flash is so damn functional. Next time the heavy hitter's voices ring in your head that FLASH IS BAD, say gently back NO. HE'S JUST MISUNDERSTOOD.

And that's what I'm working on. I may finish sometime this month...

(also taken with flash. :) Just sayin...)

2010-06-25T12:29:00.006-04:00

It's going to happen less and less frequently, but last night I actually kicked out a scrapbook page. And no one could be more surprised about than I am. And more surprising than the fact that I did a page is that the entire process took me less than 2 hours. We're talking, 2 hours from pulling the pictures out to cleaning up the desk afterwards. That's a record for me, and the fact that I like the page is even more surprising.

I think that it helped that I knew that I wanted the layout to fun. Yes, it's a layout about the kid getting bit by the dog, but it's also about how goofy she is, that despite the fact that she was actually DRIPPING BLOOD from those cuts, she wasn't sure if this was an emergency. So yeah, still not "fun", but I certainly didn't want to steer it in the direction of being morbid. Plus, the focal point photo is her mugging... I should probably come up with a way to put her big smiling picture on there, too. Hmmmm.

The biggest problem I had was using that green polka dot paper. That's from Scenic Route, and ever since they went out of business I've been using that paper ever so carefully... Like the way a person would take hits of water out of a canteen when they're stranded in the desert. I know that once that paper is gone it's GONE and that makes me a little sad and a little panicky. Yes, I like it THAT MUCH.

The title font is called "Gentle Redhead". It reminds me of the colored acrylic letters that ki came out with a while back. I definitely think it's fun! The yellow paper is Little Yellow Bicycle, the backside of one of the Zinnia line papers, and the black patterned paper is sei. The covered brads are Basic Grey. I'm pretty pleased with myself that nothing here was "meant" to with anything else - I didn't take three different papers from the same line, a la Garanimals style. (Did you know they still made Garanimals?? Holy Cow!) Anyway, I don't always have the greatest amount of confidence with mixing and matching papers.

And this is just too cute not to share. I made a thank you card for the coworker that filled in for me when I had to run out to Maggie to the urgent care. This isn't actually the card, but after making that card I got coerced into making a Father's Day card for Kerig's dad. I absolutely love this little superhero boy, and the "D" on the shield just makes me happy - those yellow/oranges with that red is so happy...

I probably won't have 10 minutes to be creative again until this semester is over, so I'm just going to soak up the much needed, all-about-me therapy that I got from whipping out that page last night...

The Percolated Story

2010-05-30T16:27:00.003-04:00

Every week I spend 90 or so minutes listening to a scrapbooking podcast called "Paperclipping Round Table". This week's show "The Sum of Our Stories", got me thinking about my story telling and my process, and how intertwined the two concepts are.

When I was relatively new to scrapbooking, but after I had identified the basis for "my style", I scrapbooked at the dining room table. I quickly came to realize that what worked best for me was to lay out my photos on the table early in the day. As the day would wear on, I'd visit them and fuss at them a little. First I'd chose a background cardstock...and then go put that load of laundry in. Next trip through I'd pick out some accent colors for use in the title and mats. Later on I might pull a punch that would help carry the theme, or rearrange the photos to play with the flow of the layout. Meanwhile, the time spent away from the layout was spent thinking about the perfect title, and what I wanted the journaling to say. By the time the kids were in bed I had the ingredients and mostly all I had to do was assemble.

And that, my friends, is a gross over simplification of the process. Because nothing is really that easy, but it is the basics of how things went, and it did make completing the page more efficient.

Fast forward to present day. I no longer have three very young children, two dogs, a cat, and a husband earning an MBA who wasn't around much and left me with almost all the chores. Now I'm divorced, have four big kids, 3 of whom don't need a mother as much as a taxi service, a dog and a full time job. Gone is the luxury or starting a page while the kids ate their cereal and finishing after they go to bed. Now it's more like starting something one day, futzing with it for a week (in snatches of time like the old system) and finally completing it a week later. This doesn't bother me. It's jut life. It's either this process or nothing. And, nothing really isn't an option.

Back to the Paperclipping Round Table and the concept of telling stories. I have come to be very grateful for how long it takes me to complete a page, or at least for what that span of time from beginning to end affords me. I have found that by pulling out the pictures and laying them out and then having a couple of day's worth of commutes to think about them, I end up with a story very different than the one I would have told had I just launched in as soon as I pulled the pictures out.

For instance:

These pictures are from a trip to park that Molly likes. We've only been twice. After our first trip Molly asked to go back there almost every month, but our time is special and I try to have new adventures when we're together. So this second trip was pretty special, because it took over a year to get back there. If I had had the luxury of time, these pictures would have been used on one layout and the journaling would have been brief and it would have centered on the trip to the park. But because of my process, and the fact that I had lots of time to think about these photos and let my mind wander and think more abstractly about the story that I could tell, I had time for new ideas to percolate to the surface.

What would have been a layout about a trip to the park turned into a layout about Molly's courage and another layout about Maggie's amazing attitude about life.

Journaling reads:

Hey chickadee! Weigh the outcome. How bad can it be? A skinned knee? A bruised ego? But what if things go according to plan? What if you don't fall? You'll have fun. You'll get that "I did it!" feeling. You'll approach the next scary thing with a little more confidence. Believe me. I know how this drill works. I know how discouraging failure can be, and how thrilling success can be. But more than anything, I know how haunting not trying can be...how - for days - you'll think back and say "I should have..." or "Next time..."

Go ahead and Jump

We stood and waited for you to muster the courage to jump off of this tire onto the rope for what felt like a half hour. Ted, Maggie and I all offered you encouraging words. Ted and Maggie tried to show you how easy it was and gave you helpful hints. I know what you were going through, agonizing over all the possible bad outcomes and wanting, more than anything, to have enough courage to do it - to experience the thrill of floating through the air. For long minutes the fear outweighed the rush, but finally a burst of courage came and you do it! I was so proud that you found it in you to just do it! This is the very definition of courage: being afraid and overcoming it. You are courageous.

Journaling reads:

I had this physics teacher in high school. He didn't like me very much and I didn't always understand the way he taught. But there is one thing that I have carried from him, one of those life lessons that spoke so directly to me that I have never been able to shake it: "You have to go along to get along". I find myself struggling against this notion, always resisting the urge to speak my mind, play the devil's advocate...and yet I still know the value of those words. Maggie, on the other hand, seems to embody the very notion of going along and getting along...and does so without appearing to compromise her core beliefs. This day, for example, was all about placating Molly, who had been asking to go to the wooden park for a solid year. The playground is most definitely geared toward younger kids, it's not really the place that most (almost) 15 year olds would get excited to visit. but Maggie didn't pout or act put out, she hopped on a swing; raced her brother down the side (although, she did cheat!); offered Molly encouragement on the rope swing... all with a genuine smile on her face. I often think that Maggie was given to me as a gift, as a lesson...as an example. (oct 18)

Sometimes I wish that I had more time to scrapbook. But then when I think about how differently these pictures would have been treated if I hadn't had time to let those stories develop. I really love the fact that I have two pages that offer positive reinforcement and recognition of my daughters' good qualities. I don't need to record the fact that we went to the park - they'll remember our tips on their own. What I value here is that I had the chance to say something nice to and about my girls and I took it. When I'm gone I want them to know how much I loved and valued them as people. And if that means it takes a week to finish a page, then so be it.

Post #18 w00t!

2010-05-12T23:14:00.007-04:00

I mean, that's, like, a burning 2.57 posts a MONTH! Whew! No wonder I'm so exhausted!! :P

But it's Circle Journal time again! I loooooove this project. Every month (or so) I get all nervous and anxious about creating a new layout, and every month (or so) I get finished and think "That was fun!!" I would definitely do this again, and would recommend that anyone even remotely interested do it. So much fun!

This month's book is called "It's the little things that make life big" and it's all about the everyday things that we appreciate and make life more of a celebration than a chore. It was fun to think about the things that I just love, but a little harder to boil it down to things that I love *everyday*. And I don't necessarily think that Kathy meant it that way - not strictly everyday - more like ordinary, free/low cost things that occur that you take pleasure in. I guess I added the "everyday" twist. Oops. But still, fun to think about that which brings me joy daily...

So. Uh. Yeah. I used Glimmer Mist on the left page. Lovely. Except that it warped the chipboard! :( I feel like spilled tomato juice on my neighbor's carpet. I really did try to be careful. I even painted it on because I was worried about over-saturating it and ...warping it. I blame the Glimmer Mist!
The other big challenge was the acrylic page. I wonder if people before me went "I'm not dealing with that!" and just rearranged it further back in the book? If they did, I commend their resourcefulness! :P I hope that Bethany (next up in the book) doesn't hate me too much for this orange-y/yellow color that isn't exactly neutral.

Oh, and I have to point this out:

Look familiar? Seriously, why re-invent the wheel. I used this exact same arrangement for my "Play" layout not too long ago, only I used those weird waxy balls in the center. Thanks to a 40% off Michael's coupon, I now have a multi pack of these cute little micro beads. So out with the weird waxy balls and in with the cute little micro beads! And will Kathy know that I totally ripped off my own layout? Only if she reads this blog, which I'm thinking: NOT SO MUCH. Score one for the lazy scrapbooker!

Week in the Life Project

2010-04-22T22:13:00.005-04:00

These are all from Wednesday. Hopefully I'll be able to organize and share some from the rest of the week, too.
Just before pulling into the store's parking lot. Should I be taking pictures while driving down Mayfield Road? Probably not.

Having some cream cheese on saltines while doing some photo editing between customers. Someone needs a damn manicure!

The view from my "spot". This is our classroom, you can see the LCD projector we use for PowerPoint presentations. I taught our Digital 101 class at the end of this day.

We currently have well over 30 tripods, probably close to 40 if you count monopods. It's becoming a bit of a running joke, so I had to get a shot.

Things are pretty casual at Dodd. I'm grateful that comfortable shoes are okay! Out the window you can see my Jalopy and beyond that is City Hall. The fire department is in the same complex, so we get a front row view of the trucks quite frequently.

My coworker Ken. He may be one of the loudest people I know, but he's a really good guy and fun to work with. God, I hope he doesn't see this... ;)

The Thomas the Train Engine table doesn't get a ton of action, since our clientele seems to be mostly older, but it's a great thing to have when we do have kids.

After teaching the class, which went really well, I stopped at the Speedway to get a beer. I probably make this stop twice a week, so it was a must get shot.

I got home just after 9:00. The little kids go to bed at 9 and read until 9:30, at which point it's lights out. This is Ted...

....and this is Ted's homework notice that I had to sign informing me that he forgot a homework assignment that day. Ooops!

This is Reba helping me make the rounds. As soon as I went into the girls room she assumed this position.

And this is Molly doing her bedtime reading. It was a joke book. She shared that she didn't get all the jokes. Like: "What happened when the garbage man went back to school? He got thrown out." Ba-dum-dumb!

Maggie doing her history homework in her dad's room. Molly put our old paintings up all over his wall. I love these paintings. But not enough to sleep with them!

Once I said good night to everyone I headed back downstairs for that beer. Reba had already made herself comfortable in one of her two favorite spots. Frankly, i think the fabric of this loveseat suits her perfectly.

And then there's this. Holy sweet mother of Abraham Lincoln, this sight just drives me nuts. Throw the soda bottle away! Throw the gross bananas away! Why can't we stack the dishes in the sink?? Usually I'd clean it up, but tonight I just took a picture and drank my beer. :)

(my)Tunes

2010-04-11T10:23:00.005-04:00

The latest circle journal to come my way was titled (my)Tunes. Catchy, eh? I like the title, and the general gist of the book. I only know a handful of people who don't proclaim "I love music!" when given the chance, so we all share this experience. And yet, it is such a personal thing! So yes, fun layout to create, and a fun one to snoop through previous pages.

I realize two things. I don't post often enough, and when I do, I write too damn much. So, without further ado:

You might notice that the holes are on the bottom of this page. It actually goes in the book sideways. It's not ideal, but the book was 6x6, and with my Silhouette out of commission I had little control over the title size. Turning the page sideways was the best solution for the too much journaling/too large title. The book is small enough to turn easily, so I hope people don't think I'm off my rocker.

I wish I had done the journaling directly on the background paper. The vellum feels awkward and mutes the pretty schwoopies too much. Next time...

It would have been easier to photograph both of these pages outside of their page protector, but somehow it didn't occur to me to do it that way. But I kinda like the protector showing, it shows the context. Plus, I love that Kerry found these cute little protectors for the book. However, I wish I would have thought to put a circular polarizer on to minimize the glare. Would love to know if that would have worked better, but alas, the thought just occurred to me this morning and the book got handed off last night.

I have an inkjet printer that allows you to print directly onto CDs. I found these silver printable CD at Sam's Club and I love them. Usually printable CDs have a white label on them. While there's nothing wrong with that, I love the pretty metallic sheen these CDs have. For this I scanned the background paper and resized it a bit. While the title is a bit narcissistic, I absolutely love the effect.

The paper is Heidi Swap, probably more than a year old. I really love it - the color is so serene, and the subtle pattern was easy for me to work with.

It's really fun to see these Circle Journals filling up. I think it's apparent that none of them are going to lay flat when they're finished! I'm getting more and more excited to see mine again!

In the meantime, I'm stewing on ideas for the next one in line: "The little things that make life big."

Having so much fun with this!!

Scrappin' Old Skool.

2010-03-21T18:37:00.006-04:00

There was a time, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, that I scrapped without the Silhouette. I will need some time to re-acclimate myself with this strange way of doing things. I'm trying, but it's slow going.

Now, in the name of full disclosure, the white border-y thing was cut with the Silhouette. And damn! I love that border! Just when I started noticing it being weird I was doing some systematic cutting to see what it was messing up, and this was the laaaaaaaast good cut I got from her.

Two things of note here. I have always been a 12x12 scrapper. Yes, I'll do the occasional mini-book, or odd sized project, but my albums have always been big and square. I have no idea what made me do it, but a year or so ago I bought a We R Memory Keepers 8.5x11 binder. Last fall I did a Halloween layout and that's been the only thing in there. I've been seeing more and more 8.5x11 layouts and there's something really appealing about them. They're...tight. And that's such a non-word for what I'm trying to express, but they have a different feel, they seem more concise. Maybe they flow in a more familiar way because we're accustomed to that format from magazines? Who knows, but it's got my interest piqued.

But I'll tell you what, it's a weird thing to go from 12x12 down. And for the most part I am a single page layout kind of gal, and I don't tend to use a ton of photos. In fact, LOTS of my pages are single photo layouts, and I know that's something that a lot of more prolific picture takers hate, but oddly enough, I'm not a prolific photographer. And either I'm a really good editor, or I hate to use anything that's less than my version of perfect. You know what? I'm going to go with "I'm a good editor". While typing that I realized that yes, I won't use cruddy pictures, but I still have plenty of shots that meet my standards. There's just no urgency to use them all. I'd rather pare it down to 1 or 3 that tell the story AND THEN TELL THE STORY, rather than use a whole bunch and then not say anything. I'm certain there are a number of reasons for this. Jana Lily's voice still echos in my head about redundant pictures (ha! The mags are FILLED with redundant pictures now, and boy do I think she was right!), and my memory, like everything else on me, is starting to fail a bit. I see the words as being something I *need*. And oh, the irony that I'm waxing poetic about the need for words on a layout with a mere 4. But truly, I don't have anything to say. It was a hella hot day, my kids had fun playing on the playground. What I remember most about this day was wishing I brought more water. This isn't compelling journaling, so I left it out.

I started that last paragraph with a point: While I thought that my one photo/lots of journaling style would easily adapt itself to this smaller format, it hasn't. I've been "working" on this layout for over 2 weeks. There was supposed to be a right page, with a couple of pictures and journaling, but I just couldn't make it work. So after daaaaaays of shuffling things around and trying to make it fit (and I was using a sketch! How come I can't get it to flow even when I'm using a sketch?!)(A: I may be severly scrapping disabled) Anyway, last night I just picked up the right page, moved it far away and asked myself: Do I really have anything that I need to say about these photos?? Do I actually need the two photos I'm losing? Obviously the answer was a resounding NO to both, and instantly I was able to move forward.
Second thing of note here is the use of some insanely old product. That, my friend, is Magic Mesh. Remember that? It was all the rage. I have like 7 (mostly ugly) colors of the stuff. I've used it twice. Including this layout. I think I bought that in like 2003. And the Scrabble tiles...whooo...again, maybe circa 2004? The felt flowers are only a year old, but the weird lumpy stuff in the middle is something I got from Magic Scraps, probably in 2003. They're little lumpy balls, they're waxy looking, not beads. Anyway, they're held in place with a 4 year old bottle of GLOO. There's also some little flower gems from KI sprinkled on there. Why am I telling you this? Because today I feel a little less guilty about all the sale items I compulsively snatched up. I do miss Cord... Mmm. Mmm. Mmm.

But less you think I'm not occasionally still pumping money into the present day economy, the paper is new, as is the fabric covered brad. Both of those were purchased in January for the calendar project. I didn't use any of the brads on that project, and I MUST find a way to use them. I think I paid full retail for them (GASP!) and I've never actually used one - I mean EVER, so buying them was silly. So I need to use them so I don't feel guilty(er) about that purchase)

Good lord. I can write this much about a totally Eh layout? I must be lonely. :P

RIP

2010-02-27T20:59:00.003-05:00

Oh, how I loved her. I may have loved her to death.

Hands down, my Silhouette has been my absolute favorite scrapbooking tool EVER.

You know how you have that revelation as a shopper about cost per use? You buy the killer pair of pumps to wear to the wedding with that amazing dress and you look HOT, but the shoes are a little owwie, and too high to wear that frequently, so you maybe wear them 3 times before giving up on them entirely. You paid $75 for them, which means it cost you $25 each time you wore them? Meanwhile, you buy a comfy white tank top that cost $10 for and wore to bed twice a week for a solid year, which means its cost per use is less than 10 cents a wear? Yeah, I think people look at the Silhouette like it's the fancy pumps, but to me it was the comfy tank top.
So I am in the market for a new, comfy tank, er, I mean Silhouette. And for a while I'll be squirreling away ten dollar bills so I can afford it without it hurting too much.

In the meantime, here's the very last thing she helped me make:

This is my most recent Circle Journal layout. The theme was spontaneous trips. I'm not much of a traveler, and for the most part "vacations" are planned well in advance - you don't navigate 2 or 3 or 4 kids very well without advance planning. Of course, this was one of the only trips I've taken in my adult life without kids, so I guess that explains that.

At any rate, the compass rose, the grunge frame, title, and borders are all from the Silhouette. And so is the cute little negative frame on the left side that goes around the Welcome to Iowa photo! That was the first time I had used that and was looking forward to finding another use for that shape. Alas, maybe later....

And oh, the irony: I just stocked up on mats and blades...

Playing Catch Up

2010-02-16T15:29:00.004-05:00

And yeah, it's been a while since my last post, but that's not what I'm talking about.

I work retail, which means mandatory 6 day work weeks during the month of December. My new job didn't have extended holiday hours, and for that I'm eternally grateful, but open to close 6 days, laundry, grocery shopping, basketball practices (?? who's dumb idea was that?!) and squeezing in some actual Christmas shopping of my own means not having time for anything that doesn't HAVE to get done. So when everyone else is crafting up a storm, baking and mailing off cards…I'm running on Red Bull and adrenaline and looking forward to things being calmer in the new year.

So then Valentine's Day rolls around and all that residual I-wish-I-were-crafting-and-baking stuff that was left from Christmas time comes bubbling to the surface. So I may have gone a smidge over board.

First I got the idea to do a word search to attach to the kids Valentine treats. It was a fun idea and would have been super easy had I remembered that I had Excel on my computer. But I didn't and created the puzzle in PhotoShop. PhotoShop is a powerful tool, but it's too powerful for some applications. Imagine driving an 18 wheeler to the grocery store. Lots of room for the groceries, but a little hard to park. It took about 4 hours to do the puzzle, but it was worth it just to see how excited Ted and Molly were to give out their treats. Oh, and God love the Silhouette for it's ability to kick out 45 shapes in a couple of minutes. Scalloped circles, the little black tab, the cute little heart – all done in about an hour. Assembling these – another story. Brought all the pieces parts to work on between customers. It was an insanely slow day, but after 9 hours, I still wasn't finished.

Each word search and the word list was "sewn" loosely to the Fun Dip. I think it turned out super cute and very fun. I still get the biggest kick that I put the word "cooties" in there. I funny.

So Friday morning rolled around and off went all my hard work, but I had the day off and still the urge to play. I decided to make Snickerdoodles – time consuming, but well within my skill set and almost always well received. Ran to the grocery store for the cream of tartar and the flour only to come home to realize that we were also out of sugar. Decided that instead of going back to Giant Eagle I'd head to Target. Maybe they'd have some fun Valentine's Day stuff marked down. Found Arcrylic tumblers marked down 25%, very cute, but not really suitable for presenting cookies in. I poked around a bit and found a naked cookie jar that whispered "etch me….etch me…"

So, 5 hours later, cookies were baked and the jar was etched:

It never shows up all that exciting in photos, but I think glass etching is so fun and easy. It takes a whopping 15 minutes, and most of that is just spent waiting. Once I put the cookies in the jar it looked a little naked. Plus, I had more time to kill and was still itching to play. Used one Silhouette design that had three hearts, cut it out once in red and once in black and layered together. So easy. The little gift cardholder is just a tag with a pocket made by wrapping a piece of vellum around the bottom. I might over-use this design, but it's handy and fun. I really dig the little border on there. This is the first time I've used that and I positively can't wait to use it again. The rub on is from Creative Imaginations. Those rub on books are so expensive, but you get a TON of designs, so they last forever. At any rate, I was pleased at how it turned out. Definitely fun and festive!

This is what I ended up doing with the plastic tumblers from Target. The shot on the right is just a detail of the tags. ScrapWorks made a clear acrylic mini album in the shape of postage stamps. Super cute, but at 2x3 they're really too small to do much with. Turns out there were perfect to make name tags for the treat cups.

I'm not wild about this card as a whole. I made the adorable little banner pieces on Friday night, and by the time I got around to making them into a card my get up and go had pretty much got up and left. There was definitely untapped potential with those banners – they're only an inch wide! So cute. Card over all? Eh.

And lastly, I decided to take some cookies for my two coworkers. Initially I threw them into a Ziploc bag, but I couldn't do it. Instead I wrapped them in kitchen parchment paper and tied them with ribbon – I love when Archiver's has the Bazzill ribbon in their Hot Buys! 15 yards for $1.99? Heck yeah! Pulled out the package of ScrapWorks acrylic mini-albums and made some quick tags, again using red and black vinyl from QuicKutz. "DNA" is just my bosses initials, and "heart breaker" is an actual design from the Silhouette online store. Again, quick, easy, and fun.

A Smidge Too Late for January…

2010-01-27T14:31:00.005-05:00

Go ahead, scroll down. I'll wait til you come back up.

Okay, so this is the project that I've been stewing on for a couple of weeks. I can't say that I've been "working" on it for that long, because truly the actual work time involved was maybe 6 or 7 hours, and that's from the (self-proclaimed) World's Slowest Scrapper. But back in December I found the base of this calendar at 2Peas, as well as the calendar rub-ons, both made by Maya Road. I wasn't certain what I wanted to do exactly but I knew the base would make a fun little calendar, and so into the shopping cart they went.

Shortly after these arrived on my doorstep (complete with a 25% off your next order! Coupon from 2Peas), the new Sugar Rush collection by Basic Grey was posted. Suddenly I had a slightly clearer vision of how I wanted the calendar to go: Fun, funky, ribbons, rub-ons, scallops… I gathered some paper, clicked "Buy Now" and then contemplated the nature of ugly gray naked chipboard. Yes. Something would have to be done with that.

Joann.com to the rescue! Glimmer Mist on sale at 30% off, free shipping on orders over $50 (excuse to buy the previously mentioned Ott-Lite): YAY! Funny thing was, the chipboard needed to be treated before anything else could be done. But once it arrived, Glimmer Misting is fast, but messy (work in an old box, and if possible line the box with papers so it doesn't seep through and ruin your work surface). It took maybe an hour to get all 6 chipboard bases dyed on both sides and another 2 or 3 hours to let them dry fully. This is my kind of project: do something and then take a two day long break.

Once the bases were dry things really started to roll along. I trimmed the paper to the size I wanted and corner rounded two corners and inked the edges. That took maybe an hour or so. No tedious brainwork. In fact, I purposely kept the thought at a minimum on this. With my colors chosen and supplies gathered, everything else was done without too much thought put into it. I knew if I started customizing things too much I'd get mired down, and most likely bored or frustrated and quit. Once the inking and rounding was done, another ½ hour or so was spent gluing the paper to the bases. For this, Scotch brand Wrinkle Free Glue Stick. It's less expensive, archival and perfectly suited to adhering larger cuts of paper without wrinkling.

The only part of the whole process was choosing the pictures. It took me about an hour or so to find pictures, resize them and order them online. I tried to keep them all vertical, because I knew that would fit better, but sometimes the shot that you want to use is horizontal, and you just have to deal. So I dealt. No biggie.

From there, it was only a matter of adhering the pictures, die cutting the scallop circles and rubbing on the calendar months (both done assembly line fashion) and adding some ribbon, jewels, a border die cut from bling cardstock or maybe a little rub on border)

And because the profile is so chunky and fun:

So, in recap:

Calendar base with acrylic flip easel: Maya Road
Dye for naked chipboard: Glimmer Mist
Patterned paper: Basic Grey
Calendar Rub-on: Maya Road
Cardstock for scalloped circles and various die cut borders: Bazzill Bling
Die cuts: QuicKutz nesting scalloped circles, scalloped border, dot border
Rub-on borders: Jenni Bowlin
Gems: Mark Richards
Inks: Staz On for edging pictures, ColorBox for papers
Various buttons and ribbons.
Oh! And teeny tiny staples courtesy of Tim holtz Tiny Attacher

Fun, fun, fun and guaranteed to on display and admired for one full year.

A little preview...

2010-01-26T00:16:00.005-05:00

I've been "working" on this project for over a month now. Granted, most of the "working" has been acquiring materials. That's the easy part, when everything is optimism and good intentions. Then you get to the "doing" phase and suddenly that which was absolutely phenomenal in your head is a little shaky on (or "in") paper. But you forge ahead and trust that the vision will play itself out. Maybe not exactly as you dreamed, but perfect in its own right. We hope.

As of this writing, it's about half-way finished. I'm hoping to make more progress tomorrow night and maybe have pictures to share on Thursday.

Oh! And guess what?? This is probably the first thing I've made in EONS that hasn't used the Silhouette in any way, shape or form. On the one hand it feels kinda wrong, but it's nice to know I'm not totally addicted. Because I really don't have time in my schedule for 12 step programs.

Stay tuned!

Here's the Proof:

2010-01-24T00:02:00.004-05:00

I have long maintained that I am a slow scrapper. I have gone to three day crops, stayed up to the wee hours of the morning only to come home with three layouts. That I dislike. It's just the way I am. I have to stew on my choices. No hasty moves for me. Adhesive is to be taken seriously.

But here it is. The proof. Today, in the time it took me to cut 12 strips of patterned paper into 3 1/4" x 6 3/4" strips and corner round them, my daughter created the Earth, the moon, and an entire galaxy of stars.

(I'll share my project when it's closer to done. Or done. We'll see.)

Two Things

2010-01-21T20:33:00.010-05:00

Number 1

Man, I love my new OTT Lite!!

I happened to stumble across the deal of the century at joann.com, where this usually $79.99 lamp was on clearance for $19.99. There was also free shipping on orders over $50, and adding this to my cart conveniently saved me $6. Sadly, it's no longer available at JoAnn's (at least not at joann.com), but I was able to find one at Amazon. It's at $35, and there's a couple in black for $39. Still a good deal, if you ask me. The color of the light is wonderful. It sits at about eye level, but the slight shade keeps it from bugging my eyes but it doesn't seem to damped the light's spread. The result is actually being able to see, without straining my eyes or second guessing what colors I'm working with. It's so great not to be casting a shadow on my projects.
YAY for OTT-Lite, and YAY for great sales!!

Number 2

Thanks to the Ott-Lite I was able to actually take pictures of my most recent Circle Journal project. Before I would wait for daylight to get a decent shot, and even then I'd do a fair amount of fussing to get it just right. Granted, these shots aren't bound for Nat'l Geographic, but I took four shots, and I'm sharing three. And I'm not sharing the 4th because I realize there's a misspelling. Oops.

So this CJ has a "Sweet Treats" theme. I have to admit, this one stressed me out a bit. I don't consider myself very handy in the kitchen, and I knew when I heard the theme that I wanted use this recipe, but frankly, this recipe has a failure rate of about 85%. It's "Magic Marshmallow Crescent Puffs", and you bake the marshmallows, which are drenched in melted butter and rolled in cinnamon and sugar, in a crescent rolls, seal it tight and hope that the exploding marshmallow doesn't escape from the roll...and leak out everywhere. It still tastes great, but it's not exactly the kind of thing you want to take a picture of. And even if you did, no one would be inspired to try the recipe. Not pretty.

But the gods were on my side, and they actually came out yummy looking. I'd like to take credit for the photo, but I was in mini-freak-out mode about getting the puffs out of the tins without messing them up, and getting them drizzled "just so"...not that it really mattered, you can barely see it. As luck would have it, I know people who can use a camera and can be paid off with food.

Silhouette. There. You knew it was coming, everything I do has that thing somewhere. The size of this particular albums is TINY. Cute, but tiny. And I found that I needed more real estate, and my solution was to cut the file folder shape from the Sil, which allowed me to squeeze in a second picture (the bowl of marshmallows. i.e. the "before" shot. That one I took.) as well as the big journaling block about my mediocre cooking skillz.

The album is handmade, out of - can you believe it? - brown lunch bags. You decorate one side of the bag, and slide your recipe inside. Originally my recipe was on two cards, and worried about how the two cards would stay together, so I made the pocket. Jury's still out on the pocket. Frankly, I think it's cute, but it adds more bulk than I think this album can take. I ended up backing the two cards to each other. I think I may ditch the pocket...

So that's this month's CJ saga. I hand this off on Saturday and get the next one. (I hope!) I'm really having so much fun with this!

Circles

2010-01-19T11:21:00.012-05:00

I think one of the neatest things about scrapbooking...well, after the shopping, buying, organizing and general fawning over products, is the wonderful sense of community that this hobby brings. There's a sense of camaraderie when you meet a fellow scrapbooker. That moment of "Oh, you're crazy too! We should get along just fine."

I find myself, for the first time in nine years, NOT working in a scrapbooking environment. This, for sure, has it's pluses, but I do miss (ever so slightly) the daily elbow-bumping of my fellow crazies.

Which makes me glad that prior to leaving the scrapbook store I set up a "circle journal" with my coworkers. This project is giving me that sense of community, the feeling of inclusion, and fills me with excitement.

If you're scratching your head and wondering what a circle journal is, relax, you're not alone. I only know about it because I was lucky enough to see journals being passed around, and I thought the idea was so intriguing it really stuck with me. A circle journal (or CJ) is an album that you create that has a theme. You create a page based on your theme, and then you pass the album onto the next person, who then creates her page addressing the same theme. Meanwhile, you've taken an album from someone else and you complete a layout based on that person's theme. Once you're finished you're going to pass it along to the same person you passed your first album to, and receive a new album from the same person who handed off to you before. Thus, the journals pass from person to person, making a circle once it gets handed back to its creator.

The albums are usually a smaller format, and generally have enough room for each participant to make a one or two page layout. The group of people involved can be people you know ahead of time, or may be people that you meet online through a message board, or if you're lucky you may be asked to round out someone else's CJ. It's best if you have 8 to 14 people. Too small a group will give you a book that's on the wimpy side, with probably not enough diversity. Too many, and you won't see your book returned to you for a year or more! Oh, that's another point, you have to decide upfront how long you have to create your entry before passing on to the next person. Our group chose a month, but everyone seems to leave it to the very last minute, so you could easily make the time frame shorter.

Themes for CJ can be anything your heart desires. Some themes in the CJ I'm in now are Sweet treats (a recipe album with a focus on sweets), Your favorite book, What makes your heart happy, spontaneous trips, holiday traditions, getting to know you... I've seen CJs with Pet Peeves, Hometowns, Shoes (thank God I don't have to create a layout based on my pathetic shoe "collection"), Music, Bucket List, etc., etc., etc. And it is always so fascinating to me to see these books. Not just the scrapbooking aspect - it's so fun to see every one's different styles, but I love seeing every one's responses to the themes. I find myself really wanting to read about someone else's hometown, and what drives everyone else crazy and what every hopes to accomplish before they die. Fascinating!

Whew. That was a long explanation! And yet, that's just the bare bones basics. We could talk for hours. Okay, maybe a half hour, but it would be a jam-packed half hour.

My little group of ladies started our journals in October, and I just completed my second one, not including my own. I'll share the one I just completed, but today I wanted to show the album I created.

This is my album. I used a Theresa Collins board book as my base. The book, as you buy it, is three tabbed pages, and I have a feeling these are meant to be kind of chapter separators, but I decided to make them my pages, and purchased several books. Because of the tremendous thickness of the book, I decided to limit my CJ to just one page per person. My theme is "Random Childhood Memories" and the title is cut from vinyl using my Silhouette. I love that the Silhouette software allows me to design in relationship - meaning I can create each word and position and size them independently so that they "go" perfectly with the other elements.

There are lots of ways to set up a CJ, and certainly there are no hard and fast rules. I wanted to create a place for each participant to sign in, answer a couple of questions pertaining to the topic, and (hopefully) add a picture of themselves. Space was an issue, so I decided to make these library pockets, also cut using the Silhouette (it's one of their designs). "Roll Call", the dots and every one's names are also cut on the Silhouette.

Just a close up of the pocket. You get a better look at the little questionnaire, which was created in Word. Nothing fancy. I'm not Word guru, so fancy isn't on the menu.

And lastly, this shot shows my intro/welcome page. It tells how I came to chose the topic, it asks them to fill out the card in the pocket and lets them know what I'm hoping they'll do.

Somehow I managed to send my book off into the wild without a picture of my page about my random childhood memories. You'll have to take my word for it: it was way cute, right down to the picture of me in one of my smocked Sunday dresses with the family's VW Bug in the background. It did not, however, follow the black, white and red theme I had for the intro section. I wanted to have a clear delineation of the business part of the book and the fun part of the book.

Okay, so that's today's monster post. I will grab some pictures of the layout I just did and post again soon. I would strongly encourage anyone even remotely interested in the idea of a circle journal to find a group that's forming and join in, or take the bull by the horns and start one yourself. Additional information such as theme suggestions and samples can be found here, here and here.

The L Word

2010-01-09T11:52:00.009-05:00

Love, folks, not lesbians. But I had to get the pop culture reference in for consistency's sake.

So I started this blog with the idea that it would be a way share my "creative pursuits", it would give me a forum for sharing the Silhouette love, maybe talk about the process a little. But my big mistake was thinking that I could start this in November. Even with the best of intentions, "creative pursuits" - much less writing about them - just aren't happening in December if you happen to work in retail.

So here I am, a month since my last very off-topic post, and it's time to whip this thing into shape.

Watch, I'll probably say that a month from now, too.

But even though I was busy, it wasn't like I didn't at least try to be creative. Granted, it only happened once, and it didn't get very far, but still: I'm giving myself credit for trying.

And more than that, I'm giving myself credit for finishing something, even if it's not what I started. See that picture up top? That started out as a Ho Ho Ho banner. One rare day off I decided that I could spend an afternoon and make a cute little banner. 97 interruptions later, I had the base cut and assembled. That's when I lost steam for the day and figured I'd finished some other day. Turns out that was the last day in December with any "me" time in it at all. So the pretty red, black and white banner bases sat on my scrap table, making me wish for time to myself, and thinking at the very least I'd have a jump on next year's holiday decorations. Needless to say, Christmas came and went, and the banner never got any more done.

As my first day off without obligations out the wazoo approached, I spent a lot of time daydreaming about what I might work on once I had some time. I had the sudden realization that Valentine's Day was coming, and wouldn't my pretty red, black and white banner bases look darling dressed up with pink and purple and glitter and bling and ribbon and buttons? Why yes, yes they would!

I love those drop-back-and-punt moments. This isn't what I planned for, but I still feel like I accomplished something pretty cool.

I wish I had a really great picture of the entire banner, but I don't. What I have is snippets of the final product, and maybe that's just enough to jump start an idea for someone else...

Big Love

2009-12-08T23:04:00.009-05:00

I've finally found a way to watch season 3 of Big Love. I love this show, it's a peek into a world that is foreign to me. The idea of really believing in something is a notion I find enviable. And believe or not, there is something very enticing about the notion of sister wives, and that whole concubine way of life that is appealing. I'm not exactly certain I could share a man's affections, but I could probably get on board with the group mothering and having other like-minded women there to share life with.

But that's not what this is about. And spoiler alert: if you haven't begun season 3, I may be blowing things for you. But I'm pretty sure that (A) there's no one actually reading this, and (B) I'm late enough to this rodeo that I won't ruin anything.

At any rate: Sarah Hendrickson is pregnant. Daughter of devout, polygamist Mormons, high school senior, bright, beautiful, her whole life ahead of her. And she can kiss her future good bye. She's only just found out, so at this point I'm mostly just speculating. Hell, for all intents and purposes, I'm projecting. But here's how I see it: She's a disappointment, she's a disgrace. She's cast her parents in terrible light. Chances are good that her potential just took a free fall. I look at her and think "What if she had been dealt another card? Something other than the dreaded 'early pregnancy' card? What could she have become?"

You see, there are times that I feel I was dealt that card.

It's not exactly a secret: I got pregnant, out of wedlock, when I was 22 years old. I had just graduated from college when it happened. To be exact, I found out the very day I was offered my first real job.

It's not like I was promiscuous. I really and truly wasn't. Obviously I wasn't virtuous until I got married, but still. Let's put it this way: there wasn't any possible way that I could have become a teenage statistic. If you catch my drift. wink wink

So looking back, I kind of think that way: I was dealt a card. The early pregnancy, change your life card. At the time, I felt like I was being punished: I had done something wrong and I had to pay the consequences. Now that I've had 18 years to think about it, I wonder: What about all those girls? How come they didn't have to pay the consequences?? Was I stupider than the other girls? 18 years and 3 other children later, I realize that no, I wasn't stupider, I wasn't being punished for doing something wrong. However, I am FERTILE. Women who have difficulty conceiving aren't being punished. It's unfortunate, and I'm certain maddening for them, but it's not punishment. I find it telling that I can feel such empathy and pain for women who have problems conceiving, but I can't issue myself any forgiveness for my own physical shortcomings. Wait. Scratch that. Couldn't. I can now. I've had time to think about it, to feel my shame, to repent, to question, to grieve, to be angry, to think more and finally to forgive.

But I often wonder: What would it have been like if I had been dealt some other card?

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

2009-11-21T01:01:00.001-05:00

The movie is dark and twisty, but I think there's a genius to the phrase.

I feel unburdened today. I feel free, and the weight that's been lifted is so great that I feel as though I could burst. I don't know if it's happiness, per se... I think it's an immense feeling of relief.

It's no longer my fault.
It's no longer my responsibility.
I no longer feel the need to buffer, apologize, explain, excuse, plead, justify, sacrifice or worry.
I have not burned bridges.
I have not hurt feelings.
I have acted maturely and given it my all when I really didn't want to.

I am done and I am moving on and I am relieved.

Cha-cha-cha-CHANGES

2009-11-11T08:39:00.001-05:00

"Turn to face the strain." That's how the Bowie lyrics go, and it seems relatively fitting. Changes most certainly can be fun, but the big ones require a lot of soul searching, and quite frankly, an awful lot of faith. And I have to say, I'm kind of struggling with that today.

A set of weird circumstances have brought on a move for me. This, in itself, would not be something I would have chosen for myself. It has the potential for being a good thing, and I'm enjoying some of the benefits of the move to be sure, but there are plenty of parts of my former life that I miss. Things that I took for granted would always be there. Things that I truly enjoyed. They're not gone, but I have to work and hope that everything falls into place to get to enjoy them again.

And the initial change - the move - has had a snowball effect. I'm on the cusp of changing jobs. And when is this not scarey? Ok, I guess for lots of people getting a new job is a really happy occasion, and in many ways this IS a happy-maker. But it's still scarey. I have a dozen devil-I-don't-know questions that I'm worrying about:

Will the money be there?
(Commission based jobs can be lucrative and challenging, and you have a sense of empowerment because you get monitary rewards for doing a good job. But in slow times, the wrong location, a bad economy it can be a be struggle)

Will the insurance be acceptable and affordable?
(Now that I'm 40-sih I find that parts are starting to fail, and the warrantee is more important than ever. Buying group health with a bunch of older, chubby, smoking men scares me. Hello high premiums.)

Will the location be okay?
Will I like my new coworkers?
Will I like the new customers?
WILL I LIKE THE NEW COMPANY?

But the last year has been no cake walk. A pressure-filled environment. A downward-trending economy in an already recessed city. Down-sizing. More hours. More demands. More accountability. More events. More stress. More grasping at straws.

And then there's the boss. Picture Meryl Strep in "The Devil Wears Prada" only without the glamor, height and poise. "Hard to please" is the kind way to phrase it. And even without the move (which brings with it a 94 mile round trip commute) I had been contemplating (read: wishing) for a new job. It's hard to feel like you're really trying every day, and yet every day you're failing. Good things happen, but they're serendipity. Bad things happen, and they happen because I let them. Or so it seems.

I want these changes to work for me. I need them to work for me. But that doesn't mean I'm not terrified.

And then I remind myself:

I am provided for. I have lived at the very brink for a long time, and yet when I get too percariously close to the edge, He's there to yank me back. Whether it's some strange check in the mail that exactly covers the speeding ticket I couldn't afford, or providing me with a new job after 2 years of looking just when the company was closing my location, I have been provided for. So it's hard to think that this oppurtunity appearing just now is coincidence. It feels more like a life preserver being thrown my way. So I'm going to grab ahold and hope for the best.

It's begining to look a lot like Christmas...

2009-11-04T21:17:00.001-05:00

I know. I know. I don't like it either. But I work retail, and in the retail world, Christmas starts early. As in, I put up the Christmas tree on Halloween. And on November 1st Musak got set to the holiday channel, where it will stay until December 26th. Uh...Woot?

But it's got me thinking Christmas. Not shopping, necessarily (I'm in denial about that), but the other stuff. What makes me happy, what I look forward to, even what I miss.

So here's a totally random list of where my head has been today.

1. Marshmellow World
This is not one of those Christmas songs that I've loved forever. In fact, it didn't appear on my radar until about five years ago, and to be frank, I hated it. And I cannot tell you how or why, but it grew on me. It's goofy, and it has nothing to do with Christmas. But it's catchy. Then one day I looked for the video on youtube, and suddenly it shot up to the number 2 spot on my Christmas music favs. They're just having so much fun, and I can't hear the song now without it putting a smile on my face.

2. Since I mentioned that Marshmellow World shot up to the number 2 spot, I feel compelled to mention that The Vince Guaraldi Trio's Linus and Lucy occupies the top spot. I have other songs that I like for their religious sentiment, but for capturing the season, for making me just plain happy when I hear it, Linus and Lucy is it. It takes me back to a simpler time, when the word "SPECIAL" would rotate across the screen in technicolor to announce a show that was, indeed, special. To a time when taking a bath and putting on one's pajamas seemed the perfectly appropriate way to celebrate something so important.

3. Cookies. I realize that lately I have begun to define myself by what I am not. As in, "I'm not a chocolate person." Or, "I'm not one much for bacon." I'm trying to change this, because it's sounds negative. I'm working on that. I can tell you, however, with much certainty: I AM a cookie person. Especially the homemade variety. Especially the homemade variety that are a little off the beaten path. I haven't had a Springerle in probably a dozen years, but what I wouldn't give... My dad was German and my mom was Irish. She made concessions, and this was one of the things that she learned to make. My brothers and sister didn't really like them, and I think my dad would eat one or two. But me? That was cookie tin I was reaching for. (Not that I wouldn't eat the other cookies. Did I mention that I am a cookie person?)

4. Lights. Camera.
Action.
I love photography, and I particularly love creating little happy still lifes. I have to admit that I go for great long stretches without indulging in this love, but come Christmas, everything seems to have photographic potential. This picture is on the old side, and it was shot on film - I know, crazy, right? It looks so much better in real life. I remember getting this set of pictures back and I think my heart skipped a beat. I love the bokeh on this, and how the lights star out. I've worn glasses since I was four, and one of my favorite things was to turn off all the room lights, turn on the tree lights, take off my glasses and stare at the tree. The way the lights look here is what they looked like to me. It has some magical essence to me...

5. Visions of sugarplums...
Only not sugarplums at all. More like treats from Red Envelope, or maybe some handmade treasure from Etsy? And on second thought, I don't know what real sugarplums are, but I'd put QuicKutz's version to good use...

On that note, it's time to settle in for my long winter's nap.

Go ahead and jump

2009-11-04T00:19:00.001-05:00

There's a park around here that one of my daughters really loves. She calls it The Wooden Park, and I suppose that makes sense, because it is, indeed, overwhelmingly wooden. It's not right around the corner, and so we don't visit it often. And by "not often" I mean...maybe once a year. This last time we were there, she (being Molly) was hell bent on finally tackling this rope swing. Only she was really quite afraid to actually take that literal leap of faith and jump. Her brother and sister both showed her how "easy" it was and demonstrated how no harm would come of her. There were words of coaxing on my part, phrased carefully as to not imply pressure, nor failure if she chose to climb off the tire and go back to the swings and slides. We knew that she could do it, but that hardly mattered: SHE needed to figure that out for herself.

And so we waited. Casually. Patiently. Empathetically. Because I remember that feeling. The nagging voice that says "What if I fall?", "What if I hurt myself?", "What if I try...and FAIL?"

Pouring over this picture I think about courage. Courage isn't about not being afriad. Courage is about being afraid and overcoming the fear.

This was a triumph for her and a reminder to me: Go ahead and jump.