I haven't been up to writing much lately. I am still recovering from foot surgery and it has been more painful than expected. I had surgery to relieve the plantar fascia and remove bone spurs on the heel. The plantar fascia apparently wasn't as bad as they had thought but the bone spurs were worse, so it is tough to walk. But every day it gets better.
I am excited to start the new session of Finding Photo Freedom (Library of Memories) over at Big Picture Classes today. I have been taking the class since 2008 and each year since as an alumni. Each year the refresher is good to help me evaluate my system and tweak where necessary. I am looking forward to this as my summer project.
I haven't been scrapping much lately, but I have a huge backlog of things I haven't shared. I played along in the Studio Calico National Scrapbook Day celebration and finished 8 layouts that week from their challenges.
Hoping to get back into a regular blogging schedule, so I hope this is my fresh start. Happy Thursday!
Sunday was the new challenge at ScrapTiffany. I am a bit tardy getting mine up here. The challenge was to scrap your guilty pleasure. Without a doubt that would be good wine. Having the kiddos has definitely cut into the budget for that, but when we can we love to have a good bottle.
Today I am having foot surgery today. My foot pain started in October when we were on vacation and grew much worse after I started training for the 60 mile 3 day breast cancer walk.
After months of trying everything else, today I am having surgery. My plan to walk this year’s 3 day walk has been derailed, but I am looking forward to healing and getting back on the walking path for 2012.
Looking forward to lots of sleep this afternoon.
In a few short hours it will be Friday. I am looking forward to a weekend hanging out with family and brunch on Sunday for Mother’s Day. Hanging out with these little guys.
A while back I took a Cosmo Cricket class at my LSS, Paper Vineyard. I never shared the layouts and cards we made so I thought I would share them today, since I still haven’t finished my CKC post. I took 3 classes and 2 of them used the newest lines Salt Air and Upcycle. The third focused on CC’s fabric and the new Glubers.
Have a great weekend!
I’m a bit late getting my ScrapTiffany challenge up for today. I thought the 1st was tomorrow, oops! I spent most of yesterday doing major cleanup on my laptop. I topped the day off with an upgrade to Windows 7, which took hours to complete. At one point I was certain that my computer was toast. But most things are looking fine now.
Of course it can’t be perfect. When I logged into Lightroom this morning, I needed an update that is downloading now. It looks quite large, so I am guessing I will have another day of computer maintenance ahead.
Today’s challenge at ScrapTiffany is Friendships. I did this layout about me and my best friend. I couldn’t do this crazy life without him. Head on over to ScrapTiffany to see what the rest of the design team ladies did.
I finished up my layouts from CKC last night. I am working on a post with an overview of my classes and my completed layouts. I hope to have it up later in the week.
Have a great Sunday!
I am looking forward to a short day at work and a weekend with family. The boys have no idea the fun they are going to have on Easter at the big Egg Hunt. Hope you have a great Easter Weekend too. I'll leave you with a couple of layouts I completed recently.
With my favorite ever Studio Calico kit, Metropolitan I made this to gather last year's Christmas cards in one place.
It’s Friday… I have a 4 day weekend…
And I am off to the Creating Keepsakes Convention in Mesa for the next 2 days!
We are staying overnight at the convention hotel . So what could be better….
A girls weekend filled with…
…all things scrapbooking …girl talk …no kids (I’ll though I will miss them terribly) …lots of classes …and LOTS OF SHOPPING.
I call that…nirvana.
Before I head off, I am sharing today’s ScrapTiffany challenge on stamping. I have been dabbling a bit with embossing powders again, American Crafts Zing to be exact. I also have been on a roll scrapping our vacation from last October.
Here is my take on this week’s challenge…
I have been doing a few more two pagers lately and using lots of my favorite photos from our vacation. It’s fun to switch it up a bit.
Nicholas was impressed with the heat gun for embossing. He kept telling me to do it again. I love that one of my boys is already hanging out with me in my craft room. His future wife will sure appreciate me (may she be a scrapbooker or crafter). LOL!
Have a great weekend!
I’ll be back on Sunday to post the winner from the ScrapTiffany Blog Hop!
Even when it means Saturday morning I must get up early and get our taxes done. I am sure we will get a refund, and even knowing that I always put it off as long as possible. I guess I just don’t like to spend a weekend that way. Today is a layout challenge at ScrapTiffany. Sassy Lil Sketches provided this cute sketch for us to use:
The ladies over at ScrapTiffany have lots of fun takes on it. Here was mine:
I loved these pictures from our vacation last year at Disneyland, and was happy to finally get them on a page.
And here is another layout I did recently, my little man is a bit messy most the time. Maybe one day he won’t be and then we can just remember when he was “into everything”
I can dream anyway.
Well, I am off to get some routine blood work before finishing out the work week.
Have a great weekend!
I unexplainably woke up at 4:00 am this morning and could not go back to sleep. I figured I may as well get up and be productive with the time. I am sure I will be loving it about 2:00 this afternoon when the lack of sleep hits. It will be even more fabulous because my entire afternoon is filled with back to back meetings. At least I have a 4 day weekend to look forward to. Last weekend was Mike’s big 45th.
His choice of celebrating was to stay at home most of the weekend and cook for us. He started off the day with his Bobby Flay inspired Bloody Mary’s and brunch on the grill. Those breakfast sandwiches are too die for.
We just hung around the house all day and he grilled us fabulous burgers for dinner. I told him I would make him anything he wanted for his birthday cake. He picked Oreo Cheesecake. I found a few recipe ideas and made a Cheesecake Factory inspired Oreo Cheesecake for our dessert. It was probably my best cheesecake effort to date.
Nicholas loves birthdays, singing and helping blow out candles.
Nicholas has decided he likes to stamp and made his Daddy a birthday card.
The great thing for me is all weekend he wanted to go down to my scrap room to stamp and do crafts. He is pretty self sufficient down there, I set him up with his own drawer full of old stamps and stamp pads, paper, stickers, and other items I didn’t want anymore. It let me get some scrap time in too, I just have to let him have control of the TV while we are down there. But that’s okay.
This was my simple card for Mike. And since I have a ton of layouts I haven’t shared, here are a few….
Jackson’s first Christmas….
At the pumpkin patch, I scrapped the enlarged photo I had in our entry way during the fall season.
ZooLights at the Phoenix Zoo in 2009 in a rare 2 pager…
Have a great weekend….
Today’s challenge at ScrapTiffany is about Beauty.
It’s weird really. Today’s post was going to be about how we celebrated Mike’s 45th birthday this weekend. I will have to save that for another day. Because, I can’t stop thinking about my Mom right now, and that she will never again experience a beautiful Arizona sunset with us.
I guess it is because I worked on the design for her headstone this weekend. We had been putting it off, but it needed to be done. I sometimes wonder if I am putting the flowers in the right spot when I visit the cemetary. So I guess we need to have that to make sure, right?
I have been disconnecting from my online world a lot lately on purpose. I have been spending time doing a few things I want to do; rather than a little of everything. I am purposefully choosing to do less online.
Last year I finally scanned all the pictures I had and those that my mom had given to me as well. I am now organizing and tagging them in Lightroom. It is forcing me to spend a lot of time with my family and my childhood. That is a good thing. It is interesting the observations I make from this exercise.
I have a category called Who’s That? I don’t know who these people are. and with my mom gone, I am not sure if I will ever find out. I am happy that there aren’t many. I hope to give my children the gift of knowing who the people in the old photos are when I am not here to tell them anymore. I meant to ask my mom, but I didn’t.
One thing that really struck me…the last picture I had with my mom and me was from Thanksgiving 2009. Really? A year before she passed. I should be able to do better than that. I have a camera around at all times, how did that happen.
The other thing that struck me is the last pictures I have of my mom were from early October 2010. She looked really good. It was just a couple of weeks before we found out the cancer had spread...That our days with her were numbered and we didn’t even know it.
I zoomed in on this picture yesterday to see that the light still sparkled in her eyes. It made me realize that I watched it dim the last 2 weeks of her life. The last couple of days they were dark. The light was gone.
Thanks for letting me remember her today. I miss her.
