Happy Friday

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.

For This layout I used the Studio Calico Who's Who kit. This was probably one of my least favorite kits, mostly because the colors were to feminine and I am in a house of boys. So I took it as a challenge and used up almost every bit of the kit. Picture from our photo shoot with Maggie Holmes last year.

Happy Friday to you!

Back from CKC Mesa & ScrapTiffany Blog Hop Winner

The winner of my drawing from last weeks ScrapTiffany blog hop is posted below. I got back from the best CKC scrapbook convention ever Saturday night. The rest of the weekend was super busy too....

Sunday we took the boys to the Garden Railroad Train Tour and came home to have my computer crash on me, Mike had to take it to Best Buy to get it fixed for me.

I had Monday off of work, so after Nicholas got out school we went to see the Easter Bunny (Jackson would not go near him)

We dyed Easter Eggs in the afternoon...

It was a great long weekend, that ended with Nicholas waking up in the middle of the night Monday with the stomach flu, and me feeling sick too. But all in all it was a great weekend, and I think Nicholas was already feeling better this evening.

Here's a quick recap of the convention.  I will have a full review of my classes after I finish up my projects in the next couple of weeks.

This year's convention was....

Having 2 fun filled days with 2 fabulous friends (and another in spirit, who was home with her sick baby)....

Taking 8 awesome classes with 5 fabulous teachers, making 16 fun layouts, a mini book and 2 cards that I love....

Meeting 3 superstar Studio Calico girls (Lorie, Nicole H and Kelly Purkey)....

Receiving a few great giveaways....

Shopping....lots and lots of shopping....

Here is a recap of my shopping finds

Just when I thought I had all the Studio Calico goodness I could ever need....(okay I didn't really think that)....I of course did some stocking up at the SC booth.

A great deal found on a Slice cartridge, an awesome Fancy Pants book for altering, the one Distress Ink color I did not own....

Some new Basic Grey. A cute Easter altered project

And some Glitz Design goodies those brown woodgrain mini letters that I had been coveting, circle stamps I was drooling over, and my favorite Glitz line ever....

I have been going to the CKC Mesa show for years, and this was definitely the best all around show. The vendor fair was awesome, there was a good selection of shopping and a much improved selection of newer products. The classes we took had awesome teachers and great layouts that we loved.

And finally, I have drawn a winner from last week's ScrapTiffany blog hop.

True Random Number Generator

Result:

7Powered by RANDOM.ORG

 Mary Ellyn said...

Cute idea

April 13, 2011 6:38 AM

Congrats Mary Ellen!  I came home with some scrappy goodness including some Studio Calico, Basic Grey, and more. I sent you an e-mail so you can claim your goodies.

All In One - A ScrapTiffany Challenge & a 2 Page Layout!

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!

ScrapTiffany Recycled Blog Hop

Welcome to the ScrapTiffany Recycled Blog Hop! I am your first stop and I am so excited you are joining us! You should be arriving here from the ScrapTiffanyblog.  If you have landed here first, head on back to the ScrapTiffany blog to start hopping!

ScrapTiffany

Michelle

Katie

Kay

Jennifer

Norazah

Jolanda

Bev

Krischelle

Sophie

Gaby

Dale

Danielle

Renee

Becca

Danielle2

ScrapTiffany

We are all going to have some fun with Recycling today and tomorrow.  I used to own a scrapbook kit club, and we would often split products for our kits. One month we used chipboard from My Mind’s Eye that came in these buckets that looked so cute filled with glittered chipboard shapes.

I ended up with tons of these and it seemed so wasteful to just toss them, so for the past 2 years they have been recycled in several different ways for fun little gifts. This seemed like the perfect item to dress up for Easter with a bit of papers I didn’t plan to use and a few tools from my stash.

Remove packaging

Punch 3” scallop circle to cover lid

Adhere punched borders to pail

Break out the embossing powder, versamark and stamps

Start Zinging….

Cut out a cute chick and layer eggs around the pail with pop dots Tie with ribbons, fill with jelly beans and give them to your favorite Easter Bunny. I am going to the CKC Mesa Scrapbook Convention this weekend. I will be bringing some goodies back to give away to a commenter from this post.

So follow me and leave a comment for a chance to win. (I will pay for US postage, and would be happy to give away to an international winner if you help out with the postage and cover the difference).

Winner will be posted when I get back on Sunday.

Thanks for hopping by!

Next stop on the Blog Hop is Katie.

Happy Hopping!

Love Fridays and a ScrapTiffany Challenge

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!

A couple layouts to share

Pictures from our first breakfast with the animals at the zoo.  Nicholas had a ball feeing the goats.

Visiting Santa in 2009, the boy's letter's from Santa are tucked in the envelope.

Have a great week!

Is this a 3 year old or....

a beaten wife? Edited - to correct to 3 year old & 3rd birthday...

This picture is just wrong on so many levels....

But it still makes me laugh.  This was me on my 3rd birthday.  I don't remember the full story, but the way I remember the story as told to me was that a few days before my birthday my mom and dad were washing down the driveway and washing my Dad's truck.  I think they told me not to do it, but I climbed up in the bed of the truck, and very obviously fell and gave myself a black eye.

It required a trip to the emergency room.  My mom said they were questioned about it to make sure they didn't do this to me (they didn't). If I remember right I may have had a concussion. Now I know what's wrong with me. LOL!

I do remember later that evening, being on the couch with a big ice bag on my face.  Then a few days later I got to celebrate turning 3 looking like this.

The iron, just add's to the image. Even more so, since I can't remember the last time I ironed anything.

Over the past 8 months, I have been working through the 23,000+ pictures stored on my computer and cataloged in Adobe Lightroom.  Last year I scanned all of my pre-digital pictures, as well as those I had from my mom.  I have spent tons of hours organizing these pictures by date, tagging them with who, what and a bit of where. Rating the best to cull them down, deleting bad pictures that just are not worth keeping.

Why did I do this? Well for a few reasons...

• This process is making it easier to find the stories from my childhood and family history that I want to tell.
• I want to enjoy these pictures.  I can have them scrolling through a slide show on our digital frames and computer screen savers.
• I have shared many of them with my parents and siblings.
• I also think at the rate we take photos today. my boys will end up with hundreds of thousands of images from their family history. I don't want them to be so overwhelmed by the thought of it that they do nothing with them or worse delete them. Because they may not appreciate what they have until after I am gone.  At that point they would be left wondering who the people in the photos are.  The task to organize them at that point would be daunting, and likely never done.

I am establishing a process that I can maintain.  And while I was already well on my way, I am loving the  class that Kayla Lamoreaux  is offering on her site for Lightroom organization.  She started with digital scrapbooking supplies, but has just moved into the photo organization module. And amazingly she is giving this class for FREE. If you have any desire to improve your photo organization, I strongly suggest you check it out. Even if you use a different organization program she has a lot of really great methods for organizing your photos.

Happy Friday

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….

Beauty

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.

A ScrapTiffany Challenge and More Layouts to Share

Happy March to you! In Arizona that means one thing…..Spring Training baseball.  Mike and I grew up Angels fans, and when we moved from California to Arizona one thing he didn’t like was that we couldn’t go to Angel’s games anymore.  But, we have the next best thing here, Spring Training.  Tempe Stadium is a great place to see a game, especially when you have little ones. The big grassy area is perfect for lounging and watching the games. And of course we are raising our boys right….Angels babies!

So what better way to meet today’s ScrapTiffany Sports Challenge than to celebrate our Angel’s and Spring Training Baseball…..

Head on over to ScrapTiffany and check out the other ladies take on the challenge. And if you take the challenge e-mail your work to Tiffany (tiffany(at)scrapbooktiffany(dot)com), we would love to see it.

I also have a few more layouts to share. I was looking through my layout pictures and I still have a lot more to share.  Here are a few….

New Shoes – using Studio Calico Candy Shoppe January 2011. Doing some shoe shopping.

Fall 2010 using October 2010 Back 40. Celebrating fall decorations around the house.

From a past Sunday Sketch at Studio Calico using Elementary. Nicholas Fall school picture.

And finally Happy Halloween using the Color Me Daisy October 2009 Halloween kit. My favorite Halloween picture from 2009.

Have a great week. It is quarter end for me at work and it will be a busy one for me.