Ms. Mojo's Visiting...

Just getting my mojo back. Still haven't finished my Hawaii mini-album, but I'm close. For some reason, scrapbooking seems to go so. sloooow. lately. It just seems to take me HOURS to finish one layout. My biggest delay is searching through paper scraps. I have no desire for new paper; I have SO MUCH already, it's crazy. Time to de-stash, but not while Mojo's visiting. Gotta put my head down and see where this latest burst of energy takes me.

This is from April 2011 (!) Yes, I'm waaay behind on last year. And yes, I MUST scrapbook chronologically (sometimes). I had 300+ photos printed for Scrap Camp back in October, and I've barely made a dent in them.

I wanted to use chevrons on this page, because Ben was hopping all over the place in these photos. I had to take a strip of diagonally striped paper and turn the middle one upside down (at the top) to make chevrons. The chevrons on the photo mat were just part of the paper (both papers from old SIStv collections, circa 2009. See? I *DO* hang on to those scraps! LOL). The black polka-dotted tape is new, from the Smash collection. Flowers are American Crafts. Title letters are from Pink Paislee, bought at the SIStv retreat I attended in Tennessee in 2009. This is why I could never be on a design team...I have to sit on stuff for YEARS before I use it! ;)

Oh yay! A Hawaii layout. Now, this could be submitted for the Graphics 45 design team, because everything on it is from their Tropical Travelogue collection. When I got back from Hawaii, a local scrapbook wholesaler had this up for sale, and I HAD to have it. Obviously. 

We rented a car for our last two days on Oahu, and the first day we had it, we drove around the island up to the North Shore. The waves were too active to see any sea turtles :( but we sat for a while and watched the powerful surf. They fully deserved full-on 5"x7" photos, and I used a sketch (HIGHLY modified) from Get it Scrapped. #73, I think...from their 30 Greatest Hits download, I believe.

Now that my youngest is in school full-time on Fridays (!!) I will be going to scrap tomorrow starting at 12 NOON. omg. I have 4 page "kits" ready with photos, sketches, and paper/embellishments, so hopefully I will have more (at least ONE, please God...I need to speed up my process!) to share this weekend.

Finally, yes, my community suffered some tornado devastation this past week...luckily, no one was seriously harmed or killed, due to the fair warning we had, the time the tornado occurred (5:15p), and the fact that mid-westerners reallyDO take tornado warnings seriously, and TAKE COVER when told. 

Tess had a school event last night and I took this photo of the post-it note boards (TWO of them) full of notes both positive and negative (kids sharing their fears), and it reminded me again what an amazing community I live in.

Taking time...

The last few mornings (while kids are in school) I have been taking time to work on crafty stuff. Since last week, though, crafty time has meant...working on their Valentines.

After last year's surplus of paper, store-bought Valentines ended up all over my house (stickers included), I decided this year I'd make them, using up some scrappy supplies in the process. Last year I bought (but didn't have a chance to use) this cool iPod candy bar wrapper for Tess. We hosted supper club at our house just prior to Valentines, and making dinner for 38 people preempted making cool Valentines. Not this year!

Just prior to February, I wrapped up a 6-month Stamp Club commitment with my Stampin' Up demonstrator (and fellow church mom), Angie. I made sure to order their Sizzix milk carton die, which, although tiny (those iPod wrappers are around regular-sized Hershey bars, for comparison), held an AMAZING amount of Jelly Bellies. Getting Ben to sign all the little cards was agonizing, but went quickly once I promised him any leftover jellies. I had to get a second (!) 2-pound bag (!!), so I wasn't sure there would be any leftovers, but made sure he had a handful for all his hard work.

Now to get back to work on my Hawaii mini-album, and the North Shore waves layout I started at home Friday night, with Graphic 45's Tropical Travelogue line (love!). That won't be too soon, as the kids have a 4-day weekend coming up, but I will try to get those finished up SOON.

Scrapping (and blogging) again

It's been so long since I've (a) dealt with Blogger and (2) used Photoshop Elements, that I'm overwhelmed by changes. So this is the new dashboard? (sorry, you can't see that, can you? Umm...it's...clean!) And I had to uninstall my "Inspiration Browser" (I didn't even know I had such a thing in PSE) and re-install the new one, then "launch" it from within PSE? (took me a minute..."Tips and Tricks," THERE it is!)

All this to show you two quite ancient layouts that I've FINALLY got around to finishing. Yes, 2010. Ancient. Right?

November 2010. I thought I had saved this turkey decoration, but couldn't find it in the disaster area that is our basement storage room (even shelving didn't help) to mine it for "things Tess was thankful for," so I simply zoomed in on the photo and found 2 things that were readable on the feathers: her family, and Silly Bandz (wow, how ancient is that?!) LOL

I thought I had written down the name of the baby reindeer the kids visited at our local library...so I had to find the date of the photo in my files (12/20/10), then *find* my 2010 diary, look up the entry, only to find...umm, no, I did not write it down (I think it was Bingo...no idea why...or why it matters). I sat down yesterday and finished the journaling without it. Imagine that! I still had room on my journaling card. Huh.

Now I am off to discover why Networked Blogs is not updating my Facebook page with these entries (there's another new one just under this one...try not to faint in amazement that I updated). But maybe that's all resolved now. Otherwise, you may get here by a self-serving link to my timeline. Hey, me updating this blog (and *scrapbooking!*) is NEWS.

Travel With Me - 2012 Sketchbook Project

Travel With Me - 2012 Sketchbook Project, a set on Flickr.

After posting this FOUR times to my old PPS blog, I finally figured out where to change my Blogger URL in Flickr. I now have a Pro Account again, and hope to be sharing more from Flickr this way. Whew!

Anyway, this is what I have been working on since returning from our holiday vacation. Now it is winging its way to Brooklyn, just under the January 31st deadline. Yay!

Spending today working on our Hawaii mini-album...hope to share that with you soon!

Whoa!

Bad, bad blogger. Just got back from Scrap Camp and I managed to finish 41 layouts...now, 29 of those were 6x6 pages for my kids' summer mini albums, but since they took the better part of my first day and a half of camp, I'm counting them as full pages! I will have photos soon...just so dang wiped by the late nights at camp...still catching up on sleep...and the Boy has decided No More Pull-Ups at night, which means LOTS of interrupted sleep and LAUNDRY :( Yeah, that's not going so well. YAWN. Okay, just wanted to let you know that I'm alive and will be updating (better) soon.

The grass is green...

Since this is not a weight loss blog, I'll keep this brief...on Easter Sunday I started walking. Oh, I've stopped, thank you very much, but I made the decision that I was (once again) at an unacceptable weight and I needed to start moving more...a lot more. Not running yet; since that didn't go as well as planned last year, I'm working my way towards it slowly. I walk, swim, use the arc trainer at the gym, and do yoga (LOVE). I have been trying to get in at least 30 minutes of movement four times a week for the last month, and it's working...I've lost 4 pounds total, slow and steady, and set up a new routine that I plan on keeping up once the kids are out of school.

Ben is almost there...next week is his last week. We've decided to send him to Young Fives instead of kindergarten, even though his birthday is not that late in the fall. So many parents are holding their kids -- especially boys -- with fall birthdays back, and in comparison to his current classmates who are already 5 years old, Ben has a bit of maturing to do. I'm sure he'll be all caught up by the fall, but what worries me more is when he is 12...and everyone in his class is turning 13...because they were held back.

I have not been getting a whole lot of scrapping done. Our Friday nights kind of petered out; we get one a month in, it seems, and my scrap room is too distracting for me to get much done. I am really hoping to scrap at home tonight; my scrap buddies all have daughters in a dance recital tonight, so nobody's hosting.

My best achievement of late is finishing a project from CKU Detroit...which came through in 2007. MAN, that felt good. It took a girls' weekend and limiting my crop choices to finally get it done, but I did it!

Hey Kelly, this one's for you...

Seems my favorite crop organizer and all-around best scrapbooker buddy, Kelly, has been looking for a new post since...umm...February? Sorry, but LOAD 2011 kept me busy. I did manage to complete a layout a day in the month of February (plus 1), and I'm hoping to participate again in May. In the meantime, I need to give a little love and attention to my much-neglected scrappy blog.

Here are the layouts I did last Friday at Kelly's house. I wish we were having a church crop tomorrow, but I can't stay to close up (at midnight), since what kept my daughter home from school 3 days this week is now attacking my system. You know it's serious when you cancel the EXTREMELY RARE babysitter you had for tonight's Supper Club Adult's Night Out (dinner! in a restaurant! with adult conversation! no kids!! Heaven...) because you'd like to crawl under the covers with the 5 year-old bottle of prescription cough medicine you just found in the back of your medicine cabinet.

Heaven forbid a medical doctor would give me a new prescription. They don't seem to be into that these days, unless you have a fever. Thanks to these new-fangled thermometers, you can't do that old "hold it to the lightbulb while the nurse is out trick," a la E.T. In the meantime, I will be organizing 4-hour doses until what I have is gone. Which should be around 10p tonight.

Onward...

This one was based on a sketch from BHG's Scrapbook Etc. Page Planner (published in 2008, I believe). I pulled this specialty issue out near the end of LOAD, and just keep finding inspiration from it. Which is pretty funny, considering I haven't used it since I bought it. Lain's "Kill Maybe" philosophy was an eye-opener.

This one turned out to be SO FUN to do. It certainly didn't start out that way! I was trying to print out 2"x3" photos at home, and my printer nozzles were clogged. I was nearly out of color ink, and -sure enough- by the time I did a few maintenance runs, I was completely out of color ink :( (doncha just love how that works?!)

I quickly threw my photos on a DVD and went to the CVS near Kelly's house after dinner out together. Apparently various smaller prints on a single sheet are under the "collage" option on Kodak Print Makers. I did not have the patience to figure that out (the picture maker at my local pharmacy is pretty upfront about how to put 4 different 2x3 prints on one 4x6 sheet. I'm spoiled!) and went with 4"x6" prints of my faves.

So, I ended up with larger (and fewer) photos than planned for both layouts, and had to get creative with my own "sketch" on this last one. I had fun going through my color-organized papers (wave of thanks to Stacy Julian for that idea) for various blues, borrowed a perfect background cardstock sheet from Kelly (thanks!...you need a blog too, ya know?), and took off running with layers & sparkles and everything nice to put this last one together.

Here's my whole LOAD 211 set...have a trick for making new sets, since I don't have a "pro" account at Flickr anymore (I need to take care of that, BTW...) Seems I can set up a set through the flickr app on my iPod Touch (score!), then I can go to flickr.com and add individual photos to the new set. Twenty-nine LOs, in all...I had extra inspiration on day 5, it seems.

I'm editing photos while the cough syrup lasts...hopefully I will feel good enough tomorrow (and dd will go to her half-day of school tomorrow, to give me a break...alas, no such luck with the preschooler) to get a little more scrapping in...with HOME PRINTED photos.

Until then, hoarding my cough syrup...