National Park addiction

Last night I was in turmoil: I normally have to divide my time between watching The Biggest Loser and Warehouse 13 (I know this makes me seem kind of pathetic). The latter was a rerun, but I had a more pronounced problem: I am LOVING the Ken Burns miniseries on PBS The National Parks: America's Best Idea. I decided to go with that program, and I'm glad I did.

If I have one dream for the future, it's to see every National Park. I can't believe that I grew up in Maine and never went until I was dating Derick, but now I'm hooked. BK (Before Kids) we also visited Glacier and the Grand Tetons (hello, Jenny Lake!). We returned to Acadia with our boys last summer. The year before we went as a family to Yellowstone, and this year we went to Olympic. I can't describe enough how enriching it is to go to the parks, do without some of the "necessities" (TV, internet, and good luck getting a signal in Yellowstone--I dare the Verizon guy!), and immerse ourselves in ineffable beauty, as well as encounter more than a little fear (walking through the hot pots at Yellowstone with a 4-year-old with ADHD comes to mind). Our boys love to walk on rocks, climb trees, and wade in the water, skipping rocks if they can. I'm glad the parks afford such a chance.

Here's a few things I've learned about taking pictures in National Parks:

1. Dress in bright clothes. I tell you, the photos will pop if you take a picture of a person in a bright shirt standing in the middle of nature.
2. Take some pictures from behind. It's poignant to see someone looking at nature. Some of favorites have been these.
3. Try some off-center shots. This is a fabulous way of adding context, especially comparing size--a person next to a hill or a vista, e.g.
4. Don't worry about not getting a posed picture--candids may work better. After three years of trying to get the perfect family photo, I have given up. But I love my photos of the kids walking with dad, climbing trees, and doing all the other things they do.
5. Personalize the iconic shot. Some vistas at the N.P.'s have been photographed again and again--but not by you and of your people. Getting a shot of your family near the iconic image--Old Faithful, the vista of Mt. Olympus--is more meaningful.
6. Take pictures that tell the story of your experience there. My son (then three) was seriously grumpy walking around Yellowstone one day. My sister-in-law Mel saved the day by carrying him on her shoulders and pretending to drop him. I am so glad I have pictures of that, even though I never got a perfect shot of the hot pools at Mammoth.
7. You may want to play with color-saturation when editing, and also lighting and contrast. Using Photoshop to do these two things greatly improved the quality of my photos without really altering the images too much. I usually increase the saturation to 20 or 25. I have to be careful with photos of me--my face tends to turn bright red--but in general, 20-25 increases the color enough.
   

I haven't printed my photos from Olympus yet--just the ones for the mini albums I created the other day. But over the next month I look forward to editing my photos (all 3000 or so of them!), picking my favorites, and scrapping them. Here's one I did recently of a beloved shot of my son at Olympus.

Perler ball

ETA: Please ignore huge pile of unfolded laundry behind him. At least my underwear was out of sight!

In honor of the Vikings' last minute heroics from Packer (oops, Viking) great Bret Favre, here's what Rowan created with perler beads yesterday:


A football field, along with players and ball. He made goal posts today.

On a funnier note, this morning he told me that he had been sent to the principal's office for hitting someone. I was shocked and asked him when. He thought about it and said, "Last Wednesday?" I was MAD at that point, but eventually it came out that he didn't mean last Wednesday, he meant sometime last year.

Last Wednesday, last year. Potato, potato.

A Mini Weekend

Derick is going away on business, so I got to go to scrap mania at Archiver's. I made two minis there.


The first was a mini for Dominic about Olympic National Park, our vacation this year. They have so much fun on vacation, I have started making mini albums for them to take with them when they move out someday. I've only posted a couple pages here, but if you want to see it all, go HERE. I enjoyed using up a lot of old Fancy Pants and My Mind's Eye rubons.


This next mini is a tradition. I make a small one with a photo of each of us listing our five favorite things from vacation. Yet again, Dominic's was the hotel with a swimming pool. To see the whole album, go HERE.

And here's two minis I made last month:

This is Rowan's version of the Olympic NP mini. Again, I blew through some old rubons, and some new ones too. BTW, the October Afternoon color rubons were HARD to get to stick. Not sure I'll buy them again. You can look at the whole album HERE.


I actually made this mini last year. It's an ongoing mini that I add to every year. I add whatever out "Cheese" phrase was that we used on vacation, along with a family photo. Simple and fun. But trust me, you don't want to know why we started saying "banana slug." Bleh.

Back to normal

Rowan's leg seems to be a little better--at least, the blood poisoning seems to be abating. And when I dug his schoolwork out of his bag, I could see documented evidence he was back to normal.


Look at the picture he drew for the word "man." Looks like an alien, doesn't it?


And this is the picture he drew of himself. He's got a hole through his middle, which I guess explains his scream.

I have kept a ream of art from kindergarten that is similar--snowmen with noses in his mouth, a picture of a volcano with an airplane flying over it, and someone dropping out of the airplane and screaming "Agghhhh!" My ultimate plan is to turn this into a mini album of typical Rowan art in all its gruesomeness. I hope this foreshadows Stephen King, not Jeffrey Dahmer.

Personal day

I took a personal day to go to my kids' school for a BBQ lunch. Lots of fun seeing them at school, so knowing in exactly what they need to do. The Secret Life of Boys, if you will.

About an hour before their bus would arrive, I got a call from the school nurse: Rowan had come in, complaining of a bug bite he'd itched. Apparently, it was swollen, hard, puss-filled, and red. Nice. So when Rowan got home, we got in the car and went to Urgent Care, where he got a prescription for antibiotics. The doctor also drew a line around the red area so we could keep track of the infection, make sure it didn't get any worse.

I finished up some layouts:


This one was inspired by the tag. When I saw some leftover pictures from the summer, I joined them with the tag for a LO about brotherhood. The photo corners I made with a punch, a pen, a Xyron X, and some superfine glitter.

This one got its inspiration from a challenge at Studio Calico: use floss, eyelets, paint, letter stickers, patterned paper no bigger than 4x4.


The same challenge inspired me as I created this, but the photo itself was sort of the ultimate inspiration.


I love these photos of Dominic and his toys. This summer I had bought a Star Wars collection of papers, so I used it here. (To me, I have to use a kit enough so that it evens out to about $5--I spent $15 on the kit, I have used it on three layouts, so I have gotten my money's worth. Anything I use from now on is icing.) To avoid looking too theme-y, I used a subdued pattern as a background and cardstock for the rest. And I limited myself to just one sticker. Amazing.

I think this one is my favorite. I used the August Scarlet Lime kit, maybe my favorite one that I got with my subscription this past year. I had already used up my M's, so I had to improvise with a W.

Maternal Hall of Shame

Yep, I sent my son to school with a hole in his butt, his fancy schmancy Star Wars undies clearly visible. Yikes. As soon as he got home and I realized this, I threw the shorts away. Just a little too late. I'm consoling myself by telling myself that all the older boys seem to want to let their underwear hang out. Dominic's just fashion forward, so to speak.

He had a much better day today. I spoke with his teachers and shared a few more ideas that may help him during transition times.. He apparently just has trouble during the unstructured time--going to the bathroom as a class, for example. During table time and other activities, he's great. It's good to see the day as a big picture.

And the tooth fairy visited Dominic and left him two big gold dollar coins in place of his lost tooth. Of course, Dominic ascribes too much magic to the tooth fairy and thinks she actually turns the tooth into the coins.


Would that she had so much power.

Scrapping through the rough

The start of school for the kids has been OK. Rowan is getting back into the routine of work, and is getting some minor warnings about disruptions, but he is working and learning and enjoying school.

Dominic is enjoying school too, but more and more we are getting notes home from Kidstop, his after school program...not listening...not keeping his hands to himself...screaming when he doesn't get his way. It's disheartening to get a note every day. I know his autism makes it hard for him to see beyond what he's feeling and think about something other than what he's thinking, but I don't know how to make it better or easier. I know he's getting used to a new routine, and he needs to keep learning the same lessons until he learns it, but it's still hard, for Kidstop, for him, and for me and Derick.

To deal, I give him hugs (he got lots today) and put my love on paper.
This is Dominic at 5. These details make me think that it will all work out and get easier, for everyone.

On a happier note, he lost his second tooth today. For real, he almost lost it completely in the car, but we got it in the pillow for the tooth fairy safe and sound.

May Day in September

Last spring my husband sent me an email while I was at work. I was on the computer working; he may not have been. After I got the email, I may have stopped working for a while to investigate because it was such a great deal: 80 bulbs, plus 80 free bulbs, plus free shipping, for about 10 dollars. WOW. This was from a company I'd never heard of, Bulbs Direct, but I was willing to spend 10 dollars to see what I got. So I did.

They came this week, a mix of four varieties of bulbs. I'm interested to see how they fare here; I'm mostly zone 4, but I have had some success with zone five, even one of the bulbs in this packet. For me, it was worth the 10 dollars just to see.

But 160 bulbs is a lot. Much more than I have room for. So this weekend, I assembled little packets like this:


I put some bulbs in the middle of the paper towel, wrote the name of the bulb on the towel too, and used garden twisties to close them up. I took the bag of packets to school and deposited bulbs on some coworkers' desks who I know garden. Sort of the autumn equivalent of May Day.

The big question in all of this, of course, is not whether the bulbs will make it through the winter. The big question is what the heck my husband was doing on a gardening website?

And for something completely magical, check out the chrysalis my son discovered in our garden:

The younger grades at his school focus on butterflies for science, raising caterpillars, observing the chrysalises (sp?), and tagging them, I believe, before they are set free. My tax dollars at work: the first Chrysalis I've seen in my garden ever. Worth it.

Inspired by scraps

For the most part my scrap "room" is organized, crowded only because it is small (about 5x5). A few things, though, I can't bring myself to throw away and there is no logical place to put them, so they stay on my desk. This was the case of a scrap of dotted ribbon that came with a kit I got from Scrap-Diner. When I cleaned out my ribbon scrap basket (I think it was an old blueberry basket), I found a yellow scrap that went, so I put them together. At this point I looked around my scraps lying around. I picked up a small piece of a Doodlebug paper frill, a leftover orange floral ribbon from a Scarlet Lime kit, and a Hambly overlay scrap and took these four things to my space where I actually scrap: by the TV in my easy chair with the ottoman. I left them by the TV for weeks.

After I got new photos from Shutterfly, I went through my small number of leftover photos to see if any inspired me. I came across a picture of Rowan last year doing homework. He was smiling and wearing an orange shirt. I put this next to these scraps. The shape of the scraps--lines, basically--made me think of a stamp I just got in a kit from Studio Calico. At this point a layout was born.

I sprayed the background lightly with a couple colors of Glimmer Mist, then stamped the letters, put down the photo, and attached my strips. (Yes, I was "stripping" again.) I had a space for a journaling stamp, so I found a small library card stamp by Maya Road I had almost gotten rid of because it was too small. Glad I didn't now. I added a strip of gems under the stamp to link the lines from the bottom frill to the journaling stamp.

I still had a hole or two, so I found last year's Fancy Pants Chipboard--All Fall--that I had gotten on clearance this summer. The colors didn't exactly match, but I found three pieces that went nicely with the colors on the layout. After I added them, all I had left was the title. I knew it needed to be boldly colored but not boldly sized, so I found some bright orange letters from My Little Shoebox. I like using more than one letter type in titles, and I had some ancient rub-ons sitting next to the TV that I had never put away, so I used those two. And a layout was born.

I'll post a photo after the sun comes over the trees. Autumn is definitely here in Minnesota, even if it was 85 degrees yesterday.

Edited to add: Here's the layout!


And here's a couple more:


This one was one of very few that I actually remade. I started with traditional Easter colors and hated it. I tore the photos off (I actually lay it face down and peeled the patterned paper off the photos--I'd rather destroy the backing than the pics), found a more subdued color and redid it.


Events I almost always make as a two pager. This event was chronological, so I didn't worry about design--I basically put the photos in order after trimming them to identical or compatible sizes, then added labels to tell the best parts of the story that you don't get from the photos. And yep, that's a scanned and shrunk diploma on the page--the real one he got--along with a picture he had drawn for the back of the program. So darn cute!

Best. Show. Ever.

I am strangely addicted to several TV shows right now. It's been a while since I've dedicated my nights to more than one show. But here I am, waiting for new episodes of Castle, The Biggest Loser, Warehouse 13, Lost, and Project Runway.

Project Runway...Sigh! Last night's show was a paper lover's dream. The contestants had to make clothes out of newspapers, and the dresses I saw were easily some of the best designs I have seen on the show (I concede I have not seen every episode ever). The designers did an amazing job seeing the paper for its potential shape, textures, and color. Yes colors--it's not just black and white, and some really talented people noticed that and worked with it. (Truth be told, they were also given stuff like paint to work with.) As someone who works with paper, I LOVED looking at all the amazing, innovative things that were done. With paper. To create clothing. WOW. If you want to see what they did, and I hope you do, go here.

As those designs came down the runway, I wondered who would get sent home because so many were awesome. Eventually, a couple stood out as being poorly conceived and constructed, but when one of the bottom three is there because it wasn't innovative like the others, you know you've seen a great show. And of course, essentially what they did was create something out of paper. Be still my heart.

Under the weather

Spent the day sick at home. I stayed in bed, drank OJ, took meds, and read a little. I feel a little better. I'd hoped to do some grading, but I couldn't quite swing it.

I appear to have just a head cold, and I'm through the sneezing stage, so I'll head back tomorrow.

How happy was I to find this site today? Made my sick day.

Finding the purpose

Not much of a post today. My husband has co-opted the computer room for his gaming group, and I'm feeling a little tired and under the weather--a cold, I think.

I am, however, sitting on a bunch of new photos from Shutterfly. They came yesterday, and I have about 6 layouts I can make with them. Bliss.

The hardest thing for me at this point is deciding what to do with them. Say I have a great photo--my son in the pool, for example. (I do, actually.) It's a great photo, I want to scrap it, but I can't until I figure out why I want to scrap it. Personally, I cannot scrap a photo just because it's a good photo. I have to have more of a reason. So for some of the photos, I know I want a layout with it--but I won't start making it until I figure out why I want to scrap it. I need to find my purpose--or as that cowboy in City Slickers would say, I have to find my One Thing: the One Thing I have to say about the picture. I don't think I need to find anything particularly deep--right now I'm thinking of scrapping how amazing it is that my son can touch in the deep end of the kid's pool--wow. He's standing on tip-toes, but he doesn't need me.

Now that's my reason for scrapping--because sometime they'll be able to stand on their own, and I need to remember it.

Weekend on parade

We are in the midst of some gorgeous weather. True, my garden could use some rain, but it's hard not to be excited as we're entering into the longest stretch of 80 degree weather we've had all year--just in time for fall!

This weekend our family went to a parade. Derick, Dominic and I watched, scoring a ton of candy from paraders.


Rowan was in the parade with his taekwondo group (sorry for the blurry photo).


Rally day at our church was awesome, and the boys were natty dressers.


(Don't ask me how many threats went into getting semi-normal happy faces almost looking at the camera. You can still see how much they want to stick their tongues out and wrestle each other.)

And in between mowing the lawn and other 80-degree things, I scrapped.

Here's a few layouts I did from Studio calico kits from July and August. The first one is a layout I did about meeting mystery author Laura Childs:


The next two are layouts I made with leftover photos from our trip to Como Zoo this summer. I made a layout for each boy's album. And the title is different because of course, I ran out of E's. Typical.

Anytime I get a kit, I figure out how many layouts I must make to get my money's worth. With the two zoo ones, I reached my goal. The mystery one means I am three layouts away from my goal.

Giving pictures a home

When I make a LO, I almost always start with the photos. I have trouble putting them on the page helter-skelter, so I tend to group and grid them.

Where to put other "stuff"? I tend to put paper, embellishments, titles, and journaling around the photos in some way to give the photos a home.

On this first layout, I housed the photo on a small piece of patterned paper, embellished with strips.


I then added the title on top of the block and the journaling overlapping on the right.

For the next layout, I planned on gridding the photo, but to "contain" the photos on this expanse of white, I placed the photos on top of a rubon and enclosed the pictures with more page elements:


The elements include patterned paper, journaling, title, and butterflies. The butterfly path was a whim, but I'm glad I added it. I think it adds some literal movement to the page.

Building Blocks

My guys love Legos. Once the boys took apart their Daddy's Star Wars Legos (and almost caused him to explode, but that's another story), they ended up with an entire bucket of creative fun. They can spend hours building building building.

Taking their creativity to heart, I think you can build multiphoto pages the same way: pretend the photos are Legos and stack them.

Here's one layout where I did this:


I sort of stacked them kitty corner, doing something I almost never do: overlapping them.

On this next one, I sort of literally stacked them on top of one another:


After I stacked the pictures, I added strips of paper below and then a block for the title. (By the way, notice that over the last 10 years, I still put my sunglasses above my head in a photo. Some things never change.)

This last one stacks side by side with common margins:


Now, I know it's trendy right now to scrap full 4x6 photos, but I find I can fit them better on a page if I trim a few even by a couple inches.

So even though I cannot actually build a Lego spaceship by looking at a Lego pattern book(I've tried, and I fail), I can build photos to create a pretty tight multi-photo page with just 4x6 prints. The Lego Force will be with me...always.

: - }

I'm a little verklempt

So yesterday was the first day of school, for me as a teacher and my boys as students in kindergarten and first grade. That traditional first day of school shot of the boys getting on the bus will not be mine, because I drop the boys off hours earlier at Kidstop, then head to work myself at 7 A.M. They get to their classes via Kidstop.

On this first day, Derick took Rowan and Dominic to school and attended kindergarten with Dominic. They both had a great day; Dominic's only worry was whether to eat hot lunch or bring a lunch. (He ate hot lunch yesterday--pizza. Today he brought a lunch--not too keen on Sloppy Joes.)

The morning bus shot will never be mine, but my moment is when they arrive home on the bus. And I took a picture. And I hugged them, both very excited about school.

Here's where I got emotional: Seeing them get off the bus reminded me of some pictures on my desk at school. It's been 6 years to go from this:

to this:


And it's been five years to go from this:


to this:

Like I said, verklempt.

Me

I started CathyZielske's Big Picture Scrapbooking Class Me: The Abridged Version, a class based on the wonderful book Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life. For the past couple months I've been filling out this tag album with words that represent or explain me from A to Z.

The class finally started this week, and I had to dig it out of my purse, where I've been carrying it right next to the Wet Wipes, ready to fill it out wherever inspiration strikes. I was sad to see it a little...wet. Discolored. Bent. Right next to the Wet Wipes was NOT a good idea. For a brief moment, I debated redoing the cover and first page, but then reason took over: the purpose of the tag book was to generate ideas for the album. It's not the end product, so if it looks cruddy, that's OK.

So for the next few weeks, I will get a taste of what my English Composition students feel like as I generate 26 mini-essays about me based around the alphabet. Though I'm nervous beginning this class as I begin the school year at the same time, I look forward to detailing the following:

A: Azores
E: estranged
I: INTJ
L: LOST
O: October
Q: quotations
T: tatoo
U: Uncle Dick
V: Vampire Slayer, Buffy the
X: X-Wing
Z: Zombies, Pride and Prejudice and

Scrapping challenges

Sometimes I get inspiration from challenges. One of the first sites I frequented for challenge inspiration was Simple Scrapbooks; now I stalk Write.Click.Scrapbook, its legacy site. Every week designers there generate techniques and ideas and sometimes challenges. This past week one challenge involved using a blog post. Since I'm a blog newbie, I didn't have much to go from, but my husband has been blogging for a while, so I got inspiration from him. When he blogged on August 31, he had posted this photo of my son and titled it "Never Take the Easy Route." (It actually said "path," but I had an idea about using a rub-on from the brand name "Scenic Route," so I changed it.) When I saw his post, a page was born:

(This is the layout I blogged about yesterday; I found it easier to create then search for a sketch. And I should mention: those little charms were clipped from a metal bookmark I have. I thank my bookmark for the sacrifice it made in service of my page.)

Another site I get inspiration from is One Little Word. I have been playing along for about a yer, drawing inspiration from the words they post. I was lucky enough to be a guest designer on the blog in June this week and this week. The week's post was Beauty. As summer winds down, I have been taking pictures of everything beautiful, so they worked perfectly on a layout about beauty. Here's my take on the word:

This is the first time I used Core-dinations paper. I sanded to reveal some orange, which the photo doesn't show well. I thought I got a nicer effect when I sanded lightly in circles and also sanded the edges of the paper, which doesn't show well on the photo.

Design-wise, it took me a while to get the right combo of accents. I really wanted to use flowers on this layout sort of about flowers. Think about that: it's like saying, "We need something to go with steak tonight--let's have steak--that'll go with steak!" Insane. I removed all flowers but one, which worked much better.

There are many more wonderful challenge sites out there. I hope to explore them more and draw inspiration from them, but I fear that will have to wait until we get one more hour in each day!

Designing with Sketches

I tend not to use sketches because for me they take a long time. Case in point: Tonight I was working on a single photo layout and was stumped, so I pulled out a few magazines and books and started searching through them for single photo layout ideas. Nothing worked with the photo I had. I put aside the sketches, pulled out some product, spent the same amount of time designing and finished the layout sans sketch. I'll share that layout tomorrow.

Even though I don't use others' sketches, I do make my own. Here's a couple pages from my sketch book:


You can see that I do not draw to scale, so I have to rework them as I do them. When I finished, I write "DONE" on it. And as you can see on the right, I sometimes use my sketchbook for a to-do list.

This first layout is the sketch from the upper left:


I switched where the red photo block would go, dropped a picture, and added embellishments.

The next is the sketch from the upper right:

It transformed from a 12x12 to an 8 1/2x11 layout based on the orientation of the photos.

The next two use sketches, but from pages I didn't show. This first used products from a kit from Scarlet Lime:
I can't tell you how much my son liked this layout. He studied it, and then I found out why: He reproduced his Hot Wheel contraption.

This next is a small page about the five things I do every day that leave me having a good day:
I had some Making Memories Flower Patch papers out to get ready to scrap Easter, but I thought they looked good with my purple shirt. And I never scrap purple, so green it was.

That's my process with sketches. I'll post two more pages tomorrow; I did them without sketches, but I like the end product on them.