Flock of Seagulls

Yesterday, to allow my husband to nap during football, I took the boys swimming. Dominic has decided he is a swimmer and now swims across the pool--with one breath. What lungs! Afterwards, I indulged myself and went to Michaels to get this punch. Now, I know Christmas is coming, but my husband was also leaving for a week long business trip, so I purchased a little sanity: a rainbow Jenga game for Dominic, and more origami paper for my paper crafter Rowan.

Here's what he made tonight:


I thought, "A Flock of Seagulls!" Rowan totally didn't get the joke (I'm old), and he told me it was butterflies. We are planning something big for them tomorrow night after Tae Kwon Do.

Tomorrow I'll also post some two page alayouts from last summer.

Play on Words

My favorite thing about scrapbooking* may be playing around with words and using titles and products with double meanings.

My son Dominic has started calling himself Nic. This of course brought to mind the word "Nicknames" and a layout was born.


For this next layout, I made an homage page for my husband winning it all in fantasy football. Correction: he won the best of the worst, awarding him the Toilet Bowl prize. Title of the layout? Bottom Prize. (I almost called it "Top of the Bottom.)


Finally, I found the perfect card for a layout about haircuts. See the title on it?

*This is my favorite thing about scrapbooking today, but this designation changes all the titme. I love scrapbooking...

What do you plan to do?

Our Thanksgiving sermons at my church are always terrific. I cry a little, I smile a lot, and I laugh in them. Tonight our pastor ended with this poem, which to me is almost a manifesto for scrapbooking. (Bold print is mine.) Enjoy.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down,
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

~ Mary Oliver ~

(New and Selected Poems, Volume I)

In the Middle

I have one week left in the trimester after Thanksgiving. I also have about 60 memoirs, 60 portfolios, 70 comparison papers, and 70 final tests to grade. All by December 10.

(Deep breath)

So you can understand why I eke in iotas of scrap time, and how much that drives me nuts. I look at partially finished pages, dreaming of how I will finish them. Here's what's on my scrap space:

1. The page about my friend and our trip to the sculpture garden. Almost done. I may finish it tonight.
2. A page about my son and his violin. I leaned on the top and squished it (@!#$%), so I need to fix it and add journaling.
   
3. A page about my husband and me. I love that one. I may submit it for publication.
4. A huge photo I want to turn into a full page layout--12x12 photo. This may take time.
5. A layout from last Christmas of me putting together the boys' toys. I'm stuck on that one. I like the start but am not sure how to finish it.
6. A page about my mother-in-law and her immense talent in photography. She studied with Ansel Adams. No lie. I'm doing some elaborate stitching with it, but my goal is to finish this weekend.
7. Two goofy pages--one of my husband winning "The Toilet Bowl" last year in his fantasy football league, and another of my older boy pretending to be an alien.

This list is a good example of how I scrap--I have many projects going, and I work on them a little at a time until they are done. Sometimes I have to abandon a project--dissatisfied with it, but I can do no more. When I'm stuck, though, I tend to do what I typically do on a page, which satisfies me. Done is done. And so I'm happy.

This is a test

My mother's birthday is coming up--Thanksgiving actually. I make a scrapbook page for my parents at every momentous day and send it out to them in Maine.

I used the July Scarlet Lime kit. I hadn't been too fond of it, so I hadn't made many pages. Here's a couple I did make with it:





After I scrapped some summer photos, I had two wonderful pictures of the boys left, so I used more of the kit to make this page for my mom:


Here's the test: I don't know if she reads my blog. She says she intends to but...you know, she's busy. Plus she has dial up. Things get in the way. So if my mom knows before next Wednesday what's coming her way, either she or my dad reads the blog.

Finally.

Good day

• My dog, though she still chews her feet, pulls hard to walk around the block in the afternoon.
  
• My mother-in-law's pancreatic cancer had clean edges, and it appears that it had not spread. Right now there is no chemo, just observations.
• No behavior reports for the boys.
• Rowan had been doing his homework at school so he doesn't have to worry about finishing it at home. (Really, I'm the worrier. I am awash in my children's elementary school paperwork.)
• Dominic has taken to wearing his goggles all the time at home because he "sees better" with them on. Okay.
• The first five memoirs I graded from my AP students were A's. I'm not an easy grader.
• Derick and I spent the afternoon reminiscing about our favorite days, based on a page call from Scrapbook Trends (I didn't tell him that). You know what? He remembers the dress I was wearing when he first saw me. He even remembers where I bought it. What an amazing guy.
  

It's all in the details

I teach 11th grade English. Right now we're reading the book Kindred by Octavia Butler. I was teaching students how to collect text details and events in order to develop a statement about theme.

The problem? Many were stuck in generalizations about the text, pointing out what tended to happen without pointing out one specific event. One student tried to excuse that, saying that it was totally OK to generalize. I asked him if, the next time he goes in for surgery, does he want to doctor to know the general area where the surgery is to occur, or does he want the doctor to know the precise place it needs to happen? That got some laughs, and I think the point was made: it's easy to deal with generalizations, but it's problematic if we don't get into the details.

For me, that's what I think of when journaling: the details. After I collect the details, I go from there to figure out my purpose: why do I want to create this layout? And usually at this point, my layout is born.

For example, I have some leftover photos from my Sculpture Garden trip this summer. I've done two layouts already, one documenting the trip (little journaling) and one about my sons' climbing habits. But I love these photos, so I want to scrap them. I wasn't sure why, so I started to write down details from the trip. Here's what I got:

• I went with the boys and my college friend Lisa
• Lisa was pregnant at the time, due around Labor Day (no lie)
• She ultimately gave birth to a boy
• My boys were typical that day, climbing, exploring, talking, goofing, etc.

After I got this far, I realized something: this was a trip with two gals and three boys. Three. She just didn't know it until she gave birth. And the afternoon with my boys doubtless gave her a glimpse of what being a mother of a boy is like.

So what will my purpose be? I will share to my friend (and to whoever else reads it) what it is like to be a mother of boys. It's fun, exciting, tiring, worrisome, energizing, and joyful. The details from this day revealed to me that I had something bigger to say about this experience, so I do have one more layout to create using these photos.

Didn't make the cut

The calls went out for Scrapbook Trends, and none of my pages were picked up this time. That's OK; I have a few coming out in the winter, so I'll give you the specifics on those when they are in print!

Here's some of the ones that I made:


This was for Lots of Photos. I could have submitted it for budget pages: I used a pen, half a sheet of BoBunny stickers, and a piece of My Mind's Eye paper.


Another Lots of Photos. I like the white space and the title.


This was for Blogging. I scrapped about meeting my blog friend Alexandra in Chicago. This may be my favorite layout--more girly than I normally can do.


A page about my. I love digging through my small scraps basket to find odd combos I like. And I love lists.

Blessings

My layout that I created to help me deal with this week.


And flowers my husband sent to me at school today. (The office ladies love him.) Such a glorious sight on a gloomy, grey day.

Yay me!

The week is doing better--my sons' behavior has evened out, so far it looks like the cancer is out of my MIL, Roswell is taking her medicine (though still chewing and licking). The only down spot now is that I have to give medicine 3 times a day to my cat, who had a tooth removed. She hides under my son's bed all day now. She has defeated me.

Regardless, I want to share two high spots:

1. Thanks Lonely Scrapbooker (Artemis, right?) for sharing this link. Featured layout on Stacy Julian's site!
2. I am up for Reader's Choice at CK. (My screen name is Buffy fan). If you wish to vote you can go here.

Three Stories

1. When I brought Rowan to school this morning, he asked me, "Want to see a miracle?" He pointed me down the hallway, so I walked down, trying to find the miracle. Rolls of paper? No. Poster? No. Clean bathroom? No--well, maybe. I looked back at him, and he had the cutest smile on his face, sort of impish, and he pointed, saying, "Up there."

I looked up, and hanging from the ceiling all the way down the hall were green bags made of papier mache, I think. He told me, "Those are chrysalis." The school does a butterfly project in the younger grades every fall, and his grade made these miracles.

2. After I dropped my cat off at the vet this morning to get her teeth cleaned, I turned left onto Elm Creek Boulevard. As I turned, a spider dropped next to my face, hanging from its thread. Inside the car. Now understand, I want to get this shirt: that's how I feel about spiders. I finished the turn trying to kill the spider without killing me.

3. Dominic requested grilled cheese with tomato soup for dinner. I told him we didn't have tomato soup, and he said, "You can make it. Just get a tomato, drop it in a pan, then stir it. Tomato soup."

Tough

This is kind of a hard time right now. Not just the constant correcting of papers, which I've been doing until I can no longer read, but a few other pressures too. For one, my mother-in-law was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and underwent surgery last Friday. (They seemed to have excised all the tumor, and they are doing more tests to be sure.)

My dog, an 11 year old American Staffordshire Terrier, is dying. Since last summer, she's been chewing her feet apart, and month after month of medication works for a while but then stops, making her sad and making us talk about when we will need to put her down.


These two issues are difficult enough, but it all compounded yesterday: my boys came home with three behavior reports from school yesterday. I have two boys. You can do the math. And to top it off, Derick is away on vacat--oops, working in Vegas with the software company he works for.

But I scrap, and so I used my hobby to persevere.

Write Click Scrapbook challenged us Monday to count our blessings, so I did that. I'll turn it in to a layout soon. And on Stacy Julian's color blog, she suggested a muted color palette with just one photo, one accent, and one word. I used an expression instead of a word, but otherwise followed the challenge to create this:


I felt a lot better after I made it.

Not too different

I had some strips of patterned paper lying on my scrap space for a while. I hate to throw them away, so without thinking if they went together, I put them together with a favorite photo on this layout:

That Stampin' Up! journaling tag had also been sitting around for a while.

Because I suffer from scrapper's guilt, I had to do a layout about my other boy too. I pulled a photo that had been sitting around for a while, put away the busy patterned paper I had been trying to force (unsuccessfully), and pulled out some Crate Paper paper and October Afternoon stickers I'd gotten recently. Here's what I did:


To do the journaling, I drew lines with a ruler, wrote, then drew over the pencil lines freehand with a pen. I like that they're evenly spaced without being too razor sharp.

Both of them on my lapdesk made me realize what I had done. Can you see it?


Yes, that's the same layout.

I know some people worry about that--they want to do something different. I guess I don't see why design has to be different. When these two pages get in their respective books, no one who ever wants a chocolate chip cookie from me again would tell me, gasping in horror, "But you did a similar design!" Really.

Inspiration from submission

A couple days ago was the submission deadline for Scrapbook Trends' April issue. I submitted a few, and though I would like to get at least one picked up, I've got to say that the submission process alone is beneficial.

Why? It encourages me to try new (or long dormant) products and techniques. It also gets me motivated to scrap photos that may otherwise not inspire me.

Here were the calls I submitted to:

• birthday (I submitted already created layouts for this)
  
• chipboard (ditto)
  
• lots of photos
• showcase (a miscellaneous category)
  
• my top ten
• blogging

Some I submitted a couple layouts, others just one. The ones I really want to get picked up are the lots of photos call, blogging, and my top ten. Those gave me the most fun time making them.

I'll post any that don't get picked up. Until then, here's a LO I have already posted that didn't get picked up last month:


It was for a glitter call. The submission call gave me creative inspiration to use product I had on hand and had not thought of using on this layout. Definitely made me stretch, but that's good.

Papers papers everywhere...

I have about 4 weeks left in the term I teach, and I am awash in papers. Yikes. I like reading them and seeing how the kids have (mostly) applied the lessons I've taught. What a great bunch of students I'm teaching now.

Still, it takes time, so the blog posts will be sporadic. As will the scrapping.

Rats.

Bonus points for hubby

Saturday I had a busy day. I got the oil changed in my car, graded papers, took both boys to a birthday party at the bowling alley, and gardened until my hand couldn't chop down any more dead perennials. When the afternoon came around, I was wiped, so doubt still a little tired from H1N1. I went and took a nap, missing a prime photo op: carving pumpkins.

This is where my husband earned major points. He took amazing photos of the boys throughout the process. The killer shots were after he'd carved the pumpkin. They were so good, I had to scrap them right away.

This was the first LO I did. I had bought a couple pieces of Making Memories Halloween paper when it went on sale at Archiver's a couple weeks ago. I hate to buy Halloween embellishments--it's only one day!--so I used a fall pumpkin accent I had with a few Halloween colored metal accents.

I used the other half of the die cut circle here. I cut the other piece of paper I bought by tracing it on another piece of Making Memories paper. I mounted it on purple cardstock, which Dominic calls "poison color." I think it's a reference to Pokemon, but I'm not sure. That's like a foreign language to me. To enclose the rough cut paper, I stitched around it. And I used another pumpkin and the rest of the Halloween journaling tags from last year.

This layout borrows a part of a title from last year's layout:

Again, I used Making Memories. I like their Halloween papers. I just need to exhibit restraint in purchasing embellishments, which is hard. You'll notice I did a similar thing with the same batch of Halloween journaling spots.

I still have their costume pictures to scrap. Some very nice shots which will be fun.