My least favorite scrapbooking task

I hate to journal on computer. I love to write, mind you, a lucky trait since I am an English teacher and all, but I HATE to sit down at the computer to scrap. Not sure why: maybe because my least favorite tasks with teaching involve the computer too.

I had a pile of pages I had to add journaling on yesterday, so I finally bit the bullet and journaled. I do not spend a ton of time selecting fonts; I tend to use Times New Roman, Gill Sans, and Arial, all of which come with Word. And learning about text boxes and leading (Thank you Cathy Zielske) has made my journaling look nicer.

One I'm submitting for publication. Here's the other two.

Sorry that I look like I'm possessed by Legion in those photos. I love my title for this LO though.

Don't read the journaling if you don't want to. It is a little sad. And thank you, Mous Earz, for the quote from the Little House book. It perfectly matches how I feel.

Scrapping at Archiver's

I got a phone call Monday from a friend at church. Her husband had the day off and she wondered if I wanted to come scrapping with her. My husband did too, so I went. This first layout I had started but finally got together enough mojo to put it to bed:


I have had that Magic Mesh for YEARS. I used the last of it on this layout. Those plant-like things I trimmed off a grassy plant I got at Michaels. There are many glue dots hidden within the reeds...

These next two I finished at home Monday night:

Yes, extreme sledding. I made use of the list I had made on Monday's post to build this page. Seriously, I have a bruise the size of an orange on my leg.

This next one I used two Studio Calico kits--this month's kit Orchestra, and that card comes from the first kit I bought, last December's Center Stage. I kept the card--had no use for it at the time--but decided now would be the time to use it.

Delightful holiday

I hope all of your holidays were memorable. Ours began a little melancholy: when the UPS guy rang the bell with our last Christmas package Thursday, no barking. And every time I dropped food on the floor, I automatically called, "Roswell!" That may become a family joke.

Still, Christmas day was wonderful. The boys were delighted with the gifts, Derick loved his sherry-cask aged scotch and his remote control R2-D2 the best, and I got two of these. I returned one and got supplies to go with it, along with some of the luscious new Basic Grey, Origins. Working with it makes me feel like I am in a spa.

We couldn't go sledding Christmas day because we were in the middle of a big three-day storm of soaking wet snow. "Soaking wet" means "heavier than a bowling ball with each shovelful," and the fact that we had to shovel three times made it infinitely more difficult. It was a big snow, though, evidenced by our being on the national news. Since most of that news is located on the East Coast, the stories were precious: "Midwest Gets Big Snow" for a few paragraphs, then a connection to what would happen on the East Coast. (Insert eye roll.)

Because of the frequent wet snow, we went sledding the day after Christmas, along with a healthy number of families from town. We go here for the free sledding (not the pay inner tube hill), and the sledding hill is HUGE, with many bumps. Not that any of us cared:

Speaking of bumps, here's the final injury checklist:

• three clocked heads
• two pulled-back fingernails
• one strained neck
• one sprained wrist
• two sore backs

As I mentally tallied that list, I got an idea for a layout: my favorite photos of each of us, plus the list under the title, "Extreme Sledding." Either that or "Going Downhill."

* Note: I finished the Jessica Sprague class Good-to-Great Workflow. I practiced on these photos in this post. I think they turned out very nice, considering it was cloudy and (of course) snowing at the time.

Ready

I made this layout with our tree from last year. I wanted to journal a lot about the significance of each ornament here, but I just decided to simplify the concept--who wants to read a ton about inanimate objects anyway?--and wrote the basics around the outer edge. I used my Coluzzle for the circles, then used leftover Christmas products for the rest. Our decorations are done, with the final exception of the stockings, which we hang before bed Christmas Eve.

We are just about ready for the holidays. I want to bake a lot, but I haven't had it in me; I'm a much more productive baker when Derick is here to keep the natives from going insane (and me, for that matter) while I bake. So we will be baking, getting last-minutes ingredients for pie, and waiting in eager anticipation for the Big Heap of Snow coming tonight. We started going sledding Christmas Day; I hope to do it again this year.

Tomorrow night will be the first in a while I will be home for Christmas Eve. The Chorale I sing in performs at the candlelight service, and I've had to go sing every year. Now that both Derick and I are in it, I told the conductor she had to pick one of us for the night; the boys are just too young to make it that late without a huge meltdown. She needed a low bass more than a high soprano for the song being performed, so Derick gets to sing while I get an early start on counting sugar plums.

Merry Christmas.

Holiday Gifts

I spent the morning working on Christmas presents--it's good to put my mind on busy stuff right now. My in-laws and parents basically ask for nothing, so I make them scrapbook pages of the grandkids. Here's a few older ones I made for them this past year:


Here's the layout I sent to my parents:


I like the dramatic background paper. It's so gorgeous, it doesn't need many embellishments. Still, I added a cluster of embellishments around the title.

This one I made for my in-laws. I liked clustering trees to add to the theme of family tree. And may my sister-in-law Marty forgive me, but I couldn't fit her name in the journaling tag. It was the whole family--except her.


I normally don't have an issue with sending layouts away, but I'm having trouble with these two. Gosh, I love them. Ah, well, the season of giving.

Tough decision

Roswell did not have a good weekend. She has not come out of her kennel; I have to give her water and food in there, and she doesn't always drink. Today she hasn't stopped shaking, her nose is cracked from dehydration, and she has multiple sores around her body, including a bloody nose. So it was with great difficulty that we decided to put her down tonight. We plan on burying her cremated remains under her favorite tree in the backyard.

Intellectually, I know that it is the best decision, but emotionally it was really hard to make the call. Was it too soon? Will she have better days ahead? The doggie dermatologist told me today she thought it was the best decision; there's no hope it will get better, and that thought helps. A little.

The image at the top is a card I bought yesterday. It made me smile, so I thought I'd share it. It's a Compendium card that I got at a local store called The Woods. I'm grateful for words and images that encapsulate so perfectly how I feel.

Keeping busy

Thank you for your well wishes. Roswell is slower, and I tend to put the food and water in her crate. The happy note for her is the fact that she has been prescribed four egg yolks a day to increase her protein intake. Plus, I give her all the fat I cut off my meat. When we had steak the other night, she was SOOOO happy.

We've been keeping busy with preparing for my church's Christmas Festival choral service. Derick is singing this year too, so every rehearsal where we have to bring the boys is an adventure, sort of like the Indiana Jones adventure when he was dragged behind the truck for miles. But in a good way. I have another solo, a lullaby sung to the baby Jesus. This is a running joke in our family: any time there is a Mary solo in choir, I am asked to sing it. If I have put $10 in the kitty for every time that's happened, I would be well on my way to buying a new computer.

I am starting my Christmas break on Monday. This year is a good one: we get two whole weeks. So like every year, I made up a list of what I will do in the next two weeks. Not the stuff I know I'll do, like get my hair highlighted (appointment Wednesday) or get the tailight replaced in my car (appointment Monday). Here's a sampling:

• wash the walls
• put together a mini-album for Roswell
• work out
• go sledding with the boys
• do my Jessica Sprague online photo editing class
• edit my vacation photos and send them to print
• ditto for my Christmas cards
• finish Christmas shopping
• download a new insurance card for my car so the next time a nice cop stops me for my taillight being out, I don't have to pray I can Blonde my way out of a ticket (that would be what happened to me last Thursday)
• *

These lists serve as motivation for me. They help me stay productive so I don't lose myself in the potential torpor of a two-week vacation. I will relax--did you see the sledding? I can't wait--but I always like to accomplish something inside my home, since the school year, grading tends to eat up a lot of time, leaving me little time to take care of some stuff at home. And here's a layout about sledding last year that I did using a Becky Higgins sketch:


Edited to add: Most of the products on here are SEI from last year's collection, and the ribbon is Stampin' Up! I'm proud of that snowflake. I used a Crafter's Workshop stencil and misted around it in brown. And since I always think of misting after I have adhered my photos, I put scraps of paper over the photos while I sprayed to protect them. It mostly worked.

*I couldn't bring myself to put it on the list, but I know we will be putting Roswell down after Christmas if she doesn't get precipitously worse in the next few days. We just don't want to do it before Christmas.

Cold corner in my heart

The cold corner I wrote about last week disappeared this weekend--it got downright warm, about 20 degrees! The cold corner returned this morning, as evidenced by the temp on the evening news:


Yes, it says -0 degrees. That's cold. The weather is supposed to warm back up into the twenties, which is nice, because the cold corner, though gone from the door, has settled in my heart.

Roswell is dying.

None of the medications have helped stop her chewing her feet apart. She's getting more gimpy and doesn't like getting up. Last weekend, we finally got an answer from the doggie dermatologist (yes, there are such things):

Liver disease. She has about 2-4 months left tops.

The doctor prescribed some pain meds, and we're going back for another blood test this weekend (last week's blood sugar was so low, it made the vet think it may have been a mistake; either that or her liver is much worse, which I'm sorely hoping is not true). The past few days I've been reminiscing and crying. Unfortunately, raising a dog means not just committing yourself to its life but also to its death, and it appears that time is soon approaching for Roswell.

I have a few ways I want to remember her, one of which is putting together a memory mini-album of all the things around the house that remind me of Roswell. Thank you, Alexandra, for the gift; when you gave it to me in October, you never knew how much it would help me deal with the sorrow right now.

Here's some layouts I have done about her recently and older layouts:




The last layout had been published in the final issue of Simple Scrapbooks. Unfortunately, I never got the layout back. I still wish I would get some apology or recompense from CK, but truth be told, a layout is a thing. The memory is still there, so I will remake this one layout. I don't have all the supplies, unfortunately, but I will make do.

At least it's above zero

When I woke up the morning, it was below zero here in Minnesota. We survived the blizzard yesterday (no school cancellations for us here), though Rowan and Dominic were unenthused when I took their pictures picking them up at school Tuesday.

Post-blizzard, we are now in the deep freeze. How can I tell? Because of this:


It's hard to tell what that it, but that's the lower corner of my front door. Yes, there is ice on the inside. That little corner tells me how cold it is outside. If there is snow inside, it is near or below zero.

I did a layout about that corner last year:

Sorry for the crooked photo. The photos on the layout are a little dull, so I added a bunch of snowflakes. 'Cause that's how it feels right now.

Brrr!

The biggest winner

I have a few shows to which I am devoted--one in particular, but there are a few I love on the air today (see sidebar). But I love The Biggest Loser, and I so enjoyed tonight's conclusion. Now, there is some staginess to it--sincerely, I want to whack the producer with my purse, whichever one decided to offer a tease right before the commerical (How much does he weigh? We'll see...after the break). Still, this finale may have been a perfect episode.

1. Marriage proposal--hooray, Alexandra and Antoine!
2. Second chance for Shay--and one that offers her money.
3. New baby for Sean.
4. Some amazing transformations, particularly Rebecca and Abby.
   
5. Redemption for scorned contestants (yes, Tracey and Julio--I'm talking about you).
6. Potential relationship?
7. Rock star winner--seriously, the second Danny came on stage, I knew he would win. Awesome.

And of course, the best thing about this show? The fact that these contestants are about changing their lives, not about making a name for themselves. Amazing.

No guilt

I feel little guilt about the occasional ordering of scrapbooking supplies online because of my husband's similar tendencies to Woot.


Yes, he wooted three times, all of which arrived the same day while he was gone on business. Busted. And the shipping alone on each totalled the cost of this, which I got last week from Peachy Cheap in 4 different colors.

Woot!

Same photos, different albums

In my last post, Artemis asked me about where my layouts go, specifically when I use the same photos on different layouts. Let me use the Sculpture Garden photos as an example.

I took a lot of photos, many good ones, at that outing. So I printed a lot, some of them enlarged. After I got them from the printer, I pulled one photo out and did a layout with it right away:

This one went in my son's album.

Next, I pulled my favorites and put together a two-pager for the family album:

While I was narrowing the photos for that layout, I noticed many of them involved my boys climbing, so I made this layout next, again for the family album.

I still had many great photos left. I blogged about the genesis for the next layout in this post, making this page about what it mean to be a mother of boys. Here is the layout:

I ended up putting that layout in my album.

Finally, I used remaining photos for a layout to put in my older boy's album, the layout I showed yesterday.

So I don't make it a point to use up all my photos, but this event created many stories for me, so I made many layouts using most if not all of the photos.

The island of misfit toys

I think Rudolph is going to be on TV this week. Wow, do I remember watching that show every year as a child. I want to sit my boys down to watch it, at least partially to get extra enjoyment out of the Yeti when they see Monsters Inc. again, but also to see that classic place, the Island of Misfit Toys.

I'm drawn to that island because the concept applies to my scrapbook supplies, and I have a feeling I'm not the only one. C'mon, in your stash, should there be an island of misfit (and forgotten) supplies? What would it take to get them off the island and put them to use?

This applies because I drew inspiration for a layout from some of those misfit supplies in my stash, specifically some brads I got a couple years ago from K & Co. and Autumn Leaves. I was putting my Big Brads in a new storage container, and they all didn't quite fit, so I pulled three and decided to make a layout. They were green, so I looked for green photos. I had some photos of my older boy in my particular at the Sculpture Garden (Lord, I got a lot of layouts out of that visit!), so I took them, grabbed some Kraft paper, and looked through my green patterned paper.

(Side comment: my productivity has increased since I sorted my brads, buttons, and paper into colors, I don't create all-encompassing color drawers like Stacy Julian--that's too messy for anal ol' me--but it helps to look through many supplies by color since that's how I scrap.)

I found a piece of shaped paper from Pink Paislee that I somehow ended up with two pieces of. I think it's Christmas paper, but that's OK. I trimmed the shapes and used them to bookend the photos. I left enough space for journaling and a title, and added some blooms to fill space. Confession: I never measure right the first time, so I always end up peeling up a photo or two to retrim them. To avoid damaging the photo, I turn the layout upside down and peel the layout off the photo.

Here's the end result:


So yes, this entire layout started with those three brads in the lower left. Funny!

Event pages

When I scrap events--especially summer touristy trips--I often use a very basic design and play around with embellishments to make it a little unique. For these two layouts, I did the same basic design, but I altered the title treatment and the journaling set-up.



For this next one, I went back to my "Lego layout" and built the photos on top of each other, then added the journaling and title to the side. To unify the pages, I added the strips of paper and transparency.