Chairbound

This has been a week that  has left me in my chair more than usual but too exhausted right now to do much with that chair time, especially scrapbook. Here's what happened:

I have had a fairly big mole on the bottom of my foot--the arch--for a while. My doctor checked it out, said it didn't look cancerous, and told me just to "keep an eye on it," an interesting prospect, for how often do you really look at the bottom of your feet? Still, I periodically did, until I noticed this summer that the edges looked a little blurry. My doctor recommended I see a dermatologist, who recommended I get it removed. Not that they thought it was cancerous; normally, they would biopsy, then remove only if it's bad, but the doctor told me that they don't like to operate on the bottom of the foot more than once--and now that I've had that happen, I can see why.

Wednesday, the doctor showed me what she would do: she had drawn a circle around the mole, then a diamond shape around it. The diamond, she said, was how they would close the wound. She said it would be like a dart. Did I know what a dart was? Why, yes I did; I've seen Silence of the Lambs.

The surgery was minor, though for the record, the table was made for someone SIGNIFICANTLY shorter than I am. The surgery was alright; the shots didn't hurt nearly as bad as had been warned, and I read my book through the whole procedure. I was gimpy and swollen, though, and she warned me to stay off my feet for a couple days.

Now, if you're a mother or a teacher, those are hard things to do (not just mothers and teachers, I suspect!), but I did manage to get to my car, get my boys to choir then violin then home that night.

The next morning when I got up at 5:30 like usual, I went to change the bandages like I'd been told. They were awfully red, and the more I peeled off, the fainter I got. When I saw the dart, I told my husband that I was feeling faint and I sat down. He teased me, asking if I'd be like his brother who passed out at the sight of his own blood. And that is when I passed out.

I was out for maybe five minutes. When I got up, I was still woozy and had to call in sick for the day. It took me until about 10:30 to recover fully. (We figured my fainting was a result of low blood sugar, low blood pressure, which is normal for me, and the sight of the blood and dart.) I spent the day grading and scrapbooking and off my feet, like I was supposed to.

Two days later, my foot is still sore. I've borrowed crutches from my school nurse and am glad my mom left her ice pack here when she returned home to Maine. My foot is better today, though, and I haven't passed out in a couple days, so I'm good.

Here's a page I worked on while I have been chairbound:

I collected all of the reading photos of my boys from this past summer on this page. (My favorite photo is the one of my son asleep after reading Shel Silverstein, a bedtime favorite of his!) I used the remnants of my September Studio Calico kit on this page. Almost done with that kit! I'll post the journaling later for you to read it. I love this story.

ETA: Here's the journaling:

Summer of 2012 will go down in history as the summer my boys became Readers. They fell in love with Shel Silverstein, and Dominic often fell asleep reading him. We regularly went to the library, mostly visiting the graphic novels. Dominic fell in love with the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series and begged to buy the copy he could never find at the library. I agreed and told Rowan I’d get him a book too, but it had to be a chapter book. He grumped but eventually picked The Unwanted, and he’s just about done, a rarity for him and chapter books. This fall they kept reading, both boys returning to their unfinished Harry Potter books and still going back to the library for more. In the words of the Doctor, “You want weapons? We’re in a library! Books! The best weapons in the world!”

Family tree

A few years ago my family went to Minnehaha Park in Minneapolis. It was a park with a long family tradition; many years ago, a couple years after I was born, the family gathered for a family photo:

The email invitation for the party included this photo on it, and at the new reunion, we recreated the photo. (Just in case you're wondering, my mother is in the middle row on the left, and I am the one on her lap.)

Since then, I've wanted to make a page with both photos side by side. Recently, I was able to scan the original, so I printed it and put it together with the more recent photo. Here's the page:

I used Studio Calico's September kit with it. I'm nearing the end of the kit, so I didn't have many embellishments; however, one of the kits I got came with a leaf stamp. I thought it could double as a tree, so I stamped the green part for the leaves, then the veins in dark brown as a trunk, then used a Zig embossing Pen on the edges, scattered some Zing embossing powder in Leaf, then embossed. Here's how it looks:

I don't do many family tree layouts, but this one, I wrote about the family history in Minnehaha Park and how almost forty years later the family tree has grown, which you can clearly see in the same place in the park. Amazing.

The life and death of creative ideas

I have a notebook with pockets that I bought at Target where I keep track of my creative ideas. I like the pockets so I can keep memorabilia or master lists I might need; I can also keep photos in them to plan pages if I'm going somewhere (like taekwondo to watch the boys). I post some sticky notes on the inside cover and list page ideas when I get them, either spontaneously or when I'm browsing photos on PSE, deciding what to print. 

I did that with the following page:

I was poking around an iPhone app I use when jogging, MapMyRun, and discovered I could find out how far I'd run this past summer. When I added it all up, I was surprised to find I'd run 131.27 miles. (Somewhere on the trails by my house I'd left 12 pounds behind.) I needed to make a page about this accomplishment, so I printed an iPhone photo from a 5K my family ran in August (I didn't want to take a photo special) and made the following.

I had these big numbers in a Studio Calico kit and decided to use them for this page, along with the map and number paper. (Note: I rounded down because the big numbers only came with one digit. Guess I should have run another mile!) Here's some details:

 

I used this page on the Thinking Through Design lesson on adding dimension to pages. You can see how many accents I popped with Dimensional stickers. Even the photo!

Back to the creative journal: When I finish pages I've logged in my journal, I cross them off the list. But some ideas stay on that list for a long time. A loooong time...

What happens with those ideas? Sometimes I just let them go. I had been excited to do them once, but not anymore. I might even have printed photos for them, but I think it's OK to let creative ideas die. They die a good death. It's OK.

Other times I leave them on there and the page eventually gets made. Here's one of them:

 

 

 

I went to CHA Winter and Summer in 2011 representing Ella Publishing and had printed photos, intending to make a page about each event. I never did, though I made minis of both. That will usually make me abandon the idea, but this one kept nagging at me. I wanted to make the page! So I pulled out some Jillibean Soup papers I'd pulled when I intended to apply for the design team( I never did--regrets! Ah well, next year) and got to work.

Here's some details:

Please know I corrected that errant gem!

The Studio Calico word bubbles I backed in pink paper.

I liked using the photo for part of the title and the calendar for the journaling. By the way, those were mistable Thickers. I bent them prying them off my cardboard box I mist in. Next time I'll put them on wax paper in the box. Hopefully they'll bend less.

So here's my question to you: how do you keep track of ideas? How do you plan? And how about letting creative ideas die--do you? Or do they get life support? :-)

New galleries up at WCS and Elle's Studio

The first of October has come and gone very swiftly. It's homecoming week at the high school I teach at, and the year keeps getting busier. Here's the pages that popped up in some galleries this week:

I posted this LO as a page for Write Click Scrapbook, inspired by Pinterest. I found an old pin from  the Indigo Bunting which gave me ideas for both design and content. It was seriously fun to make. (Circles!)

Next was my gallery for Elle's Studio:

 

This was a project I don't typically do--home decor--mainly because I have two boys who don't truly appreciate the concept of "decor." Still,  I found this pumpkin at the Target Dollar Spot and thought I'd dress it up for October.

  

Probably my favorite page. I love Halloween products, and I have a ton, but I wondered what it would look like if I used tags in pace of patterned paper. I used a bit of patterned paper as a mat, then a bit of striped patterned paper along the left, but the rest are tags. Sigh.

 

 

Sometimes I like to collect photos I love and put them on a page together. Here I picked a bunch of goofy photos and used them. (God knows I have enough goofy photos to scrap from now until I die. But that's OK.) A simple design, and I loved layering the tags with dimensional stickers for interest.  Plus, every single photo makes me smile. And that's good.

Thanks for looking at my pages and projects! How's your October looking--as busy as mine? :-)