Who would have thought...Looking back at the beginning of the year

Now that Distance Learning is in full swing in Minnesota, I am busy all day long, setting up my classes, assessing student work, emailing (lots of that!), and Google meeting. As a result, I'm not scrapbooking as much. I'll share what I make as I finish.

In the meantime, I thought I'd go back to two pages I made for Simple Scrapper in January to start the year:

This page is actually really important right now. I looked back on the last year and some struggles we went through and reframed them as positives. I'm finding myself doing that a lot nowadays, of course, taking small sips of gratitude as the day progresses.

Craft-wise, I love the stitching template. It comes from a misting mask from Studio Calico, but you could achieve the same effect with a ruler and a paper piercer.

I used some flowers that I tore off a greeting card to use. I like the effect.

Next is a page about an event that broke my heart last year, the sudden death of my dog Lola:

For me, pages about loss are also pages about memory. I want to remember them, so I like recording the great things we experienced. In this case, my dog Lola in December stopped moving and eating, so we took her to the vet, where we discovered she was suffering from blood inner chest cavity, more than likely from a heart tumor. There was no end available that did not include terrible suffering, so we said her goodbyes. As she passed, I reminded her of all the terrific adventures she'd been on as a part of our family. The journaling here basically recounts what I said. That is what I want to carry in my heart.

Craft-wise, I ended my journaling with perhaps my favorite memory, one that the right hand photo shows. I think ending with the best memory is a good way to commemorate tough things.

Scrapbooking the year: 2018

I recently went on a scrapbooking retreat. I do every January, and this year I completed my 2018 albums for the family.

Last summer I did a big reorganization/purge of scrapbook pages. I took every page out and organized by year, tossing those that were not meaningful. (Some I put aside to redo, either to make more concise or to reduce business.) I'm in the processor making labels and tags for the cover and bindings, and I plan to buy some albums to replace ones I have to make the look more uniform and to occupy less shelf space.

Long story, but last fall I went though my photo files from 2018 and ordered photos to finish telling my stories from that year. I made the pages at the scrap retreat. Here are some of the ones I've finished so far:

This one was perhaps my favorite, an amalgam of all the weekend outing photos I took of me and my husband. I love the bright colors in it.

This is a layout of a vivid maybe not great memory. Home opener series in sub-freezing temps. I couldn't make it to the end of the game, ergo chilly colors. Hopefully you get the title.

More and more I'm liking to print photos I love then figuring out what to do with them. I had photos from a few girlfriend weekends at The Manor, so I put them together onto a page. I'm loving using Project Life cards either in full or punched out.

This is a similar layout but more poignant. We recently lost our dog to a sudden and terminal illness. I took three character shots I'd never put on a page and scrapbooked her personality.

This was the first page I made at the retreat. I used up an old Ali Edwards kit for it because I loved the colors.

This page is an example of one I've been making more of recently, one put together with photos my husband or son shares with me. This was from the time I was in Maine helping my parents with my younger son. Here's what my husband did with my eldest while I was gone. Printing photos in standard sizes like 4x3 made this page easy to put together.

And this is what I was doing while I was in Maine! I used an About Me PL card for the page and picked pretty papers.

Here's my youngest around the same time. Not really a story, just my favorite photo I took while I was in Maine.

Finally, a page about my eldest in one of his last piano recitals. He still plays but is too busy for lessons.

Thank you for visiting! I have some 8.5x11 pages to share next time. I've been doing more of those for my smaller stories.

May pages for Simple Scrapper

Now that spring has arrived, I'm draw to clean lines and open space on my scrapbooking pages. I practiced that with these May pages for Simple Scrapper. The first celebrates the first time my son flew his birthday drone:

Dominic's grandpa, a retired Navy pilot, has always given him flying remote toys, which he loves. This one we took out to a local park on his birthday to fly. It was windy (check out my husband's beard!) so it was difficult to maneuver, but it was fun.

Because I love stitching, I placed the photos in such a way so that I could draw a "flight" line between the photos to create some motion. The paper airplane I cut out from the vintage piece of Cosmo Cricket paper I found in my stash.

(Side note: my older son picked the patterned paper and the stitching colors. He's got an eye for color!)

The next page involves my dog's secret stash that is hidden behind what we call the magic door:

We keep Lola's food in the front closet, which we have to go into for many things. Any time we do, she is RIGHT THERE, tail wagging, all pert and expectant. She's not a poser, so I couldn't take a good photo of that look, so I found the cutest, most longing look I could find from past photos to scrap.

I'm not sure why, but I think of blue-green-orange as nice pet colors, maybe because they go well with Lola's brown coat. The orange buttons in the title fit that color scheme, plus solve the problem of my having run out of O's. Sigh. Since this page was about magic, I added some sequins sort of as fairy dust across the page.

Thank you for visiting and checking out my pages! Please visit Simple Scrapper to see all that membership offers--monthly sketches and digital templates, story starters, and a digital magazine!

February scrapbooking layouts for Simple Scrapper

Now that January is almost over, winter is that much closer to being over too! Living in Minnesota, I love me some winter, but I love snow more than cold, and we've have little snow and irregular cold too. Sigh. Still, we had one nice spell of winter snow but not too much cold, enough to enjoy an outing. Here's a page I made with a sketch and story starter from Simple Scrapper:

This was a one page sketch I stretched to two to get more photos in. Maybe because I'm thinking about green, but I felt the need to put some green on this wintry page, along with the white, blue, and brown, a perfect combo for a nature outing. 

You'll note I used the map from the nature center as patterned paper on the page. I've started to enjoy doing that. It didn't fit across the 12x12 paper, of course, so I trimmed bits of the map from the unused portion and added them underneath the doily on the right to complete the spread.

I don't add sequins a lot, but sometimes the are the perfect color accent, especially since they remind me of glints of snow and ice.

The next page I made for Simple Scrapper again uses green and white and brown, but the photos come from last summer on a page I made about some neighborhood girls who love my dog:

I've used the term "Lola's fan club" to describe them to my husband, so I made it the title of my page.

Thank you for visiting today! Please go check out Simple Scrapper and look into membership. The community, the classes, and a monthly magazine complement the story starters and sketches that you see I used. All of this makes scrapbooking so much more fulfilling and refreshing.

I'll be back a few more times this week with pages from my other teams, as well as the rest of the layouts I made on my scrap weekend in January.

Welcome, summer!

We had a wonderful first week of summer break. Here's the evidence:


Rowan sent his first email this weekend to his friend spending the summer in China. He told him about going to see the Green Lantern. While typing, he asked me how to spell "guess," "usual," and "went." I only chided him about having to ask about "went," but after all the tricky words with u's in them, maybe he thought it could be spelled "wuent." English spelling is tough.

Derick got himself a brisket to BBQ at Osseo Meats. Apologies to Vegetarians, but for Derick, grilling something all day long while having a beer and watching baseball is life perfected.

While Rowan was at taekwondo, Dominic and I went to meet Scott Baker of the Twins. He's way taller IRL than he looks on TV. And he pitched an awesome game on Saturday a few hours after we met him!

(That's Dominic's new swim shirt, a la Target. He would wear it every day if I'd let him.)


On Father's Day, Derick played Go Fish with the boys. Old fashioned fun.

For Father's Day, we went to eat brunch at Famous Dave's in Calhoun Square. They have an AMAZING Sunday brunch. We hadn't been for years, and it was still good. Sadly, the hash browns didn't seem to have brisket in it anymore, but they still had the huge fruit tray, a variety of breakfast meats, and (my favorite) waffles with apple butter, praline sauce, and whipped cream. Mmmm...

We had a bit of a wait, so we went across the street to Magers and Quinn and got a couple books for the boys. The one that hyped them up was this one:

The Book With a Hole. That's the title. If you have boys, get this book. Girls would probably like it too, but boys definitely would.

Dominic got balloons at Byerly's, just because he was wearing a Twins shirt. Nice.

This was an almost dream for Lola. Look at the size of the bones she found! Sadly, Mom (me) didn't buy it for her.

We found out this weekend that she had worms--the only down part of the start of summer--so we had to take her to the vet, which is why we were in the Bone aisle. It took a few times for her to get the medicine down, but she's feeling better, as you can see:


Just a thought: If you haven't done a page about your life right now, maybe try doing a little recap: things that make you happy, things that went well, things that are driving you crazy right now, and so on. I could easily turn these photos into a grid and do a quick page on my life right now. What memories!

Meet Lola

It's been a year and a half since we had to put down Roswell because of her liver disease. Her death left a hole in my heart, but gradually we knew it was time to look for another dog. Several things happened that serendipitously led us to this little girl being cuddled by Dominic:


1. Passing by a local Petco, I noticed that they would be hosting a pet adoption June 11, the day after school got out. The timing was so perfect it felt like it was meant to be.

2. Derick found the name of the rescue group, Homeward Bound, and we had perused the avilable dogs to find ones we liked. A day or two before the 11th, Derick asked me to look again, since new dogs were coming in. I saw a dog whose picture I hadn't noticed before, a Shepherd mix named Daisy. She looked jaunty with ears askew. I liked her.

3. As we waited for the dogs to be brought into the store, I met Daisy as she was walked in. She was obviously a sweetheart.

4. We test drove two dogs, taking them outside for a walk and trying to play with them. They were nice, but neither wanted to play, which was a problem for my boys. While we were outside, I saw a couple with Daisy, so I thought we'd lost our chance with her.

5. When we went back indoors, Daisy was back in her cage. I told Derick she was the one, so we took her outside to play. And she played. She was a love.

Dominic came up with the name Lola, named after a girl in his class who I hope never learns we named our dog after her. (Rowan had come up with the boy name, had we adopted a boy dog: Killebrew.) I like the name, though every time I tell people that her name is Lola, I then proceed to hear this song for an hour.

Lola is about 5 months old, but she's already mostly house and crate trained. Now we're teaching her her new name and some basic commands. Right now she's mastered "Go get your toy," which we need because her definition of a toy is much larger than our definition.

We had a funny moment this afternoon when she trotted into the room with Derick's hiking boot hanging out of her mouth. I took it away, she left, and she returned with the bathroom rug. I took it, and she came back with the kitchen rug! I then took out a tennis ball and played fetch until she was tired.

She's a love, though. When we got her home, we gave her a bath:

Doesn't she look so forlorn? All the good crusty doggie smells were taken away from her coat!

Here we tried our first walk. She's not a natural with a leash. That will take time.

After we came home, she lay on my legs and fell asleep. I didn't have to heart to move her.

I'm enjoying thinking about these next few weeks of summer, taking her to the park, taking her camping, and teaching her that her name is Lola.