"And Away We Go!"

Sorry for the lapse in posting. I have had a fun month, attending my sons' butterfly fair at their STEM school, going away for a scrap weekend with friends to Pine City, and then finishing up some of the pages I started there. I'm also up to my ears in grading--two weeks left in the term!--and my foot is slowly healing. The bottom of my foot has healed well enough to start jogging, which is good, because Thursday I'm doing this.

This week I'll be blogging at Write Click Scrapbook about one of my favorite techniques: hand stitching on pages. I hope you get a chance to visit, read, and share!

Here's a page I made right before I went on my scrap retreat, using a kit from Studio Calico (can't remember which--either September or October. I think September--I killed that kit on the scrap retreat):

I love this photo. My mother borrowed it from my cousin, and I scanned it and printed it to use on a page about the phrase I now say when we leave on road trips, which came from my Grandpa John.  You can read the journaling here:

I got the idea for this design from this layout; I wasn't too fond of the paper, which I got in a kit, but I liked how it fit as the background of this nostalgic page.

Here's some details:

 

I love clusters. And mixed fonts.

Here's a close up of the photo turn, which is really a geotag stamp I embossed and added with a brad. Love that stamp.

Please check out Write Click Scrapbook this week--I'll share some of the cross-stitched projects from around my house so you can see a little of my first creative hobby!

How about you--do you have other creative ventures, or do you focus on scrapbooking and card making?

Well, here I am!

The summer is almost done, workshops are about to begin, so it's time I achieved my goal of starting a blog. So here I am.

A little about me...I teach high school students English, I am a wife, a very tired mother of two very active boys, a reader, a scrapper, a gardener. I grew up in Maine, went to Minnesota to attend college at St. Olaf (Um Yah Yah!), and now live and work here still.

I have been a crafter my whole life, first with cross-stitching, which I still do, then gardening when we bought our house in 1998, and starting in 2002 I scrapped. I still scrap, as you can see by my links. In the summer, my heart belongs to my garden, though. The photo on the right shows why. That's my big garden at its glory in July: heliopsis (false sunflowers), gooseneck loosestrife, purple coneflowers, asclepias (butterfly weed), liatris (gayfeather), Asiatic lilies, and right in the middle a daylily that I think is called "Happy Day." Every morning for a week I look out at my garden and see that bloom. Happy indeed.

Last night I scrapped for a few hours at Archiver's, so I'll post some of what I did tomorrow.