No, I haven't abandoned my blog :)

I really do remember I have a blog!

With Christmas coming, I have taken on way too many projects. Seems to be a yearly tradition lately! In the last three days, I have finished 75 Christmas cards, a wedding guest book for my little brother and his fiance, as well as putting on a calendar workshop, and I still have one more secret project to go...

Will I get it all done without going insane?

I guess you can be the judge!! ;)

Merry Christmas y'all!!

See you after the new year!

Go Check It Out!

My good friend from high school, Blaire, has a blog called Elliette Baby where she show cases some of her very cool, handmade baby items. In addition, she has tutorials for how to do different crafty things. This week she asked me to do a tutorial for her on making Christmas cards. I made these circle Christmas cards that are also great as tags. I have a link to her blog on my sidebar, so go check it out!

Event Calendar

This is the event calendar we will be making at my December card night - turned calendar workshop! The event calendars (and other products as well, actually) are from CTMH and you just add a topper for each month. I thought they might make fun Christmas gifts. Oh, and sorry, my super techno skills came into play again: the months are totally out of order, even though I had it all figured out so they would be perfectly in order! ;)

This is what each calendar page looks like,

just with the topper for that specific month on top. Then you just fill in the birthdays, anniversaries, etc., that you have each month and you can use it year after year! A great invention, I'm telling you.....

Christmas Gift Tags

These are the 3x3 inch Christmas gift tags

that we will be making at my card night this week. Should be fun!!

Christmas ALREADY?!?

I hope so!! Christmas can never come too soon, in my book!

These are the Christmas cards that I made for my church's Relief Society craft day that is this Saturday. I am making 36 kits for people to come put together. Hopefully they have fun!

A week of fun projects!

Thanks to the kindness of my husband and children, I was able to get a lot of fun layouts done this week! Bryan took Saturday off an let me enjoy a nice relaxing day of doing whatever I wanted! Isn't he the greatest? Thanks, Love!

This first layout Joshua helped me do about him. He picked the papers, wrote his name, and answered the journaling prompts. I ordered them from Close to my Heart, and they are so fun! I love seeing his answers and opinions on these things, and I know they are something we will always treasure! Especially how when I asked him about people that are special to him, his friend Claire came first and foremost, before any of his family, including his Mommy!! What's that all about? :)

This one is about the fateful day when Grace fell at the playground and came up with a bump the size of a golf ball on her forehead. I was so worried that she might have a concussion or something, but she just cried for a while and then went right on being her running-every-where, climbing-everything self.
Just some pics from Halloween a few years ago, finally getting around to scrapbooking them. I had to try out my fun new alphabet stamps from Close to my Heart.
And I think this is my favorite of the bunch. How can you resist a chubby baby face?!?
This is a wood pumpkin that I bought at Hobby Lobby and decorated with some paint, paper, ribbon, and buttons. Kind of fun to try something outside the scrapbooking box once in awhile. :)

October Card Night

Here are the cards for my October Card Night!

I used papers from a couple different CTMh paper packs to come up with a new color combo. I quite like 'em!

Lest you think I do nothing other than Scrapbook my life away . . . :)

It occurred to me that you folks probably think I eat, sleep and live scrapbooking, but amazingly that is not true. :) Don't get me wrong, I do love it, especially for the release that it gives me from the everyday grind of things, but there are other "favorite things" in my life!

First, my family:

I love these silly kids and I especially love that I get to be with them everyday, all day, through the good days and the bad! Of course if you ask me how much I love it on a bad day . . . :)

And of course my awesome husband who is not in the picture because he is slaving away at law school and work so I can be at home.

I also really enjoy cooking - especially trying a new recipe, such as this roll recipe we made, and having it actually turn out!
I love learning and I love helping my children learn new things (I have been working on letters with Joshua). I love their natural curiosity about things - it is a great reminder to me to always find something exciting about the small things of each day!

New Pages

I have been trying to get these posted for a while now, but my computer has been on the fritz all week. So sorry for the poor pictures, but I want to try and get these up before it freezes again. I really do love technology! :)

This halloween page was for a contest on the AC Bailey site. It was nice to finally get these pics scrapbooked - I'm only three years behind! Isn't the little pumpkin cute? Got that idea from the new Scrapbooks, Etc. magazine - love it!

These are some of my favorite pictures of Joshua, taken back when we lived in a place where the leaves really turned colors in the fall! :) I miss fall!

This layout was a little experimental. I dry embossed the circles on vellum and then turned the vellum over and colored in the back side with different colors of blue chalk. Made for the perfect bubbles!

This last one I made using a sketch off of the blog called Sketches! {by tamara} It is one of my new favorite blogs. She posts a layout sketch, a card sketch, and a recipe each week, as well as examples made with each. Lots of fun inspiration there! I've got a link to it on my sidebar, so go check it out!

Super Cute Cards :)

This is the set of six cards that my friends and I made at my last card night. We get together once a month for a card workshop and it is soo much fun! We almost got rained out this time (record rain here - almost 8 inches in one day!), but three brave souls still ventured out to my place and we had a great time. We made six birthday cards, three for boys and three for girls. I used a new paper kit from Close to My Heart called "Magic Moments." It is seriously stinkin' adorable and great for boys or girls because their patterned paper is double sided now, so it was perfect!

This was my first attempt at sending something in to try and get it published. Obviously it failed, or it wouldn't be posted here!! I still think it is a great layout, you just never know what people are looking for. I'm really not surprised or disappointed, though, as it was my first attempt ever, and it was kinda fun to try to get something published, so I think I just might try some more! I do have this killer cute card that might be worth sending in. . . I guess I'm only out the time it takes to email a picture, so what can it hurt to try? Wish me luck . . . :)

A *new* page :)

Okay, so it's not really new, just hasn't been posted before. Isn't he a cutie?!? Back when he was a little tiny boy, now he's all big . . . dang it! :)

What a feat!!

Here they are, all 110 baby announcements I made for my brother and sister-in-law and my new nephew Stanley.

These were very fun to make and I thought they turned out so cute!

And here is the handome man himself! Isn't he adorable?

We are so happy to have him in the family!!

I'm not really a slacker . . . I'm just on a three month vacation!

So I know I haven't posted in a long time, and since I'm pretty certain I'm the only one that looks at this, I haven't been to worried about it. But because I don't want to look like a slacker to anyone who might come upon this blog, I thought I'd better post my explanation. The kids and I have been staying in Utah at my parents while Bryan is in Denver for an internship. I haven't been doing much scrapbooking because I have been working on one mega project of making 110 baby announcements for my bro- and sis-in law. They turned out so cute and I am quite proud of myself for accomplishing such a feat, but I don't want to spoil their surprise by posting them before they get to send them out, so y'all are just going to have to wait in suspense . . .

"Camping" Projects :)

So, no, we are not really camping while staying here in Amarillo, but in a way I kind of feel like I am! The apartment is old, but plenty nice enough, so that is not it. It is just really weird to try and do the normal things with out all of the normal supplies, you know? It reminds me of when my family used to take three week road trips when I was a kid. We'd stay in the trailer the whole time, and there wasn't a lot of storage space for us to pack things, so we just took the basic necessities and made do with what we had.

That is what I feel like now. I have very few cooking utensils and only the most basic of ingredients, so that is an adventure. Yesterday I made chocolate chip cookies from a mix, because it was cheaper to buy the mix than all of the ingredients, and baked them on a pizza pan because it is the only pan I have!! Last night Bryan made pizza, but about died when he had to cut it with a knife!! They claimed the kitchen was fully equipped, but I'm not so sure I would agree!

Anyway, it's the same with my scrapbooking. Although I was able to bring quite a bit of my supplies in my rolling tote (a fabulous invention!! I've really never used it much until now, but boy am I glad I have it!) it is still not the same as having EVERYTHING out on the table in front of me or on the shelf behind me, like I am used to. I still managed to complete a few layouts this week though! So here are my "camping layouts:"

The story behind the overalls layout is that I bought them years ago when I found them on clearance at the Gap. They were too cute to pass up, even though Bryan and I were still a LONG ways from dating and I didn't have a little girl to put in them. But now I am glad I bought them and held on to them for all these years - they look soooo cute on Grace and are one of my favorite outfits she has!!

This layout was for a challenge using only cardstock, no pattern papers, and at least three different stamps. I love stamps, so I had fun with this one! I think I ended up using seven different stamps!

I have had a lot of fun with this latest batch of projects!! I've been breaking in to some new techniques I haven't tried before and some supplies I have had forever, but haven't used, and it has been a lot of fun!!

These cards were for the card challenge at AC Bailey. I had to make three cards that matched but were not the same. I used up some of the Making Memories printed cardstock that I had had for a couple of years and never used, so that was good (Yes, I am very talented at hoarding scrapbook supplies, and I admit it!). I also did a little distressing with white paint around the edges, which was a new technique for me. I loved it so much, I did it again on this next layout!

These two layouts were for the digital hybrid layout challenge. The idea was to create a layout that had both digital aspects and traditional paper scrapbooking aspects to it. I had never done anything more digital than print out journaling for a page, so this was a new one for me, but it was sooo fun! I had to do two pages to experiment with it. I used our Photoshop Elements program to 'dress up' my photos. For the first one I added a sepia torn paper frame to the photo and then added the star graphics in the corner.

On the second page I adjusted the color of the picture so that it was black and white around the edges and color in the middle where her eyes are, since they were the focus of my page. Then I added the flower graphics around the edge of the picture.

I have also finished a super cute fabulous Mother's Day gift, but since it's not Mother's Day yet, I'll have to post it later. Don't want to give away our secret!! It was something I hadn't done before and was a bit of an experiment, but I am sooo happy with how it turned out, so You'll have to watch for that one next week ;)

And this is just a favorite recent picture of me and my adorable kids that are my favorite subjects to scrapbook!! I really wouldn't have much of a hobby with out them because I can't imagine there is anything that is as fun to scrapbook as cute, silly kids! We had spent all morning at the Ranching Heritage Center for their Ranching Day, which was a lot of fun but exhausting, so we came home and crashed on the couch!