Simple and Sweet

Hello there! How are you? I am...tired! :)
Grace and I spent most of the day at Joshua's school for field day. It was very fun! Tug of war, relays, a water slide, and lots and lots of time in the sun!
I really enjoyed seeing JBG with his school friends and it was nice to visit with some of their parents, as well as his teacher. He has had such a great teacher this year, I just couldn't be happier! It is hard to believe that the school year has just a couple of days left. I am glad, though, because that means we will be heading to Utah soon for my sister's wedding, and I am so excited for that I can hardly stand it! Aren't weddings so fun?!

Quick crafty share:
I have a couple of cards I made for our moms on Mother's Day. They were super simple, but I thought they turned out cute! I had premade card bases from CTMH, and all I did was paint around the edges, add a punched out butterfly (Martha Stewart), and stick on a few letters (SEI)! Simple and Sweet. :)

Well, that's about it for me right now. I hope you have a wonderful week and I will try to be back with something a little more exciting before I head out of town!

bye-
JAG

Artistic

Hello and Happy Friday! How I love/live for the weekends! :)

Before I show you the latest layout I've made, I wanted to show off this beautiful piece of art by my Gracie girl. I bought an art easel from Ikea and we have been having lots of fun! This was her first masterpiece. It is our family. I love how we are under the rainbow - - seems so idyllic, doesn't it?! And look, she has been practicing writing her name, too! This girl is so smart it kinda scares me. ;) She has this thirst for learning new things, which I love and I want to follow her example! The other day we went to story time at the library and the for the craft the kids got to decorate sticker books. Grace couldn't just color and stick the stickers in...no, she had to write a whole book! All about flowers. What a fun girl!



This is a layout that I made for the Color challenge on the Get Picky Challenge blog. The challenge was just to use the colors yellow, blue, and white...not too hard since that is one of my favorite combos! I used some of my favorite bald baby pictures of Grace. Loved that bald head and blue eyes!

Thanks for stopping by and have a wonderful weekend!

JAG

An Oldie but a Goodie

Hey, just a quick layout to share.
I was going through some pictures last night to get some ready to print and I found a couple of layouts that I made a while ago...like over a year ago...so I thought I would share! I love this one of Grace on Halloween 2009, it is still one of my favorites. I just love this picture of her!

For this layout I used papers from Pink Paislee, Prima flowers, CTMH alphabet rubons, and American Crafts Thickers. I also cut our the word "little" and the leaf vines on my cricut.

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So...I have been spending the last, umm, three months I think it has been, painting, reorganizing, and decorating my scrapbook room. I am very slow, but it is almost done!! I am very excited to have my own little peaceful space. I love the wall color, it is so relaxing to me. Sometimes when we get a little crazy around here I just sneak into my room for a few minutes and sit there and look at the walls! It calms me right down and I can get back to the craziness. :) I still have things to hang on the walls and a few boxes of things I am trying to decide what to do with, but once I sort through all that I will post some pictures.

Have a great day!
JAG

Bella Blvd. Giveaway!

Hey y'all!
I was just taking a minute to surf a few blogs and I came across this awesome giveaway on the Bella Blvd blog! The winner gets the entire Sophisticates collection...Paper, chipboard, flowers and all! How awesome would it be to win that prize?! Check it out on their BLOG. Maybe one of us will be the lucky, lucky winner! :)

So how is your Saturday going? It is pretty quite and peaceful here right now....which is lovely.
Bryan and Grace fell asleep on the couch watching the OKC Thunder play the Memphis Grizzlies. I got a really cute picture of that! Joshua is playing with his cars and is completely in his own world. I love to listen to him play, it is so cute!

I hope you have a great weekend and that your Mother's Day is especially fabulous!

JAG

Hi!

So I decided to be a good blogger and actually post something this week....haha!
Maybe someday I will be a good blogger, but I wouldn't hold your breath! :) Too many other things to do............
at least it seems like there are a lot of other things to do.
Do you ever have those days were you know you don't just sit around doing nothing all day, and yet at the end of the day it seems like you haven't accomplished anything? I've had a string of days like that lately. I love spending time reading books and playing games with the kiddos, but then sometimes at the end of the day when there is nothing obviously finished or improved I get frustrated and feel like I have been lazy. But then on the other hand, I really don't want to spend so much time cleaning, etc. that I miss the time with my kids and I KNOW that I am accomplishing things by spending time with them....in fact I am accomplishing the most important things. But still, sometimes it is hard at the end of the day when you don't see immediate results...and the laundry is still piled high!
My endless dilemma, it seems...probably the same dilemma most moms face! :)

Anyway, here is a layout that I created a while back. The pictures were taken by my father-in-law in 2009 for our Christmas card. I love these pictures!
For this layout I used the "For the Record" collection kit from Echo Park. I also attempted a little misting with the red ink....I think I need to practice that one some more!

I have also been venturing a bit further into the photography world lately....meaning I finally took took the D-90 off the automatic settings and learned to use it in manual mode!!! I know, it only took two years, right?! :) But I am loving the results and I feel like I am really creating good photos now, not just getting them by default because I have a good camera. My poor father-in-law had tried to explain it to me several times, but I wasn't getting how to use my camera to get the results I wanted. Then a couple weeks ago I found this digital book called "Say No To Auto!" by Kristen Duke. I bought it, downloaded it, printed it and within a half hour had the basics figured out - -amazing!

I wanted to learn how to use the manual settings because a girl in my ward, Jackie, had asked me to take some senior pictures for her. She has been very patient and endured nearly five hours total in front of my camera (I took nearly 1,000 pics), but we have got some photos that I am really pleased with....hopefully she is, too! :) She is a beautiful girl, so really, my job was easy!

Here are a few of my favorites:

***this last one is my favorite!!***

Well thanks for stopping by. Hopefully I will be back soon!

cross your fingers... :)

JAG