Gwen

Project!

The title of my post, in my head, is Alicia Silverstone in "Clueless" when she gets to do a makeover - complete with bouncing up and down and hand motions. lol. But, while my project doesn't involve make-up, it IS a makeover of sorts and I'm kind of excited. I pulled together all the stuff to do it... it's going to take a bit, but I can't wait to play. Part of it may or may not turn out as planned, but it's all good. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? And if it turns out like I think it will, it's going to rock.

As to how it started, last night I was having trouble sleeping - my brain wouldn't shut up. And part of what was running through it had to do with the window treatments in my bedroom. What I have is okay, but it was kind of a stop-gap until I could do something cool. So, since I couldn't sleep anyway, I pulled out my iPad and sat in bed at 2am looking for ideas. I found this:

I fell in love. And funny enough... after I decided this was part of my plan, I fell asleep! I'm going to do some bead strands mixed with orange and red curtain panels (which I already have) - so it will be turquoise, orange, and red. But that's just part of it - and will probably be pretty fast. The other part is what I'm not sure will turn out, but it will be super awesome if it does.

A little sneaky peek:

I'm off to get started... we'll see how it goes :)

Project Life - Week 20

I can't believe it's week 20... I did a double take at work today when we were talking deadlines and I realized that Memorial Day is next week! Wow...

Anyway, here's the layout for last week. Not a lot... as you can tell by the main photo, it was all about being sick as a dog. lol.

All the digital supplies are by Gennifer Bursett at Design House Digital. Mostly the Favorite Things 2 collection and a few other odds and ends.

And since I'm still not totally well yet, I think I might make it an early night. That's sounding quite lovely!

Sunday Scrapping

More like weekend scrapping, really... I started this layout on Friday and just got back to it this afternoon. I pulled out my Design Your Life class to keep working on chapter 2 about asymmetrical balance. This is the 2nd sketch in the chapter - a 2-pager that required us to spread photos across the gutter of the page. I know it bothers lots of people to do this, but as long as I don't cut the photos in a weird place it doesn't bug me.

For this one, I dug into my pictures from Spain and decided to use some from our visit to the steel showroom in Toledo where I bought my sword. I used pieces of my last 3 Studio Calico kits along with some Papertrey Ink stamps - the Delightful Doilies set.

I decided to use some blocks of patterned paper instead of doing all photos (I didn't have that many I wanted to use, and I don't really like nothing but photos - I need embellishment!) I also switched the placement of the horizontal and vertical photos on the left - it really just worked better for the photos I had to do it that way.

Before going, I knew there was a good chance I'd buy a sword in Toledo if I had an opportunity and found one I really liked, so I had a mental price range I was willing to go with. Almost right off the bat, I was drawn to the Gladius sword on the rack. I loved the engraved blade and hilt and it just felt like "me." But although the price was in my range, I wasn't quite sure so I put it back on the rack while I looked around and thought about it.

But then I looked over and saw that Eric had taken the sword off and was admiring it. And the voice in my head just shouted "hands off my sword!" Which is how I knew that was the one.

So I took it back off the rack before Eric could decide he wanted it (and he later admitted that if I hadn't bought it, he would have... but since I saw it first and all... lol). I took it and carried it around until I was ready to make my purchases (this is also where I got some demasquinado necklace pendants - one for me and one for my mom). I hauled that sword in my suitcase for another 2 weeks and 4 more plane rides. And I love it... I keep it on my coffee table (except when small kiddies come to visit).

Other things this weekend...

I went to see The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel yesterday... I've wanted to see it since the first preview came out months ago. I absolutely loved it. I don't think it's a movie for everyone, but I thought it was a beautiful story, and beautifully filmed as well. And moving to some random place in India as my retirement is totally something I would do. lol.

I also stopped at Target to run some errands...

Yeah. Target = dangerous. They had so much fun stuff, but I managed to resist. Mostly. I was wandering the aisles on my way to get things I actually needed, when I noticed that they had some of their accent tables on sale. I don't want to say that I really needed an accent table, but I kind of did. I had things piled on the floor under my coffee table that I really wanted to have out and that just wasn't happening without one. I've long admired this hexagonal accent table because it fits my style and would work well in my living room:

At $20 off plus another 5% off with my Red Card, I decided to go ahead and get it... they only had one left and I knew exactly where I could put it and what would go on it. So I came home and got it all set up with my books that were previously on the floor.

Doesn't that look nice? With the new arrangement my Venetian mask is much more prominant, which I like, and I was able to put a few things in the opening below that had previously been stored in a cupboard. Nice!

That "turquoise" book is actually a cookbook, but with all the photography and the size of it, it works like a coffee table book. I also really love that Paris in Color book - it's a beautiful book of everyday scenes all arranged by color.

The bottom book is a photo book I made of two of my weekend trips. I love that size... and in fact, on Friday night I finished my photobook for Peru. It's going to be 11"x15" and 124 pages. I pared it down to 750 or so of my favorite photos. lol. And it took me HOURS to put together... I edited every photo and then arranged everything and added my narrative... I used a Groupon for Photobook America and they have really terrible templates, so it took a long time. But I'm thrilled with it and can't wait to get it. I have one more Groupon with them and I'm hoping to do my FBE next.

So that's the weekend! I haven't cooked in almost 2 weeks with being sick and all, but I'm thinking I might go down and attempt some quinoa cakes from my newest cookbook... or maybe a quinoa risotto? After doing all those Peru photos, I'm really just craving quinoa!

 

Views from Cape Town

I'm finally starting to get some energy back after a few days flat on my back. I was back at work Tuesday and tonight I finally felt good enough to come up and play in my scrap attic for a while. It took a bit to decide what I wanted to work on... I knew I wanted to play with my May Studio Calico kit since I've had it for over a week and haven't touched it, so I spent a while going through photos to pick something fun.

I decided to do something a little older, so I pulled out a few pictures I hadn't scrapbooked yet from my trip to South Africa a few years ago.

This was from Nicole and I flew from Johannesburg down to Cape Town to spend a few days there. We decided to do one of those hop-on-hop-off tours on our first afternoon just to get the lay of the land before our small group tour the next day. I just loved this view of the mountain range along the coast that's called the Twelve Apostles for the twelve peaks. It was stunning.

That panoramic photo on top is actually three photos I took as the bus was moving along the road that I merged together in Photoshop. The other picture is Nicole... we didn't get one of me, but that's okay. We got some good ones from the beach the next day.

Almost everything was from my May Studio Kit and add-ons... I cut apart one of the Heidi Swapp mistable folders and used some Mister Huey's on it. I added that cute little SC wood venner car and a piece of flair from A Flair for Buttons on Etsy. I also painted over the Amy Tangerine Thickers with Golden Titanium White fluid acrylic paint to try and get the title to stand out a bit - it helped a lot. Then I brushed just a bit of the paint over the navy blue letters spelling "Cape Town" to tone it down a bit.

Anyway, I'm just glad I was finally able to get up here and do something. And now that I've been back looking at Africa photos, I think I need to finish my safari mini album!

But for now, the energy is gone, so I'm off... later!

Project Life Week 19

I have to say, I so didn't want to do this this week. Of course, that's because doing anything takes way more energy than I want to use. lol. I am sick as a dog and pretty much miserable. I've been in bed or close to it since Saturday evening with a yucky, awful cold. It's mostly my own fault for going too long without catching up on my sleep, but what can I say? Too late now! But seriously... how it it possible to have a stuffed AND runny nose all at once? I don't know. But it's not fun.

In any case, I crawled up into the attic to spend a few minutes at the computer and pulled together the layout for last week. Fast, simple. Done.

I think it's now time to search out some more meds and crawl back into bed. Sigh.

Getting Messy with Celine - Part Deux

I finished! I absolutely LOVED doing this project and the class was so much fun. I always forget how much I love to "get messy" so this was a great reminder.

It ended up being quite a bit bigger and more involved than I anticipated...

28 total pages, all of them using some kind of technique, even if just a little bit.

And let's face it. Me? Going overboard? Not really unexpected. lol.

And because I did go so overboard, there are a LOT of photos of the album. So instead of having a humungous post clogging up the front page of my blog, I put it on its own page.

Without further ado, my completed Getting Messy Goreme mini scrapbook.

Enjoy!

Posts from my day job

I realize that I don't actually talk a lot about my work here on the blog... mostly because I kind of like to keep work and personal separate, and also so I don't get in trouble. lol. But I had a work "thing" to share today, so I thought I'd share a little bit about what I do.

I started my current job in February after months of persistence by a friend I'd worked with at Ancestry who talked me into coming to join him here. And I'm so glad I did! I won't go into lots of details, but part of what we do is offer online communities for people who are dealing, in some way, with specific health conditions. The communities have message boards, articles and information, and all kinds of great stuff. Part of that great stuff includes pulling together information to share with our communities.

What better way to make health information interesting and relevant all at once than to do an infographic? We're doing more of these, but we just launched this one and it's quite interesting. This is for our community for people dealing with depression. And even if you don't have depression or care for someone who does, it's still an interesting read! Click through to see the whole thing...

From Depression Connect

 

Project Life Week 18

Popping in quickly with the layout for last week... just a one-pager this week since the weekend was the main event and I'll probably do a separate layout about the Doodlebug event.

I used a template by Agnes Biro and the new Design House Digital collaboration kit - Retrospect (free with the coupon code from the blog hop!) I've said repeatedly that I'm not really a digi scrapper, but I'd like to note that I successfully blended two patterned papers for the background on this one. High fives to me! Now if I can remember how to do it for next time... I have a feeling it's like threading the bobbin on my sewing machine - I'll need instructions every.single.time. But I guess that's okay.

Anyway, I got caught up reading a book and got a late start on my layout, so no more time for playing tonight... off to bed! Hopefully I can get back to getting messy tomorrow :)

Sunday NSD Challenges

I actually didn't think I was going to get much done today, but I finished another 2 layouts and with that, did all of the NSD weekend challenges at Studio Calico. I'm just excited that I got stuff done! And I love the challenges... I feel like it helped me use my stash and get a little more creative.

So first up, a layout about Adorable-Nephew-William at 9 months for the challenge to use triangles on a layout.

I actually really like how this turned out... another example of a challenge pushing me to do something I otherwise wouldn't have done.

I put baker's twine down the middle of the photos and then added some diecut triangles on top - those are an old Quickutz die shape. It was fun to pull those out again and use my cute pink QK Squeeze :)

I also pulled out some older Making Memories puffy stickers - the Giggles collection they did for Archivers a while ago... those are the colored circles and stars. I'm so glad I rediscovered those!

I also used my April Studio Calico kits and a library card journaling file from Kate Pertiet (digital). It was fun to see William tonight (and the girls too) when we Skyped for my mom's birthday party - he's almost 10 months now and just the cutest little boy you've ever seen. That smile is going to break hearts. lol.

My second layout uses pictures from last weekend - it's for two challenges. The first was to use confetti on a layout and the other was to use some kind of geometric shape - I chose circles and made them into peaches.

Coincidence that the secret ingredient on Iron Chef America tonight was peaches? I think not. And it was my favorite Iron Chef too... Geoffrey Zakarian. (And he won, of course.) Someday I'd love to eat at one of his restaurants. However I think it was the Hello Kitty bandaids in Next Iron Chef - Battle of the Super Chefs that really won me over to Team Zakarian.

However, as good as real peaches are, the pastry version is something in another realm entirely. I don't think I've done an Ode to a {insert food} layout since my Ode to Fried Pickles several years ago. Refresher:

I actually wrote a poem that time. This time I just described it. Although now that I think about it, it seems like poetry to me to just read about the ingredients. Drool-worthy, really.

I digress.

I'm too much of a control freak to really do confetti... almost every single one of these dots was carefully placed with a pick-up tool and precise dots of glue. lol.

For the "peaches," I punched the circles and hand-cut the leaves and stems from different papers. The circles are October Afternoon, Basic Grey, and Sassafras Lass. The leaves are Amy Tangerine - Sketchbook.

I'm SUPER proud of myself for the journaling on the tag... I put it on a sheet of 8.5x11 paper with temp adhesive and scanned it in. Then I created a path for the journaling, subracting out the area around the "love" cutout - typed and printed. And it worked on my first try! I think I absorbed more than I realized from listening to Renee Pearson teach another lady about text paths at the retreat last weekend.

So that's it! Classes, babysitting, and 4 layouts... a Skyped birthdy party, cooking up a new farro dish and did I mention I taught Sunday School today too? It's been a busy weekend. Now it's time to crash before work tomorrow.

Saturday NSD Challenges

I was able to squeeze in a little scrapbooking time to work on NSD challenges yesterday. Only 2 layouts, but I got 5 challenges knocked out between them.

Here's the first one... mainly I wanted to do the stamping challenge from Jen over in the Scrapbook Stamping workshop - we combined techniques from 3 of the 5 chapters in class. I also used a sketch from Studio Calico for the sketch challenge, and also used 6 photos for the SC multiple photo challenge.

Some pictures of Adorable-Niece-Eraleigh and her Joy School activities. So cute...

I used a background stamp and embossed it for the alphabet pattern on the left. I used an open design stamp set (Studio Calico days of the week) to create the block on the right, and colored a few of the letters with a Copic marker. The journaling block is Heidi Swapp, and I added Studio Calico sentiments stamped on vellum to the photos.

The little girl stamp is Stamping Bella - I colored her with Copics. I ended up adding tape and sequins to cover up some mistakes... I wasn't paying attention and set my hand on the stamped vellum before it was dry and then set it down on the layout. Several times. lol. I managed to cover most of it, but you can still see it on the bottom left. But that one isn't bothering me... and it looks cuter now :)

The second layout I did was for a challenge in the Sassy Scrapping 2 Peas workshop - I used the challenge from the bonus video and layout Shannon posted. This was to pull an element from my photo as inspiration for the layout. Obviously, I used the design of my henna tattoo for this one. It also met a Studio Calico challenge to use alphabet stamps - I used 2 different SC stamp sets.

These pictures are from the desert safari we went on in Dubai where we all got henna tattoos. I absolutely loved mine, and it cracked me up that all the guys were getting them too - only snakes and scorpions instead of flowers.

I pulled out some old Basic Grey Marrakech paper (that's how they spell it, anyway) and mixed it with new Studio Calico Classics 2 for the background.

I used some copper colored fabric puffy paint to do the "tattoo" on my paper - it actually looks like a close match to the wet henna.

I finished it off with some washi tape, some Basic Grey glazed brads and a fun little sequined clip. I'm pretty pleased with how it came out! And I don't know if I would have thought to do this if I hadn't had the challenge from Shannon. So yay for NSD challenges!

Now I'm off to try and do some Sunday challenges since I have a quiet afternoon free... just have to pick the photos :)