Christmas Kitty

I don't scrap in any sort of order.  I was going to print some photos a few weeks ago and realized I still had way too many already printed and waiting to scrapped.  I started looking through my albums to put away many of the pages that were already completed and was shocked to find that I haven't scrapped any Christmas photos from the last 6 years!!  How did I not scrap ANY of those pics?  So, I must start scrapping some of those and what better time than December.

I have a ton of Christmas scrapping stuff...from many years ago though.  Nothing really current except for one Basic Grey kit.  I seriously need to buy some new stuff, but I wanted to try and use up some of that older stash first.

If you like a good scrappy challenge, head on over to Candie Shoppe Designs.  There are some really fun challenges going on right now.  One is called "We are Women, Hear us Roar".  We were challenged to make a layout about ourselves using animal prints, animal shapes, or just about animals.  So I made this layout with that challenge in mind.

Ok...off to get something productive accomplished!!  Have a happy Tuesday!!

Build a Snowman

You've heard me talk about the photo scavenger hunt, so here is another layout.  I used the following sketch as inspiration:

Stuck?! has some really great sketches.  And the inspirational layouts by the design team were just amazing!!

This was so much fun to put together.  I really wanted to use the tulle I got in my Scarlet Lime kit but wasn't sure what to do with it.  So I tied a knot in it and stuck a brad in it.

I am really lovin' these cork buttons.  They are different and they add some fun dimension to the page.


Here is what I used:

Paper:  Making Memories, Crate Paper, Lillybee Design.  Rub-ons:  Kaiser Craft.  Brads:  Basic Grey and Making Memories.  Border Stickers:  Crate Paper.  Tulle:  Glitz.  Cork buttons:  Pink Paislee.  Paper clip:  Melody Ross.

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An Eventful Thanksgiving!!

We had such a wonderful day yesterday!!  Abbie turned 10 and is officially out of the single digits (her words!!). 

We started our day with baking her pumpkin cheesecake.

She wanted to do as much of the baking as she could...so she did!!  She even put her kitchen tools in her apron so they would be handy.

In the oven for an hour and twenty minutes.

I couldn't find the brown sugar so Tom decided it would be a good day to organize the pantry and all the kitchen cabinets.

Is that not a supremely organized pantry?  We found so much stuff in there that we had forgotten about.  Anyway, after the kitchen was done, I started on the baked mac and cheese for lunch.

I baked a plain cheese tray for Abbie

And a broccoli one with cayenne pepper for me.  Love it hot and spicy.

The kids came over for cake later in the night and Shannon and Anthony had a surprise for us...

Yup, they're engaged!!  And we are so excited for them!!

After cake comes presents and she could hardly contain herself!!  (Yup, the cheese cake cracked, by that's ok.  It still tasted REALLY great!!)

Littlest Pet Shops, DS game and Wii games round out the night.

She'll always be my little peanut...no matter how old she is.  I love you baby!! 

Happy Thanksgiving

Today is a wonderful day for us, not only because it's Thanksgiving, but because it's Abbie's birthday.  We are starting our day by baking a pumpkin cheesecake as Abbie's birthday cake.  Then baking mac and cheese for lunch, also at Abbie's request.  The kids will be over for cake and dessert later tonight. 

We love the relaxed feel of Thanksgiving in our home.  We love the happiness that fills our home when everyone is over and having a fun time.  Happiness is a wonderful thing!!

Hope you all have a wonderful time with your family and friends!!

Banners!!

Last week there was sketch and challenge over at Sassie Lil Sketches.  I really liked the sketch and the challenge to put a banner on my layout, among a few other challenges.  So I put this layout together and created the triangles for the banner on the Design Studio so I could cut them on the Cricut.  I then spent the next three days looking for my cartridges.  Can you believe I still don't know where my Cricut cartridges are!!!  I am so upset!!

So, I had this unfinished layout on my desk for days and finally decided to cut the triangle by hand.  I missed the deadline to post my layout for the challenge, but wanted to share it with you anyway.  Here is the sketch:

The other parts of the challenge were to use lace, use ink, add texture or embossing, and use three of something. 

I covered everthing in the layout.  I used the sketch, used an embossing border punch from Martha Stewart, used brown ink on the all the squares and the banners, used the little rhinestones in three different places and instead of lace, I used the swirly border at the bottom of the page.

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Pretty in Pink

My little peanut LOVES pink and all things girly!!  So when she was 5 and saw a frilly pink night gown at the Disney Store, she just had to have it.

She was so excited and just couldn't stop twirling it around. 

I used Basic Grey and Bazzill cardstock for this layout and I added some sparkle to the vine at the bottom of the page with Ranger Stickles.  Not sure where the bling came from,but isn't it cute??

Fashionista

I have tons of pictures printed to scrap and thousands more on my computer waiting to be printed.  But I really need to start making some layouts with some older pictures.  I checked my favorite sketch blogs for some inspiration and this what I found:

A cute, simple sketch that I could draw inspiration from and still make the layout my own.  You can check out their blog here.

Here is my take on the sketch:

I decided to use two random beach photos of Abbie looking oh so stylish at the beach a few years ago.  This kid has always put so much thought into what she wears even to the beach!! 

Here is what I used:
Papers by My Mind's Eye, Pink Paislee, Dear Lizzy, October Afternoon, Lillybee Design, and a few others from my stash.  The letter stickers are both from Making Memories, the studs are from Where Memories are Created, the brad is from Lost and Found and the cork buttons are from Pink Paislee.  I used black soot ink from Ranger for the all the edges.

Hope you all have a very happy Monday!!

I Cooked...All Weekend!!

All my friends know that I don't like to cook or bake and when I do I'm not very good at it.  But this weekend I wanted to try a few different recipes that I have been sitting on.  The first was Pumpkin Cinnamon Buns.  Now, I'm not going to share that recipe because they were horrible (it could have been operator error, but I don't really think so).  I was determined to make a wonderful breakfast for my family so I found this other recipe for cinnamon buns.  They were so much work to make but turned out to be the most amazing cinnamon buns we have ever had.  You can find the recipe here.  Check out the buns before I put them in the oven:

The recipe called for this weird lemon frosting, so I made my own cream cheese frosting with vanilla extract and sweetened condensed milk (that's for you Val!!)

And here is the deliciousness!!!  Can you smell them?  I made 15 normal sized buns and then 4 others out of the ends.

I also made butternut squash soup, thai chicken noodle soup and chicken and dumplings.  I stocked my fridge and freezer for the week!! 

I had a super busy weekend, but I had time to catch up on the laundry (even folded it and put it away), I scrapped a few pages, which you'll see over the course of the next few days and played a few fun games with Abbie.  A very different weekend from last weekend.

Weekend Laziness

So I had all these plans for this weekend...clean out the fridge and freezer, catch up on laundry, go food shopping, get a crock pot (can you believe I don't own one of these???) make a bunch of food and stock the freezer and of course scrap some.

But I have had a nasty cold for 3 days now and I don't want to do anything!!  Abbie hurt her knee yesterday and it still hurts when she walks so she doesn't want to go anywhere...even shopping.  So guess what...

Today is going to be a very lazy day for us!!

I found this blog about a month ago and the artist has the cutest cartoons.  Todays was about being lazy and that is very fitting for our mood.

Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend.  Be sure to sneak in some lazy time for yourself!!

One The Stairs

Another scavenger hunt layout...this is going to be a HUGE album!!!

I like to have a plan when I start a layout, but this was not one of those layouts.  I started it and came back to it 5 or 6 times during the course of the week.  I just couldn't figure out what to do with it.

So after a few long week of staring at it and re working it several times, here is the final product..I think:

Some of the papers are My Mind's Eye and Pink Paislee, the others, not sure.  The long border sticker is Pink Paislee and the letters are K & Co.

Happy Friday all!!



The Treasure Hunter

Sketchy Thursdays had a great sketch last week that I wanted to try.  Here it is:

I don't usually print any photos larger than 5 X 7 so I used two pictures instead of one.  I don't really like to only scrap one picture on a page either so I changed it up a bit.

Here is my take on the sketch:

I'm deciding whether I want to journal on the front of the page or just write on the back.  I do a lot of my journaling on the back side of my pages because that way I can write as much as I want without having to worry about space or spelling.  If I mess up it isn't visible to everyone.

The papers I used are from the Lush Collection of Kaiser Craft, The Girl's Paperie and Scribble Scrabble.  I used an embossing punch from Martha Stewart and the stitched rub-on is from DCWV.

I bought these really cute rub from Kaiser Craft and this one really seemed to fit the pictures.  Every trip to the beach is a journey full of discovery, wonder and joy.

Mountains of Snow

I was playing around with some Echo Park wintery paper this weekend.  We has such awesome snow storms last year!!  I really hope we get some more really big snow piles again this year.  Just too much fun.

I decided to make a matchy 2 page layout:



Everything is from Echo Park except for the little red shiny beads on the darker pink swirl.  And the red letters are from Glitz.

These were really fun to play with.  I'll leave with thoughts of winter...until tomorrow!!

Weekend Recap

So my hopes of a relaxing weekend weren't completely thrown out the window this weekend.  Friday we went to the Tuckerton Seaport with our homeschool group.  It was a really interesting place.  They had a bunch of little houses set up along the water with each house dedicated to a particular theme.  Some of the themes were:

Early settlers and their fishing practices.

A surf board musuem with all sorts of different surf boards.

A quick little talk about how decoy ducks were made in the early 1920's - 1950's.  They also spoke a lot about which animals were hunted and how...this was quite disturbing to Abbie a few times so we had to excuse ourselves for a little a fresh air a few times along the way.

The original Light House fell into the sea many years ago so they recreated this one.  The view from the top was amazing...wanna see?

Told ya!!  We ended up finishing the tour on our own with a trip to a little house all about clams and scallops and a round of mini golf. 

The Tuckerton Seaport also had one of the Giant Clam Shells on our Clam Tour for 2011.  What???  You don't know what that means??  All around the county, there are these Giant (fake) clam shells with information on them.  We picked up our "Official" clam tour log at the Beach Plum Festival in September, but hadn't started searching for our shells yet.  There were 2 in Tuckerton so after our tour we set off to find the second one.

The second one was at the end of a very long road at a marina.  They had already stored it away for the winter, but let us go and take a look at it anyway.

The giant clam was sitting next to their really neat clam nursery.  They had several very large trays of clam beds with all these tiny little clams in them.

I'd never seen that before!!  Can you imagine all the clams they can grow?!?! 

So the rest of the day was dedicated to scrapping and relaxing.  On Saturday our friend Lyell turned 50 (Happy Birthday!!) and had an amazing party in Asbury Park.  I did have my camera with me but I was so busy holding a sleeping baby for most of the party (not mine, of course) that by the time I got around to pulling my camera out of my pocket, we were leaving I had forgot to take pictures.  So all I have are my memories and those don't always translate well.

On Sunday I baked cupcakes for Dom's spooky birthday party.  He turned 6 last week.  Shannon did such a great job with all the spooky decorations and Halloween themed food.  This time I forgot my camera all together!!  I had a ton of stuff to take to the party and the camera just didn't make it.  The rest of the night was filled with laundry.  Not very relaxing, but completely necessary.

So that was my weekend.  Hopefully all of you got to spend time doing what makes you happy with people who make you happy.

Last Weeks Layout

So I finally got around to finishing the layout I started last week while my friend Amy was over.  I needed some small black letters to finish it up so I headed out to AC Moore in the pooring rain.  Did I ever mention how much I hate going out in the rain??? 

These are pictures of mine and Shannon's photo scavenger hunt at our first CRC crop last year..or was two years ago??  I don't think it was our first scavenger hunt either now that I think about...I'll have to go back and check.  Anyway, here is the finished product:

Here is what I KNOW I used:  black felt border - Queen and Co, black round letters - Glitz, black title letters - K & Co., green felt border - Kaiser Scrapbook, the star border stickers - Jenni Bowlin and the some of the papers are Pink Paislee and other random ones that I dug up from my stash.

As I was chatting with Amy, I started folding a scrap of the yellow patterned paper.  About 30 minutes later I was still playing around with it so I decided to put it behind the yellow fuzzy brad.  It looked pretty neat so that's where it stayed.  I think it looks pretty fun.

I love the look of banners, but I really stink at getting them to look right on the page.  These stars are so cute so I decided just to stagger them rather swag them. 

It's almost Friday...hope everyone is looking to the weekend as I am!!

Birthday Time, Almost!!

Abbie's birthday is fast approaching and she can't stop talking about it.  Every year, Abbie tells us how she would like to spend her special day.  Two years ago she wanted to go ice skating...so we did!!  I used to enjoy ice skating when I was younger, but hadn't gone in years.  Abbie did really well, she didn't fall at all.  Neither did I.  Tom was another story.  He fell multiple times, which prompted me to take many pictures thus creating this layout:

I used Crate Paper for the patterned paper, a Fiskars border punch and some random rub ons.

Abbie had such a great time skating we got her skates for Christmas that same year.

We spent many a Friday at the skating rink in those shiny white skates.  Even though the rink we go to is indoors, I just can't bring myself to bundle up in the summer and go skating.  But now that the weather is chilly, we will hit the rink again!!