Adornit Blog Hop

I am excited to be participating in the Adornit Blog Hop Event!

Where shall we start? Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. When you read you begin with A-B-C. When you sing you begin with do-re-mi. Well, if nothing else, I hope you have that song stuck in your head now, LOL!

So the theme of the Adornit summer blog hop is "Summer Favorites." To that end, I have created a 2-page layout "How Does Our Summer Grow?" A huge part of our summer is spent caring for our gardens. It is truly a rewarding experience to watch one's garden growing from seeds to food on the table, or in some case, snacks while gardening :)

For this layout, I used mostly Adornit patterned papers with a touch of Collage Press. Most of the supplies I used is from Scrap Attack Scrapbooking's July 09 Mini {Sas}sy kit which is still available! I was a very lucky girl to have won that kit on SAS's blog. I absolutely love how that kit was put together, the papers from Adornit were from several collections and they go together so marvelously well. I really love the cool color palettes, and even though my pages are about summer, they represent what I want to convey so well, the little earthly escape that is our gardens and gardening. Thank you Lauri for the kit, I so love it!

Here I used just a little bit of Collage Press die cut, showing the summer months. Oh yes, I feel clever! LOL.

That's about it at my little art :) Now to continue with the blog hop, your next stop is at the extremely talented and fabulous Jana Eubank!

From CHA, with Love

I am not at CHA, but my layouts and cards are. The guest designers for Prism Papers were invited to submit three projects to their CHA booth. Mine are the three below and I could see them on display here! Wahoo!

I also have asked friends at high places to be sure to take some pictures for me at the Graphic 45 booth. I am hopeful that this will be the year that I see a Graphic 45 layout of mine on display, lol!

Don't Let the Junebug Bite!

On a second thought, if I must have a bug bite, let it be a Junebug one :) This month at Scrapbook Obsessions, we are working with Basic Grey's Junebug line. I think I flipped out when this line was first introduced just a short month ago. To my untrained eyes, this collection looks and feels very unique. On the other hand, it is Basic Grey, they have never done a line that I don't like and couldn't use over and over. From that angel, it's the same ol' same ol' fabulous scrappiness.

I may not use masks often, but they are one of my favorite tools. This Heidi Swapp polka dot mask just makes me happy every time I use it. I thought the dots go so well with these papers. She is just flipping hilarious when she walks with her arms like that.

Uh, everyone cleans out lint in between their toes with the help of a sibling on the living room floor right? You tell me! I don't have a sibling so no one helped me out, ever! LOL!

More to come later!

Working on My Muffin Top

After a Saturday morning run, I asked DH to take some pictures of me because I had already known the subject matter and title for this next layout. Then I saw the pictures and even I felt a little ridiculous because I looked, kinda, rail-like... Nevertheless, I do have my own muffin top battle going on, and now it's documented. *smirk*

Sketch Time with Graphic 45

It's Wednesday and sketch time at the Graphic 45 blog. This week's sketch interpretation is brought to you by me! I believe I had mentioned before how many photos I have of certain people trying to yank on the fruit! LOL! Here I combined green PP from three different Graphic 45 collections, Wall Flower Front from Times Nouveau, Secret Garden Back from Botanicabella, and Jack and Jill Back from Playtimes Past. It's easy being green! :)

Here are a couple of closeups of the layout.

And a very quick and easy card with some Communique leftovers. I got that typewriter stamp from Studio Calico specifically to try out with Communique. I need to experiment more.

The CHA show is right around the corner, after that, we can post all our projects that were sent to the show. In other words, I will have lots of Graphic 45 stuff to post in August.

Calypso Some Strawberries...

This strawberry season has come to an end. The scrapping of huge pile of strawberry planting, growing, waiting, picking, eating, savoring, jamming of this year has begun. I'm still not half way through the millions of pictures from last year. As I clicked away asking the family for various poses, DH even said, "Didn't you take the same pictures last year?" sigh... I suppose one of these days, I shall be able to have a MAJOR album of all the years of strawberry activities... No matter, this year's starts with this one:

Long Wait for My October Afternoon

I did a pre-order of OA's winter release. I must not do that again. Impatient people like me should never pre-order anything. But at last, it came, so I played. More specifically, I tried out making cards mainly out of Prism Papers' cardstock with the new Road Map stamps. I am feeling more generous in my Prism cardstock usage because I just received a huge stash from them. I lost count by 350... They are so incredibly generous!

I wish I can come up with more clever sayings for the car and the wagon in the OA stamp set, so if you have some clever sentiments to go with this motif, I would love it if you could share those with me! Where's Tom Heinz when you need him?!



This card is based on Tami's CPS sketch 123. I wasn't paying a lot of attention apparently, I didn't see the horizontal dividing line across the sketch, oops...

"The" Fruit

This is an "interesting" combo for me, not the colors, but the patterned papers and the chipboard letters. The whole thing is motivated by my desire to use new and old stuff together. My stash is precious to me! I loved it back then, so why should I not love it today? That's why I have an impossible time cleaning things out. In fact, it pretty much does not happen! Anyway, I digress.

This year, there are a LOT more such fruits on the tree and so far, no one has bothered to look at them, let alone reaching for them. I have no doubt that Mama will try to tempt people to reach out and touch the fruits, just so she can get some pictures :)

Nose Deep in Graphic 45

I didn't expect it, but I got all the new Graphic 45 lines in the mail on Tuesday. I dove in since I only had 48 hours to produce and send the projects for the CHA show. I have done two layouts and the mini-album is 85% there. Here is a sneak peak of one of my projects using Domestic Goddess. I need at least three more packs of that line, I absolutely LOVE it. Believe me you'll need it too!!!

Graphic 45 CHA-S 09 and My Prism Project

The three new lines by Graphic 45 are up on the website. I am loving what I see and looking forward to getting my hands on these lines... I am most excited about the Domestic Goddess line, because that's who I am! LOL!

Then stop by Prism Papers Blog to see my layout, it's a fun one :) Now that you've seen mine, you can check out Amanda Probst's layout, did someone say HOF'er?

Saturday, Lovely Day...

I told DH this pm that the day seems so long when I go running at 7:30 a.m. If only every day can be like this day!

I splurged and purchased a Studio Calico July kit. In fact, I was already in bed when I suddenly remembered that I wanted to check out the kit. Wouldn't you know it, the kit just went up a minute before that! Today, I was determined to put the kit to use instead of hoarding them and using them for dust collection! Overall, I blame Aubree for this purchase. She was gaga over the camera stamp!!

I received some good news from a couple of magazines. One of my Cosmo DT entries got picked up by Scrapbook Trends. One of my Graphic 45 cards got picked up by CARDS. I am doing some serious happy dance now! Saturday, lovely day indeed!

Scrapbook Trends June

I received my complimentary contributor copies of the Scrapbook Trends June issue this Monday. I admit to going to Archiver's to take a peek at my first layout in this amazing magazine several times. Still, I'm intimidated by the incredible talents showcased in this magazine. It reads like a "Who is Who" in my GoogleReader blog-roll :)

So I finally have a layout in this amazing magazine. Believe me, I try, every, single, month :) Requests are rare, so I will celebrate success when I have found it.

My dad was with me when I first saw this at Archiver's. His comment was that these are old and no-good photos. LOL, of course, they are no good to him, his beloved grandchild was crying, and that is just not right. I must say that this name has indeed stuck. We now refer to her affectionately as Bucket. We did have to explain to First Born, "what Bucket" we were talking about...

This Little Hobbit Went to the Big Trial

Sitting in the movie theater watching Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring, I turned to DH and uttered these words, "What is a hobbit?" The genre of epic fantasy was not in my must-read list in high school or college. Then the movie gripped me and I spent a solid week finishing the trilogy. Now surpassing Jane Austen, Tolkien is my all-time favorite author. His imagination gives me a glimpse of the Creator's imagination...

And we come to my favorite line in the book... Gandalf Said: "There never was much hope, just a fool's hope."

I am not disappointed about not making the Cosmo finalists. I have a stack of wonderful layouts to show for that intense week. If I'm into stash reduction, I need more calls such as that :)

Here is a layout that I didn't include in the Cosmo entry, my family making my requested treat for Mother's Day. My waist line looks like that cupcake spillage as well. :)

Proud to be Americans!

Happy 4th of July to you and yours!!!

I went to Old Navy hoping to score some $1 flag t-shirts yesterday, but apparently, the information on Money Saving Mom blog was not accurate. The shirts were $5 each. Oh well... Thankfully, Second Child still fit into this 12-18 months shirt. We could even buckle the bottom, woohoo!! Nothing like stretching those BabyGap shirts!!

Happy Birthday, U.S.A. ! ! !

Collage Pressbrate Father

Collage Press is having monthly challenges now on their blog! The first challenge of June is to create a father themed layout. I was particularly inspired by the words of Jill Sprott when she said that we could use "any past or present lines" of Collage Press. So I did, combining three past and present lines of Collage Press, using up some miscellaneous photos of DH and Second Child. It wasn't easy to part with the last bit of Grayson Hall. Really, what am I going to do now? I'm Grayson Hall-less... sigh... The upside is that I love the look of combining the lines, or maybe it's because the people in the photo are so good-looking?? When I was creating this layout, a song kept running through my head, "loooooooooooving you... is easy cuz you are beautiful..." lol...