Sammy faces on...

Sammy showing what it feels like to be home sick today:

Sammy showing what it's like to watch Sesame Street during normally non-TV time:

I should be worried that he can put on these faces at will, right??

The Funky Chicken Coop Tour is Saturday!

It's that time again! Check out the FREE and very interesting Funky Chicken Coop Tour of Austin, held all over Austin on the Saturday before Easter.  It's self-guided so see a couple in your area or travel around to all of it.  We went last year and the year before - it's always great!

Wow, that's quite a prize pack!

**Please tell me the photos worked this time?  I'm getting so tired of uploading them only to find that I can see them but others can't!

A little while back I won a weekly giveaway from Write.Click.Scrapbook. I really like the blog there, or "the inspiration collective", as they call it. There is a different author every week, who posts each day on a themed subject - it may be about mini books one week, or journaling or taking better photos, or incorporating art techniques. Always different perspectives and a lot of talented scrapbookers showing their work. The giveaways are on Thursdays if you are interested in entering.

I was thrilled to win, but I will say the packs they showed did not do my prize pack justice!!

From this photo, you see four packs of Basic Grey paper, but not how rich the packs are.  I had to spread them all out and take pictures of all the sheets!  Also, when I got my packs there were FIVE instead of four, plus a bunch of 3D embellishments!  The girl who was mailing them was out of town and they came later than I expected, so maybe she threw in some extra goodies because of that?  The last pack was missing the alphas and stickers, but the 3D stuff I wasn't expecting matches it.  Whatever the reason, I say Lucky Me!

Also, I guess I've never actually purchased Basic Grey before (how could that be? It's soooo beautiful!) so I didn't know how really lovely the paper quality is or how sturdy the cardstock stickers are.  There are 18 pages of patterned cardstock per pack.  They are double sided with great designs front and back.  And each set comes with TWO designs of matching alphas and a full sheet of coordinating cardstock stickers with a really nice matte finish (no old-school "sticker" look here).  If Basic Grey thought they were going two make a new convert with their giveaway, they were right!

It's Finished!

Just in time for Sammy's third birthday, I finished his first year baby book!  This is the title page.  I've always really loved his eyes in this picture.

I did learn something doing this layout.  I stamped that lower area of damask looking background in Versamark, then tried to emboss over it with Chocolate Chip pigment ink and clear embossing powder.  But the powder stuck to the Versamark.  So, I dried the Versamark ink with a heat tool and repeated my effort.  Still the embossing powder stuck to the Versamark.  So, I left it OVERNIGHT after drying it with the eat tool and repeated.  STILL it stuck to the Versamark!  I had to just brush off as much powder as possible with the heat tool and call the rest an "effect".  I don't mind it, but I was surprised!

More Pink Poodles

I really did make more of them. Hee hee. James likes the black ones even better. Julie still likes the original. I just think they are funny!

It's a Challenge, all right!

This past Christmas, we had several family members sharing some papercrafting supplies - especially anything of which we had extra or were tired. This patterned paper belonged to  my Mother-In-Law and I just couldn't resist saying it should go straight out to Goodwill. "Too silly! Ridiculous!" I said. "Are you EVER going to find a use for pink poodle paper?" I said.

My own mother commented that since the other side of my family has a quilting challenge (quilt one, quilt two, and quilt three) maybe we should have a papercrafting challenge. Funny, because she's much more of a quilter. Maybe she was joking but the idea took hold. We all had an entire year to come up with some card using this crazy paper. My sister already did hers so I thought I'd better go ahead and try to figure something out.

I can't believe that I actually like what I came up with! I like it so much I made another. And saved some bits to make still more. I mean, who would have thought a cute card could evolve out of these pink poodles??  I might just owe my Mother In Law an apology, hee hee!

 

 

Oh, and here's Julie's creation!!

San Antonio Zoo

Here's another great springtime activity!  We like to go down to San Antonio and spend the day at the zoo there.  This time Zack declared that he didn't want to go (he had a museum picked out instead) but Sammy was so keen on going that we decided it would be the best plan.  That and the fact that we usually go in the summer and we really wanted to try it when it wasn't crazy hot instead. 

As you can see from that first picture, taken in the first ten minutes, it didn't take long for Zack to get on board!  We had a great time and it WAS a beautiful time of year to be there.  Afterward we rode the zoo train and then got on the road to head back to Austin.  We could see immediately that traffic was terrible so we did an about face and had a mid-afternoon dinner on the Riverwalk instead.  We sat outside, right on the water, with no waiting - that makes a trip to San Antonio complete!

Scrapbook Layout: Waiting

This was one of the later pages to go into Sammy's baby album, though it's at the beginning of the book.  When we had these photos taken, I mainly wanted to get some pregnant photos I didn't completely hate and capture how sweet Zack had been taking care of me when I didn't feel well.  Looking at them three years later, I'm pretty happy we did!  One thing I really like is that they are in our home.  I didn't think that would matter to me much, but it really does.  That painting in the background of my picture is this giant green abstract scene that I saw randomly and James got me for my birthday.  I love love love it.  And in the family one, we are in Zack's new room that had just barely been finished - I painted the silhouette of an oak tree on the wall (there are also two deer on the wall that don't show - it's his Walking in the Woods room).  Something about the setting brings out the ideas I had about what I wanted to capture, which is really cool.

Enchanted Rock

What a beautiful time of year to head to Enchanted Rock!  If you haven't been it's a great central Texas outing.  We drove out there over spring break and had a really great time.  At the very beginning of the summit trail (which is short but steep!) Zack bounded up, no problem.  Sammy tried to insist on being carried.  We got him excited about walking and he went five steps before crashing and skinning one palm and the other elbow!  Still he got going again and then walked almost all of it, up and down. 

Is it always windy on the top?  I think it must be.  I've been at different times of year but it always feels like the wind will knock you over.  When we were on the steepest part I really did fear for Sammy being blown over!  We insisted he hold someone's hand - otherwise we could just see him starting to tumble down and just never stopping! 

Some tips: If you want to camp there make reservations far in advance.  If you just want to hike, get there early! We arrived at 9:30 (it's a two hour drive from Austin) and only had to wait a little but later the park was closed, only letting a car in when a car left.  As we left we counted about 120 cars waiting to get in.  Bring a flashlight if you want to explore the caves.  Finally, dress in layers - it's cooler in the wind but HOT down at the base!

Family Game Night

It's just Candyland, but it's a start! I love games. My family has played cards at every family gathering my whole life. When we were little, the adults would play Pinochle or 42 (a game with dominoes that is played like Spades or Hearts) and the four cousins would play Hearts. My sister and I were four years apart and our two cousins were three years apart - one my age and one older. When we started my sister was so young she could barely follow the rules, much less a strategy, so we paired her up with the older cousin. It evened out, except when they cheated, hee hee. Well, it probably evened out then too. Later we moved up to Pinochle, a game I still love. When we visit my parents or my parents visit here we play 42.  When my Granny gets to come along we play 5-handed Pinochle.  When it's my parents and my in-laws (or my sister and her husband) together with us, we play 6-handed Pinochle.  There's nothing better than a few games of 42 to get everyone really laughing.  It's some of our best times and best memories as a family.

Won't it be fun when my own kids get old enough for a family game night more complex than Candyland? I know kids start getting less interested in games with their parents as they get older but I'm not above making a rule they have to play. They'll thank us for it later, right? Not to wish these days away - I am in love with how cute an age Sammy is at right now, and Zack is learning so much every day. But I'm thinking later will be really cool too.

In the Next Moment...

We're having some pretty days here so we took some time just to go to the park and hang out. After this picture was taken, Zack shimmied over this limb to the higher section at the upper right of the photo. He hung there for a good long while until I decided he must be stuck and headed over to see if he'd like some help getting down. I was going to be discreet and not embarrass him in front of the bigger boy who had climbed another part of the same tree, really I was!

But when I was still fifteen feet away, he just jumped. I don't think this photo conveys how high it really was.  He landed on his feet but the impact of the landing crumpled him into a little accordion fold of a boy.  I gasped out loud and another mother gave a short little shriek.  Then he popped up with a mouthful of dirt, bark embedded into his forehead, and big smile.  I picked the bark out of his skin, which left a little puncture underneath, he spit out the dirt and the other mother offered me a defibrillator for myself. 

We've since set some firm guidelines on heights too high for jumping.

Lots of Paper Flowers Happening Here

Now that I have learned to make these flowers, I find myself going to town with them!  The punch I mentioned cuts out four shapes at once - two broad (large and small) and two narrow (large and small).  They can each be used for petals or leaves and there is quite a combination of effects possible.  After making the blue one on my Cherish layout I was so enthused that I punched an entire page of white paper into petals and started creating. 

[Technical details]  Although I enjoyed the blue one, I wanted to make something with layers of color and pattern, so I used a burnt orange ink to stamp a background script text stamp on the broad petals, then a combination of red reinker and red perfect pearls in a spray bottle and a red stamp marker to color the petals.  I added gold perfect pearls, then a brocade background pattern in versamark and clear embossing powder to finish them off.  I like working with these petals with a little embossed area on them - they seem tougher and more able to hold their shape.
[Technical details over]

I was really thrilled with the result. I put it on a card that I could hand-deliver since I didn't think it would stand up to being mailed without a padded envelope and I just didn't want to bother with that.  Next I tried the narrow shape as petals to make more of a daisy shape.

Finally, I redid the pink/coral one with kraft paper and gold embossing.  The woodgrain was supposed to just be brown and only the script text be embossed gold but it turned out all gold and it's a pretty nice effect.

It's pretty funny but the centers of the flowers are all just a snowflake stamp I already had.  I had that baby put away with my Christmas things until making the Archivers flower and realizing the stamens for the center were a snowflake!  Cool use for a previously seasonal item!

At the Capitol

Check out these two boys. Their daddy took them to the Texas state capitol building to walk around and look at all sorts of things. Didn't he get a neat shot on a rainy winter morning?

Wishes

Now that I'm back to scrapbooking again, I have to share a few layouts I've been doing!

This is a single page that serves as the last page in Sammy's baby album. It isn't the last page as in, "I'm done!", just the final page in the book. I did a double page spread about his party and then followed it with a little about his candle and cupcake that we did with just our immediate family.

A couple of things make me really excited about this layout. First, I learned to make the rosettes I'm seeing everywhere! I didn't get a die or anything and it turned out to be no big deal to make them by hand. I don't even have a score board but it didn't matter. My paper trimmer has some light lines in it so that I was able to use those as a guideline and score every quarter inch on a scrap strip of paper. Then accordion fold, glue into a loop and squish the center. Glue to a circle on the back to hold it in place and voila, rosette! If that's not a good explanation (and I admit it was a pretty sparse one) here's a video of Tim Holtz doing it. He's always fun to watch, though of course he's using the die he designed.

The second thing was that I picked up a little pack of metal keyhole embellishments at Joann's on extreme clearance and it was fun to stick one of them on here.  I put a little cork circle behind it as a base.

Finally, I was really thrilled to work in another layer of journaling to my story on this page. It's titled Wishes and I show Sammy blowing out his candle. But, I also wanted our prayer for our boys that we pray as a family each night to be in his book so I wrote that out as our wishes for him. I'm glad that's the last thing in the book, because it wraps up who we are as a family and what we wish for Sammy in a way that is meaningful for us.

Look, Mom!

This boy has been working on riding without training wheels for a looong time! He really wants to do it, but he doesn't like our holding him and running along with him and he's taking a while to gain his balance. We took the pedals off entirely for a time so that he could scoot around and get a feel for the balance and that was fun. Now he's asked for the pedals back on and it's starting to come together for him. He's still frustrated a lot of the time, but it's coming.

Scrapbook Layout: Cherish

Do you have pictures of your kids or other loved ones you love so much they make your catch your breath every time you see them?  I love, love, love this closeup of Sammy.  His eyes are just so pretty.  He does have pretty eyes and this really captures them.  I had to do a layout that captured the feeling I have about his eyes in this photo.  It might seem too flowery for a boy... but it is designed to show how I feel more than anything else.

Some of the items are pre-made - the large paper frame was from a die cut stack and I hand cut the narrower frame from the over-print to echo it.  The bracket-edged paper on the left side was from the same stack and I added the narrow echo of the shape, again by hand-cutting the over-print.  The word cherish was a K&Company adhesive chipboard that came just like that, except that it had a dot for the i.  I lost the dot somewhere between designing the page and gluing everything down, but I thought the butterfly made a good substitute.  The butterflies were made with a Stampin' Up Embosslit die on the Big Shot, which is an awesome little die that cuts and creates a raised texture at the same time.  The shiniest ones are made out of metal tape from the hardware store (ours was $3 and leftover from a minor house repair!) and the others are made of regular silver paper.  The little dark blue flower at the bottom of the word cherish is a spiral flower (brief instructions here).

But my big news on this layout is about that large blue flower in the upper left: I made it!!  I'm so excited.  I bought the Stampin' Up Blossom Petals Punch which punches out several petal shapes, but then I sat around trying to make my petals into a three dimensional shape with no luck whatsoever.  They don't look so awesome stuck together into a flower without any dimension. As luck would have it, though, Cheryl and I headed up to Archiver's (great store but a little far away from us!) this weekend for a little coupon-shopping and their weekend Make-and-Takes.  We made a card, a 12x12 scrapbook page and a tag.  All three were cute (and it was mighty cool to leave with a full 12x12 page!) but the tag had this three-dimensional flower made with the very techniques I was having trouble inventing for myself the night before!  It was soooo much fun to do, and I was so proud of the flower I created, that I came right home and made another flower from my punched petals and added it to my pretty pretty layout!

Where Did January (and most of February) Go?

Where did the time go? Mostly to road-tripping and reading! We added another trip, this one to west Texas, to our mileage count, which does take a lot of time investment between preparing, going, and recovering.

But a LOT of time went to fiction.  Oh, fiction.  I continue to find myself unable to stop once I get started!  A friend brought me a series of eleven books.  ELEVEN fun, suspenseful, page-turning, can't-stop novels, so of course I had to read them all, in a row.  Sheesh.  Then once I was on a reading roll I had to read four or five more novels.  Fun stuff but it takes all my blogging, picture taking, scrapbooking and card making time (and some of my sleeping time too.  And perhaps some of my time that should be going to everything else).  I think I'm taking a little break from obsessive fiction reading.  I've started back on some scrapbooking that I want to show you and I even took some new pictures of my children - wow.

These are from last month, but hey, here they are - a rare snow event for Austin.

School Valentines

Aren't these cute?  My friend Cheryl designed them and we made them at a little workshop.  It was fun to makes something homemade but I didn't really see myself making 34 valentines (for both Zack and Sammy's classes combined) without some assistance, so this worked out perfectly.  The kids each got a covered lolipop (heart shaped, of course) and the teachers got a matchbox with four Dove chocolates.