WOYWW #141

So, my work space is a pretty gosh darn mess right now. At least this week it wasn't due to errant zebras or anything like that but a huge undertaking I've been doing. I'm an ebay seller and I have literally boxes and boxes of old magazines to sell, some of which I'm also taking apart for clippings, which is what is on my desk. I've been spending just about all week getting them organized and figuring out what I have. I may have to turn in my crafting badge as I have done not a single Valentine related item this week. Since there is nothing too exciting on my desk--unless of course you consider a pretty big mess exciting, I thought I'd also show you some more of my nearly as equally messy space. In one cupboard, you can see my stamp pads and acrylic paint. Usually it's all standing up, nice and neat, but I've put some things away and haven't bothered neatening it up. In the same cupboard, the white container holds all my Stickles. The glass doored cupboard is where I keep spaghetti and pickles...no, wait...that's in the kitchen. It's actually my stamps and all my flower embellisments. I keep my acrylic stamps in old Stampin' Up boxes, so that's what you see stacked up. In the other cupboard I have various fabrics and my ginormous collection of ribbon. If I laid each piece of ribbon down flat, end to end, I bet it would go around the earth. Or at least to Pittsburgh. I'm hoping that now that my organizational project is dwindling down, things will get fixed up a bit, but I'm not making any promises.

Kissy Faces

I pretty much stink at the kissy face, as you can likely tell from the photo. I'm the one who looks like I've got a chunk of lemon topped with a sardine in my mouth. In my defense, however, this was another of those days when Hillary and I used our Scrapbooker's Card to go hog wild taking photos that we knew we'd want to scrapbook and I might have been pictured out. We took "playing outside in the snowstorm" pictures, she took sweet photos of her dad and I, and then the two of us posed together. I even have pictures of my CATS and hot cocoa, that's how many pictures we took. We tried to take some pictures of the monster who lives under my bed, but he was feeling uncooperative that day, which is probably a good thing. Not very photogenic. On the other hand, doing this layout four years later brought back all the nice memories of the day and how much fun we had and that's really something that I love about scrapbooking--the remembrance of days past that I get while working on it and now each time that I look at the layout. I used the My Mind's Eye Valentine collection pretty much exclusively, though I added a doily, a flower and a Martha Stewart lace butterfly.

Uncle Matt

I'm not sure why the lace is looking like that in the photo. It's absolutely perfectly straight in real life. I think, perhaps, that a gremlin has wormed his way into my camera lense to play jokes on me. But the jokes on him. There's peanut butter in there and now he's trapped forever. Cue diabolical laugh. I suppose that I could do the non-lazy thing and retake the photo. That is definitely an option. But then, I'd have not only wasted the time that I took to do it originally, but also the time that I took to upload it and then to crop it. Not to mention the time that it's taken me since then to start to write this blog post and to add the peanut butter into the battery section of my camera. Writing blogs is HARD, don't let anyone fool you. And there's things like weird lace on a photo always lurking in the background to mess with your mind. They don't tell you these things when you're just starting out and everything is peaches and cream and yogurt. Well, even though the photo is more or less ruined by the whole lace thing, I'll let you know that this is my grandmother's brother, Matt. If you're wondering, Kuula is a Finnish name. He was originally Matti, but "Americanized" it as a lot of immigrants did back then. My family is full of strange Finnish names--Toini, Onni, Reino, Aili, and I actually have a cousin named Urpo. I think he's the lost Marx Brother. I used a mixture of products on this page, including My Mind's Eye, Stella and Rose, Echo Park For the Record and of course, my beloved Ric Rac. Hope everyone has a splendid weekend!

WOYWW, Again

Well, here it is anothe Wednesday and my desk is legitimately cluttered this week. I had an all day crop on Sunday that I haven't unfinished packing from. I've been pretty good about keeping up with stuff like that lately, but didn't have a chance to in the last couple of days because....umm...a zebra broke in and tried to steal all my towels, so I've been camped out by the window making sure he doesn't come back for my wash cloths, too. I'm pretty sure that he won't be returning, so hopefully I'll have things picked up by next Wednesday. On the bright side of things, I bought that cool scrapping bag and a larger tote this week to take to crops and I LOVE them. In the past, I've been super annoying at crops, carrying my stuff in tote sort of bags and my stuff ends up all over the floor or strewn all around while I search for what I need. For this week, at least, I was able to keep all my stuff nice, neat and organized. Hopefully, once my adoration for my new bags has paled a bit (and I can't imagine that happening, I love them THAT much) I'll still keep up on keeping neater at the crops. I was much more productive and couldn't stop marveling to myself how darn organized I remained. It's a wonder I got any scrapping done at all with all the marveling I was doing. I did this page of my niece, Sam and her father (my brother, which is probably unnecessary to explain but figured I'd throw it in there, just in case) before her wedding this summer. I love My Mind's Eye Lost and Found papers. In some ways, they are hard for me to use because they're so embellished already, and it's challenging still adding my own touches to them, but in other ways, they're great because so much is right there for you. This page pretty much screamed to use the wooden Kaiser Craft bird cages (and boy, did that screaming hurt my ears. Inside voices, please, inside voices.) I was drawn to those cages the moment I saw them and was happy to have the perfect opportunity to do so.

So, that's what I've been up to this week. At least the stuff that I can tell you here.

Sketchy

Ah, sketches. Sketches are great to me because they give you a starting point and then let you bounce off into your own creative stratosphere. In this sketch, from PageMaps, I did stay pretty close to it, and for the most part used all Crate Paper products--a mix of their Farm and new Love lines. We did it as a group challenge at an all day crop and it was really fun to see everyone's different take on it. I find it funny though, that whenever I'm doing a sketch or a scraplift, my layouts seem to take eight times as long as when I'm just plopping them out myself. I can't decide if that's a good or a bad thing. Maybe it's a case for Judge Judy. That woman is MEAN. And likely a bit psycho, although if push came to shove, I could probably knock her down and run. If I had to go to televised court, I think I'd go on Judge Mathis. He seems to be the most compassionate of all those TV judges. I find the whole "People's Court" sort of thing fascinating. I went through a period where I was watching those shows every day while I was at home working, because there was nothing else on. There were about a billion of them on the air--maybe there still is, but I haven't watched daytime TV for years. What fascinates me about these shows are the people that go on them and some of their stories. Why in the heck would you subject yourself for public ridicule that way? You owe somebody 200 dollars because you ate their parrot? Pay the man. If you know that you're going to look like an idiot on the air, I think I'd just find a way to scrape up that money. It might be fun to set up a fake case with a friend, though, and make it the most bizarre one ever-- "Stephanie borrowed 600 dollars from me to buy Vaseline for her idea of greasing up everything in the house to make it a fun "socks off" skating rink. I thought it was a good idea, but she took the money and bought doughnuts instead. Now she won't pay me." I guess they might see through that one, though.

So anyway, I've forgotten what I was originally talking about, which was this layout and scraplifting. Scraplifting. Sounds like another case for Judge Judy.

Party

This is a page from Kevin's great Aunt Flora's surprise 90th birthday party last February. She's nearly 91 years old now and still lives on her own and if you can't tell from the photos, she was thrilled by the party, where nearly a hundred people showed up to her church to wish her well. She never married or had children, so Kevin's been like her grandson, and she's been like a grandmother to me, as well. She's a very dear person, but saying that she's a "fussbudget" is putting it lightly. And she's super concerned about everyone's feelings and trying not to hurt them. At one visit, I'd purchased her a new nightlight for her bathroom and also brought home lunch. As we were eating, Kevin said, "I'll put that light in for you after we eat." As things happened, he got a bit sidetracked and was doing some other chore for her. She wanted to see how the light was going to look, so I took it out of the package and we gave her a go in the kitchen. When she was pleased with the results, I said, "I'll go put it in the bathroom for you." She stopped me and said, "Well, Kevin wanted to do that." Yes, Kevin could likely not hold in his excitement on getting to go and plug it in there and bask in it's warm glow. I just smiled and said, "OK" and brought it in to him. Then, of course, she worried that she'd hurt MY feelings and came in and said, "I'm so sorry, Stephanie. I know that you wanted to plug the light in, but you DID get to plug it in the kitchen." You just know that nightlights are the hottest toy around--everyone wants to plug 'em in. Anyway, I love her to death and have a million of these stories. Lucky you.

This layout uses all Echo Park "For the Record" stuff, for the most part. I painted the chipboard title and added Stickles, just as I did to the phrase sticker. I added one of my brads from my ginourmous collection, and a little bit of stamping. I saw the basic idea for the cake in the lower left hand side in a magazine--I'd like to give credit, but I've torn up my magazines for idea books and have no idea who did it.

Spring?

It's kind of felt that here, with the warm weather that we've been having and the real lack of snow that we've had here all winter. I'm not complaining, mind you, but it was a good lead in for today's blog. These photos are from about 5 years ago or so. It was an absolutely beautiful day outside, so being the scrapbookers that we are, Hillary and I forced Kevin outside for a spring photo shoot. And we proceeded to take roughly 80,000 photos. Well, not really, but there's a sizeable chunk from that day and I love so many of them. I go back every once in awhile and dip into them and will do a page. That's the thing about digital photos--you can take 70 billion and not have to worry the way we had to back in those ancient times when we only had film and were still walking twenty miles to school in the snow with our shoes on backwards. Oh, I wish I'd had digital when I was younger--these kids today don't know how good they have it, able to take countless photos of themselves holding their phones up to the mirror. Back when I was a kid, we had to put stupid little square flash bulbs on top of a camera, hold our arm wayyyy out and hope for the best. And then pay money for a shot of the top of our head..........Anyway, back to the matter at hand before I wax nostalgic all over the floor, this is a layout featuring all Basic Grey Sweet Threads and an ample amount of ink. Have I mentioned my love of inking before? It's there, like the force, burning strong within me. I might have to turn in my scrapbooker's badge after the following admission, though--I don't really like Tim Holtz's Distress Inks. I'm a fan of Stampin' Up's inks and Tim's don't dry quickly enough for me and inevitably I get ink all over my hands and occasionally my photos. There, I've said it and there's no turning back.....And finally, I've been nominated for the Liebster blogging award! IThanks so much, Tanya!!) I'm so thrilled and will post the particulars that I need to in the next couple of days. I have to admit my ignorance and say that I don't know how to post the URL's I need to for it, so I'm having a friend show me and will get the info up very, very soon.