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.

Don't Try This At Home, Kids

This is a layout that I did at my LSS Paper! Paper! at a crop. She'd found this awesome Little Yellow Bicycle Sketch online and made it a challenge for the day, so because I can't resist a challenge, off I went. Yes, those are indeed silhouetted photos that you're seeing. Back in October of 2000, when I started scrapbooking, I was smugly sure that I wouldn't mind cutting up priceless family photos (and not very well either, mind you) into odd shapes and/or silhouettes. I was also smugly sure that those lovely Paper Pizazz and Precious Moments papers would be the way I'd want to represent my photos forever. As hard as it is to believe, I was absolutely wrong. After my scrapbooking had progressed a bit and I stopped doing 8x10 AND hacking away at my photos, I redid some of those horrible pages and others I just took apart to do again some other day. I rescanned the photos and tried to trim them a bit better and have had to come up with creative ways to sort of fix the horrible mistake I made. So anyway, this long winded description explains what is going on in this page. I can't believe I hacked up photos of me meeting my beautiful niece, Samantha, for the first time. (I'd also cut the bottom of the photos of my mother with decorative edged scissors. Ugh.) So, don't try it at home, kids. It's not worth the pain. Silhouetting your pictures will only lead to heartache. So, back to this layout. I'm also endeavoring to use up old products along with my new. I'm not sure where this paper all came from, but it looks like some old stack papers. I used some of the papers to cover the flourishes, added some lace and used the Cricut for the title. I still look at it and see those blaring silhouettes but what's done is done.

Butterfly

Ah, butterflies. Who doesn't love them? Me, actually. I'll clarify that--I think that they're beautiful and I love the symbolism of them...but don't get any of them near me. To me, they're just cleverly disguised moths, and since I'm slighly phobic of moths, it's my rule of thumb to just generally steer clear of butterflies, too. Luckily for me, paper ones hold no such phobia for me and I can happily punch them out to my heart's content and dream of world where moths all go jump off a cliff, which is what I did as I completed this layout of my beautiful niece, Samantha--dream of moths that is, not jump off a cliff. All the papery stuff is Aunthentique and then I used a wooden flourish by Kaiser Craft, which I painted with Stickles. I have a thing about Stickles. I have to restrain myself from wanting Stickles on every page. Stickles for President!!

I also used some nice, puffy ric rac and a button. Ric Rac is also one of my sublime pleasures. Ric Rac for President!! You can see why my scrapbooking supplies hate me.