teach

Lenny had an opportunity to return to the classroom for a day in March.  Many years ago he did a stint as a full-time high school math teacher after subbing for a couple of years the first time he 'retired.'  It was a challenge to say the least.  "There were just so many things they didn't tell me before I took the job," he kept saying.  Yeah, no kidding.  If they had told him everything, he would have run for the hills.  Teachers are way underpaid.

His recent return to the classroom was much different.  He did a session in a program called "Technology Talks" for a local college.  His segment was on the Nintendo Wii.  He explained how and why you might want to use the Wii for games and mostly for exercise.  I helped him out a little and one thing that was the same between this and high school classes - you sure are tired at the end of the day!  He did say he would do this one again, though.

Project Notes

• The little Wii character (Mii) was generated using a website where you build your own Mii.  I then screen captured it (Print Screen and pasted into Paint) and printed.
• The journaling was printed directly on the 12x12 Kraft paper first. 

• 'SHARE' is stamped off in Soft Suede to lighten the look.  Soft Suede - soon to be a regular color at SU! - is great with Kraft.  Also, Kraft will be available in ink, too under a new name.

Happy Earth Day and thanks for visiting!

Ingredients:  Stamps:  Autumn Leaves

Ink:  Soft Suede

DSP and Buttons:  Delight by Fancy Pants

Cardstock:  Kraft by Stampin' Up!

Chipboard letters:  Offbeat by Basic Grey

Font:  Problem Secretary Normal from dafont.com

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TIPsy Tuesday - Easy Wood Grain

Wood grain has been a big trend in scrapbooking.  There are a lot of chipboard letters out there in woodgrain looks.  I stumbled across this easy way to get a wood grain with undressed chipboard:

Thin dark brown paint slightly - not too thin or your chipboard will warp.  Brush onto plain chipboard with a somewhat rough paintbrush - one that has been used a lot.  You'll get a nice grainy look.

Old paintbrushes - that's another way scrapbooking let's you repurpose stuff!

One quick project notes:

• The cork is leftover from my tumbled tile coaster projects.  It's just shelf liner from Lowes Hardware.

My goal for this layout was to use some of my older stash.  I think everything on this layout except the ink is at least 2 or 3 years old.  Thanks for stopping by!

Ingredients:  Stamps:  Polka Dot Punches, Office Accruement by SU!

Ink:  Soft Suede

DSP:  My Mind's Eye

Embellishments:  Oriental Trading

Chipboard:  Unknown source (I've had it a very long time.)

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Project 365 - Update

Happy Monday.  Thanks for joining me this week!

One of my New Year's resolutions was to do a photo every day for Project 365.  With this effort, you commit to taking one photo per day and then scrapbooking them.  The idea is to capture the little stuff as well as the big events of a year.  I'm a quarter of the way through this project now and here are a few things I've learned:

• The world won't come to an end if you forget to take a photo.  I have resisted (without too much effort) the urge to leap out of bed at 11:00 p.m. and snap a photo when I realized I'd missed one that day.  It is sort of like dieting. If you slip one day, just start back the next.  OK, it is easier than dieting. Fortunately, I haven't missed too many days.
• I've also decided it is OK to capture two interesting things from the same day.  Particularly since it is Spring and so many things are changing in our yard and lives at this time of year, it is OK to snap quite a few different images.  It sort of makes up for those days I forget to photograph.
• It is best to scrapbook these photos as you go. I can't imagine they would ever get done if I left them till the end of the year.  This is actually one of the best parts.  I have a quarter of my 2009 album done!  That has never happened at this point in the year.
• I'm still a theme person.  I try to take photographs of random stuff each week but invariable start looking for themes.  That is how we go the CHORES layout above.

Project Notes:

• To create the photo collage in PSE, I typed out CHORES in white and changed the transparency to 75%.  I added each photo and then cropped with the marqee tool.
• The design was inspired by a layout in Scrapbooks, Etc. April 2010 issue.
• The waves were cut with a Creative Memories tool.  I'm not sure it is still available.  Every time I think I might list it on E-bay, I find a use for it.
• One of the circle designs was stamped with the Medallion background stamp in black pigment ink and then embossed.  I then just cut out the center circle from this design and added the cork clock button.
• The other circle designs were typed in PowerPoint using the WordArt tool.

Ingredients:  Stamps:  Medallion, Trendy Trees, Polka Dot Punches from Stampin' Up!
Ink:  Black pigment ink from Colorbox
Fonts:  Andy, Book Aniqua, Honey Script
DSP:  Crate Paper Mia Collection
Cardstock:  Brocade Blue
Cork buttons:  Pink Paislee 365 Collection

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Together in '09 and SU! Big News

Rarely do I do a layout with only one photo and no journaling.  I often see beautiful ones in galleries but I wonder what the story is.  For me, scrapbooking is all about telling the story, capturing the memories of what you were doing and how you felt.  This page will be the first of several I've already posted about the kids visit.  So the rest of the pages will really tell about our week together.

The photo does tell one little piece of the story of that week.  See my scabby knees.  I fell on the day before the kids arrived for a week's visit and missed all the activities they did away from the house.   I'll always remember little Nai Nai saying each morning, "Will you be going with us today, Miss Lisa?"  I was just too swollen to walk very far.   Fortunately, we did several things around the house, like "Christmas in July," playing dress up, making ice cream, picking zucchini (Nai Nai is crazy about vegetables) and playing games.  I still got in on some of the fun.

Project Notes:

• The Cricut and SCAL software cut out all the letters and the little ric rac type border.  The border is made by using the tilde (~) symbol over and over again, squished together and then stretched vertically.  You can make great borders in SCAL just with simple fonts.

• From a class at Two Peas, I learned from Nichol Magourik to use spray adhesive when applying glue to very delicate die cuts.  Worked beautifully.  To do this, lay the cutout - in my case "together" - face down in a cardboard box, spray with adhesive and then adhere to your project. 
• As mentioned in an earlier post, KI Memories Enchanting grads look great with Stampin' Up! Sweet Pea designer paper.

Speaking of SU! ...BIG NEWS!  Have you heard that Stampin' Up! is changing their color families.  Many, many colors are going away, some old In Colors (sadly, not Kiwi Kiss) are returning, and some new colors are being introduced.  They are bringing back Baja Breeze, yeah!  Mary Fish has a great writeup with all the colors going and coming on her blog:  http://www.stampinpretty.com/2010/04/stampin-up-gets-a-color-facelift.html

Have a great weekend!

Ingredients:  DSP:  Sweet Pea by Stampin' Up!

Brads:  Oriental Trading; Enchanting by KI Memories
Chipboard:  Oriental Trading

Ink:  Whisper White

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in the Watermelon Patch

Lenny is very excited about soon sowing seeds for the 2010 watermelon patch.  Last year's was his first and here is the layout I did on it. Journaling reads:

In the summer of 2009, Lenny announced that he had always wanted a watermelon patch. I agreed that he could plant watermelon and cantalope in the front flower garden since we weren’t ready for flowers. I bought some small seedlings at a garden center which he planted and didn’t water right away. After they died, he brought home seeds from Walmart and planted the whole pack! Soon a large part of a very large bed was filled with watermelon vines. Soon enough, the entire neighborhood began to talk about his watermelon patch. One of my friends even noticed it driving by! Lenny was so excited checking out the status of the melons each day. He was a little dismayed that his first melon got ripe while he was in Missouri. Not to worry though, he had plenty more. He had a few helpers in giving the watermelons away - everyone was sure he could not eat them all himself, but he gave it a good try. We weighed one in at over 50 lbs! “Why did we wait so long - we should have been growing watermelons for decades?” Lenny is excited about his 2010 patch to be in front of the shop and has started preparing land for many future summers.

Project Notes:

• To create the watermelon vine leaves, I used a leaf from Photoshop Elements and added a couple of extra "parts" - whatever the little leaf parts of a leaf are called?  I also used PSE to draw the vine and then cut the pieces in different sizes on the Cricut using SCAL software.  I used two different green papers to add some interest.

Ingredients:  DSP and stickers:  Lemon Grass from Crate Paper
Digital Grid Paper from  Katie Pertiet
Font:  Times New Roman
Chipboard letters:  Sam's Club kit

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Super Supervisor

My husband has a Mother-in-law and he wouldn’t take anything in the world for her. They kid one another. He is always up for her projects. She likes to bring him little treats or take him to lunch when he has been working for her. Mother is always upbeat and is very active. (I’m glad he helps her garden. She can work me into the ground along with her plants!)

There is one thing about it; if he is doing a project for her, you better believe she is going to be there to supervise. She loves to tell him what to do just after he has started doing the task exactly like she says. When he gets home from their house, I always ask if he had his ‘supervisor’ with him.

It took him a couple of days to get their driveway pressure washed last spring and it looked great – just like his supervisor said it would.

Project Notes:

• This is a real switch for me to only sort of match the photos with my papers. I was mostly matching my Mother’s leopard print shirt. She loves animal prints. I think it works because this is really about Mother’s personality not the actual chore.

• The title is cut out twice on the Cricut. I stamped some of the gold dsp with black circles in SU! classic black ink then cut out the letters. I enlarged the letters just slightly and cut them again in black cardstock.

• I downloaded Futura Rounded from dafont.com for cutting the letters with SCAL software. A really heavy font was needed since I was stamping.

Have you ever scrapped about your or your spouses relationship with in-laws? This reminds me of more relationships I keep meaning to capture. Ah well, another day…


Ingredients: Ink: Basic Black from SU!
DSP and glittery die cuts: Lemon Grass from Crate Paper
Ledger DSP:  Notebook from Stampin' Up!
Cardstock: Bazzell
Fonts: Just Act Casual (journaling), Futura Rounded for letters from dafont.com

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The reasons Why

One of the reasons I love this hobby of papercrafting is no one knows what you really intended to do.  This layout is a great example.  I started out with this cool circle paper from American Crafts.  I loved the colors and they fit my photos.  I knew I wanted to create a shopping bag and have my photos spilling out of it on tags.  Yet the paper was just too busy as a background so I started cutting and cutting... and cutting.  The short version is I was left with too short an amount of the paper to even get a border going all the way across the page!  That's when I improvised the idea of splitting the border with the circle element.   It's still a busy page, but no one really saw it the way it was before as I was assembling it.  If I hadn't told you, you would never know the border being in two pieces was really a way to fix a big mistake.  This just proves...

There really are no mistakes in papercrafting - just opportunities to be even more creative.  And thus this page kicks off a series of posts - about one a week - on all the joys of papercrafting.  You know them; I know them, but sometimes it is nice to see them in print.  So when someone (like your Mother or your husband) wonders why you can spend an hour in the scrapbooking section of Hobby Lobby or can't wait for the next card making video or just hole up in your craft room, you'll have a few ready answers. 

Notes for this Project 365 Layout:

• As I've already confessed, I had to stretch the designer paper to get this border by cutting it and adding the circle element.  The center is a chipboard circle I painted with various shades of yellow and orange until I got something that worked.  I used Creative Memories circle cutters to cut the edges of the DSP around the circle element.
• American Crafts DSP has a solid back that coordinates and it was a great blessing to this layout for the background and some of the elements.
• The tags were cut with the Cricut and Tags, Bags, Boxes and More cartridge.  I printed the photos on matte paper and then pasted them on the tags.
• The Kraft bag is cut with decorative scissors along the top edge and then just scored and folded.  It has 1/4" deep sides.  The handle is cut from a real shopping bag.
• The 'tissue' is scrap cardstock.  I soaked each piece in water briefly, crumpled them up wet in my hands and then laid flat to dry.  None of these papers had an ink run but I've had that happen before so be careful of handling wet paper or you can end up with a lot of dye on your hands.
• Another fix for this page was the yellow strip at the top.  I got the whole thing a little too high on the page so I just cut off some of the bottom and added a contrasting strip to the top.

In taking these photos for a week of Project 365, I was amazed that even when we shop in stores we often start on-line such as the Liberty of London bowls I bought at Target.  Target is a bit of drive for me so I wanted to know they had them before I bothered.  The Internet has changed many, many things but definitely the way we make purchases - and very much for the better.

Ingredients:  Designer Paper:  Everyday collection by American Crafts

Cardstock: Kraft and Choc Chip by SU!

Pens:  Signo White gel pen and journaling marker from SU!

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