Oma's Christmas card (only a couple of hours from an idea to printing!)

My mom was in town this past weekend for Thanksgiving. Sunday morning we were talking and we thought it would be great if she sent out a picture Christmas card this year. It was a completely spur of the moment kinda thing. She needed a picture of the family for the card and we hadn't taken a big group photo yet this year so - like I said, spur of the moment - we shuffled the furniture in my living room, set my camera on a tripod and everyone squeezed together for a casual family photo. It was fun. After we snapped a bunch of group photos the kids wanted to have a cousin picture so they decided they wanted a kid pyramid. What a fun idea. I LOVE that photo!

We of course had more spur of the moment fun. Mom and I checked out the Christmas cards Costco and Walmart had to offer (she wanted to order some place where she could pick up her cards easily) and none of their designs really fit the bill for the two photos we wanted to use. We decided to design our own card. In about 15 minutes time Mom and I sat on the couch and I designed this card. I love it. With the awesomeness of the internet and online ordering Mom had her cards printed and in her hands in about 2 hours time. You've gotta love it!

From the initial thought of sending out a Christmas card, to taking the pictures, to designing and printing the cards - not more than a couple of hours passed! No wasting time in our household!

So ... I wanted to share her card ... FYI, it's using papers, ribbons, overlays and a postage stamp frame from Katie Pertiet at Designer Digitals.

Now ... I really need to put something together for my Christmas card one of these days!!

P365+1: Week 47: November 18 - November 24, 2012 + Thanksgiving + the family!

It was good to sit at the computer tonight and put these photos together. It was a great week and a fun long weekend spent with family!

These are pages 87, 88 and 89 of my 2012 photo-of-the-day book. The year is fast coming to a close. Now I need to be careful that I don't overdo my pages. I print at Shutterfly and the max number of pages my book can hold is 100 so I need to keep tabs on pages and not get carried away!

Family Pics / An Awesome Thanksgiving / Time for Christmas Prep!

It’s back to a normal routine today. Those of us in the US celebrated Thanksgiving this past weekend. We had such a fun and busy holiday. We spent lots of time with the extended and immediate family. We always enjoy that! Despite spending so much time with the family for some reason I didn’t take as many photos as I might have liked. I wonder how that happened! I did get some fun photos though!

My mother decided to send out Christmas picture cards this year (yay!) so as my family was getting ready to head out the door Sunday afternoon we all posed for a picture (yup, totally last minute!). I’m so glad we did that! Then afterwards the cousins wanted a fun picture of just them as well. I thought I’d share these photos cuz they’re so fun! I love these kids!

Unfortunately, we forgot to get a cousin photo on my husband’s side of the family. Christmas is right around the corner though so we can do that in just a month!

So, with Thanksgiving over it’s time to switch gears and begin Christmas prep. Tonight we're going to put up our Christmas decorations. I love that! Can't wait!

Happy holidays!

 I love these kids!

  What goes up must come down!

P365+1: Week 46: November 11 - November 17, 2012

I would have to say that the highlight this week for my son (and I say this with absolute certainty) was that Call of Duty Black Ops 2 came out on Tuesday. He was so excited. Needless to say he played a lot this week. As for me, I do not "game" at all, but on Wednesday he wanted to teach me and he showed me some of the ins and outs of the remote and how to play. (It was kind of hard.) He did a great job. We spent a 1/2 hour and he patiently sat beside me and instructed me what I should be doing. I was quite impressed. It was fun. I was a little hesitant to try because he tried to "teach me" one other time a few months back and that time he was NOT a good teacher. That time he supposedly was teaching me but at the same time he was teaching me he was playing against me. There was no learning on my part at all that time and I finally told him enough was enough. But ... this time was different. It was fun and I couldn't believe how quickly 1/2 hour went by. I'm really not interested in being a "gamer" (I've got my scrapping you know!), but what I am interested in is being able to play a game with my son that he loves.

My daughter had a fun week. Sunday a friend invited her to the Vikings game. She doesn't know anything about football but she and her friend had a great time. They had awesome seats and enjoyed watching the game at the Dome without adults. Last night (which will be included in next week's POTD) she went to a friend's birthday party. Her friend's parents rented a stretch limo and she and 9 other girls drove around town. How fun is that? I never got to do that when I was a kid. I'm sure I would have enjoyed it too! Another day this week she was busy baking for our church. As I'm sure you know by now, she LOVES baking! She baked pumpkin bars for 100 people for a leadership event. It was so much fun for her. I'm glad they ask her to bake for their events sometimes.

That's about it. It was a good week. Have a great Sunday and Thanksgiving week!

Family Bowling outing

A fun family bowling outing this past spring:

I wanted to mention to you digi scrappers that LivE Designs recently came out with an amazing new element set filled with paper creases you can add to any digital paper. I've had 'em for about a week now and I've used them a few times already. They are so versatile. I love it.

A random thought ... I was looking at some scrapbook pages with my daughter today and talking about paper and digital scrapping. I told her that when I paper scrapped I really hated when my papers would get crumpled at all, I'd never use regular tape, and I'd hate when things would get grungy, messy stuff like that. It's funny ... the very things that bugged me when I paper scrapped are favorites when I'm digi scrapping. Kinda funny I think. (Yup ... totally random!)

Supplies I used:

Katie Pertiet: Digital Date Stamps No. 26, Photo Clusters No. 11 circle frames; LivE Designs: Bubbling Over Brushes, Creasers Vol. 1; Paula Kesselring: watercolor papers; Jessica Sprague: Home for the Holidays striped paper; Tiffany Tillman: stars; DeCrowe: square matte; Julie Makotinsky: Once Upon a Time sketched circle frames; BA Fixit staples; Fonts: Cafe Roji, Very Fine Serif

March 2012 Random Moments/Recap Pages

Checking out my photos I'm realizing that I've scrapped many of the individual pages/memories for the earlier part of this year. I didn't have any more pages for March that I was thinking I still wanted individual pages for, so I could put together my random photos for March. Yay! I feel like I'm getting lots accomplished!

A new idea ... For these pages I even used an iPhone screenshot I'd taken of a Facebook posting I made back in March. Facebook postings ... that's pretty "everyday life." You know ... I really like that. I think I'm going to make a point of taking more screenshots and perhaps including them more often!

So, to share ... here are the two pages together:

Left page detail:

Right page detail:

Evidence of a 13 year old girl with time on her hands

I went out for dinner with a friend last night and apparently my daughter was busy when I was gone. I didn't even notice all these post-it notes when I got home last night, and my daughter didn't mention them either, but it was fun to see these notes strewn about the desk this morning. I just had to scrap a page with all of 'em because ... well, just because. It's good to remember the normal, everyday happenings!

I love this kid!

To create this page I used:

Instagram!
Splendid Fiins: @ the Office Supplies (staples); Katie Pertiet: Hanging tags; Vinnie Pierce: Create Art Mini Kit (wordart); Paula Kesselring: Watercolor Papers (blue paper); Shabby Princess: Clementine (black paper); Fonts: Very Thin Serif; Cafe Rojo

A February recap - My process of "rounding out" my annual scrapbooks.

Last year I added something new to my scrapbooks. I added monthly recap pages. I think these recap pages really round out my yearly albums. As you can tell from this blog I scrap a lot of pages of individual stories throughout the year. Once I thought about it though - and what became really apparent when I viewed my starred photos in Picasa - is that there are a LOT, and I mean a LOT of photos that I enjoy throughout the year that don't make a scrapbook page of their own. These are photos that I enjoy just because I like them or that tell teeny tiny stories that don't warrant a full scrapbook page all on their own but that I want printed out and represented in the family album so they make their way off my computer. That's where my recap pages come in.

For every month of the year, once I feel I've finished scrapping all the individual pages of stories from that particular month, I go into Picasa (where I tag and catalog all my photos) and I check out my "starred" photos that haven't made it to a separate page in my album. "Starred" photos are photos that I've marked as my favorites for whatever reason. I then pull a bunch of 'em together for monthly recap pages.

I like all of my monthly recap pages to coordinate throughout the year. While these monthly pages aren't next to each other in my albums, I still want them to be a visual reminder that another month has come to a close. I'm going to use different kits every month, but I'm always going to do a basic Becky Higgins/Project Life style layout. I'm doing that so that I don't have to think about the layout every month and I don't have to spend time "reinventing the wheel" shall we say. Like my Photo-A-Day project, I want these pages to be somewhat fast to put together. OK, lets be real, "somewhat fast" isn't all that fast (which is ok!). With this quantity of photos, these pages still take a few hours to put together, but I'm not spending tons of time designing the pages at least. I like that!

I've certainly scrapped lots and lots of pages for 2012 already. I just took a peek at the Finder on my Mac where I save my completed pages and it looks like I'm at about 140 pages for my 2012 so far. Geez. That's a lot of pages. Love it!

In any event ... I just put together my February 2012 "recap" pages and I wanted to share them with you. First off are the side-by-side views:

And the detail views:

gooey. greasy. grimey. pumpkin guts.

The carving of a 52 pound monster pumpkin ... 

This is by far the largest pumpkin we've ever gotten. It was the day before Halloween and we had yet to carve a pumpkin or put up any Halloween decorations. (We were - I should probably say I was - kind of a dud this year I'm sorry to say.) We did buy candy though! It's a tradition that my husband carves pumpkins with the kids every year. My son wasn't interested in carving a pumpkin this year but my daughter definitely was. She's the one who picked out this giant pumpkin. I thought the pumpkin was a bit large, but I told her that as long as she was strong enough to carry it we'd get it. She could barely carry it, but she did manage. {She was pretty excited about it.}

It was funny ... when we got home she was going to carry the pumpkin in the house, but since her brother came out to check it out she let him carry it in. He carried it with ease - didn't struggle even the slightest bit - the way she did. I think she was pretty impressed with him (or else it might have just made her feel weak). I choose to think that she was impressed with her big brother! LOL!

To create this page I used:
Design by Dani's That Old Black Magic kit
Katie Pertiet's Photo Clusters No. 31, Fine Lines Borders 8, Worth Repeating Fall & Stitched Border
Nancie Rowe Janitz's Oct 31 Brush Set
and finally the fonts Very Fine Serif and Marketing Script

Oh ... I said we were duds. That's not completely true. When my daughter got home from school on Halloween she grabbed my husband's roll of "Caution" tape and essentially wrapped up our entire yard with it. It was kind of fun actually. I'll show you a picture of our yard (and the kids). I think all we were missing was a CSI-style outline of a body in the yard. Maybe next year!! LOL!

Halloween - A Randomly Awesome Person

My daughter wasn't planning on going out trick or treating this year. She wanted to hand out candy to the neighbor kids. The night before Halloween she had a change in plans. A friend texted her and asked her to trick or treat with her in her neighborhood. So, last minute, she threw together this fun mish mash outfit and went as (and I quote!) “a randomly awesome person.” What fun!

Here's what I used to create this page:

Nancie Rowe Janitz: Oct 31 Brushset & Paperset; Vintage Hallowe-en; Dreamy Photos & Cowgirl Textures
Jodi Lee: Vintage Photo Textures
Carina Gardner: Spiders Web Stamps
Queen of Quirk: Jeepers Accents (tree)
Michelle Coleman: Halloween Brushes
Katie Pertiet: Halloween wordart freebie 10-31-10
Traci Murphy Designs: Mask Your Pics 1
Gina Cabrera: Wave Stitching
Font: Texas Hero

Spring Break Vacation to the Wisconsin Dells

I've finally done it. I scrapped the pictures from our spring break vacation to the Wisconsin Dells this past March/April. It was an awesome mini vacation ... so very much fun ... but for some reason I had a mental block or something about scrapbooking them. I put the photos together for my photo-a-day project really quickly, but for the regular scrapbook the photos have just been sitting in my computer hard drive all year. I'm not sure why. Maybe because I had so many pictures so I wanted to make a bunch of pages and with a bunch of pages from the same event I wanted the pages to coordinate. Come to think of it, that's probably the reason. I like to make a bunch of randomly designed pages. Anyway ... I did it and the pages do kind of go together (which I think is important because the pages are in amongst my entire family scrapbook). I think I even remembered the highlights of our trip. Yay!

Family spring break vacation memories scrapped. Check!

I think, for the most part, I remembered the supplies I used to scrap these pages. Here's my list:


Echo Park Hybrids: Splash; Winter Park
Katie Pertiet: Basic Twills Summertime; Buttoned Up (Ice Cream & Car)
Splendid Fiins: @ the Office Supplies 1 (staples)
Design by Dan: Boy Crazy (robot & race car)
LivE Designs: Needs + Wants Date Stamps
ScrapGirls: Tickets
Cosmo Cricket: Joy Ride (arrow sticker); Boyfriend (moose)
Crystal Wilkerson: Rounded Corner Templates; Playground Collection (lips button)
Lori Whitlock: Spring Collection (banner)
Samantha Walker: Retro Roadtrip (family vacation sticker)

P365+1: Week 45: November 4 - November 10, 2012 + My son is almost 16!

Week 45 already. Wow. This year sure is flying by! It's already coming time for me to think about a layout for my photo-a-day project for 2013. Lets be real though, I won't really come up with a format until the end of the first week of 2013. That seems to be the way I roll with this stuff. You'd think I've got 52 weeks to plan for next year, but I don't. Oh well. I keep toying with the idea of doing a Becky Higgins style Project Life design but I keep thinking that the way I'm doing it works for me. I adore the Project Life style, I just wonder if it would take me a lot more time every week to do my pages. The way I've been doing my photo a day project is really very quick. Thoughts anyone? Anyone out there doing PL who wants to weigh in for me?

I'm thinking I could do a December Daily project in the PL format and see how that goes. It could be a good test for me. I suppose December is coming up pretty quickly, I really should decide that too. LOL!

It was a good week. Elections are over. I'm doing a happy dance. I was so ready for that to be over and done with.

I went outside with my son yesterday and took some photos of him. He's almost 16. Wow! I was so glad he was open to hanging out with me for a while and letting me snap some pictures of him! I suggested we go outside and take some pictures of him (wanting to take pictures of him but thinking he of course say no), and he immediately said yes. Without waiting another minute we went outside. (I'm glad my camera was ready!) I asked if he wanted to change and he told me that this is what he looks like and this is what he dresses like so this is what he's wearing. Makes sense to me. What a great kid!

Have a good week everyone!

Barbara

Almost 16. Wow! He is such a great kid!

Hanging with the Family

I made a quick companion page to go with a scrapbook page I created a couple of weeks ago with yet another of the many photos I took when we went up to Bemidji for the weekend to celebrate September family birthdays. It's always fun when pages go together so quickly!

What'd I use on this page? Click here for a full list of credits.

For fun I thought I'd share with you the way the two pages are going to look together...

The shortest person in my family

It's happened. I'm officially the shortest person in my family. It's kinda weird. (OK, I'm not much shorter than my daughter but she is taller than me now.) What's happening? My kids are all supposed to be little. I guess since they're both teenagers, it was bound to happen sooner or later.

I created this layout after I saw a recent page by Linda (Lindsan). I thought ... hmmm ... I should design a similar page for this recent photo of Lauren and me. I love all the talent in the scrapbooking galleries ... there's such awesome inspiration out there1!

What'd I use to create this page?

Splendid Fiins: Teen Add On Papers; Stamped Circle Brushes; Evidence Paper Pack; Make a Mess Spatter Overlays; @ the Office Supplies 1 (date stamps); Kinda Sketchy Template No. 1
Queen of Quirk: word art

Guy Time!

There are two awesome new kits coming out at Jessica Sprague on November 19th. (Well, actually there are a lot more than two kits coming out that day, but this page uses two of them!) For this page I  used LivE Designs' awesome Foto Focus Album set (a set of templates to create an ENTIRE album ... how cool is that?!) and Pink Paislee's Season of Change kit (a kit filled with wonderful warm fall colors and textures ... fabulous!)

So, what's going on in these pictures you ask? Well, my side of the family all got together for an out of town getaway over MEA weekend. We rented a cabin on a lake and in the afternoons and evenings hung out at the cabin. During the days, the women and girls did a bunch of shopping and the guys golfed. Actually, on Friday Scott and Tim golfed and Grant and Mitch came to town with us. They wandered around a bit as we shopped and then went to a movie (an action packed movie of course!). Saturday there was NO WAY they were going to go to town with us again so they went golfing with the dads. Grant has golfed before but this was Mitch's very first time. They both enjoyed it. Yay! Hopefully the guys will golf together more often!!

A big thanks goes to my hubby who took these pictures on his iPhone. After I got a Facebook notification while I was shopping and I saw that Sheldin posted a pic on FB of him and Mitch, it made me think I wanted some photos of Scott and Grant. I called Scott and asked him to take some photos for me. He snapped a couple photos of Grant and had the guys take a pic of the two of them. Yay!

Credits are here.

P365+1: Week 44: October 28 - November 3, 2012 + Celebrating Halloween

Just an ordinary week + Halloween fun!