Making the Most of Things

Melancholy--I have always liked that word. I'm not sad, nor "down in the dumps". But I am feeling a little melancholy today.

The weather is turning to fall unseasonably early here and I know that soon the days will be short, the sky will be gray and I will be incessantly cleaning snow and ice off of my car. And while I love winter images, snowflakes and snowmen and crystal-like ice on branches... I truly hate dealing with it every day for 8 long months!

Along with this early fall-like weather (or because of it?) I have also felt a great urgency about cleaning house and purging things. So perhaps I am working this to my advantage!!! Last weekend it was the kitchen -- I'm talking walls, cabinets, countertops emptied and scoured. This weekend it was the car. But right now the sun is out and even though it is cool outside, I am taking the dogs for a nice long walk and going to savor the sun on my face and the green of the trees. I want to make the most of these last sunny days.

I started straightening cleaning out files on the computer and came across this photo. It was one of the last projects I completed as an AOC for Stampington and it is the thing that made me think of the word melancholy.

More Kaiser Tag Boxes!

I said I would post a few more of the
tag boxes that some of the Legacy gals put together for samples.

This fun vintage look box is Colleen's and the Spooky one is Nola's and then one more bright and kitschy one from Lynn.

Aren't they fun? I have an odd
attraction for decorative little boxes and containers, so I was excited to get these into the store to play with!

What would you turn one into?

A Little June Bug!

I had the best time putting this page together with Basic Grey's June Bug! The bright colors really worked with pictures from my nieces' 5th birthday.






Mind you she is 13 now!!! I told you I don't scrap chronologically! But really, I just never had the right paper! My sister always dressed her girls in bright, bright colors when they were younger and I can see I am going to get a lot more of these photos scrapped now that I have June Bug!

Bus Tour!

Several times a year
my favorite LSS,
Legacy,
hosts a bus tour
along with
two other stores. We try to change up the other stores so the participants aren't always going to the same places. The event operates like a round robin with a bus beginning at each store location and traveling to the other locations. At each store, the participants complete a project, have some shopping time and some eats and treats before they hop back on the bus and move on to the next store. Sounds like fun, huh?


This is the our happy Legacy group before they got on the bus this morning (wouldn't ya know it? it was a beastly rainy morning so we took this inside -- usually we take the group photo right in front of the bus, but today we would have had some mighty soggy folks so we opted for an inside shot).



And here's what they made at Legacy this morning. A fun little box from Kaiser that we decked out in papers from Basic Grey and Kaiser. Kaiser calls this a tag box, but we thought it would make a cute place to corrall those I-pods, cell phones and chargers; or TV remotes, or even some post it pads and pens by the phone.


I'll be back to post some other options for decorating this cute little box. Right now I have to go get changed and get back to the store to meet the evening group.

A Little Bit of Bella

I do so love the papers from Bella Blvd (can't wait for the new lines to arrive at Legacy!!!). Anyway, I just had to use them on one of the upcoming Formula Pages classes. These are older photos, but I never could seem to find the right combination of papers for them until I used these from Bella Blvd. (and one piece of LYB Travel line). Those papers, the large Accucut bracket die, and a few arrows punched with EK's arrow punch did it for me. The only other embellishment was a few ribbons (American Crafts and Creative Impressions) tied onto one of the brackets. Sometimes you just don't need a bunch of stickers and such.

This layout came together so nice and quick. Like I said the photos are old though, Jacob is 13 now and he was only 4 when these were taken. As you can tell, I do not scrap in chronological order. I tend to bounce all over the place and store my pages in a box until the box is full, then I put the pages into their appropriate albums.

Gosh, the photo of this page looks dark -- I have to get better at taking these kind of pictures. I turned the flash off so I wouldn't get the glare off the photos on the layout, but this seems a little dark. I'll try some other things in the future when I take photos at the store to get the lighting right. But for now--well you get the idea!!!

Will be back soon with a blog post about our fan-tab-u-lous Bus Tour. Hope all the ladies are having a super day at the participating stores!

Summer Daze

I am in kind of a daze... It seems like summer only just began. And yet, we have spent the last week or so placing CHA orders for.... wait for it... autumn, Halloween and Holiday papers and embellishments . We've already received part of our orders from SEI, LYB, and Reminisce!

Photos of goodies and some new pages are coming soon, but in the meantime I had to share a typical summer time photo. This just so says "summer" to me -- a boy, water and a fishing pole! Jacob is blessed to be living only a couple of blocks from the lake, so fishing at the lake or in a neighboring creek is almost a daily event (unless there is wrestling camp, baseball games, tubing, baseball or football practice, etc. etc. etc.) Ahhh, life in a small town.

More later!