Christmas Cards

What a busy season! The Conservatory Ballet's 10 Nutcracker performances are over (finally!). I didn't volunteer this year, and still didn't have time to do everything! I have completed about 100 handstamped Christmas cards (and sent out all but a few); made books for both kids; and completed 10 re-usable grocery bags for the teacher gifts. Now, I can get back to Shimelle's "Journal Your Christmas" (www.shimelle.com). This posts's picture is of one of the card designs. I used the Stampin Up Christmas scandinavian stamps -- which reminds me of my time in Stockholm back in the 90s.

Happy Holidays!

Recycleable Grocery Bags

While perusing my digital scrapbook magazine, I came across a project where we decorate recyclable grocery bags. What a fabulous idea! I'm going to try this idea for this year's teacher gifts for the holidays! Here's my 3rd try - and so far it's the best! This uses a digital kit from Sweet Shoppe Designs and stock photos from iStockPhoto.

Fall and Thansgiving Cards

I seem to have gotten back into the scrapping and cardmaking thing. After going to Snowshoe for the "Harvest Your Memories" weekend crop and taking the BPS "Design Your Life" class - I'm unstoppable. For the last week or so, I've been doing Fall and Thansgiving cards. The picture below is for a card I made using an iStockphoto vector image (the ballerina) and manipulating it with Photoshop - combined with one of the PCLayers kits -- called Autumn Beauty. I made this one for our ballet teacher.

Alltogether, I made about 10 cards. Now, it's back to the layouts for the class. I've got another to finish up tonight and I'll get more assignments on Thursday. I have been able to keep up with this class - it's been really cool -- not so embellishment-y. But, lots more journaling than I'm used to. I'm also working on some 6x6 layouts for a small album that I made for my inlaws. They're looking really great!

More BPS

I signed up for another BPS (Big Picture Scrapbooking) class. This one is called Design your life and I'm hoping to get better at page composition. The photo here is from our class pre-assignment and the theme is "why scrapbooking". I used a variety of American Crafts papers that match the class colors (green, red, brown). I've had these for a while, and it seemed to fit.
The class officially begins on October 3 (next Friday). I will try very hard to keep up this time!

Sunday, after a weekend of struggle, I managed to install Susie's Wishblade software on my Macbook. It shouldn't have been hard, except that I've never installed anything on the mac before - we use it mainly for web surfing. So, most of my struggle was figuring out what to do with applications on the Mac. Anyway, I successfully cut out some page titles. Next challenge, some shapes! Stay tuned.

Stress Management thru scrapbooking!

Today, let's talk about stress! Almost anything can cause stress – especially when we feel like we don’t have control! In the media, we all see many reports of stress at work and at home – whether it’s a new baby or a new project at work. And, many of use have both at the same time! I attended a class focused on how to manage all this stress (without going crazy)and one of the recommendations was to create a stress journal – the idea is that you write it down when you feel the stress, and do some analysis around it – knowing gives some of the control back! I went to Google and looked for some templates for what to include, and came up with a basic format with information about day/time, the situation, the triggering event, the emotional reaction as well as the intensity and duration of the stress. The images below show the section of my journal for stress and the diary format I created. You'll note that I am not showing you a filled out version!




Then, I combined this with a wellness class I signed up for (last year and I didn’t do any of the work) and created a more holistic wellness journal. I’m hoping that I can use this wellness concept to address stress as well as other healthy habits – like exercise and more veggies. I’ve got my Wii fit and am ready to go! By the way, I can vouch for the AMA class on stress management – it was a very interesting 2 days!

Sister Days

Last May, my sister Lynn came to visit with Susie and me. We had a fab several days - it involved trips to Charlottesville and a couple of fine Virginia wineries. I was reminded about how important it is to have some sister time. I finally got around to scrapping a layout. The idea for it came from a Big Picture scrapbooking class. The paper and embellies come from My Mind's Eye.