Back home!

It's great to have our son, Stephen, home! The leave that could possibly have been cancelled ended up being extended due to flight issues! So, he'll be home for 3.5 weeks. :-) Hopefully, he'll get to work one week with the recruiter, so that the extra leave won't be taken from his time in Sicily. :-)

Masculine "praying for you" card

Most sympathy-type cards are flowery and feminine, so I wanted to make one more masculine. This one was a breeze to make ... I already had the wood background. I'm not sure where I learned the technique, but it's very easy. Simply slide a brown ink pad down the card a couple of times, then repeat with a white craft pad. Perfect!

Tomorrow we leave for Great Lakes, Ill. to attend our son Stephen's graduation from Corpsman (medic) school. Supposedly, we are taking him home for two weeks, but he just skyped tonight to tell me he still does not have his orders, so he may not be able to go on leave after all. :-( At any rate, we'll be gone a few days, so I won't be posting again 'till Saturday.

"Waste not, want not!"

I really try to be a good steward of my resources, so when I gave the local printshop some cardstock to cut for some 8.5" square journal pages, it left 2.5" strips. I had some cut into two inch squares. This gave me two cute sizes for books. I thought the size here would be cute for child, perhaps to draw little comic strips in, or as a list book for adults. It was fun to make!

Excuse the poor quality of the photo. It looked fine on the camera, but I should have downloaded it first. The album is not here now, so I probably won't retake it. I definitely need a good photo editing program, that would have made a difference in appearance!

"Genuine" Scrapbook pages

I thought I'd show a sample of my "scrapbook" pages. On the left are a couple of scraps; I really did use a bunch of scraps ... I keep drawers of partially used pieces of cardstock. But of course, I added a lot, especially in the efforts to have most "pages" full size. When I paired up two (occasionally three) scraps, I used post-it notes or tape to keep them together when punching the holes. :-)

Genuine Scrap book ... as simple as it gets!

Here is the second "genuine" scrap book. As I said in yesterday's post, I could not get the computer to work properly (still haven't). The printer worked fine with the last computer, but this one can't seem to "agree" with the computer over color. Running a sizzix through cuttlebug is a nuisance, and the sizzix dies shed all over the place as well, so I didn't want to just copy the first journal. I finally just pulled together the flowers and brads, and decided I really liked the simple look! I played around with a few embellishments, but this just looked so sweet and simple, I decided I would quit trying to "fix" it!

Genuine "scrap" book

So odd, I thought I had posted this yesterday, I even can remember how I described the scrap book ... but the post is not in drafts, hmmm... this morning I spent 20 minutes seeking the description I'd used for the blog and altered slightly to print out for the journal itself, and couldn't find that either. ???

Anyway, this is a I'm calling this a "Genuine Scrap Book”. That is, it really is created with cardstock scraps! I put interesting cuts and strips in (wide enough to be useful, and to be sure the bind-it-all punched at least a couple of holes so those scraps wouldn't just hang out), and plenty of full sized pages with some borders and punched outs. It was more time-consuming than I expected it to be, but I liked the concept enough to try a second one, which I'll post tomorrow. I had major frustration with our new computer: the colors do not work properly. It's so weird. I finally gave up and used the sizzix alphabet dies instead!

Home Alone

Actually, I'm not alone, but it's just family, for the first day in over a month ... so it feels like being "home alone," in a group of us sort of a way. :-)

It's been good, but now there are less distractions as I get ready for the craft shop. I spend the afternoon painting a huge bookshelf that I am being allowed to use. It's been crazy. I had some white stain blocking spray paint, that I used up with the shelf, and so I bought another can while at the paint store. When I arrived, I realized to my dismay that somehow, with all the shelves (horizontal AND vertical) on the unit that I was trying to cover, I had completely overlooked the sides of it! So, I sent a daughter back to the store for another can. I don't know why I just thought one more would do it! But I was NOT going to go down again or send my dd! (Small town, remember!). I looked at my cans of white paint and knew those would not be enough. Hmmm... is it possible that at the back of the barn there might be some old cans of spray paint? Ones that allthough years old, cans covered in rust, having been frozen and thawed and baked in the summer heat might do the job? Wow! Two partially used cans! Since I plan to rag on some beige paint, I'm not worried about how it might look, as long as it goes on white! So, spray away. It's odd stuff, I'm continually stepping out of clouds of paint dust, and it's going on the shelf a bit oddly. Oh well. At some point, I actually look at the can label ... it's not regulary paint, it's enamel! At this point, some of it has gone on most of the shelves, so I use it up anyway. Tomorrow I paint ... should be interesting...

I have a "not yet posted" file in my photos, and Saturday, fully intending to post, I moved the card I was going to used to it's proper folder. We had two extras staying with us, and since I'm naturally distractable anyway, I got derailed before starting my post. Of course, I can't remember which card I was going to use. As I looked through all my folders, I discovered this card I had made a couple of months ago for someone. I never posted it, so it seemed a good choice to just go with this one! The gal I made it for is a lot of fun, so I though she might appreciate loud, vibrant color!