Christmas cards

Sharing a christmas card that I made for a challenge on the Turtle Soup forum.

And I can't count!

I actually got 4 layouts done! This is a photo of all our friends that were with us when we were in Mexico. They could only stay for a week but what a fun week it was!

Went to a crop this past weekend......

And got 3 more layouts done for the challenges!

Three more layouts for my 100 layouts from stash challenge! I may just make that July 31st deadline! These three are for the My Scraps and More month long daily sketch challenge for April. Our little don Juan layout also qualifies for a Turtle Soup challenge.

A Sketch I found on Pinterest

This is my kind of sketch, I like the layering and I like more than one photo on a page. I have lots of sketches pinned on Pinterest, it's one my favourite things to get me going when I lose my mojo!

And I am on a roll!

I did another layout this evening. It's for challenge #3 on My Scraps and More site. This is not my kind of layout to do so it was rather stressful and not really relaxing for me. It took me way outside my comfort zone with scrapping but it's done and I will get it loaded up in the challenge thread and go onto the next one!  This is my handsome little grandson the day of his birthday in March. He is such a little cutie! and no I am not biased! Not in the least! LOL

 

 A couple of layouts that I did today. I made today a "no work" day and spent most of the day holed up in my scrap room. I still have photos of our Europe trip that we took a few years ago. Did I ever say that I don't scrap chronologically?? I decided to participate in a Sketchathon on the My Scraps and More forum. This layout of the Eiffel Tower is for challenge #1.

This layout is for Challenge #2. Grampa decided that he and Amanda needed to cool off one hot day last summer so he put some water in an old fish pond liner that we had in the shed. The water was pretty cold, and the look on Amanda's face when she got into the pool was priceless! They had so much fun though.

Maybe I should update this?

I never feel like I have anything much to say so I don't post here often (guess that's pretty obvious!) I thought maybe I would give it another try and post some of my layouts and other crafty things I like to do, like quilting and photography.

 Sun rises can be just as beautiful as sunsets on the prairies.

And a quilt that I made for my nephew's new baby. It was so much fun to do.

No Sunshine Today!

It's Good Friday, and past the middle of April and we are getting snow! Again, more of, still! Mother Nature teased us with some warm weather and now is torturing us. At least it isn't 40 below!
There is a blog hop going on at Turtle Soup. And they are doing a puzzle sketch challenge. You pick up pieces of a puzzle as you hop along to the different blogs, save them to your computer and then print them out to make up the sketch that they want you to use. Pretty cool, huh? I have done the hop, saved the puzzle pieces and now I need to go and print them off and see what the sketch is.
Because it's so crappy outside, I think I will stay in my nice warm house and possibly scrap the day away!

Is it spring yet?

I am tired of waiting for spring.
On facebook my friend Julie hinted that I need to update my blog.
I did a few more layouts so I thought I would post them here so she can see that even though my mojo took a long holiday, I did find it for a little while and get something done!
I am almost at the end of my fulltime job contract and so will have more time at home again, that will be nice, especially for spring. I am thinking total revamping of my backyard garden would be a good thing to tackle this year, only, I have no idea where to start!
So here are the layouts I did in the past couple of days. Amanda loved running through the maze at the local garden center, Grandpa chased her through a couple of times I think, his chasing is done at a much slower pace than her running though! Then we had some posing for photos for Grandma of course. She is pretty good with posing for me now!

She is such a helper in the garden! I am not sure what she was attempting with the hoe, I don't think there were weeds on Grandpa's back, but what do I know?

This look was priceless! I had never seen it before this day! Wonder where she learned that one?

Actual glaciers,not snowbanks!

So,
we drove by this little piece of snow that the sign said was a glacier, Les and one of the other guys decided that they needed to check it out alittle more closely. I had to put on my 70-250mm lenses to get in closer but left the faraway photos to show perspective!

Some more photos

Jackson Glacier

More Mountains

There was the prettiest little waterfall behind the campgrounds in Waterton. I took about 100 photos of it from all different angles but this one shows almost all of it in one frame!

Then a couple of days later, we did the highway to the sun in Glacier Park, in the States. It took us pretty much the whole day, we started at 10 am and I think we were back at our campgrounds by about 5 pm. There was some construction going on so there were a couple of waits but there were also many places to stop and take little walks to see waterfalls and glacier creeks, I guess you would call them.

Frustration!

We were enjoying our first day of a long awaited holiday when my cell phone rang and interrupted a perfectly fine morning of coffee and beautiful scenery!! We were at Waterton National Park, away from work, phones, computers, and any other problems associated with them!! OR so we thought!! The first phone call came from dh's sister, where are you, are you okay, everything cool in your world?? Why do you ask, we say. Oh, just got an email saying you were in London and having some trouble and needing some money!! WHAT!!!! Well, that just threw my lovely holiday into a stress coated mind meltdown!!! Not only had someone taken over my email account, Hotmail had locked me out as well!! Which, I suppose, was a good thing at the time but it has taken me until tonight to convince them that I am the real person that belongs to this account. In the meantime I had started a new account and reasked all my friends on facebook to become my friends again because, facebook is hooked into your email and I was locked out of there as well!! We had many phone calls over this email, most of them from very concerned family members and friends. My biggest concern was that whoever got into my email could get into other things as well, and I had myself quite stressed over this for a day or 2. We finally got to a place where I could plug in my own computer and not use a WI-fi tower and I managed to set my mind at ease in regards to other things.

So now I am sort of back to where I was but with all my passwords changed and I hope a smarter outlook on how easy it was for someone to hack into my email. I will be much more cautious now about where I am when I log in!

Now, for some really pretty pictures:

Some new layouts

I haven't really been doing them in chronological order but here are some of the layouts that I have done for my travel album. I included the itinerary page because I wanted to show just how much we saw in the 2 weeks!!

There weren't alot of windmills in Holland, apparently they are going the way of the elevators here on the prairies.

This guy was worth taking the tour for all by himself! He was great, informative, interesting and funny!!

Another member of the tour group got this photo and kindly sent it to us as we didn't leave the same time as them, we stayed an extra week after the tour was over. They took this in the morning when they left the hotel, we were still sleeping!

I have sooo many photos yet to go through and make a decision of which ones to print and put into the album. It 's going to take me a long time to get this album put together. As well, I have alot of "stuff" that I saved over the tour that needs to somehow be fit in! Like tickets, and maps and things like that!

Sorry for being MIA

Sorry for being totally off the blogging world map but it's something that I just don't think of doing for myself. I love stalking, er, I mean looking, at other people's blogs but I just don't think that I have anything very interesting to blog about so I don't!!
So we have been back from our whirlwind european tour for about 3 weeks now. The tour company does not lie when they say the word "whirl"!! We saw alot of things in 2 weeks. There were many places I wished we could stay little longer and some places I was glad we were getting back on the bus in 45 mins!! I have finally started going through the photos and deleting the really bad ones and seeing what I could do with the others. I had bought PSE8 before we left and I got the book PSE8 for Dummies, so that I could figure out how to use this program abit more. I am still in the learning process, so alot of my photos have been touched up with Picassa instead.
I have around 3000 photos to go through so bear with me!
I decided the other day, I really should get started on
scrapping some of them before I totally forgot what and where
they were about. I also did a couple of layouts of our sweet little
granddaughter.

We sometimes have her here with us for the day and there is nothing more fun than playing with a 2 year old! Teaching her all the ways to have fun in the snow!! Just watching and listening to her chatter and learn new things. Or to listen to her tell her stuffed animals stories or instruct them on proper etiquette!! It's hilarious.

Another Try at Digital

Well, I tried another lesson with the digital scrapbooking CD. This time we started from a blank page instead of using a template so it was alittle more involved. The concepts are starting to make sense to me now but it is taking along time for me to remember all the little details involved in making a page. I really think I enjoy the actual physical actions of glueing and cutting and arranging to the digital versions. I am thinking maybe hybrid might be a good way to go and I have done abit of hybrid already because I have the Print Artist program and have done up journalling for my pages for along time now and in the beginning I made titles and printed out some graphics alot, before I started buying all the cute,matching stuff! Sooo, I think I will continue to learn because I like learning new things, but whether or not I will go digital remains to be seen. I am looking forward to learning more things on PSE8 in regards to photo manipulation though. There is a whole new world out there I think!!

I did it!!

Well, this took just about all day to do!! I broke down and bought Photoshop elements 8 yesterday out at Costco and today I spent pretty much the entire day, watching the extra CD on introducing scrapbooking with PS8. I followed along with the instructions, watching most of the stuff twice before it soaked into my poor, aching brain!! But I have now officially made my very first digital scrapbooking page!!! I did take a few breaks to throw some laundry in and take a run to the library but other than that, I have been at this pretty much all day today! I am not all that sure I like this enough to totally immerse myself in it but for a page every now and then, it could be an okay thing to do!

New Project

I have doing a different project lately. My reason? Monkeyface is getting her own "big girl bed" so I thought that I would do another one of my many hobbies and make her a quilt. I chose a simple one because I didn't want it to take too long or me to run out of steam before I got it done!! Sometimes I think I suffer from ADD because if something doesn't come together easily and quickly for me, I lose interest and start something else that looks like it might be more fun. The result?? I have a house full of unfinished projects!! Oh, I have lots of finished ones too but I do have quite afew unfinished ones as well. One of my New Year's resolutions, every year, is to finish up some of them!! And I usually do get a couple done before, yes, you guessed it, I lose my focus. Anyway, I digress. Here is the lovely Princess Quilt to go on the Princess's new bed. She has a lovely, freshly painted room with all the things in it that a little princess would need. The other grandma helped out with that too!! She has a little princess deacon's bench with baskets underneath for toys and a princess picture for on the wall!! Her mom bought her princess sheets for her bed too!! She had her first night in her bed on Saturday and apparently did very well. She stayed in bed all night!!




And then I went shopping last week to the LSS and
bought some new MME paper. I know, I know, I am supposed to be
using up my stash but this stuff was sooooo pretty, I couldn't resist! We babysat Monkeyface last week I think it was and Grandpa took her outside to play with her. She was soo cute in her little snowsuit and she just loved being in the snow. Grandpa made alittle hill for her to slide down and she just had so much fun with that! We really should get a toboggan and go onto a real hill with her, I think she would have a blast!! They built some snowmen too and made snow angels but those will be on other layouts!!

A New Education

Okay, so if you would have asked me a year ago who Dora and Diego were, I would have looked at you and said, huh? But this year, I know exactly who they are and I have probably watched most of the episodes of Dora, more than once! So when I read a poster in the mall that Dora was coming to town I asked my dd if she thought Monkeyface would like to go and see them. So yesterday, off we went to the mall. I got there before the designated time and I saw a very long lineup. Now, I have always said it isn't what you know but who you know that counts in this world and again, I was proven correct!! There, in the front of the line were 2 of my scrapping buddies and they called me over and told me to stick with them, they are the pros of children's stuff, they had been there since 8:30 waiting, had even packed a picnic breakfast!!! Now, my hat is off to these ladies, they knew their stuff. Monkeyface seemed alittle overwhelmed by all the people and I had been alittle nervous about taking her into the mall as she tends to like to run, usually away from me!! But she stuck right close and when she saw Dora coming down the hall, she was sooooo excited. As they lined up for photos and there were a few others that had won contests I think, that got to go ahead of the lineups, she talked a mile a minute about Dora and Diego and where was Boots, and look she had her backpack on and oh grandma, there's the map, you get the picture, right? then, came time to go on stage and get her photo with them, guess what, no way was she going, no, no, no, so I hauled her up there and stood with her almost glued to my leg!!! And, then as we left, she turns around and waves and says, bye Dora!!!! Fear seemed to be forgotten already!! oh well, she didn't really like Santa either!! When I asked her later why she was so scared of them, she said, "Diego, too big!!!" So I guess, from afar, they looked okay, but up close, they were just too big! All in all, it was a great day spent with my dear little Monkeyface. I got to have her for the entire day and she is soooo much fun. She seems to have learned something new everytime I see her.