Christmas is coming!

OK, I'm trying something new here, so hopefully this will work. For the last seven or eight years, I've put together a calendar of activities for our family to do during the month of December. (That's not the new part.) Back in the dark ages, I made a paper chain and fastened it on the wall, like a caveman. I cut a star out of yellow construction paper and it moved down the chain to show what day it was. (I'm totally laughing at how primitive this was compared to the Advent Bucket Lists we see on Pinterest now!) 

It is completely impossible that they were ever this little.
Somebody must have been using a trick camera.

 Some of the activities stay the same year after year, under threat of rioting by the minions. Watching Elf, for example, absolutely must happen. Last year, I collected a couple dozen Elf quotes and put them into a Bingo card generator. Everybody's cards were different and it was so funny to watch people tense up when they were approaching a Bingo and the line they needed was coming up. So now we can't just watch Elf and be happy. We have to watch Elf while playing Elf Bingo. But I'm okay with that!

Some of the activities stay on the calendar for a while but then fade away due to changes in age or location. "Play in the snow" is a safe bet at some point in December if you live in Virginia, but not so much in south Texas. Sadly, "letters to Santa" and "Put out ho-hos and milk for Santa" have also cycled off the calendar.  On the bright side, "Christmas Eve tamales" is a delicious new tradition.

Now that both my kids are older (read: have more demanding homeschool schedules and ::gasp:: independent social lives), we may not be able to do every single thing I have planned. I'm going to find a way to be okay with that. I don't want to be the crazed Pinterest mom making the whole family miserable because "TODAY IS RANDOM ACT OF KINDNESS DAY, DO YOU HEAR ME?!"

So here's what I'm hoping December 2014 will look like at our house. Feel free to copy any ideas that appeal to you, or--better yet--leave some ideas of your own in the comments.

Here's the new part I mentioned. I've never had a download link before today. The instructions seemed pretty straightforward which is almost always a sure sign it's not going to work. If you try to download it, would you please oh please do me a favor and let me know if it works?
click here to download calendar

A little "happy mail"

Last week my daughter and I were visiting my parents, and a dear friend of my mother's wanted to take us to the Esse Purse Museum in downtown Little Rock. I had heard that such a thing existed, but I have to say that it was not at all what I expected. The museum is arranged by decade, from the 1900s through the 1990s, and each case is thoughtfully curated, giving historical context as well as details about why the purses of that decade were a particular size or color or fabric. I'm not much of a purse girl, but it was really surprisingly interesting. And their gift shop! My daughter went crazy at all the coin purses, clutches, handbags and evening bags. I thought it would be fun to snag a purse as a souvenir of our afternoon, but I have much better taste than I realized. Every single purse that I thought I could see myself carrying was at least $200. Do people really pay that kind of money for a bag??

Well, now we're home and I wanted to thank our friend properly for taking us to the museum. (And in Little Rock, that means nothing less than a handwritten thank you note.) Our friend is also a creative-crafty genius, so I wanted to make the card myself. First stop, Pinterest. 

This is what I ended up with. The striped paper is single-sided scrapbook paper, folded in half and cut into a trapezoid shape. I couldn't find a die that I know I have somewhere (grrr! So irritating!) so I drew a shape like this:

by hand and cut it with scissors. Like a caveman. I sliced two small openings along the fold of the red piece and threaded in ribbon for the handle, and added a brad as the purse closure.  Easy! 

Day One of LOAD

LOAD1, originally uploaded by Wendy.A.

LOAD stands for "Layout a Day" and for the month of February, I am participating in a challenge to create at least one scrapbook page each day.  Each morning I get a prompt via email. Using that as a springboard, I came up with this layout about cooking with my kids.

Just between you and me, I fully expect to tweak this page a little before it goes into an album. It needs a little something-something to make it pop.

my latest scrapbook page

(I'm terribly disappointed that I can't make this look better online, but every single bit of technology in my house is conspiring against me at the moment.)

I've been on a West Wing kick the last couple of weeks. (I do this from time to time, obsess over a TV show and watch the whole series from beginning to end. Thank goodness for Netflix.)  In one of the episodes I recently watched, somebody said something in the midst of a volley of witty banter and it caused me to remember a moment from my childhood. It was more of a micro-moment--definitely not one of the moments we retell and retell. ("I didn't fall, I was tripped!" and "The lady gave me a free hamburger for being able to write my name," would be examples of stories that get told ad nauseam.) Even though I would bet all the guacamole in Texas that I am the only one who remembers this little exchange, I remember it with perfect clarity. It makes me smile, and anything that makes me smile is great scrapbooking fodder.

A scrapbook page & thoughts on antiques

I've had this page in my head for a good while, but it took its sweet time coming into being! I'm okay with that, though, because it came out just how I pictured it. These are a few of the antiques I've collected in the last six or seven years. I am ridiculously sentimental (which, at least in my case, leads to pack rat tendencies), and I just cannot seem to resist things that evoke memories for me.

Seems like to me, there are three kinds of antiques: pretty antiques, technological antiques and sentimental antiques. Of course, pretty antiques can also be sentimental, as can technological antiques. Let's look at some examples, shall we?

Pretty Antiques. This is my mom's niche. When we go antiquing together, we never have to worry about fighting over a find, because she zeroes in on the pretties. I definitely appreciate the pretties, but they're not what gets my heart racing.

    

Now, technological antiques...ooooh, that's what makes my heart sing. Old phones, old cameras, old typewriters...Sign. Me. UP.

I actually wanted to get a fan like this for my daughter's room. My husband took one look at all the places she could easily stick her finger and crushed my dream. 

 

My collection of cameras sits on the shelf above my scrapbooking table. I can't even glance at it without smiling.

Finally, sentimental antiques. These are the ones that make kindred spirits squeal, "Ohhh! I REMEMBER those!" and normal people ask, "Is that a....????"

Like this thing:

The Wham-O Magic Window. My grandmother had one--just like this one, in fact--and if I ever come across one, I'm snapping it up. Back in the day, everybody seemed to have one, but now they are scarce as hens' teeth. Who would have thought that I would obsess over 1970s kitsch?

Or this, the glorious Donut Phone (also available with rotary dial): 

And what I would give to casually pull this little number out of my purse to refresh my lipgloss after dinner with the girls: 

My childhood frenemy had one from her mom's Avon lady and I was PEA GREEN over it. She wouldn't even let me touch it. To this very day, I harbor a little ill will. I can't help it; I think it says something about a person if she won't share such fabulously-packaged cosmetics.

Whoops, I just thought of a fourth category: antique books! Love 'em, love 'em, love 'em! Besides my collection of "little orange biographies" (aka the Childhood of Famous Americans series) pictured on my scrapbook page, I've recently found a couple of children's books that I spent years searching for.

Did I leave anything out? Strange, I have an urge to do a little antiquing now. :)

Something that makes me inexplicably happy

I've always thought that making homemade jam sounded like just the most charming idea.  It makes me think of aprons and clotheslines and breezes through open windows. Pretty wholesome, right? The only thing stopping me was that canning has a language all its own. Every recipe I found contained the phrase "process in water bath." It seemed pretty important, and I didn't know what it meant. That pretty much ended my jam-making aspirations. Until several years ago, that is, when my sister-in-law taught me how to make homemade jam. I will never be able to repay her, but occasionally I ship a jar or two of my jam to her oldest son. He's partial to the apple pie jam. ;)

Our school is having a silent auction and I raided my jam pantry to put together this little sampler. I don't know if it will raise much, but I do know my husband and my father will bid on it! (Especially since my husband heard that we're now down to only one jar of apple pie jam--which is his favorite!) The other three flavors are blackberry (my personal favorite!), strawberry-banana and apricot.

I made the little tote out of scrapbook cardstock over the weekend. (This is where 1950s jam-making Wendy collides with 2011's computer-loving Wendy.)  I am so pleased with myself over this. I used clip art to make a label for the top of each jar.  There's also a fruit-themed Bible verse on each side, with--get this!--the same clip art layered under the verse. Oh, I'm a big computer deal now, huh?? (I think it took me longer to make the packaging than it took me to make the jam!!)

I know you can't read the verses in these pictures, so let me put them here, too: 

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.   Galatians 5:22-23  

I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.   John 15:5

You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.   Matthew 7:16,17

And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God.

Colossians 1:10

I'm just curious--which of those four jams would be your favorite?

8 Things To Know About Will

8 Things To Know About Will, originally uploaded by Wendy.A.

The challenge was to scrap a list, and this was a list of things I had written a couple of years ago when Will turned 8.

I'm not at all sure how I feel about this layout. Even blaming some of it on the horrible iPhone picture of it, I have to admit I'm not feeling great love for this one. I got the idea to use a bunch of tags from something I saw in Elsie Flannigan's book, 52 Scrapbooking Challenges. Her style is super-doodly (that was even fun to type. Now say it out loud: super-doodly!) and random. On the scrapbook style spectrum, I fall much closer to the Cathy Zielske (Clean and Simple Scrapbooking and Clean and Simple Scrapbooking The Sequel) end than the Elsie Flannigan end.

So, yeah, overall, having 8 different snippets of the list sneezed all over the layout kind of stresses me out. Lesson learned. But isn't the patterned paper adorable??

First Pro Football Game

First Pro Football Game, originally uploaded by Wendy.A.

Have I mentioned that I'm scrapbooking a lot this month?? :) Somehow I missed uploading this page from last weekend. Katie saw this one and said she thought I had a shot at winning this scrapbook contest! That's pretty amazing, considering that the page isn't about her.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving, originally uploaded by Wendy.A. (click to see full image)

Last night I attempted some digital scrapbooking. This morning I went back to traditional paper and was much, much happier with both the process and the results. One thing I am doing, though, is resizing and masking my photos on the computer and then printing them out at home. The good thing about doing that is that I can crop the pictures *and* make them the size I want. When I order photos, I can't do that as easily. (Well, I could, but it would require me to know what I wanted to do with each picture before I uploaded it. I don't think I can maintain a Creative Vision long enough for the photos to ship here, etc.) The bad thing about resizing, masking and printing at home is that a) I am using an insane amount of ink and b) I don't think the quality is as good. It may be the photo paper I'm printing on; I don't know.

Anyway, about this particular layout: today's challenge was to follow a sketch she had posted. Having the layout predetermined really made the whole process super-easy, especially since I was able to use any photos I wanted with the aforementioned masking/resizing technique. If I had been trying to use photos from the stack on my desk, it would have been much harder to find pictures that I wanted that also worked size-wise.

Y'all have a wonderful day and I'll see you tomorrow. :)

Darth Vader spring line

Darth Vader spring line, originally uploaded by Wendy.A.

Just wanted to share my layout from yesterday. This is a picture that has cracked me up every time I've come across it.

I have now officially completed a full week of LOAD. YAY!

Pumpkin Patch

Pumpkin Patch, originally uploaded by Wendy.A.

I could have done 2--maybe even 4--pages with all the pictures I took at the pumpkin patch, but after I messed with it and messed with it, I finally decided these four pictures told the story best. I'm reserving the right to use pumpkin patch pictures on a "2010 in review" layout later on.

Dinomania

Dinomania, originally uploaded by Wendy.A.

I've made it to day four in LOAD! This page has been in the back of my mind for several years, and it feels wonderful to have it out of my brain and ready to finally go in the scrapbook!

Stay tuned for tomorrow's layout! :)

A little bit of scrapping, a little bit of blogging

ebay inspired, originally uploaded by Wendy.A.

Today's the second day of LOAD211, a scrapbook challenge I signed myself up for in a moment of insanity. The challenge is to complete one layout every day in February. (There is also a LOAD challenge in October and May, but February only has 28 days, which made it feel a little less overwhelming.)

The specific challenge for today was to go to Ebay, type my first name into the search box and find something on the first page of results that inspired a scrapbook page. I was surprised to get a bunch of doll auctions; apparently Madame Alexander has a Wendy doll. I scanned down to the bottom, hoping to see another option, but it was dolls, doll clothes and more dolls.

Then I remembered that I have a daughter! Maybe I could think of some doll connection there. Think, Wendy, think! Then I remembered an old blog entry from the days when everything that fell into Katie's hand became "her phone." A few mouse clicks + a printer + a little scrapbook magic (aka a paper punch) and I had a quickie layout complete.

Mood when finished: pretty pleased with it!

Further back in the Time Machine

Journaling reads:

Katie picked out her very prettiest dress to wear on her first day of Creation Corner. When something got on her dress and I foolishly insisted that she change, nothing measured up to her pink dress. We tried on a yellow dress, but she ripped it off before I could get her downstairs. I got her outside in Dress #3, but she ran away from the camera, screaming, "Do not take my picture! This dress not look pretty on mine!" She was so upset that I decided to keep her home. We tried again when her pretty pink dress was clean and Happy Katie returned. August 2006

**************

I have to say that this journaling really does not touch the rage she expressed that day. When I see the picture of her running away from the camera, I can't help but laugh to see her at a dead run, but with her arms straight. That's some angry body language, right there.

When I initially wrote the journaling for this page, it was three pages long! I ultimately edited out the fact that I drove her halfway to the preschool with her screaming like a banshee in the backseat. I turned around and headed back home because I decided both of us deserved a better First Day of School than this was shaping up to be. The whole year that she was three, people kept telling me I would "look back and miss these days." She is now 7 1/2, and I can honestly say that I can look back and laugh, but I don't miss those days AT ALL. Maybe it takes more than four years to get nostalgic for volatile meltdowns. *grin*

First Day of School--2009

Don't panic, there hasn't been a glitch in the time-space continuum. It is still 2010.

I recently had a chance to finish a couple of scrapbook pages that have been languishing half-completed for far too long. These pages are from our first day of this school year. I have been doing handprints and signatures on the first day of school for a couple of years, but I may have to discontinue the handprint because Will's is about to take over the whole page!

I tend to follow a formula for this type of page--questionnaire, photo, handprint & signature--and because of that I didn't put a whole lot of effort into design elements or embellishing. Hopefully the cute kiddos can carry the page on their own. ;)

A little long-overdue craftiness

I wanted to share the Valentine's I made last month but never got around to posting. (OK, if you want the whole truth, some of my Valentines finally made it into the mail just last week and I wanted the recipients to see them first. Things have been really chaotic here lately!)

This one was for Will. On the inside it said, "Have I toad you lately that I love you?" He liked that it wasn't all girly, so I was happy that he was happy.

Katie's had to be pink and purple. I embossed all the hearts and she was impressed with that. I was pretty much ecstatic that she liked her card.

I cheated a little with this card. It came out just how I envisioned it, which happens so seldom that I decided to make one for both my mom and my husband.

My father is a Valentine baby, so he got a birthday card. He's a retired CPA and I have saved this little piece of ledger paper for months to make a card for him. Wouldn't you know the ink on the sentiment would smear?? Pfffft. I just told myself it added to the handmade charm. (But I'll be more careful next time!)

A couple of scrapbook pages

This was the second year I got to go on a scrapbooking weekend with some ladies from church. I was as slow as ever--finishing only 20 pages over 4 days--but I had a great time, and I made great strides in organizing pictures so they'll be ready to go, should any scrapbooking opportunities crop up in the future. ;)

When you scrapbook away from home, it is crucial to spend a good bit of time formulating a plan before you go. I had a long list of events and page ideas, and photos, papers and embellishments to go along with them. Ironically, my two favorite pages were completely unplanned; I didn't even remember taking these pictures until I happened upon them the last night of our weekend.

I can't quite remember when I captured Ninja Daddy in action. Scott is dressed for fall, and Katie's in a swimsuit, so there's really just no telling.

In case you can't read Katie's "bubbles," the first one says, "This zoo is crowded. And hot. And stinky. And I am not happy." The second one--taken a split second later-- says, "Oh, I didn't realize you had a camera!"

August Card Swap

I'm lucky enough to be part of a monthly stamp club that my Stampin' Up demonstrator Katrice has. (You can see Katrice's blog here). I joined this group three years ago and have stayed with them even though I now live a jillion miles away. August is my month to host, which I'm doing "live via satellite" with help from my friend Angie who is catering the event for me.

Anyway, this is the card I sent for the card swap. The name of the floral stamp set is "Painted Posies" a hostess set from (gulp) 2006, and the sentiment is from the "Sincere Salutations" set. The ink and paper colors are Sage Shadow, Rose Red and Regal Rose. (If you follow Kristina Werner's color challenges, you know exactly where I got that combo!) This two-step stamping is a pain in the patootie not my favorite technique.

Next time I'm in my stamp room, I will try to find my July card swap entry to show you. It won a Major Award.

A Little Bit of Stamping

I thought I would share a couple of recent projects. Both of these cards were made with a retired Stampin' Up set called "Treat Yourself." The first one is a birthday card and I colored the cupcake with Watercolor Wonder crayons then "watercolored" over it with a blender pen. I just love the colors in this card; it turned out just like I pictured it in my mind.
This next project was the reason I bought "Treat Yourself." Will wanted his birthday party to be a trip to the movies. I'm always in favor of a birthday party that happens somewhere other than my house, so he and I set to work on an invitation. "It has to be cool, though; I have cool friends." As if I would have sent out Hello Kitty party invitations if he hadn't reminded me.

Katie had the brilliant idea of coloring the popcorn with chalk instead of markers and it looked just exactly right. That popcorn stamp, by the way, is one kernal of popcorn. I had to stamp the spilled piece, then mask it to stamp the bucket, then mask the bucket to stamp another kernal inside the bucket, mask that kernal to stamp another, etc. A labor of love, that's all I'm saying. I stamped the wording all caddy-wonkus because after I'd done the popcorn, the very last thing on earth I wanted to deal with was fitting all those letters into a straight line.


I'm leaving in the morning to pick Will & Katie up from Camp Nana, but I'm sure there will be some silliness down there worth popping in to tell you about!

Stopping to catch my breath!

It's been a whirlwind around the Button Factory the last couple of weeks! By the end of the week, it's going to be more like a category 5 hurricane. Pray for us!!

Here's a little of what's been going on and what's coming up:

*Will earned his red belt, and I finally managed to not screw up the video of the board breaking!

*My mom and dad are here for a visit-- because this week is so insane with goings-on that it just made sense to add two more people to the mix.

*Will had his 8th birthday party yesterday. Imagine taking 6 boys and 3 girls, two parents and two grandparents to see Prince Caspian. I was almost sick, thinking that they would take the theater apart, but everybody sat transfixed through the whole two hour and twenty minutes. I just love that movie. Can't wait for it to come out on DVD!

*Will & Katie have Sports Camp at church all week. We have two members of the Power Team performing CRAZY feats of strength and sharing about the power of God. We've all been looking forward to this all year--it is seriously cool stuff.

*Katie's first ballet recital is coming up on Saturday. Is this the sweetest thing you've ever seen in life?? I just about passed out from the unbearable cuteness. I'm sure I will be posting more pictures (many more) later next week.