Good enough is good enough...

Since it is SO hot outside (and my allergies are going crazy), I am having a creative day today. Well, it has been more like a creative five minutes here and a creative five minutes there, but it is working for me anyway. My brain has been stuck lately...too much to think about and too much going on, so it was nice to get a few things done.

I did one layout the last few days. It is only a one page layout, but it has been sitting on my desk taunting me. Telling me that it is not quite what I want it to be. Well, you know what, layout? I'm done with you. Good enough will have to be good enough this time. So there! LOL I love thise pictures of my girl and her first time doing a slip and slide. She was so excited. I forgot how much they can hurt, though.

I was feeling inspired to try and make my own patterened paper again. I haven't done that in YEARS ( I never like the way it comes out), but thought I would give it a go again. I stamped the background for this card and then distressed the paper with some Tim Holtz ink. Not too terrible.

I was excited today about 2 of my projects. Just felt inspired on these topics, I guess. First I made a birthday card for my little sister. She is turning 8 this week. :) I had loved (and missed) the Copic Challenge for making a bookmark, so I made her a card with a bookmark. (Sorry about the sideways pics; Blogger is acting up. However, if you hold your head JUUUUST so...you will not notice. LOL)

My (hopefully not) last project today was some notecards for the give bags I am making for the kids teachers. I found some for Collin's teacher, but they only had one pack, so I made some for Isabel's teacher. I like mine better. LOL

Later Gaters! I'm hoping to have a little more fun before I need to make dinner. Be on the look out for a challenge with a prize coming very soon. :)

An Ode to Jennifer....and a Copics Challenge

My friend Jen and I met in a very strange way...through a garage sale. LOL My DH went to her sale and brought me home one of her CTMH catalogs. The rest was history. We started at downline/upline and ended up great friends. I can always count on her to understand EXACTLY what I am talking about...and to be excited about the same silly things that get me happy. We don't live near each other any more and don't talk as much as we should/could/want to, but I don't think it matters how much time passes. We are friends no matter what.

We both would like to get back to scrapbooking more, so she challenged me to do a Copic Marker Challenge. The theme of the challenge is birds. Gee. It is not like I am obessed with Owls or anything. Picking WHICH stamp was the hardest part of this challenge.

I used one of my favorite color combos of Copics right now: B02, YG03 and E37 for the owls. Love them!

While I am sharing, I also just made this card the other day...inspired by Alice in Wonderland. Copics used for this one: YG03, B02, Y21, B24, E00, and RV11. Doesn't that Hero Arts set remind you of a modern Alice? So cute!

If you want to play along with the Copics Challenge (Yes, I mean YOU, Pam) then go here and see what you can make. http://copiccreations.wordpress.com/

Bugs in my brain

Do you know how distracting it can be to get things done if a fly is buzzing around you? It is probably one of the most distracting things in the world. Hard to think...hard to get anything finished. I guess the same could be said of mosquitos if you are camping and trying to sleep. Not the end of the world, but irritating nonetheless. Apparently, my kids are being bugs today. LOL They keep buzzing around me, interrupting what was supposed to be my mommy time. I will not give in, though. Usually a few times of interrupting my scrapping and I give up and put things away for another day. Today, however, I will prevail. I am taking care of business with the kiddos (no guilt here...I have been entertaining them non-stop for several weeks now) and getting my scrapping done, too. Slowly. Oh, so slowly. LOL

Here is the ONE thing I have managed to put together today. I have some pretty aweful (composition wise) pictures of Collin's first time roller skating (bad lighting and I did not have the camera...LOL). I found a sketch I liked in Creating Keepsakes May/June 2010 and built on that. It is clean, simple and I like it. Hopefully I can get some more done today to add to this post. :)

What can be better than pb and marshmellow sandwhiches?

There are just some foods that remind you of certain people. For example, when I think of my husband, I think, Mac and cheese. Orange Marmalade, homeade chip dip (miracle whip, mustard and ketchup) and bread and butter remind me of my grandma. Bacon (nice and crispy) reminds me of Sunday brunch with my grandpa. And peanut butter and marshmellow sandwhiches remind me of my dad. They are FAR from healthy the way he makes them (slathered in butter), so he would sneak them to us whenever my mom was out of the house and he needed to make lunch. We thought he was so cool. SO I have passed this onto my kiddos. We have them rarely and I don't use butter, but they think they are just as cool. :)I did 2 more cards yesterday and they were HARD! LOL I picked a challenge from this site: http://cas-tasticchallenges.blogspot.com/ and tried to make some cards that only had one layer. One layer? No patterned paper? Just stamps? Oh, boy! Let's see what you think.

Oh, I can't believe I never mentioned my darling daughter and her latest obsession: mustaches. Yep. You heard it right. She wants a mustache. Now, not a real one, but she did see some in a gumball machine and has begged and pleaded to have one, so...

We went out shopping and she wore it part of the morning. We got stopped a multitude of times with people wanting to tell her how cute she was. Wrong move, people. Baby girl got the idea in her head that people were making fun of her and she was done. Decided that having a mustache was a silly idea. I'm so glad I got some pictures first. :( I liked the mustache phase.

Give me back my Mojo, Pam!

I need ALOT of inspiration. I will admit it. It doesn't always come naturally. My excuse is that my brain is too full for new ideas sometimes. Really. I have a very full brain. LOL I recently found the answer to my full brain problems...a blog that lists daily challenges found on other blogs. How perfect is that? Now I can have inspiration at my fingertips any day of the week. Most of my scrappy friends live far away, so that is a great way for us to do some challenges together. :)

http://dailydare4u.blogspot.com/

I got my favorite scrappy friend, Pam on board to play with me. In fact, now that I think about it, I think I was much more inspired when Pam lived closer to me. Hmmmm...maybe she stole my Mojo. That has to be it. Anyway, the challenge link I chose for today is found at Sweet Sketch Wednesday. Here is the sketch for today:

Here is my interpretation of the sketch:

Not bad, not bad. I love the house part. I have been struggling lately with choosing papers. I don't know why. Maybe I need some new ones. ;) Here is another card and 2 layouts I have finished in the last week. I have chatted with Pam. Maybe some of my Mojo leaked back out over the phone. I hope she is taking good care of it.

Okay, now for the most exciting thing of all! Seriously, I haven't stopped smiling since I bought it. I am totally in love with it:

For those of you who think I have lost my mind along with my mojo (maybe Pam took that, too). Take a closer look at my "disposable" Starbucks cup. It is NOT disposable! It is a double insulated tumbler cup made to look like a Starbucks cup. How clever is that. It does a great job keeping my ice water icy and I think it is too cute. (Billy thinks it is retarded, but he didn't pay for it...LOL)

Off to finish up one of my favorite layouts that I have done in a long time. I hope to post it soon!

We are here! We are here! We are here! We are here!

Or at least, I am here. I just love Horton Hears a Who. First of all, who doesn't love an elephant who hears voices. And secondly, don't we all just want to be noticed? I look at my little wall of subscribers and feel loved. I'm sorry I have been neglecting you.

So today Isabel is not feeling well. I'm sorry she is sick, but oh, I have needed a "play day"! She is happily watching cartoons on the couch and I am sitting in my studio deciding whether to create something or organize. LOL Which do I like better? Anyway, I am keeping her in popsicles and happily watching Julie & Julia. What a lovely day!

I hope all of you had a wonderful Mother's Day. My kids are getting to the age where they like to participate in it more and are so excited to make me/buy me things. This year, Collin's teacher at school really outdid herself with having the kids make things for Mother's Day. On Friday, Collin happily ran out of school holding a plastic cup in which he planted some flowers that were beginning to sprout. He proudly thrust it at me shouting "Happy Valentines Day"! I love it! He was also thrilled to have some other surprises for me in his bookbag. He enjoyed playing a "can you guess what I made you...don't look in my bag" sort of game with me all that afternoon. The kids also picked me out some gifts (from Goodwill...we are not rich, you know...lol) that they were delighted with. Isabel got me the school house and Collin got me the tiger. I am a lucky mom.

Although my time to create has been sparse, I have made a few cards lately. Of course, I keep mailing them off without pictures. LOL However, I did try a new type of card called an easle card. You can find the directions for it here: http://www.splitcoaststampers.com/resources/tutorials/easelcard/

It was much easier than I thought and really a lovely card to decorate. You should give them a try.

Now that we have had a nice chat, I am going to get back to finishing up some layouts. How refreshing is that?

It's a rainbow kind of day...

So today I have a RAGING headache. Wow. I don't know where it came from, but it is about flattening me. However, the sun is shining in my studio window. Did you hear me? That blows any headache pain right out of the water. Hurt away head. My sunny room is glowing.

The day did not start off well for me. Collin was throwing up last night. No fever. No other symptoms, but random throwing up. Which he does not handle well. At all. **Can you say drama queen?** Apparently the male "I'm sicker than anyone has ever been in the history of sickness and will die soon" gene is alive and well in my house. Yippee. I sent him to school since he does not indicate being in any other way sick...and he was running around like a lunatic at 6:00 this morning. And arguing with his sister. Hey. Don't judge me.

After taking him to school, next on my agenda was Isabel's room. Ummm...can you say tiny toy disaster? I was NOT looking forward to the day long battle to get her to clean. She truely does not care about her room. But I can't even walk in there without getting hurt and REALLY need her to develope a clean gene (it can happen...ask my sister). So....I got an idea. My friend, Kasey, gave Isabel a pretty, purple fairy costume last night. Isabel wanted to wear it today. I asked her if she knew what fairy it was (we are very into Tinkerbelle here). She said no. And thus the cleaning fairy was born. She promptly put on the cleaning fairy outfit and CLEANED HER WHOLE ROOM! No joke! Here is a pic. to prove it:

See! My day just keeps getting better and better! I found some fantastic rainbow paper in the K and Company Girl Scouts stack that was just crying out to me. And since her room was done, i had time to play with it. I had some pics. of Billy I really love from last summer that I wanted to scrap, but I wanted some wallets of several different pics. I can do that on my photo printer, but you get the same picture on the print four times. It won't let me do any differently. So I discovered Photosheet. It is a free program that lets you put 4 different photos on one print. It works beautifully! I love it! The story I shared on this page is about Billy's need to insist that I moved to Puerto Rico just to marry him. LOL Nothing was further from my mind at that time, but it makes him happy to tell everyone that. So I had to record my side of the story for my kid's sake.

I was very careful to save every scrap left from that adorable rainbow paper, and was able to make this card and still have some left over.

And, since this was my rainbow day, I also found out that I won a blog hop from Zva Creative! They will be sending me $30 of their new releases from CHA! Check it out! http://www.zvacreative.com/index.html WhooHoo! So rage on headache! It is still a great day!