A little Christmas Interlude...

I haven't been around much lately... busy, busy, busy with work for last 6 weeks... but here is my favorite American Idol singing my favorite Christmas song...

Craft Night Tonight!

I love our after work craft nights... usually only once a month but this month we are trying to squeeze in two due to the holidays fast approaching. I brought way too much stuff this time but I wasn't sure what I was going to work on. I will have access to the Christmas Solutions cart and the Happily Ever After cart (both of which I don't own) so I may just cut some of those for future use. I also need to take pics of the cards I have been working on. So look for a post later.

More Blog Candy...

I love the scrapbook world... it is filled with the nicest, most talented people. I mentioned earlier winning two prizes this past weekend just by leaving comments on their blogs. Well, I found another one where the talent is amazing and once again... more blog candy. It's over at Crafty Chatter . To enter to win, I just need to leave a comment on her post and link to it from my blog. She is offering a surprise candy package of approx $100 worth of goodies. Please, pick me... pick me! :)

Pumpkins 2009

Before we get too far into November, I guess I should post pictures of our pumpkins. Once again we have grown our own ginormous pumpkins... aww, who am I kiddin'... Jeff grew the pumpkins. He did a real bang-up job this year too. We were able to harvest 12 large ones. We kept one for each of us and gave the other 7 away. We also set a new family record... the largest one weighed in at a whopping 79.8 pounds!!! That will be the Jack Skeleton head in the upcoming pics.

This year though Jeff was busy working overtime and didn't have time to carve them until - gasp! - Halloween day... then he got stuck carving 4 of them by himself... he told me if I wanted one then I needed to carve it.

Here are our masterpieces:

Our record breaker!

Maleficent

The Pirate Fish (see the eyepatch?)

Bat in the Moon


The Wise Old Owl

I Never Win Anything...

But this weekend received notice from two separate contests that I won! The first I found out about was from one of the hostesses of the BBTB (Bitten by the Bug) Blog Hop, Creative Candy... It's a Sweet Thing. How cool is that?!?!? The blog hop did a challenge where they all had to use the tag from Stretch Your Imagination cart and to use it in a Halloween themed idea. Because of this blog hop, I was introduced to a bunch of talented ladies all of whom I have become followers on their respective blogs. It is such a good way for me to learn how to think outside the box for scrappin'. What did I win? Creative Candy mentioned in her blog post that it would be cartoon dimensional stickers... very, very cool!

Tonight I was reading a new post for Bo Bunny blog. And reading it, once again, saw my name. Now Carrie isn't exactly a common name but it's not all that unusual either. So I went back to the comments on their post about "BOO"ing two people... one from Facebook and one who left a comment on the post commenting on their favorite Halloween memory/tradition and linked them to their blog. That was me... my favorite tradition... growing our own pumpkins and carving them Halloween week (but how sad is it that I don't even have pics posted yet). I wasn't sure how I was supposed to be contacted. Had to search my comments from the previous post and there it was.. on the one from August 3... again, very sad that it's been so long since I've blogged. As for the prize... some goodies from their Boo Crew Bo Bunny line... which is pretty dang awesome! Their paper is fantastic. Bo Bunny is a new product line for me but one that I will definitely be looking for.

So right now I am feeling like I should go buy a lottery ticket... aww, but what could be better than winning from 2 scrapbooking sites... guess I'll forget the lottery ticket, save my money and buy some scrapbook products instead... definitely a better investment!

Halloween 2009

Halloween is supposed to be less hectic as our kids get older, right? At least that's what I thought... but not so. This has been a crazy busy week. My kids are older so no costumes to prep... well, not really. They were all pretty much on their own for them... no one really needed mom's help. But Cheryl at work decided that we should put out Halloween treats for the other members of the office. It turned into quite the spread.





















She LOVES to bake and did quite a bit... including gross but yummy Witches Fingers (the cookies are hers, the witch is mine) and super delicious monster cookies (again, my monster contriubution). Both were made from Paper Doll Dress-Up.





Besides contributing sloppy joes and a pasta salad, I decided to decorate my treats this year. Through the cricut MB, I have discovered lots of creative ladies and one in particula, Kerry, amazed me with her work so I completely stole her ideas and made these... little bats on the kit kats... and spiders on the York pepermint patties. The bats were from Hello Kitty Greetings and the spider was from DoodleCharms.



I also copied her Pumpkin Poop... which I thought was so cute! Mr. Pumpkin was from Stretch Your Imagination.



But thankfully we don't get any trick or treaters at our house so I only had to make about 35 of each and not hundreds!


Halloween Day arrived and with it so did the flu... poor Kendra! Since Kevin had it 2 weeks ago, we've been waiting to see who would be next and very surprised that it took this long! But she had been showing subtle symptoms this week and unfortunately today it decided to rear it's ugly head. So no trick or treatin' for her... but I felt so bad that I went to Culver's and picked her up a double scoop Chocolate Oreo Volcano Explosion. Yummy!



Kaitlyn was invited to a friend's birthday party tonite started with t/t and then bonfire and cake. She threw her costume together very quickly... quite appropriate for her... The crazy cat lady.




Kevin who should really be too old to go trick or treatin' (are you ever too old?) decided to go out with his GF, Kelly. I didn't care as long as costumes were worn. He was a gangster and she was a flight attendant. They were frozen when they got back in... I think it was about 40 degrees while
they were out.
While all of this was going on... Jeff was busy carving our pumpkins as we didn't get to do them earlier this week. But it's late and I'm tired and going to bed.

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Aug 3 Challenge - Fun in the Sun

We had a great day yesterday helping Andrea and Jeremy prep for the babies arrival which is happening this Wednesday!! The nursery has been done but we helped get their bedroom moved upstairs, moved other furniture downstairs and did some general cleaning. We probably should've gone for the whole weekend and more would've gotten done. But I think most stuff is in place. This is so exciting but I am so glad it is not me... don't think I would've survived 3 babies at once. And I just have to add here that Andrea looks FANTASTIC! I don't think she put on any weight that wasn't baby related. Granted her tummy is very large (but let's see you carry 3 babies at one time) but the rest of her is her same old skinny self! Heck I don't think her ankles ever swelled up... she looks good. We made her post for pictures before we left (mean of us, I know, after she spent the day cleaning)... I plan on doing a layout of them so you will have to wait for the layout to see how good she looks.

Back to scrappin'... Today's challenge had to do with the book, Holes by Louis Sachar. I took this one very literally and challenged the ladies to use something to represent holes on their layout.. eyelets, brads, buttons, etc. My layout is the kids back in 2003 (Kevin looks so little compared to today!) playing at the lake by Grandma and Grandpa's house. "Fun in the Sun" is cut from Life's a Beach cartridge.

August 2 Challenge - Hiking

We are off to the in-laws in the morning so I am posting this now. Got another layout done for my Monthly Challenges at MSH. Today's book is A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle. The quote I used from the book was this... "Love. That was what she had that IT did not have." Okay, if I am being honest, I have never read this book and I don't think my daughters have either. Is that a bad thing??

The challenge I issued to the ladies was to create a layout on something that we love... not necessarily someone (because honestly so much of our scrappin' already involves pictures of those we love). My layout reflects on the hiking we do as a family. My first few mother's days were spent hiking the Ice Age Trail in the lower Kettle Morraines. The picture is from our last hiking excursion at Governor Dodge State Park. The hiking boots were cut from my Camping Solutions cartridge.

Finally Scrappin' Again!

I can't believe it's been 6 weeks since I've last posted but so much has happened... good and bad. The good is that Kaitlyn and I went to Savannah for a week on a girl scout trip. I will try to post some pictures from that soon. And we went camping for the first time in 3 summers! Jeff and Kevin have been so busy the last couple of summers preparing for and going to Philmont. This was the first summer we were finally able to go as a family. We also had a wedding in the family. My aunt married her sweetie earlier this month and Jeff served as photographer for it. Now if only the photo lab we used would get their machine fixed so we could see how his pictures turned out. The bad I am not going into.

I've always said that scrapbooking is my "yoga" or "mental health therapy". And that is so true! When I scrap, everything else goes away...at least for a little while. So I guess it's a good thing I am serving as guest moderator over at MegaScrapHappy, an online Yahoo group I belong too. Everyday this month I have to post a challenge based on theme of my choosing... so I chose Children's Books. Everyday I will post the title and a quote from a well known children's book and issue a challenge to the group.

My first one for today was The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss. My quote had to do with cleaning up the mess they had made so I issued a challenge for this first layout to keep it "clean and simple". Here is my layout for it...



This is the most recent picture of us taken at Lynn and Jeff's wedding. I can't believe how much time has passed... the kids are all getting so old. Which I guess means that I am really getting old. At least I don't have nearly as much gray hair as Jeff though. LOL!

Sweet Layout

Here's another layout I did based on a challenge from the If It's Groovy blog. I am really loving challenges like these. I have so many pictures, events and ideas I want to scrap that sometimes it's hard to settle down on one. Using a challenge, whether it be a sketch, a song or a theme, gives me a starting point. It's easier to search my stash of pictures and supplies and put them together. It also helps with scrappers block.

The June challenge at IIG is to do a "Candy" layout. I had some candy stickers on hand but no candy pictures simply because my darling children don't eat candy (Ha! Right! Then why did Kaitlyn only want the largest bag of dum dum suckers I could find for her birthday??) I decided to take this theme in a different direction. At work there are a few of us who share a love for trashy romance novels which we call brain candy. It was a simple matter of taking a couple pictures of some of my books and going from there. I should mention that I also used a sketch from the MSH sketch challenge(this one was based on # 20 from 52 Sketches... 52 Weeks).

Scrappin' Late into the Night...

Last night I went to my scrappin' table around 10. I had spent part of the day cleaning it off and it was calling to me. Marci, from the MSH group, had mentioned a Cyber Blog Hop Crop being sponsored by If It's Groovy . A group of bloggers were each posting separate challenges with an 80's theme. Marci's challenge at her blog, Marci's Scrapping Spot, was to use some suggested 80's movie titles. I thought I'd give it a try and used the Pretty in Pink (a movie that I have never actually seen - I must be the only one!). I grabbed some photos of Kendra at one, a sketch posted in the MSH sketch challenge and a stack of pink papers. The title was cut from the TearDrop cartridge. This was my result...



Since I had so much fun doing that one, I decided to do another one from the If It's Groovy Blog Hop Crop. This one was posted by Scrap Happy Mama and it was to do a layout featuring neon, another 80's staple. This one took me a little more time. I went thru a box of old photos til I found some that I could use neon (neon, really???) with. Then I came across some great pictures of Kaitlyn in 1999 at grandpa's Iowa farm. She was wearing a great neon green tank (hmmm... maybe neon didn't leave with the 80's) and some bright purple shorts. After finding the pictures, I went through more of the sketch layouts posted in the MSH challenges and found one that would work for my pictures (this one came from the ScrapRoomClub). After grabbing some paper, some flowers and my green stickles bottle, I was off. I cut "Summer" from Stretch Your Imagination and "FUN" from Lyrical Letters. And here it is...

I really like how these pages came out... maybe I should do more of my scrappin' late at night.

Edited to say... I messed up. "Pretty in Pink" was not one of the movie choices in the challenge. 16 Candles... Pretty in Pink... they both had Molly Ringwald... same diff, right? LOL! I still got a great layout out of it! :-D

Summer is Here!

Yesterday brought the last day of school. I always look forward to it thinking its going to be so much easier with only getting myself out the door in the morning but usually a week or two into summer break I am reminded that there are other problems. But it's the first official day of spring break today and I am not going to worry about that just yet.

This past week has been busy, busy, busy! We decided to make some teacher gifts this year. Earlier I posted a pic of the thank you card for Kendra's teacher. Well, Mrs. Bates also got a flower bouquet. We figured she would probably get lots of flowers and we wanted to give her one that would last longer. Before you start thinking how clever and talented I am, you must know that I completely copied this idea from a post on the cricut messageboards. I will have to go back and find her name but saw these posted and knew we had to do them. We cut flowers from the Walk in My Garden cart and pop dotted them to wooden skewers. We bought a ceramic pot from Michael's and added some flower foam and moss to poke the skewers into. Voila! A flower arangement that doesn't require watering!


We also found another great craft on the cricut message boards for Thank You Candy. That place is a wealth of information and ideas!! When I find her name, I will definitely post and give credit. This was another joint effort between Kendra and myself (just like the flower bouquet). This one involved covering theater size candy boxes with two different cardstocks (I used the DCWV Elementary pack). Kendra cut an apple from the Doodlecharms cart. The apple was layered with red, green and brown and shadowed with black. She then cut "Thank You" from the the Alphalicious cart in yellow and shadowed in blue. I used stickles to add some oomph to the whole design. After the stickles dried, we glued it all together and added a red raffia bow. We made 14 of these. Kaitlyn took 4 to school for her house teachers and Kendra took the other 10 for current teachers, past favorites and the principal and staff. We were so impressed with how these turned out that they are going to become our new birthday card. (We are currently making our first for a party today... will post a picture when it is done).



This end of the school year turned out to be a little more crafty than normal but we had a great time making it all.

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My Birthday Celebration...

Last Saturday was my birthday... not a milestone one... just a plain old ordinary one. However, I was determined to do whatever I wanted on that day and it did not include cleaning, laundry, etc, etc. Unfortunately for me it started with me leaping out of bed at 6:30 a.m. thinking that I had forgotten to set the alarm. Before I could go wake up Kaitlyn, the hubby told me that it was Saturday. Well, once that adrenaline got pumping thru my veins, it was pretty much guaranteed that I was AWAKE. So even though my day started earlier than I had intended, my morning was still a lazy, relaxing one.

By 11:30 the girls and I headed over to Serendipity, a local scrapbook store. They had sent me $5 on a minimum $5 purchase... how could I not go take advantage of that. It also happened to be their customer appreciation day which meant a free gift with purchase (I chose buttons) and a free lunch of hot dogs, chips and cookies. How cool! My birthday and I didn't have to pay for lunch. Score! While we were there the girls and I also took part in one of their make 'n takes... an adorable owl card.

They include phrase such as "You're a HOOT!" and "Thank you for being so wise!" Kendra made hers for Mrs. Bates, her 5th grade teacher, I made mine just because it was too damn cute not to and Kaitlyn made one just because (or so I thought).

After Serendipity, we ended up at the mall and guess what?!?! I didn't have to pay for anything! The girls had gift cards, coupons and their own money to spend. Woo Hoo! Another birthday treat for me. While we were there, Kaitlyn asked if Kendra and she could go to Boston Store to look for a birthday present for me. I let them go in after reiterating that they did not have to get me a present. They were only gone about 20 minutes but were rather pleased with themselves when we joined up again.

We headed for home after that. Jeff had said we could go out to dinner, my choice. I had a craving for Mexican and decided to try a Mexican restaurant that we hadn't been to before, La Estacion. It is a converted old train depot complete with trains still in the station. We were seated in one of the old trains... the kids thought that was pretty cool.

The food was yummy, the portions were huge and the margaritas were perfect. When our waitress asked if we wanted dessert, Kevin made a point of saying that it was my birthday. When she heard that she asked me if I wanted a piece of cake or get this... a tequila shot! Since it was family night and I had just had two margaritas, I chose the cake.... it was also easier to share!



Oh... I almost forgot to mention my birthday present from the girls... a black leather purse. Kaitlyn knows me well. My old one had just broken and I have decided to use a light weight tote for the summer. She however left the original price tag on... $108. WHAT?!?! She assured me that they got a really, really good sale... I hope so as I have never spent that much on a purse.

Crafts, shopping, food, time with my family... It was a great day... probably one of my best birthdays.

Think Big

This is a single page layout I did last week. I belong to a Yahoo group, MegaScrapHappy. It's a great group of ladies who share their love for scrappin'. It is a great place for inspiration, challenges and help. Each month a different member offers to host a montly challenge.... it can be just about anything, just so that each day there is a new challenge presented. This month it is all about sketches, which I love.

This layout is based on a sketch from Inspired Blueprints, a sketch site that is new to me but one that I will definitely return to. This was the sketch...

Usually I find that I am not very original. If I have a recipe, I tend to follow it pretty closely. The same goes for sketches. If a sketch is laid out in a particular way that is usually the way that I will do it. Part of this challenge posted with this layout was to alter the sketch... a little or a lot. I really didn't think I would be doing too much altering. But once I decided on the pics I would be using, I already had to alter it since I was going with vertical. Then one thing led to another and my finished page was quite a bit altered from the sketch. Sometimes scrappin' just happens that way... I think I have a layout all figured out and boom! What I end up with is completely different. Here is my interpretation of this sketch...


The journaling reads... Look at the expressions on your face. I can't help but wonder what big thoughts are going thru your head. Think BIG... Dream BIG!! Summer '96

These pictures of Kaitlyn were originally put aside to do a Cheerios layout. But when I pulled them out to use for this sketch, I couldn't help but focus on her expressions. She really looks like she is thinking on something big.

Teacher Thank You Notes...

Kendra and I have been busy making presents the last couple of weeks. I made 30 of these Thank You notes to give to her 5th grade teacher. They are pretty basic and simple just an apple cut with the Making the Grade Cricut cart, a simple green on green polka-dot ribbon (don't remember where I got it from) and a stamped "Thank You".

Kendra's been steadily working on a gift to give to her and we both combined efforts on a simple Thank You to give to current teachers and some of the office staff. I will have to take pictures of those when they are finished.

Welcome back...

Why is the theme song from Welcome Back, Kotter running thru my head right now???

I have wanted to get back into blogging for while now and just haven't found the time or inspiration. I thought maybe by starting over completely from scratch I might have better luck. Don't you like my background... isn't it cute?? I haven't fully decided the full theme of this yet... it's going to be a little bit of everything for right now... family, life, scrapbookin' and whatever else I feel like.

Sit back... enjoy... read a bit... look at the pictures... Time to be Carried Away....