Legos Day 3

Today, Chet's stormtroopers took a ride in a crystal sleigh. They travel in style!

"Wheeeee!"


After, the Mumu monster destroyed the Christmas tree, Ethan's guys and monster narrowly escaped the blast in a convienently located car ornament!

Go Legos!

Legos Day 2

Captions by kids:

Phot by Chet:

"Aaaaaa.....Bat!"

Ethan:

Paraphrasing: "So, the monster dude stole the other dude's machine so the other dude decided to tan and the monster dude thought that looked good so he decided to tan, too!"
Photo by Dad with his fancy Canon and his fancy tripod!

Lesson learned: Take pictures earlier in the day when the lighting is MUCH better! ;-)

Legos Everyday!

Well, my first blog post in forever is inspired by my boys who got inspired by the blog "A Lego a Day" @ legomyphoto.wordpress.com. This site is done by a gentlemen named Dan Phelps who is an amateur photographer and Lego enthusiast! He is on his second year of photographing Lego minifigures every day and posting them on his blog. He has quite the sense of humor and is very creative. I was showing his site to Chet and Ethan today and they both asked, "Can we do that?" I figure anything that encourages them to be creative and doesn't involve a computer screen or video game controller is something I should encourage. Besides, I've been looking for an excuse to pick up on my blog.

So, here is our first day of photographing Legos. They each get one picture to post and it has to be set up creatively. Those are "the rules"! Here's what we got today:

From Chet:

He took this photo and has decided that his Lego bat will be in every photo he takes. (Since we've already lost the bat once this afternoon, we'll have to see how this pans out.) Today his bat is guarding our newly erected Christmas tree.

From Ethan:

His Star Wars Lego creature (like I can keep track of all those names...) has just awaken one large furry Mumu Monster and is running for his life!

Oops! Didn't make it! (Alright, I know that seems like two photos for Ethan, but as editor of this endeavor I reserve the right to add photos that make me laugh!)

Go Lego

2010 - The Year My Scrapbooking Changed

It started simple enough: a desire to take some online scrapbooking classes. One from a teacher I've long admired and another a class on organization that I had been drooling over for a year. The end of one and the beginning of another overlapped and I almost didn't do it knowing it would be a huge workload for a hobby related activity, but I decided to take the plunge and take Cathy Zielske's Design Your Life class and Stacy Julian's Library of Memories.

Layout from Lesson on Symmetry, if you divide the page in half what's on the right matches what's on the left.

When I started the Cathy's DYL class, I had been struggling for sometime to finish my 2008 album. I wasn't motivated by the pictures I've been looking at for over a year and scrapbooking was beginning to feel like a chore. The only time I actually scrapbooked was when I was preparing for my next class and essentially scrapbooking for others.

Lesson on Emphasis, specifically using a LARGE photo!

Being invigorated by the design principles and sketches I used the remaining pictures from that year to complete my 'assignments'. Not only was I happy to be learning new principles and understanding old ones, it also brought a new excitement to teaching my Year in Review class, as I felt even more confident about what I was teaching and design principles I was passing along. I loved the simple but strong layouts and I never ever thought I would like scrapping in a 8 1/2 x 10" format but following Cathy's sketches opened my eyes to just how I could do on a smaller canvas. I also realized I actually like practicing my ever growing digital scrapbooking skills on this smaller size so I can print them out and see them in real life. I can't say enough about how awesome this class was and how much it rekindled my love for scrapbooking.

Lesson on Repetition - note the repeating colors (Okay, maybe not the best example of reptition but I LOVE the way this layout turned out!)


This was a Real World Color challenge. She gave us the color scheme and we had to adapt. Not colors I would normally put together, but again I love the way this turned out!

It was a good thing that I was excited about scrapbooking again because Stacy Julian's Library of Memories Class is work! I mean it's good work, playing with pictures, rethinking, reorganizing, finding long forgotten things, discovering new ones, but it is indeed work! And knowing I wanted to approach my scrapbooking from a different prespective saw me through the many challenges this class gave me.

Title page for my new All About Us album. Pictures span several years and this album contains pages that show off our immediate family's personality traits and things that are just us! Other albums include People We Love, Places We Go and Things We Do.

Stacy's LOM system allowed me to keep the chronological structure I need to find my photos but also gave me a new way organize photos that I like, photos that show a relationship or photos that just sum up someone's personality. Taking these special photos out of chronological order and putting them together, showed me new connections between the people I love and things we do. My favorite part is when the kids do something fun or funny, I can go to these category drawers, pull a picture that shows their cute little personality and make a quick layout right then that gets the memory down before I forget it and it gets lost in all the "to-do" piles! I LOVE this! So, I have been converted from my strictly chronological ways to seeing stories in new ways. I've told more stories about the people we love, the things we do and places we go and I've used pictures that I just love to create layouts I never would have before because they didn't fall in to the "year" I was scrapping about it. This is life-changing in my little scrapbooking world.

As I was going through photos I found Ethan making this face over and over again. I thought it would make for an adorable personality page about my most exuberant child. Then as I was going through pictures from my childhood I found one of me making the exact same face! So this page turned in to a page about how our personalities are alike. Simple design and a story no one else could tell but me.


Again going through photos I found this "ready to go" shot from two different times of my life but still traveling the world! It wasn't until after I posted this layout I realized that in both pictures I am heading to my favorite location in the world: Salzburg, Austria!

Now that I worked my way through learning design principals and changing my photo organization and work flow, this summer I took May Flaum's Use Your Stash class.

Stash used: Travel paper (3 years old), chipboard letters (4 years old), chipboard accents (2 years old, photo overlay (1 year old), Ribbon (Who knows how old?!)

I figured this class had my name on it since I could open a small scrapbook store with the amount of "stash" I have in my scraproom. So each week May challenged us go through our stash and reminded us about older products that might be lurking in our stash from years gone by: Chipboard, stamps, eyelets, magic mesh, rub-ons (I had some so old they don't actually rub-on anything anymore.), etc.

Stash used: a sample layout I created for A Memory to Scrap (1 year old). The flower and letter stickers are from this year, but were both freebies and I had no idea how or when I might use them!

So, I was using my stash, telling the stories I was inspired to tell and designing wonderfully balanced pages and took on the ultimate challenge: Lain Ehmann's Layout A Day October 2010 also affectionately known as LOAD. The challenge is pretty straight forward create a layout, any layout, any size, every day in the month. I've made many a layout over my scrapbooking career, but never this many in this time frame and never that many days in a row. I'm always trying to scrapbook everyday, but that never happens! So, I thought having an actual challenge to do it would be VERY motivating!

This day's prompt was to use Ali Edward's journal idea of "Today You..." to tell an every day story. With the arrival of our new puppy life has changed a lot for me, I thought it would be a great way to show how she has affected every day life around here. I am in love with this page!

So, I pulled out some favorite pictures and sketches I've been meaning to use. I planned things out the night before. I worked to finish some projects I've started and never completed. I followed prompts that were given by Lain and sometimes I took those prompts in a completely different direction. I tried new techniques I saw others use on their layouts and I was totally inspired!

This day's prompt was to use photo in a film strip or photo booth style. Since I take so many consecutive pictures at the boys' sports game, I knew this would be a perfect way to use them.

This day's prompt was put the journaling or title on the photo itself. Using my new Photoshop skills, I used a Dr. Suess quote on this adorable picture of E from his First Day of School this year. He's shown some new confidence this year without his older brother being at school with him and I thought this quote exemplified that.

And yes, it took some time and, yes, it was not always easy or convenient, but I DID IT! I am absoultely positive that all the other classes I took set me up for this success and the culmination of all my efforts was really gratifying.

Now, doing a layout a day in November and December is not exactly feasible, but I've been able to get some in here and there and I am so happy with where my hobby is taking me and the pages that I am currently doing. I love my new found scrapbook freedom and I am excited about the pages and projects that I will be inspired to do in 2011! Here's to a new year of making memories!

Ten on Tuesday at Ten!

1. This is my first blog post this year. I've been so neglectful! But I'm learning that while it's fun to express myself in 160 characters or less over on Facebook, it's hardly telling the little stories of my everyday life. As I've been reading up on my favorite blogs, I realized I missed typing out whatever's on my mind these days. Elizabeth Dillow issued a Ten on Tuesday challenge for the year and while I'm still undecided if I want to do Project 365 again, I think I can handle a blog post at least once a week.

2. My oldest informed me today that he wants a wireless keyboard. When asked how he intends to pay for such an item, he said he would like to have his brother appraised to see how he could sell him for. Ethan said he's only worth a dollar...

3. Botox may make celebrities wrinkles go away but it also makes them look weird and fake.

4. I am loving my digital scrapbooking class, Design Your Life by Cathy Zielske. I've done more personal scrapbooking in the last three weeks than I have in months! I've done some traditional paper scrapbooking with pictures from a couple years ago and I've done some digital scrapbooking with pics from a few weeks ago. Look at me expand my horizons! It also helped motivate me for...

5. My 2010 Year in Review class starts this Thursday! Last year went well enough that Ashley trusted me again with another cycle. (It's either that or she's clued in to the fact that I work more efficiently on a deadline.) So, we have 24 in the class and 9 on the waiting list! Wha...??? As much I as would like to believe these numbers are all about my mad skills as a scrapbooking instructor, I do know it's got alot to do with the closing of another store and limited options for people looking for classes in our area now.

6. I was unwittingly so excited that we were going to have a FULL COLOR yearbook back in May when we decided to bite the bullet and sign the contract. Now, that I'm having to coordinate all the colors of the all the photos and all the backgrounds and all the accents and all the titles, it's not nearly as exciting.

7. I hope The Marriage Ref is as amusing as the commercials make it out to be. Maybe we could get one for our house! hee! hee!

8. The email on my Droid is about 20 minutes behind the email on my laptop and I really wish once I'd read it on my computer it would not show up as unread on my phone. I really need to learn how to get more out of this phone. Do you think there is a class for that?

9. I hope all those California people who were giving me a hard time when we were snowed in and freezing for weeks were making good use of their 70 degree temperatures to build themselves an ark, because looking at the forecast they're gonna need it. 40 cubits x 40 cubits....

10. If I wait late enough to do my Ten on Tuesday I can actually do it at 10 o'clock!

What a decade!

I've been reading all these magazine articles about the best of the decade and it got me thinking about how my life has changed in this first decade of the new century. So, I put my new digital scrapbooking skills to use and created a layout about it! Hopefully, you'll be able to read the Then and Now journaling. Of course, I've thought of several to add since I finished this page like: Then, I played CD's and cassettes on my boom box. Now, I download songs to my iPod from my computer. Then, I would wonder about something and then let it go. Now, I wonder about something and I google it. (A word that didn't even exist 10 years ago!)

Leave me any of your ideas in the comments and maybe I'll make a part 2 of this page!

Hope you all have a very Happy New Year! I look forward to what's in store for 2010!!!!

Our First White Christmas!

Yet another first in our life here in Oklahoma: A Christmas Eve Blizzard! That's right, not just a little dusting of snow for a White Christmas, we got a actual full blown Blizzard! A first even for Tulsa and not person has said to me, "It's not normally like this here!"


The snow was very powdery and pretty tough to make snowballs with, but that didn't keep Chet from trying! (Notice the pond didn't even freeze over because it was sooo windy! 25-30mph!)



This where our sidewalk use to be. Now it is a snowdrift. In other parts of the yard, the grass was still peeking out where the snow had been blown away. So, in some places we had 1 inch of snow and in others it was closer to three feet!

You would think an older dog with arthritic hips would not really like the snow, but there's Bo dog running around the yard (and outside of it) just having a great time. Here he is on the snow dunes that cover our driveway.

And there's the old homestead on a magical Christmas Day morning! It was so special to be surrounded by all this white, just like all the old movies and Christmas cards. I don't think it is a holiday we will soon forget!