Scrap Girl

Hello scrappers!  I was supposed to post some pages from my Grandma’s 90th Birthday album, but I haven’t been able to do it yet.  She just passed away and I’m still feeling blue.  I did pick out the pages I want to show you, but won’t be posting those until next week.  I’ve also had other bad news–my friend’s mother passed away this week and another friend was supposed to have minor surgery that turned into major surgery.  Ugh!  Tonight, luckily, I’m going out for dinner with a girlfriend and then we are going scrapbooking.  I always feel better when I scrapbook, so this is my “Scrap Therapy.”   

I just opened a digital kit from my digital designer friend Karyn Robinson called “Flutter By” to play with.  I had some pictures I took last month at a friend’s house and had to try out this kit.  This page is of my friend, Allyson, and her daughter.  I wanted to do something different with them and managed to dig out a frame I got in a newsletter from Scrapgirls.com.  It looks like a negative so I used two of them on this page for the two pictures.  The rest of the embellishments and the digital paper came from the “Flutter By” kit that you can find on sale at Enchanted Studios.  This page went really fast for me and came together in about 15 minutes. 

For girl scouts, my daughters both went to the rock climbing wall at our local college.  I took a few pictures and did a page for each of them.  For this page I used some chipboard for the title that happens to match the paper.  This page was pretty quick and easy because I had limited pictures to choose from.  I decided to crop them all to the same size.  I added a journal box at the bottom to tell about the page and added a ”discover” sticker.   

Sorry I have neglected my blog scrappers.  We were so busy last month.  My father-in-law had surgery for a brain tumor and now we found out it is cancer.  If you have ever dealt with this please leave a comment for me.  I’m trying to gather as much information as I can on conventional treatment as well as complementary and alternative options.  Doing and looking at scrapbook pages like this helps me really appreciate the simple terrific moments in life.  When we were on a camping trip this summer, my daughter wanted to take some pictures with her camera so myself and my two girls did some goofy poses and the pictures turned out pretty cute.  Of course, I’m quite biased about the cuteness of my kids, but that’s a whole other blog entry.  I made the “Strike a Pose” embellishment by printing out the words on a printer from my computer and then punched out a circle around the words.  After that, I cut out a scalloped circle with the Cricut Electronic Cutting Machine and there you go–a five minute decoration.  The “Just Being Silly” vellum piece was from some paper pack I bought quite a while back.  I just secured it with some eyelets.  This page took about 10-15 minutes.  The pictures were just left 4×6 size. 

Hello scrappers!  I don’t know if any of you make your own cards or not, but I’ve found having scrapbook supplies and making homemade cards kind of run hand in hand.  It also saves me some money as cards are running a couple of dollars per card these days.  I was making a couple of birthday cards and decided to try using a couple of different kinds of letter stickers to put “Happy Birthday” on the front of a card.  I really didn’t have a choice because some of the most used letters I was out of.  It turned out quite nice and now I’m going to be using my leftover letters for this purpose.  You can also mix up your stickers on your scrapbook pages for titles and journaling.  Try it sometime for a different look! 

An old family friend passed away this week and her funeral was today.  I make quite a few cards and I wanted to make a sympathy card, but wondered how I should do it.  I started thinking about this as soon as I heard of her death.  I was thinking…do I have any pictures of her?  I went looking in one of my wedding albums and I found a picture of Betty and her late husband at my friend’s (their daughter’s) wedding.  After I found that picture, I started talking to my husband and a scrapping friend about whether I should use this picture to make some nice remembrance cards for her children (my friends).  They thought it was a good idea so I went ahead and scanned the picture out of the album.  I cropped it into an oval shape and placed it on some digital paper.  I made it a 4×6 print so I could upload it to a photo site and add a border around it and get it in one hour.  I also added a “Carpe Diem–Seize the Day” saying on the front.  I also wonder if it is appropriate to blog about making this card, but it will help the healing process I guess as I’m pretty torn up about this loss.  You see, my friends, Paul and Linda just lost their dad a year and a half ago and now their mom this week.  My friends are only 41 and 42 years old so it is a tragic loss for them.  Here’s the base for the card front.

Rest well old friend….

Betty Purington 1938-2009

Hello scrappers!  Two girlfriends and myself went on a little scrapping retreat last weekend.  We went ahead and did it with little to no planning and it was terrific.  We knew we wanted to do something scrappy about 3 weeks ahead of time and I started looking into retreat houses within a couple of hours drive from us.  I ended up finding a place an hour from me that wasn’t booked that weekend.  The best part is she usually rents to a party of five at $120 per person, but since it was last minute she rented it to the three of us at the same rate.  Yes!  We all stayed the weekend for a grand total of $360!  The best part about the place was the scraproom which had beautiful views of the lake and a lot of space for our supplies.  We kept the food simple and just made a sandwich or had a salad whenever we felt like eating.  We also brought veggies and dip and chips and salsa to have for snacking.  The best treat for me was the cheesecake that my girlfriend brought!  Loved it!

Yes, I was supposed to do more scrapbooking this weekend.  I did do a little bit, but many other distractions got in the way.  For instance, we had 2 cups of raspberries in the refrigerator and I had just picked 2 more cups from our bushes, so I had to think of something to do with them.  I remembered that there was a recipe in one of my Taste of Home books that I had been wanting to try and here was my chance.  We had everyone in my family rate the pie when they tasted it and the lowest it got was nine out of 10.  I was also impressed that my picture nearly matches the one in my cookbook.  That almost never happens for me.  Here’s the recipe:

Raspberry Patch Cream Pie

1 pre-made graham cracker crust (here’s where I cheat)

Filling:

1 package (8 oz.) cream cheese

1/4 cup confectioner’s sugar

2 teaspoons milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Topping:

3/4 cup sugar

3 tablespoons cornstarch

1 1/3 cups cold water

1/4 cup raspberry gelatin powder

3 cups fresh raspberries

For the filling, combine the cream cheese, confectioner’s sugar, milk and vanilla in a mixing bowl.  Carefully spread over crust.

For the topping, in a small saucepan, combine, sugar, cornstarch, and cold water until smooth.  Bring to a boil; cook and stir for 2 min.  Remove from heat and stir in raspberry gelatin until dissolved.  Cool and refrigerate until thickened.

Arrange berries over filling.  Spoon gelatin mixture over berries and refrigerate until set.  Serve with whipped cream on top.  Enjoy!  If I can make it so can you!

(Recipe from Taste of Home Annual Recipes 2008)

Hello scrappers!  I’m back from vacation and will be posting more in a few days.  I’m just beat.  The first couple of days were beautiful and we did a lot of hiking and biking.  The last couple of days were cold, even by Minnesota standards for summer–50’s and 60’s.  The breeze off of Lake Superior made it even more chilly and one day it rained almost all day and night which made camping a little less fun, although I’m glad we have a camper.  One good thing about the rain that was beautiful was that it made for more water going over Gooseberry Falls, which was quite awesome.  So the saying is true, I guess you have to weather the storm to get to see what is truly beautiful in life.  In this case, it was quite literal in meaning.  I didn’t take quite as many pictures, but got a few good ones, and thought I would try a little journaling while on the trip to add to my scrapbook later.

I received a new digital kit to make some pages and a freebie out of and wow, it is cute!  The kit is called “At the Zoo” by Karyn Robinson, my online scrapbooking friend who creates kits for Digital Arts Cafe.  Now if you are creative enough, and I think you are, you can use this kit for other topics and pages besides just trips to the zoo.  For example, I created a “Wild Thing” page that could be used for just about anything you are wild about:  your honey, your pets, and/or your kids.  In my case, I’m using it for my “sugar and more than you ever wanted spice” daughter.  She has a sly look on her face in this picture so I decided to throw it into this layout.  The freebie quickpage will be on the blog tomorrow, so be sure to grab it for yourself.