It was a dark and stormy night

okay here in Suzy's neighborhood it is a dark and stormy afternoon.

The weather leaves a lot to be desired. However we're feeling grateful because the original prediction was snow. I know some of my northern friends are dealing with that - Sorry girls.

I feel for you. This is 'sposed to be spring!

Anyway

"it was a dark and stormy night"

Reminds me of Snoopy writing his books and beginning with that phrase.

And i was thinking of that writing thing when i got on here to post some pictures of my special project i mentioned earlier in the week.

Writing anything in school was like torture for me. I don't know why. I hated it with a passion.

And so strangely enough I never mind doing the journaling stuff in my scrapbooks.

Maybe its cos i know i'm not getting graded :-)
But really i think i don't mind journaling because when i do it - i just write what i'm thinking - I want it to sound like me - so one day, when my kids read it they'll almost be able to hear me talking to them.

As most of you know i'm not one for the "explore, dream, discover, journey" business. It's just not me - and my kids know it.

However, I am not adverse to writing some pretty mushy stuff to my kids in my scrapbooks.

They'd recognize that as being me on occasion.

Moms are allowed mushy moments.

Which brings me to my special little project.

My sister asked me to make an album for a friend of hers. It's a special occasion for the friend and they're having a party. The album will be presented at the party. It's filled with all kinds of quotes regarding friendship mostly. But my sister and her friends wanted to be able to add notes to the friend to go in the album. The notes are of a personal nature and not to be shared with everyone. So i came up with a solution that i think worked very nicely. See what you think:

This i s the cover. No special embellishment on it - I decided we'd just let the pretty paper (Anna Griffin) be displayed and I added a whole lot of ribbons on 3 binder circle clippy things (what do you call those anyway?) which held the album together.

On the inside there are 15pages - 28 sides with quotes and stamped (in versamark) and chalked images. 1 more page with just a mat on each side for pics. You can see that there are 14 tabs. Each set of 2 sides was attached to a center white sheet of cardstock (sortofa cardstock sandwich - 1 blue 1 white 1 blue). The white center sheet had the tab attached to it. I ran tape along the long sides and the binding side which created 2 pockets for those personal notes. I hope this description is making sense - its kind of hard to describe. I'll throw in one more image just so you get the idea.

I used a whole host of stamps from my collection for the images. The background stamp on every page is one of my very favorites - a script stamp from www.purpleoniondesigns.com

I use it all the time. When its stamped in versamark on colored cardstock you just get a lovely hint of pattern but it only adds to your page and never detract. I printed out all the quotes on the maize colored cardstock and stitched them and the images to the pages. The tabs were all created using my Quickutz tab die. I love that die.

So there you have it. Now on to other things on this dark and stormy Sunday afternoon.