still busy

a little bird watching

(see http://smallsmackerels.blogspot.com/ )

a little card making with my girlfriends yesterday.

so no scrapping.

However yesterday afternoon i did a lot of scraproom cleaning

it seems i'm cleaning up in here once a week.

I make a lot of pages, cards, whatever

and the room turns into a disaster area

(as i pull things out of every nook and cranny - trying to use up my stuff)

I'm still not done with the cleaning up however my

drawing table is considerably less junked up

yesterday there were piles of stamps, stamp pads, stacks of cardstock

now just a few things.

so i can work i think now

In the meantime i've got a layout to share

A two pager with pics from a play my daughter was in. Some cardstock, vellum quotes, quickutz star die, a 3D keeper from Deja Views to hold a dried flower (daughter received at the play), and a cut up page protector to house the program from the play.

Now to stop blogging and get on with some scrapbooking (along with some laundry.......)

suzy's been busy

doing other things -

check out

http://smallsmackerels.blogspot.com/

among other things. i'll post them over there probably tomorrow

i've had a few layouts on my desk

which i've had to remove to make a few cards

so i'll get back on track soon

having family around all holiday weekend was also not conducive

to getting any scrapping done.

but that's ok

all those pictures aren't going anywhere

i did have a few interesting ideas however that i'll share soon

About saving memories when there aren't any pictures.

hopefully i'll be back tomorrow

in the meantime, another one of those layouts i'd made week before last. this one i used a vellum quote i had about family

It was wednesday

sorry i didn't get back to post yesterday. i promised to add some more things i'd done last week. so today i'll give you two:

i've been catching up on my daughter's school album. we're into a new album (pre-k thru middle school is huge - in horse terms it's one hand high LOL) i started for high school. Actually i should post the main page to that one soon. I like my idea - taking the index file pics and using them to create a cover page for her entire high school career. yeah - i'll post that one next week. Anway this photo shows you a bunch of pages i made to catch up on last year and the beginning of this year in her album. Homecoming from last fall, first day of school this year, the school portrait and a pic from summer school and her report card for the summer class she took (they offer classes during the summer at her school so they can pick up classes they need but can't fit into their schedule during the regular year). No fascinating techniques used here. Just a lotta Quickutz!

this page came about because i had three random photos of things (one from the spring formal which really wasn't too formal LOL) and two from the last day of school. So i thought why not just put them on the same page and call it a day. and it worked out quite nicely. i used Quckutz for the word Formal and a quickutz tulip die (i love that little die!) as well as Purple Onion Designs alpha Skinny Dip which is the cutest alpha and worked just right.

ok... i've gotta run.

It's Tuesday

but i'm not posting something yet about the category for the day - me

i will give you another pic of some pages i made last week but first i'm going to digress a little and tell you about 2 books.

The first one i just included in my sidebar - i'd pulled it out last nite and realized i should mention it here:

Scrapbooking Life's Little Treasures by Rebecca Sower

if you don't have this little treasure i highly recommend it. I think i've got most every idea book there ever was - up until about 1 year ago - when i decided they weren't doing me any good. (I don't want to put anyone's book down - i had just come to a place where it was not for me anymore. I was on my way mentally to the Suzy place i'm now at in my head - how's that?)

I absolutely adore this book. I return to it over and over to just look at and be inspired by. I actually have her other book Scrapbooking Life's Little Secrets as well - and a fine book it is - but the Treasures book will always rank among my favorites.

If you're interested I'm sure you can find it available from the Creating Keepsakes website.

Okay - i said 2 books

The second book is a novel.

Rockville Pike by Susan Coll

here's a link to it on amazon ( i wish i could figure out how to hide these links within the title - however )

http://www.amazon.com/Rockville-Pike-Suburban-Comedy-Manners/dp/B000OZ28JW/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-3756686-2294242?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1179870804&sr=8-1

I'd read a review in the Washington Post some time ago about this book - named after a road in not-s0-far-away Maryland. I am always amused by books with familiar locales in them (and we always get hysterical at references to the area in movies - they always show lovely locations but the actual geography of living in the Nation's Capital area - well you never see the traffic in the movies and it never seems to take any time to get anywhere LOL) but what really intrigued me is that the main character gets involved in scrapbooking! It's a small but somewhat important part of the story. I don't know if I'd necessarily recommend the book but it was strangely amusing and the references to scrapbooking definitely had been researched (perhaps the author had been to a Creative Memories party or two).

Okay here a few more layouts i've accomplished. Nothing fancy but I had a lot of photos of places in Washington, DC. We'd done a day downtown for the Cherry Blossom Festival and to see 2 of the monuments we hadn't been to (WWII and Korean War) and revisited a few others (Lincoln and VietNam). I used some River City Rubber Works stamps as well as Quickutz Zoe.

It's Monday

and its time to plan again
actually today i'll be going thru my RTG (ready to go) file
I've been getting so much done my file is getting smaller
this is a good thing
but it also requires that i see what needs to be done imminently and also to start planning some pages for the future - so when i've got time i can just pick up and work on something!
i'm pondering a few possibilities:

working on my wedding photos (not the official wedding photographer album - got that - i'm talking about all the photos people took that day and gave to us, the memorabilia from that time frame - that kinda stuff. i actually put all that stuff in an album years ago. during the first year we were married. I've been married - eek - over 22 years! so that means all that stuff is in a bad, i mean BAD kinda album. So i really need to make this a priority.)

working on my kids baby albums - from reading previous posts you have already assessed the ages of my kids - one in college and one in high school. so Yes - working on baby albums is long overdue.

those 2 projects alone could keep me busy for a long time. Not as much the wedding album - the kids baby albums and childhood albums. I've been working on their school albums for a long time and they are mostly up-to-date.

Ok so thats what i'll be doing today in my spare time - which is not so spare today but i'll do my best. I promised more pages so here's another.

i used Purple Onion Design stamps: Pink Flamingo Small, Skinny Dip (the word "smiles") is colored in with prismacolor pencil and the little flourish is from the Vintage Journaling set.
ok - go make some pages or plan something to make this week ok?

I know i know

I promised days ago i'd be posting all kinds of pages i've been doing.
And i will. I will keep my promise and post them.
I took tons of pictures of them.
It is just the way life is around Suzy's house.
Things happen.
And scrapbooking didn't go by the wayside this time
I have made even MORE pages in the last few days.
But blogging did go by the wayside.
It takes time - uploading photos etc etc takes away time i wanted to use to scrapbook when i could fit it in between little crises round here.

So... I promise - i will upload more but right now i'll throw one out into cyber space just to show you Suzy ain't full of baloney :-)
i don't think the photo is the best (i laid a bunch
of layouts on the floor and starting taking pics) but i was quite pleased with this one. I used stamps from my favorite company www.purpleoniondesigns.com
the alpha is pink flamingo large and the flowers are also POD stamps! cute huh? i stamped them and then used prismacolor colored pencils to color them in and used the Magic Colored Pencil technique to blend the pencil.
more to come hopefully tomorrow!
Oh - i forgot to mention i used a new punch from StampinUp to create that scallop border on the left. And yes that is me and my sisters - i'm the one on your left with the glasses.

Wednesday - Family Husband

I will probably return a little later to post something for today specifically but i'd promised to show some stuff i've been making. I need to do a few errands this morning so I'll post this one now and come on back later


I made this one about my (paternal) grandmother. I have more to tell about her but this was the first page with 3 photos of me and my older siblings. I used some Chatterbox paper that i love and stitched it. I also added 2 ribbons - on on top of the other and created a loop at the top which i kinda like. And finally i added some drawings of my own to illustrate. This for me was essential as my grandmother liked to adorn letters to me with her drawings. Whenever I find myself thinking about her i seem to draw the same little drawings: ones with strawberries, pudding, and smiling flowers in pots - all things that mean Mom-Mom to me. She was a wonderful grandmother. Oh yeah - i also used my quickutz index tab die. And the drawings were done with pen, ink and colored pencils (prismacolors natch)


I decided I will be doing more of my own little drawings in my scrapbooking. Seems much more me than anything else.