Q and R

I made the Q and R pages for Emma's ABC book:) I had issues getting the Q page just right, but I'm finally satisfied with it.

I've mentioned before that Sundays are long days for us. Well, by the time we finally get home from church, we're starving but too tired to actually cook. Plus, we don't want to wait that long. I decided that we should start using our awesome crock pot on Sundays. So today, I stuck a pot roast in the crock pot with potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, salt, pepper, chicken stock (didn't have beef), and some water before I got ready for church. I bought some French bread Saturday night to go along with it, too. Oh my goodness, it was soooooo good! I loved walking up to our apartment and smelling the roast before we even opened the door. Our neighbors must have been drooling - I know I was;) The meat was perfectly tender and everything was oh-so-yummy. Emma didn't care for the meat, but she loved the veggies. We had Nathan and Jessica over to enjoy it, too. It was awesome. We will definitely be using our crock pot on Sundays now! I LOVE coming home with a meal already cooked and ready to eat. It was so nice to not have to worry about throwing something together for dinner at the last minute. Just a little advance prep and it's SO worth it!

I tried to have choir practice today (still no official director, but that SHOULD be changing soon), but only 2 people showed up - Jessica being one of them. Since we had 2 sopranos + me (also soprano), there really was no point in practicing. Oh well. I don't really want to direct anyway;)

We had a really fun activity at church last night. We had a "drive in" where we made cars out of refridgerator boxes and watched The Princess Bride. We rented a popcorn machine and potlucked candy to share. It was really fun! Babysitting was provided (single college students;)), too! Emma lasted about an hour with the babysitters...she started crying and wouldn't stop, so they brought her out to us. She hung out with us in the car we made. She had lots of fun eating chocolate and she watched a lot of the movie, too. Usually she's only interested in TV if Elmo is involved... It was fun, despite our toddler's lack of cooperation with the babysitters. At least she was ok there while we made our car.

Anyway, you probably want to see my new pages now, right? Well, here they are:



Credits:
Paper (grayscaled and used as an overlay) - Quilt Papers (no TOU)
Elements - The Maltese Scrapper, Sewing
Quilt - 3 wonderful ladies from church made it for us as a baby shower gift. It's too pretty to use as a blanket, so it's hanging on the wall in Emma's room.
Font - kwekel
Atomic Cupcake actions - fabric, stitches

I originally had the teal as the background and the pink on the text, but the teal looked too plain and dead, especially when paired with it's neighboring page. So I switched them. It looks MUCH better now!

And now for R:


Background paper, clouds, rain - Megan B Designs, Rainy Day
Textured overlay (on hills) - Tammy Jackson
Crumpled overlay (on hills) - Princess Kate Designs
Sun - Kimi (kit not released yet^_^)
Rainbow - Jennifer Fletcher, March Daily Download #4
Rainbow stripes on text - me:) It's part of a new kit I'm working on
Font - Waterfalls
Atomic Cupcake actions - colored chrome

For those of you who are wondering, my kit Emma's Toybox is complete! I'll post it soon. I'm just waiting on my "CT" pages. The ones I've seen so far are all awesome!! It's SUCH a thrill to see pages made using my kit! I'm going to make a couple of pages with it, too.

I'm also working on another kit. Well, sort of. I made a minikit for a color challenge on BAM and plan to expand it. I've made a few more things for it (like the striped paper I used on the R page). All designing of kits and templates is on hold for a little bit. I need to finish Emma's ABC book and get it printed in time for Easter, so it's crunch time. I have 8 pages to make by the 31st if I want to get it in time. So until that's done, kits and templates are on the back burner. But I'm still doing a speed scrap tomorrow afternoon during naptime and will keep doing the weekly/monthly challenges on BAM. A page isn't as involved as a kit;) But the minikit will be released on Friday, as part of a blog train, so be sure to check us all out then!

My future templates will be getting a facelift, too. I'm going to give them more of a branding and I have learned more cool things about Photoshop to implement in my designs.

Anyway, it's late and I need to clear a bunch of stuff off my bed before I can sleep. Hehe, we had tons of stuff on our counters, but since we were having company over for dinner, it got shoved on the bed instead of put away;) Now to move it back to the counters - I'll deal with getting it organized and put away later. Night all!

Is it Spring yet?

This page pretty much captures how I feel about our weather.

Anyway, this is my page for the weekly challenge on BAM. The challenge is to use Summer Driggs' Sweet Springtime kit. It's a cute kit, but the papers are like 8x8 instead of 12x12. I had to double them over to fill the page in places. But I love how this page turned out! I'm not normally a 1-picture-per-page person, but I really like this. Then again, my old camera was only 3 megapixels, so one picture wouldn't fill up a decent amount of page space with that one. Now I have 8 megapixels and am loving it!!



Credits:
Papers and elements - Summer Driggs, Sweet Springtime
Waiting for Spring wordart - Lilipruneau, Sweet Envy
Overlay - LBC Designs, Blog Gift 3-9-09
Bracket matte - Scrappin' Cop, Bracket Shapes
Fonts - Too Much Paper, Vaguely Repulsive, Tracy, My Own Topher
Atomic Cupcake actions - colored chrome, painted wood, rub on

And once again, I'm up super late. Time for bed!

Exceeded Bandwidth

Apparently I exceeded my bandwidth on Photobucket, so now none of my images are showing up anywhere. Very frustrating. Sorry for anyone who actually wants to look at/download things here! I'm looking into various free solutions to get me up and running again. I DO have actual webhosting, but my internet connection MAJORLY sucks here and I can't upload anything to my site. And there's nothing I can do about that, since our internet comes with the apartment.

Hopefully I'll be up and running again soon! But I'm in a pretty bad mood with this whole bandwidth issue at the moment.

***EDIT***

I'm up and running again! I didn't even read the email saying I was over on my bandwidth, but in it, PB said I could upgrade to Pro for free via TrialPay. I figure since Photobucket is a trusted source, it should be safe. The idea is the promotors pay for Pro FOR you. Hey, it's a year long free upgrade to Pro - what normally costs $40. I had to sign up for a free trial from one of their promotors, but I will cancel it before it ends. Worst case, I pay $10...hopefully it will cancel easily. I've tried trial versions of things before and got burned (it was only $12, but still, I was mad because I DID cancel beforehand...never use freecreditreport.com - EVER. They're eeeeeevil).

Anyway. My images are back online, and I didn't have to do any changing of links or anything. I'd prefer using my FTP webhosting, but FTP and my crappy connection don't play nice.

Now I can go prep my kit for my "CT." It's almost done. I hope to finish tonight, or by naptime tomorrow. But I'll let my "CT" play with it before I post it;)

Going to Check the Mail

We had a speed scrap on BAM tonight, and this is the page I did for it:



Credits:
Papers and elements - Jessica Edwards, How Sweet It Is
Clover - Danielle Young, Lucky Me add-on
Staple - Shabby Princess, Promise
Fonts - Vaguely Repulsive, My Own Topher, Too Much Paper, Tracy, and Digs My Hart
Atomic Cupcake actions - painted wood, rub on

It's cute, and well designed (especially considering how much time I had to do it and that this was only my 2nd real speed scrap), but it doesn't stand out the way a couple of the others do, so I don't think I'm in the running to host next time. But that's ok. One of these days I'll win, I'm sure. LOL, I even made up a set of rules for when I DO win eventually;) I was one of several runner-ups last time.

These were the parameters, given throughout the first hour:

1. - 6 words - If you want to use a date, that will count as 1 word - eg. March 17, 2009 = 1 word
2. - 5 papers - Use them as much as you want and do whatever you want to them
3. - 4 elements - All different - use them only once each
4. - 3 fasteners - Same or different, but a total of 3
5. - The one you have all been waiting for - - - 2 photos
6. - And, in honor of St. Patrick's Day today, 1 clover leaf - 3 leaf or 4 leaf - you can make it as bold or as subtle as you wish!

The not knowing how many pictures until the end of the first hour was driving me NUTS! So many things depend on how many pictures - which pictures to use, what to scrap in the first place (and therefore, which kit to use), the grand scheme of the LO in general...yeah. Not knowing pictures till the 2nd to last clue is hard for me. I like having that near the beginning. It gives me more time to plan out what I want to do. Finding out an hour before the speed scrap ends is difficult for me. Doable, but definitely part of the challenge. But that's what speed scraps are all about. I don't feel I was as creative this round as I was last time. Sure, I made a page and it's cute, but it doesn't stand out the way my other one does. Which is probably why all the comments were on how cute Emma is in her coat and hat than on the page design itself. Kind of annoys me, to be honest, but whatever.

The 6 words thing hung me up a bit, too. I like words - I have a BA in English, after all. So limiting myself to 6 words TOTAL hindered me a bit. I could only scrap something that would work with 6 words in some form or another. The 5 papers thing was easy for me. I LOVE layering papers. I used 3 as the background, 1 on the text, and 1 on the frames. I thought the 4 elements would be hard, since I like to use lots of elements in general, but it proved to be pretty easy for me. I also tend to use more photos on my pages (but not always). I actually had 4 pictures picked out for this, but obviously had to cut 2 of them off my list.

So, while I think this page is cute, it's not my best. My page last time was better. And the P is for Princess page is better, too. That's one of my current favorites.

Hmm...I'm going to go work on my kit now. It's ALMOST done. The internet was down all day yesterday, and was off and on today. I got almost all the elements done! Just a few more to go and I'll be able to send it to my "CT" (ie - whoever asks/wants to do a page with it before I release it). Of course, I saved some of the more difficult ones for last. But hopefully I'll be able to post it soon, along with some cute pages others made with it!

Anyway, that's it for now!

Template 12 (8x10) and P is for Princess

I did the P page! It's SO cute! I'm very happy with how it turned out:) I ended up doing 2 extractions for this one (Emma and the castle), so despite how simple the design is, it took awhile to do. And extracting hair is a pain in the butt! Especially since the background of the photo blended in with her hair somewhat. But it was absolutely necessary to make this page work. Anyway, here's the page:



Credits:
Background paper, pink flower, and "sceptor" star pin - Sweet Blossom Designs, Enchanted Forest Collab
Castle (extracted from paper and desaturated)- Russian-Dutch Heart Design, Knighthood
Tree - Scrap Mania, My Little Magic Garden
Grass clump - Jaelop Designs, Spring
Flowers (in front of grass) - Tiramisu, Summer Breeze
Rose - Miss13, Storia Bella add on
Mushrooms - A Work in Progress, Enchanted Forest Collab
Crown - geniaBeana, Queen for a Day
Tiarra - Jamie Dell
Font - Merced
Atomic Cupcake action - colored chrome

Today turned out a lot better than I anticipated, actually. It had some very difficult parts (like Emma screaming in the middle of church...), but it wasn't nearly as stressful as I expected it to be. A large part of that was because John helped with Emma a TON throughout the day. He took her with him to some of his meetings, allowing me to sleep in and get ready without a toddler underfoot. No one showed up for choir (big surprise - we had a linger longer), so I didn't have to conduct. And John didn't have to stay long after church at all, so he got to come home with Emma and I instead of staying for hours on end (ok, so it's usually only 1-2 hours, but still). John watched Emma till bedtime so I could relax and play on the computer:) We didn't end up having our speed scrap today on BAM after all, but that's totally fine with me. It'll be on Tuesday instead.

So, today's template is actually an 8x10 version of a previous template - template 12. It's the baby's first year one. A good neighbor friend of mine is going to make an Easter gift for her mom and MIL using this template, and she wants to print it as an 8x10. So, of course, the template needs resizing for printing purposes. My friend hasn't had time to start digiscrapping yet, so she's going to come over here (she only lives 2 doors down) and I'm going to help her with it. She's already picked out most of her pictures. Should be fun!

I thought about naming this one template 20, but since it's really just a resized version of 12 (with adjusted removable papers), I decided not to. I still have an idea for template 20 in the works. I might start on it tonight, but don't count on it;) Anyway, template 12 (8x10) is a single page template in PSD format. Here's the preview:



You can download it here.

As always, I'd love to hear back from you and see your pages with my templates. Also, if you have any requests, I'd love to hear it. If you'd like an 8x10 version of any of my templates for priting and framing, let me know and I'll make it for you:)

Well, that's all for now! I may be back later tonight - we'll see. It depends. I have several options. I could work on my kit, I could make another page, I could make a template, or I could go freebie hunting. I haven't decided yet!! But whatever I do, it will likely be digiscrapping related;)

O is for Outside

I finally made the O is for Outside page tonight! I really like how it came out:)

I had a REALLY hard day today. I did do some fun things, but by the time both were over, Emma was being difficult because it was either naptime or bedtime. I've been on a crazy emotional rollercoaster all day. Just lots of frustrating or stressful things going on. And the fact that 4shared was saying I had 0 downloads of yesterday's template was pretty depressing. I was already having self esteem issues and that didn't help. I found out later that for some reason 4shared wasn't recording the downloads. So now I have no idea how many I got! It's currently saying there were 9, but I know there were more than that, based on the comments I got here and on 4shared, and the fact that Kimi said she downloaded it but that it was not registering the download in the numbers. Weird.

We had enrichment today. It was purse themed, and we had a lesson, some yummy food, played a couple purse related games, and made cute little purses out of fabric placemats and ribbon. But the ribbon was...well...cheap (no offence to my enrichment committee girls who read this!). It frayed past my double/triple stitching and one side came completely off. I went to Walmart to look for a better quality ribbon. I ran into a neighbor that I don't get to see very often (she goes to a community ward instead of the student ward), and she pointed me towards something even better than the ribbons I was looking at - a thick, braided ribbon that matched the little bag I sewed perfectly! It's going to be SO cute when I switch the purse string. I was going to break out the sewing machine tonight, but I forgot until after Emma was in bed and I keep it in a storage closet in her room. Yeah, not gonna risk waking her up for that.

Now, I know very little about sewing. I've made a few things, but they've all been very simple: curtains, nursing cover, simple quilt, hemming, and now this little purse. I have yet to learn to use a pattern. I did buy a PJ bottom one recently (and some fabric) to make John some new PJ pants. All his lightweight ones are pretty much trashed. I just need Jessica or someone else to help me with it. Problem is, everyone around me who sews is in school. I also have issues trying to set my machine up. I can thread the bobbin, I can thread the needle, but catching the needle on the bobbin...I have the hardest time with that. I have a very old machine (my mom bought it when I was a baby...), so it's not one of the easy-to-use machines of today. But it's a good, sturdy metal one and it works great. It's the user that's the problem;)

Aaaanyway, this wasn't going to be about sewing LOL. This is supposed to be about my new page. Normally, I do the ABC pages in sets of 2, so I can see how they'll fit together when printed. But this page took too much time for me to do another tonight! And the P page requires an extraction. I'll wait on that till at least tomorrow. So, without further ado, here is my O is for Outside page:



Credits:
Background paper - East West Scraps, A Walk in the Park
Textured overlay (on hills and background) - Tammy Jackson
Crumpled overlay (on hills) - Princess Kate Designs
Sun and clouds - Kasie:)
Leafy trees (recolored) - Waterlo Project, In the Sleeping Orchard
Bare tree and bike - NewLife Dreams, A Walk in the Park
Birdhouse - Jamie Dell, Spring is in the Air
Bird - Choukette, Sweet Envy
Butterfly - Scrapidea, A Walk in the Park
Kite, bee, caterpiller, snail - Goth Kittie, Vite Vite Printemps
Flowers - Nanine, Waiting for Spring
Paper grass - Redju, Paper Grass CU freebie
Font - My Own Topher
Atomic Cupcake action - painted wood

Oh, we did go swimming today, and it was fun, but trying to get dried off and dressed in a locker room with a toddler all by myself is VERY difficult! She kept trying to run away when I was trying to change! Yeah...next time I'll be sure to have other girls around when we go change. Nathan, Jessica, and Victoria all went swimming with us, but they left a little before we did, so I didn't have anyone to help with Emma in the locker room. And I'm not comfortable with the idea of her going into the men's locker room with John to change.

Anyway, I'd best go to bed. We've got a looooong day ahead of us tomorrow. John has home teaching at 9:45 AM, ward audit at 10:20 (he's the financial clerk), we both have an activities committee meeting at noon, church from 1-4 (during naptime...so no nap for Emma), a linger longer that we're in charge of, choir practice and I'm directing since I'm the assistant choir director and we don't HAVE an actual choir director right now (I REAAAALLY hope they find someone ASAP - and NOT ME!), and then John has to do more financial clerk stuff afterwards. Just shoot me now. This sounds horrible, and I feel so guilty for it, but...I'm starting to really hate/dread Sundays. They're supposed to be relaxing days spent with family - um...how is this relaxing? Yeah. It's not. And John being gone all morning before church and all afternoon after church doesn't exactly count as spending time with family. Oh, and have I mentioned that Emma doesn't nap on Sundays? Yeah...THAT'S fun...cranky toddler for the last half of the day. Thankfully John offered to take Emma with him to both his before church responsibilities. Yay! I'll actually be able to shower before church on Sunday! (I usually end up showered Saturday night instead.) But it's still going to be a long day. Hopefully it will turn out well, but I'm not feeling very optimistic about it. I'm dreading it.

We're having another speed scrap on BAM tomorrow, too, but I'm not sure if our hostess has decided what time we're doing it. Based on my insane schedule tomorrow, I will only be available for the evening slot. But with such a stressful day, I'm not sure if a speed scrap would be GOOD or BAD for me.

And now I'm babbling. But I'm definitely feeling better than I was when I ranted in my LiveJournal, for those of you who have access there (it's friends only - can't share EVERYTHING about my life with the whole internet;)). Time to sign off before I babble even more. Night all!

Template 19 and Trip to the Park

Template 19 is up and ready for download! We had a speed scrap tonight on BAM (my mommy forum), and I turned my LO into a template for you. This is the first REAL speed scrap I've done. It was really fun! A bit stressful towards the end, but wow, what an adrenaline rush! Instructions were given out every 10 minutes for the first hour and we then had a second hour to complete the page, plus a 15 minute grace period for saving and uploading. I was scrapping well into the allotted grace period and got my page up 5 minutes late. I hope that doesn't disqualify me from the voting. No one said anything either way after I asked about it, so hopefully I'm good to go.

Here are the instructions we were given:
1. Choose 1 background paper. Then choose 3 more papers that will be used in the background.
2. Your page must contain 4 photos. They can all be differnt, or some can be duplicated.
3. Choose 1 element, and use it 3 times on your page.
4. Choose 2 fasteners. Use them as much as you like.
5. Choose 2 more elements. You can use these ones as much as you like!
6. Add as much journaling, word art, and title as you like

And this is the page I did for it (from our attempt to go to the park this week):



Credits:
Striped paper and small trees - Scrap Matters Design Star mini kit
Dotted paper, big trees, and alpha paper - Project B Designs Time Stood Still
Green paper and journaling frame - Val (aka geniaBeana), Chocolate Temptation
Staple - MissVivi, Happy Birthday
Other fastener - NewLife Dreams, Happy Birthday
Fonts - Too Much Paper, Digs My Heart
Atomic Cupcake actions - wild tear, painted wood

There were a couple of things that needed fixing, but I didn't have time to fix them. I did so later in Photoshop, though;) But of course, the revised version doesn't count towards the speed scrap.

Afterwards, I turned my LO into a template to share:) Hope you like it! Template 19 is a single page LO in PSD format. I used one of Scrappin' Cops' CU bracket frames for the journaling tab in this template. Here's the preview:



You can download it here.

As always, I'd love to hear back from you and see what you do with my templates!

I have an idea for template 20, and I've been working on a kit that I hope to finish soon, so keep checking back for more! Assuming, of course, that you like my work;) Anyway, goodnight all!