Winter Wonderland!

Wow! The 'hood is gorgeous this morning! Snow's already melting but we will enjoy it while we can -- major photo ops and I feel a double layout scrapbook page coming on! The snow came up I-85 from Georgia which is weird but we always get our best snows when they come from the south. The Rio dog had a 'hip' incident playing in our neighbor's yard while I did the picture thing but no idea what? He had hip surgery as a puppy and has no "joint" on the right side, just cartilage. As a "Senior" Senor Dog he still likes to play but "mom" needs to be more careful!

Got a bunch of kid's Easter cards done for the troops last night while we watched the Olympics (and the snow coming down) so it was a very good Friday night.

Timing is Everything...

I thought it was going to be a great evening when the plan was to assemble Easter cards for OpWriteHome and watch the Olympic opening ceremonies with the dog (hubby is off "fiddling" at the folk society)...and now it's snowing.. soft beautiful snow... I feel a Robert Frost "woods are lovely, dark and deep..." scrapbook page coming on!

Heating It Up!

This weeks's "technique" challenge was heat embossing, something I learned in the past couple of years when I was still gainfully employed and learning a lot of "stuff" about scrapbooking but that I didn't have time to actually play with and perfect.. I was pleasantly surprised when this embossing project "worked" on the first go round. I love the combination of red and teal and used Zing red embossing powder, Colorobox Aquamarine ink and one of my favorite Technique Tuesday mini-flowers for this card.

I must say that I'm finding these challenges to be very "challenging" because I am a scrapbooker who just happens to be making cards for Operation Write Home. I'm not a "crafter" and at least not in the near term, a dedicated card person, although I do make Christmas cards and homemade cards for family & friends on special holidays, birthdays etc. I've not had much experience with stamping (can't you tell?) so I've been focusing some free time on that recently now that I'm a "retiree." That being said, part of my "cardmaker's block" is due in part to the fact that my first love is photography and my scrapbooking approach is generally "less is more" when it comes to embellishments because I do lots of layouts that have 6-10 photos. This card is definitely a "less is more" card although I like it's simplicity. A simple design for Mom's Day cards with my new "Luv U Mom" stamp but also perfect for many "just because" and "i love you" cards.

Sketch Challenge #3 - Mixing It Up

I found a great "Dad" stamp on sale and I wanted to get a design down that I can use later for Father's Day cards for Operation Write Home -- so I adapted this week's sketch on the Stars and Stamps blog and came up with this shirt design. More challenging than the sketch -- and worth of a huge "YES!!!!!" is the fact that on my first attempt I managed to link an image of the "sketch" from Stars and Stamps to my blog... technology's great when it works....