Happy NSD!!

I've been a bit quiet because we've been dealing with some unwelcomed guests in our house....squirrels.  Its been three days of terror for me....tiptoeing around and peeking around corners in case another one got in.  As I type this there is a squirrel trapped in my laundry room until John wakes up in the morning and gets rid of it.  It was funny the first two days, but now...I'm done with this.  Arhhhhh, its always something around here!

I did manage to get over to ACOT for a little bit this evening and did one challenge and a Fast Scrap. 
The layout was part of a challenge in which we were shown two layouts and had to scraplift something from each of them to create our layout:

The Fastscrap was to create a layout in a real frame that could hang on the wall.  We had 1 hour to finish it.  Of course I saw the challenge with only 25 minutes left and just missed the deadline but its ok!  I think my frame is kinda cute!!

I am heading to bed....lots to do tomorrow.  MAtt has baseball practice at 8, Susie has a game at 1 and then to a sleepover about 20 minutes away, we have to get to the bottom of this squirrel invasion, plus I want to do lots of scrapping!  Don't forget to check out Let's Scrap....lots of fun tomorrow!!

Getting Ready for NSD!!

As an incoming Design Team member at Let's Scrap, its my pleasure to post a special NSD challenge.  I will also post it here on my blog and invite you to Let's Scrap to participate! 

This one is going to be a little more tricky than just completing a layout based on a sketch!  It's all in the numbers!!!  You will be creating a layout based on the Let's Scrapsketch below, but there will be a twist....I am going to list 5 different items and you will need to "Countdown" with those items.  For example, AND THIS IS JUST AN EXAMPLE, your layout must contain:

5 flowers
4 buttons
3 photos
2 patterned papers
1 die cut

This list may change so don't go collecting your items yet!!  I will post the list sometime on Saturday afternoon on the National Scrapbooking Discussion at Let's Scrap and you will have 24 hours to complete the challenge.  On Sunday I will randomly select one person to receive this small prize:

American Crafts Chipboard Numbers and a package of Sassafrass Lass Chipboard Numbers.
Do you see the number thing going on?  :)   The only advance information I will give you is that your inspiration must come from this sketch:

 I have some more small prizes to give away as well....so stay tuned!!  Oh...and if you want to win the prize, you must be a member of and upload your layout to Let's Scrap!  Why not join today?

The Color Room & Sketch Inspirations

I really should be in bed right now considering I had no more than three hours of sleep last night and all day long I was dragging but I had the weekly sketch from Sketch Inspirations sitting on my desk and a light bulb went off in my head and I knew just what pictures I wanted to do with this sketch. And to double my mileage on this one, I used the color palette over at the Color Room.

I used OLD OLD OLD Making Memories papers for this.  I'm talking like 10 years old!!  I was pretty shocked when I realized I really don't have much in the way of purple papers, even though for many, many years purple was my favorite color. In fact, as a way of saying "in your face", when I became "newly single" again I even painted my bedroom purple because my husband was always so adamant about having a gender neutral bedroom..no pastels or flowers allowed! Unfortunately I grew tired of the purple fairly quickly and its now a beige y-white color! :) Anyway, this is my take on both challenges! I am now checking out for the night! I'm over-exhausted!

A Better Day!!

I really must have been burning the candle at both ends! I went to bed fairly early for me last nigh since I just couldn't come up with any great ideas for layouts. I figured I'd get up bright and early and hope that I got some inspiration back. Well that plan didn't quite pan out. When I opened my eyes and looked at the clock it said 11:25!!! YIKES!!! I jumped out of bed and asked John why he didn't wake me up. His response....he tried. Once. And he knew better than to KEEP trying! (OK, so I'm not happy when someone wakes me up...so what, I get over it!) Anyway, everyone was hungry because apparently the kitchen doesn't open until I get in there. So I made some bacon and eggs with toast and we had Sunday breakfast and little past lunchtime! John started the ribs we are having tonight to slow cook on the grill. Yum, can't wait for them to be done! And after cleaning up and getting the LAST load of laundry for the week started, I headed to my scraproom. I can't show you what I created because its one of my Design Team layouts for Let's Scrap for the week of 5-12-10. But here's a couple sneak peeks! The sketch is GREAT....make sure you check it out when that challenge goes live!!

Not sure what else I will get done today. I'm starting to feel a headache coming on....or it could be an overload of coffee!!

One of those days!

Ever have one of those days when you wake up bright and early and have such high hopes for all that you will do that day, only to hit 5:00pm and realize that none of what you had planned to do worked out? Yep, that's my day. Instead of scrapping and doing laundry today, Susie woke up with a fever, congestion and then after I gave her some medicine and sent her back to her room she got sick all over the place. So, I had to tend to that mess and take care of my little girl. I'm telling you, the last few weeks have been exhausting with one kid or another sick, plus all the Spring activities. I wasted almost 2 hours this morning searching for a challenge to work on that would go with the challenge at The Color Room and I came up blank. By the time I decided to just use the one at the Color Room site, I wasn't even feeling any scrap mojo. This was literally the best I could come up with for this challenge and its just not how I envisioned it. But...its another layout in the album and years from now it will be the memories that matter, not that this wasn't how I had planned for this layout to come out. I'm in a sorta funk today and think I'm going to hang on the couch with John for a while and surf some blogs and see if later tonight I feel like scrapping.  I have a few Lets Scrap design team things to work on. I even went into AC Moore today armed with $$ and a 40% off coupon and walked out with a $1.49 hank of hemp. I couldn't get excited about ANYTHING new! That's when I know its time to go home and relax and forget scrapping for a bit. Well I didn't go home, I went grocery shopping, but thats good because now I won't have to do it tomorrow!  I did just notice the new color pallette for The Color Room for this coming week....looks pretty doesn' it?

It's Scrappy Time!

Its been a long week but its finally Friday and finally scrappy time!! I started with the weekly challenge at Let's Scrap. You can see the sketch in one of the posts below. I made the card for Susie's friend Emily who will be having her 12th Birthday party next Saturday. Then I decided to make a gift card holder to match the card. It fits right inside the card too. Both items were made entirely of scraps which is even better as I rarely use my scraps!  Love the Doodlebug glitter paper...I still have a little piece left of it too!  The butterflies are cut on the cricut.  The black glitter paper is a scrap leftover from a DCWV stack.

I'm not usually one to make cards but I like the idea of the gift card holder so I think I may whip a few more of these up to have on hand as the kids are always going to birthday parties and at the ages they are (11 and 13), CASH or GIFT CARDS are the gift of choice!!

Iwill update this post as I get more projects done tonight so as to not have a million posts!

UPDATE - I got this week's Sketchy Thursday's  challenge done.  I love the colors!  Uses Reminisce and Dream Street papers, Prima flowers, not sure where the water splashes are from as they have been in my stash for a while and I STILL have more splashes to use, palm tree brad is Creative Imaginations, round stamp is 7Gypsys, font is free on the internet and called "David" and the flower center brads were from my stash.

I think I am calling it quits for tonight.  Tomorrow morning bright and early I have to drop my car off so John can finally do my brakes!  That will give me a few hours scrapping/laundry time in the morning before I run some desperately needed errands.

The Scrapping Gods Are Mad At Me!

 

WARNING - Long post...with pictures!

All I want to do is scrap. But noooooo....I had to decide on the spur of the moment to re-do my scraproom! That started on Sunday after a trip to Ikea. Here's a couple pictures of John assembling my furniture.

So far so good right? Wrong....the last box to get opened was my desk. As you can see, all the shelving units are white. Well my desk was black. So between Sunday and today, I had my old table back as a desk.  Here are some pics of the MESS I made while trying to make room for the new furniture to go in.

I finally get to today...have the white desk and just need to put it together and put everything in its place.  Sounds like a plan right?  Well it was my plan for tonight (and then **GASP** I even planned to scrap just a little) up until noon this afternoon that is.  That's when I got the call from the school nurse.  I automatically assumed it was my daughter who went to school annoyed that I would not take her to "Take your child to work day".  You have to understand that my kids have been to my work MANY times and they HATE IT!  Its boring, there's no video games, there's nothing to do...blah blah blah.  But when she said she was calling about Matthew my heart sunk.  She said he was complaining of a lot of pain in his abdomen and since he came to her wearing gym shorts, he was able to fold the top of his shorts down where she saw "a small lump".  She said (and I agreed) that he is not one to complain and she could see the pain in his eyes and thought maybe I should pick him up and let him rest at home today.  OK....shut down the work computer (and I was being REALLY productive at work today too and off I go.  When I get him home and ask him to show me the lump I about died.   It was not SMALL at all...more like the size of a golf ball.  He was in tremendous pain by now so I skipped the pediatrician and we headed to the ER.  Fast forward 6 1/2 hours and an ultrasound, CT scan, pain killers, an IV of antibiotics, blood work, urine test, the possibility that it was a hernia...then appendicitis....we finally left the hospital about 7pm with the diagnosis of a severely strained groin muscle (inevitably from sliding in baseball) AND a bladder infection.  While I was happy to get that diagnosis as opposed to the first two...both of which would have resulted in my child having surgery and I did not want that to happen AT ALL, I once again was too wiped out to do much when I got home.  John took care of my daughter and got her to softball practice and I picked her up on the way home.  When I got home, John had assembled my desk and I once again had a mess in the room.  For the last 3 hours I've been putting things back.  Still a long way to go and some sorting and purging to do but the furniture is in place.  Here's the finished product and I have to say it was worth the stress:

I have so much more storage now....I even have some empty bins until I reorganize and do some micro-sorting.  And try to eliminate some of the plastic drawers (above) that are on the other side of the room "encroaching" on the kids half of the room as I've been told!

Now I just can't wait to create here.  Maybe tomorrow???  Oh wait...Susie has a game, I have to go grocery shopping, have to run to Kohl's before the sale on bedding is over....why Scrapbooking Gods?  What did I do!  LOL!