Tabby Thursday

Yes, Lily is especially cute and doesn't hesitate to use this fact to her advantage.

And it generally works. :-)

Almost Wordless Wednesday

a fuds BONANZA!

Monday after Christmas

Lily is suffering from a severe case of the post-holiday blues.

Santa Came! by Tinsel

After wee sended our ledders to Santa, we hanged up our stockings and went rite to slepe! (Can u tell wich is Lily's???)

Sum of u may not no dis, but Santa brot me heer 8 yeers ago, so I nose him PURR-sonally! It waz RILLY cold ridin in da slay!



An in da morning, we seed dat Santa had been at our howse!

He bringed eech of us our own can of yummy fuds wich taists lyke fishes! But we onlee had a teeny tiny sample so far.

We each got our own bag of Temptations, two! YAY! Also fishy tasting.

And Lily getted sum new nale trimmerz. And I getted sum catnip stuff. We will share ezzerieting, prettie much. We bofe had our nales trimmed last nite.

I am kinda glad Santa did not take Lily wif him, as I hoped. Cuz den I wood not have her treets to eat.

Luv,
Tinsel

Krismus Gretingz frum Lily

Marey Krismus!

My mommie letted me rite dis blog post todai so I cud send sum cheerie Krismus gretingz to u all! As u can see, I am filled wif da hollieday speerit. I hope u r two.

Luv,
Lily

Rited an tiped all bi miself!

Deer Santa

Deer Santa,

Halp! Remembr wen u brot me heer on Krismas morning a few yeerz ago? Dis is what I ask: PLEEEZE, find Lily a new home for Krismas! She chases me an tris to eet mi fuds. Den she tris to lik me -- ewww! GET HER OUT OF HEER!

Or if nobuddy wantz her (wich is entyrelie possibul) I also lik anyting dat taists lik fishes.

I hope you getz dis letr! Say hi to ur elves fur me!

Ur frend,
Tinsel

Tabby Tuesday: Movie Classics with Lily

Last week, Lily watched The Wizard of Oz for the first time.

She preferred the scenes featuring Toto. I'm sure she was picturing herself in that role!

Maybe if there's ever a re-make...

Layout: Show choir rehearsal

Show choir season is about to begin! In November, our choirs host an open rehearsal (in practice t-shirts) to give parents and friends a preview of the show. Of course, this calls for a layout.

I even used a small piece of one of my favorite older patterned papers. This one comes from my Super-Hoarded Stash of Paper from Companies That Have Gone Out of Business -- Arctic Frog. *sigh*

(Sorry for the crooked lines. It's straight in real life!)

Now back to work.

Feline Friday: No interwebs!

Halp! My mommeh is ecsrtreemlie mad! I do not undurstand wut da problum is. No eeemayle? What is dat? I am a feemayle. I haz nezer seed a eeemayle. Haz u?

As if dat wasn't bad enuf, now we has no interwebs! I DO no what dat is becuz I sumtymes get to doo a Feline Friday blogg post. I had to go to my daddies orafice to rite dis post! Thingz is BAD at r howse!

Anywais she is so mad dat I had to cuvver mi ibawlz.

Tell mee when itz ozer!!!!!

Luv,
Lily

A non-event!

In scrapbooking, we often discuss the merits of "event" versus "moment" layouts. Some of us are exclusively event scrapbookers, documenting concerts, games, birthday parties, and holidays like some kind of crazed archivist. Others take a looser approach, choosing to document relationships, cute expressions, and milestones...in short, the little things in life.

I'm sure you can tell into which of these two camps I fall!

For this layout, I took a break from my relentless event scrapbooking to capture a moment in time, specifically a 1:25 AM caffeine-powered, stressed-students-on-a-deadline moment.

For Daughter, this moment marked the first time she had stayed up THAT late working on a school project. As the snacks ran out and time ticked away, serious squirreliness set in.

I'm glad I stayed up late to capture this moment. :-)

ROYGBIV meets patterned paper

I recently undertook a rather radical reorganization of my patterned paper. Well, maybe not COMPLETELY radical, but a tiny bit radical...I re-organized ALL of my patterned paper by color!

Previously I had only one of the three above files organized by color. The others were sorted by manufacturer, with complete collections and/or brands together. I finally decided to take the plunge and sort it ALL by color....BECAUSE, you can NEVER go wrong with rainbow-color order!

Here are the completed files. In addition to the tabs for each color, I also set up a tab for "themed" paper, multi-colored paper (such as my vast collection of STRIPED paper!), and specialty paper. I kept a few collections together (notably Bazzill and Ki) but most everything else found a home in ROYGBIV.

In resorting all of my paper, I discovered a few things:

* Patterned paper can be hard to sort by color. I sorted by the dominant color or base color. If there was no dominant color, it went into my "multi-color" section.
* Holy cow, I have some very ugly paper in my possession. (I really should have made a "What was I thinking?" tab!) If it can't be used for cards, I will use the backside of it for draft copies in my wide-format printer.
* I have a TON of blue paper. Not sure why that is. I don't have anything against blue, but I'm not a huge fan, either.
* I also have way too much pink paper. I'm definitely not a pink person. The pinks need to be aggressively purged.
* I am not a themed paper person. I have some cat paper, some Girl Scout paper, and one odd sheet of paper with dominoes on it, but that's about it.
* I have more patterned paper than I will ever use in my lifetime, at the rate I use it.

With luck, the newly sorted ROYGBIV patterned paper will help me use it up a little more efficiently. At a minimum, my paper files look much cooler now that they're in proper form. :-)

Holiday Decorating - 2009

I'm not really into holidays, although you might not believe that if you were to visit our house at Christmas. I put up a lot of Christmas decorations because over the years, I have accumulated a ton of them, primarily as gifts from family members. A few years ago, I started putting up multiple trees because I have so many ornaments. I also have a Dickens Village with 30+ buildings, all gifts from my parents or late grandma over the years.

So far this year, I have put up the village and four trees (all are tethered to sturdy objects with fishing line to keep Lily from knocking them down). I may put up my fifth tree, if I can summon the strength! In addition to these decorations, I also have a collection of old world Santas, two additional villages, and a host of other holiday items (many handmade) which didn't make it out of the boxes this year.

Our big tree has a variety of ornaments, many of which are special for one reason or another. The snowflakes, for example, were all made by Spouse's late grandmother. The tree in the dining room features my late grandma's mercury glass ornaments, which I absolutely treasure. This year, the small tree in on the landing has a variety of gold ornaments (mainly musical instruments), and the kitchen tree holds the set of Cosmo Cricket ornaments I made last year. I have so many ornaments that I sometimes switch the themes or color schemes.

I have to admit that once everything is in place, I enjoy it. Taking it down, however, is another story altogether!

Feline Friday: Big Snow!

Here in the Midwest, we are digging out from a major storm which dumped 12 inches or more of snow on us. Brisk 50 mph winds followed the snow, creating hours of white-out blizzard conditions. Then, once the wind died down, the arctic air moved in. Suffice it to say, it is COLD! This snow won't be melting anytime soon.



Since the snow began a couple of days ago, Lily has been determined to investigate it. So in the height of the snowstorm, I stood outside holding her for approximately 3 seconds, just so she could see what was falling from the sky (and stop crying at the back door). Turns out she was terrified of the swirling snow, so we went immediately back inside the house.

But once the snow stopped, she wanted to try it again. So outside we went once more.



We placed her gently on the snow-covered sidewalk, then onto a tall drift. Her little toes spread wide, forming miniature snowshoes!

But after a couple of minutes, she turned to us as if to say, "Um, dis seamed lik a gud ideah at da tyme. Pleeze to go insyde nowz!"

Not a digital layout

I'm not a digital scrapbooker, and I doubt that I will ever be. BUT I am definitely a hybrid scrapbooker. I use my computer for titles, journaling, custom embellishments, and playing with layout designs. I also look at digital templates for design ideas.

Here's a layout I made using a digital template by Cathy Zielske as inspiration. With her clean style and background in graphic design, Cathy was MADE for digital design.

And that's a good thing, even for those of us still using paper! :-)

(Almost) Wordless Wednesday

We've trained her well. :-)

Layout: Pumpkin carving

Here's another quick layout I finished up recently. Daughter had several of her high school friends over for a very intense pumpkin carving session this past October so, of course, this called for a scrapbook page.

Although I have a ton of photos from this particular event, I decided to devote only one page to it. So I used the collage feature in Picasa to group a few pictures to illustrate the story. In my quest to finish up a lot of scrapbooking FAST, collages have been a saving grace.

Lucky for me, the only two predominant colors in these photos were orange and blue, which happen to be complementary colors. (I swear, I did not engineer that!) This made color selection easy.

And see that little piece of orange and blue patterned paper? That is from my Super Hoarded Stash of Paper from Companies That Have Gone Out of Business. Recognize it? Yep, it's old Arctic Frog.

Don't worry...I still have plenty left. :-)

Layout: Birthday

If you've been reading my blog, you know that I'm working to catch up on a serious backlog of scrapbooking in time for graduation at the end of May. So I'm working my way back in time through boxes of photos and ran across this set of pictures that I've been skipping over. As it happens, these are the last pictures we have of my daughter with my mom.

From a color standpoint, the photos were hard enough to deal with, but from an emotional point of view, I couldn't even look at them until recently. So I decided to keep the color scheme very simple, with a neutral white background. (Neutrals are always my solution for difficult color situations.)

If you click on the picture, you should be able to read the journaling. I didn't want it to be heavy or sad, because that is not representative of the kind of relationship my daughter shared with her grandma. The pink stuffed hearts in the ceramic basket at right were actually favors given out at the baby shower we had for my daughter after she was born. I have kept them all these years and for some reason decided to use them for our little birthday gathering that evening.

It has been hard working with pictures that include my mom, but I've found that it also feels good to finally scrapbook them. I feel that in order to be an authentic depiction of our life, our scrapbooks need to show our entire journey, including the rough patches we encounter. I'm getting there...

Feline Friday

Deer Santa,

Hai im tryin to bee gud an leef mommiez pretti tings aloan. But itz rilly, rilly hard...

Luv, Lily

It's Madrigal week!

It's the beginning of the holiday season and time for our high school's 30th annual Madrigal Feaste. It is a huge undertaking for our choir directors, our vocal students, and a host of volunteer parents. Attending the Madrigal production is a great opportunity for members of our community to enjoy the many talents of our students.

This is our daughter's last year in the Madrigal production and she has the honor of playing the role of the queen. (I had to laugh when members of the royal court decided to name her Queen Lily, which just HAPPENS to be the name of one of our kitties.)

Having helped with decorations and watched the rehearsals, I cannot wait to attend the production. It's a beautiful evening filled with song and dance and the perfect way to start the holiday season.