Two Things

Today I'm going to share a couple of things I really love right now, and they both start with the letter P:

Pandora-- Pandora is an internet radio service created by the Music Genome Project. You set up your own "radio station" which plays only music you like. The really interesting thing about this service is that it "learns" from your choices and selects music based upon the attributes of songs to which you've given a "thumbs up".

Picasa 3 -- I've written about Picasa in the past (read my past post here), and I now love it even more. Google has recently launched Picasa 3 (still in beta but fully functional) with a host of new features, many of which are PERFECT for scrapbookers, especially scrapbookers without Photoshop (yep, that would be me)! Best of all, Picasa is a free but powerful organization/editing tool for digital photos. Here are my two of my favorite new features:

* the ability to put text directly onto a JPEG format photo, using any font on your computer (there are couple of formatting limitations which I hope get worked out through testing)

* many new collage options, including my beloved grids, which allow for much more creative control. They've also added several options for creating "gatherings" of different-sized photos, plus the ability to print collages in a variety of sizes.

If you're not familiar with Pandora or Picasa, check them out!

Feline Friday: Bad Influence?

Early one morning this week, I went downstairs in the dark to make a pot of coffee.

"CRUNCH-CRUNCH-CRUNCH" I heard as I rounded the corner to the kitchen. It was clearly the sound of a kitty eating, but which kitty, and what was she crunching? Lily was shut in the basement (for bad behavior, as usual), and Tinsel hadn't yet been fed.

I flipped on the light and there was Tinsel, up on the counter and muzzle-deep in Lily's food container. She had removed the lid and was helping herself to a bountiful breakfast.



Now such behavior would not be at all unusual for Lily, but Tinsel has NEVER done anything as bold as this. It would never even occur to Tinsel to try to remove the lid from a food container. But she has obviously watched Lily do it, and now she can do it, too.

In fact, since I snapped this picture, Daughter has actually seen Tinsel remove the lid by repeatedly pulling it upward with her paw.

Lily has obviously been a bad influence on Tinsel, but I do admit it that it's pretty cute. :-) And it's proof that you can (or Lily can) teach an "older" cat new tricks!

Six Secrets

I was tagged by Linda to share six secrets. This was a fun exercise and really made me stop and think. Some of these secrets may surprise you; others not so much!

1 Unlike Sarah C :-), I make my bed every day. If I happen to miss a day and it is time to go to sleep, I still make my bed and then immediately unmake it. I could not get into a bed that hasn’t been made. I am not sure what might happen. lol

2 When I was little, our family meals consisted of meat, potatoes, and a vegetable. For a variety of reasons (my own finickiness included), we never had casseroles or soups or anything with more than one ingredient. Once in 6^th grade, I went to a sleepover and they were serving a strange food – pizza! I had never seen it before and wasn’t sure what it was, so I called home to be sure it was OK to eat! lol

3 Like Sarah C, I also have a soap opera secret. Spouse and I have been watching "As the World Turns" since we were little kids. We went to the same college, and we even watched it there every day over lunch with a group of friends. We still tape it and watch it at night. It’s kind embarrassing, actually. I’m not sure why I’m even sharing this! lol

4 When eating a meal, I have to eat all of one food before I move on to the next. I could never eat a bite of one thing and then a bite of another. I’m not sure what might happen if I were to do that. I think food might get all mixed up in my stomach, instead of going down in nice layers. :-)

5 As a result of some bad experiences with swimming lessons when I was a child, I am pretty much deathly afraid of water, except for wading in the ocean. I would love to live near a body of water, as long as I didn't have to submerge myself in it.

6 When I was little, my friend Loreen and I played some tricks on younger girls in the neighborhood. The worst one involved an outhouse in Loreen’s back yard. We were small enough that we could lower our legs into the outhouse hole by bracing our elbows on either side of the hole – our legs were too short for our feet to touch any of the nasty stuff below. Well, one day we told the younger neighbor girl that there was a Secret World down below the outhouse hole. We showed her how to lower herself down and...you guessed it...she slipped through the hole and landed with a sickening "PLOP".

I’ll never forget how they had to tip the outhouse on its side to get her out. There she sat screaming and crying in a pile of nasty stuff, toilet paper sticking out wildly all over her body. I'm sure it's taken years of therapy for her to get past this incident.

To make matters even worse, I lied about my involvement in this little plot. Of course, that didn’t go so well for me. :-)

Now I'm tagging fellow blogger Lily! :-)

Design Your Life color inspiration project

(Click to bigify)

Here's another project from Cathy Z's online Design Your Life class. She provided an 8.5x11 sketch and the journaling template. The challenge with this project was to use your own handwriting and be inspired by a particular color combination (her suggestion was blue and orange).

I created the LO on 8.5x11 and then mounted it on a 12x12 base. (I love the idea of mixing sizes in my albums, but I didn't feel like dealing with that today!) Because I expanded the size, I placed a title outside the parameters of the 8.5x11 and extended the patterned paper strip all the way down the page. The sketch also called for just one photo, but I added two additional small ones to illustrate the story. (Sorry about the crookedness at the top of the layout...it is NOT that way in real life!)

We'll see if I can keep up with the pace of this class. Because we're talking about Cathy Z's layouts, they are all very simple and relatively unembellished, so they don't take much time to complete. I'm happy to report that it has been just the push I needed to do some LONG overdue personal scrapbooking.

Design Your Life class

After thinking a LOT about it, I finally decided to sign up for Cathy Zielske's online class at Big Picture Scrapbooking. She's my all-time favorite scrapbooker, and I've taken a class from her at CKU and just think she's the best. The class is "Design Your Life", and it's a 12-week course in design. There will be at least three projects each week to accompany the discussion topic. I decided that instead of making the sample binder that is suggested, I'm going to incorporate the completed layouts into my existing scrapbooks. This way, I'll be applying design concepts and getting my own scrapbooking done at the same time! (Less guilt that way, too!)

Since I signed up so late and the class started last Thursday, I missed doing the pre-work and jumped in with the first assignment. This one was a bit of a departure for me since I'm usually too cheap to print enlargements of this size, but now that I've done it, I will definitely do it again. (I actually printed this one at home, so I convinced myself it was free! LOL) I think this simple symmetrical design will work really well for the thousands of band layouts I need to create (well, not thousands, but a LOT) because I usually have only one or two decent shots and lots of smaller distance shots.

And just like I wouldn't mind wearing the same comfortable clothes every day, no one will care if I make the same layout again and again, right? :-)

Our cat show days are over

Okay, it's only taken three cat shows to convince me that cat shows aren't really Lily's thing. I had held out hope that her behavior would improve and the judges would see what a sweet, adorable kitty she really is.

At the cat show yesterday, Lily instead went from bad to worse (if that is even possible), morphing into a vicious (and pretty much dangerous) ball of claws and teeth.

And I, of course, felt terribly guilty about putting her through the stress. So guilty that I bought her a lovely new cat basket. :-)



(Click on the collage to bigify. Note the expression of the kitty next to Lily in the lower right-hand corner photo!)

This was a national cat show, with 160+ cats from all over the Midwest and as far away as Florida. Nearly all of the participants were cat breeders, and there were some absolutely beautiful cats there, many of which I'd only seen in magazines. I quickly figured out that the breeders were also the ones showing the 35+ household pets, which are their cats that don't meet breed standards. So poor Lily was at a real disadvantage, since all of the cats (and their owners) were much more experienced than us.

All kitties were evaluated by four judges in four different rings, meaning Lily had to be taken out of her Double-Wide (properly referred to as a benching cage) and put into the judging ring cage four times. The first judge (see the middle picture on the left) was the only one who could handle her. She lunged dangerously at all the other judges. She even lunged at me, to the horror of everyone watching. I've never seen anything quite like it, and I felt badly that Lily was so upset.

A nice exhibitor from Minnesota told me that it was probably the high ceilings and the bright mercury lights causing Lily's stress. That was nice to hear, but I knew better. :-)

Household cats are separated into short-hair and long-hair, then again by spay/neuter and by coat color/markings. I learned that Lily is actually a "blue McTabby" -- a tabby with mackerel markings (vertical lines that extend around her body like ribs) as opposed to classic tabby markings (which look like a bullseye on the kitty's side). Since she was the only blue female spay McTabby, she was the only one in her class and got two blue ribbons. She also got two red-white-and-blue ribbons, which I assume mean the same thing.

Lily's behavior was so bad that we took the ribbon and ran from the ring each time. She actually had a third blue ribbon for a brief moment, until the ring clerk came to her Double-Wide and took it away, replacing it with a red-white-and-blue ribbon. "We're almost out of the blue ribbons," he said nicely. Right.

So what did I learn?

* No more cat shows for Lily. Mommy gets it now. :-)

* I MIGHT do another cat show with a future kitty, but we must start when the kitty is six months old. Starting early seems to be the key.

* We were WAY out of our league in this show, but that was okay. I learned a few things and got to see some amazing kitties, some with four-inch fur and some with no fur at all.

* Cat people are generally very nice.

* Crazy cat ladies really do exist. I met a few of them yesterday. :-)

* There are some beautiful and exotic cats in the world, but none could be more loved than our Lily and Tinsel.

Holiday Project: Covered Tins

Cat show update: Today I'm off to the cat show. Maybe I should leave the cat home, huh? :-) I have sprayed her carrier with "Herbal Calming Spray" (I'm thinking of spraying her, too) and I'm seriously considering drugging her (or me) with a tiny bit of leftover Prozac. (Daughter says this is improper use of drugs and constitutes DOPING, but I say that desperate times call for desperate measures!)

Look for an update tomorrow, or later today if we are asked to leave the show early! Thanks for all the well-wishes!

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I've been busy this week making projects for a holiday open house. I hope that some of these ideas inspire crafters to make handmade gifts this holiday season!

I created a few samples of decorated tins. These 3x3 tins have clear lids which make them perfect to use as candy tins or even little gift boxes. The really neat thing is that they can be decorated using a very small amount of product...making them perfect for using up your scraps. If you started with a full sheet of paper, you could decorate a LOT of tins!

On this tin, I used a bit of Basic Grey's Figgy Pudding line...not a new line, but it's still one of my favorites. For the lid, I cut out three poinsettias of different dimensions and layered them with foam dots. I added a bit of loopy ribbon and Stickles around the edge of the lid.

On this tin, I used a bit of Bo Bunny snowflake paper and a few snowflake rub-ons from Me and My Big Ideas. This tin took no time at all to make!

Holiday Project: Cards

I've been busy making projects for the holiday open house at Memory Bound. As I was checking out the new Christmas lines, I noticed the new Be Merry line by My Mind's Eye. It includes a great sheet of die-cuts and several small-scale patterns which are perfect for cards. In no time at all, I made these eight sample cards, and I still had materials left over to make several more.

I'm not normally a fan of pastels, but I love the soft colors and whimsical designs included in this line. The colors remind me of Christmas candy (which, of course, I DO like!).

And this reminds me...I'd better start making my own cards if I hope to get them mailed before Valentine's Day!

Lights Across the Web

Sarah C was the recipient of this blog award earlier this week and graciously passed it on to me. Thank you, Sarah! If you haven't visited her blog, check it out! Sarah's scrapbooking, sewing, and home improvement projects are always inspirational! And Sarah is the one who introduced me to Daisy the Curly Cat's blog. Even though I've never met Daisy, I feel like she is a member of our family!

Today I'm passing this award on to Maureen, whose blog never fails to bring a smile. Whatever the topic -- bird droppings, Star Wars, cats, or the misadventures of daily life -- Maureen has a way with words! She definitely lights up the web!

Feline Friday: Lily practices for the cat show

Holiday Project: Tag Tin

Oh, my goodness: From the looks of my craft space, Christmas must be fast approaching! And given that October is already here, I guess that really is the case. This week, I've been working on a series of projects for a holiday open house at Memory Bound. Today I finished a tag tin.

For this project, I used a small metal "lunch box" tin. These have been on the market for at least a couple of years now, and I still think they're a great value for the creative possibilities they offer. I chose to use the new Happy Holidays paper line by Fancy Pants. The great thing about this line is that it includes a sheet of 12 journaling cards that are easy to transform into tags. The double-sided paper in this line has non-traditional colors paired with whimsical designs.

I used just a little bit of the paper and ribbon to decorate the outside of the tin plus a snowflake punch to add a few designs to the lid. Diamond Stickles added just a bit of sparkle. Using leftover bits of paper, I made a few little tags to hang from the handle.

To make the 12 large tags, I cut apart the sheet of journaling cards to create 12 pieces. I backed each in a slightly larger piece of paper or cardstock, rounded the corners, and inked. I tied or stapled ribbon to the top of each and embellished as needed, although not much was necessary since the journaling cards already feature great designs.

Here's the completed project. While there are lots of pieces, the entire project was quick and easy to create! You could give this tin as a gift, or use it to store your own gift tags for the holiday season.

Holiday Project: Photo Cube Tree

I've been working on projects for the holiday open house at the store where I teach. This one was very fun and quick to complete! I started with a set of six cardboard photo cubes. I played around with them and decided to make them into a Christmas tree.

I used a line of double-sided Christmas paper by Scrapworks to cover five surfaces of each cube, with a black and white photo on the sixth side. The boxes can be stacked in almost any order. You can put all the photos on one side or mix them up as I did here.

I tied ribbons around three boxes and added a few Flair Adhesive Badges by American Crafts as trim. I used a die-cut chipboard star for the top box. To make it stand up, I poked holes in the top of the box for the two star tips, then I ran a thin line of Glossy Accents around each tip/hole to provide additional stability.

This little project would be a fun and easy Christmas gift or holiday decoration!