MiniBullyMom's Musings

For the past two years digital scrapbooking designers from all around the world team up and offer freebies. The designer that normally organizes the Christmas Around The World (CATW) Blog Train  is not organizing it this year. Instead there is a master blogpage (which can be found by clicking on the link HERE) that has been set up and bloggers are welcome to submit links to their freebies there. I figured I'd create a quickpage to give away from elements that were part of last years CATW kit. I could not find a background paper that I liked so I ended up creating one in order to complete the page.

Check back often during the month of December as I'm planning on having several other free quickpages available for downloading.

My niece is growing up so fast. Last year was her first formal dance. My sister went all out making sure it was a night to remember. She had her hair and makeup done professionally.

The minute I saw Scrappin Mommy's Autumn Splendor kit I knew it would be the perfect for showcasing this photo. You can pick it up at Divine Digital for only $2.50 right now. Angela did a great job creating this kit, it was her first time participating in Divine Digital's "PROject COLOUR". There is a unique flexibility with the kit which can appeal to those who prefer a bit of elegance yet those who enjoy a country feel to their layouts would find this a great addition to their digital stash.

I downloaded Cindi Ritter's "Spirit of Joy" kit over at Divine Digital. At first I thought this was just another religious themed kit but upon a closer look I realized that it wasn't. It contains a striking combination of flowers, butterflies and flourishes coupled with ten beautiful papers. There are two paper clip/ribbon combinations and a binder clip cluster along with a purple rose, tag and word art cluster. Other than what inspired the designer to create the kit there is nothing remotely religious about it. She has even designed a FREEBIE add-on  and the link can be found below!

Well....I'm not a "Twilight Zone" (the show/movie) fan but I am a fan of the "Twilight" series of books and the "Twilight Zone" kit designed by Christine Mortimer of DIGI_licious Designs. She also designed the wonderful little "button/typewriter key" looking alpha to coordinate with it.


Christine took inspiration from the colors used on the book covers. She gave it a soft, grungy feel with delicate elements that lend a vintage feel to the kit. I enjoyed playing with the papers and came up with the following layout without much thinking. It's not "DONE" quite yet, there is something it needs but I'm not quite sure what it is. Sometimes I sit on a layout and it' hits me later as to what needs changed. Once I figure it out I'll post the revised version here too.


What grabbed my attention to the kit first was the colors...although I will have to admit being partial to black, red and white anyways.

She did create the most awesome halloween quickpage from her "Bewitched & Spellbound" Kit that she is giving away as a freebie!
CLICK HERE for the BLOG LINK to her FREEBIE

Well Mike and I are celebrating our 19th anniversary today! We took off camping for the weekend, some people think that's weird but then we went camping on our honeymoon. This is the first year we have actually went away the weekend of our anniversary. In previous years our anniversary either fell on a weekday or we had hockey commitments and for many years we just "went to the fair" together. After going online to make the reservations last weekend we realized all of our favorite places were booked solid and that we could either go to one of the Tacoma Power Parks on Alder Lake or try some place new. We opted for someplace new and made a reservation at Tacoma Power's Taidnapam Park. When we first arrived we weren't quite sure about the site we had but by Saturday morning we fell in love with the park. We were in the "older" loop of the two camping loops. Our site was in total shade all weekend which was nice considering the temps were in the mid 80's all weekend. Technically our site backed up to the lake but there was a trail between our site and the lake. The trail was far enough away and on the other side of a dense stand of shrubs/trees which meant that people on the trail couldn't see into our site or inadvertently wander into it. We walked down to the boat launch in the park yesterday and played alongside it with the dogs. They have already closed this launch for the season because they have already started dropping the resevoir levels.


Since Mike works graveyard and I work days our schedules are pretty much completely opposite. When we go camping he tries to compensate by going to bed around 3am and getting up by noon and I stay up later than normal. No matter how much I try to sleep late in the morning by 8:30am I'm wide awake and the dogs are getting restless. So I take them for long morning walks and spend time digiscrapping until Mike wakes up. I was able to get three pages completed yesterday morning and even turned one of them into a quickpage.

 

Decided to start scrapping some of my photos from my "work retreat" in Waikiki this past week. We sat and watched the sunset on the beach right outside our hotel twice and played in the surf afterwards. The first evening down there a young student approached us with leis that they were taking donations for to help offset volleyball tournament costs. We were suckers and forked over $10 each even though we could have walked down the beach to Dukes and bought them for $5 each. But it was for a "good cause" we figured even if it was just spending money for the students.

...are in full swing everywhere else but here. Every year I tell myself that life will slow down when hockey season winds down but it never seems to do that. I think it's because we put off doing a bunch of stuff until the "off-season". Toss in a family reunion, garage roofing, upgrading some wiring, reseed or rebark half the lawn on top of all the normal stuff we do during the summertime. It just gets overwhelming and then we do a bit of this and a bit of that. The scary part is that none of it gets totally done. But I can say that about 10 other "little projects" that aren't part of the big projects do end up getting done.
One of the major "little projects" I recently completed was unzipping, organizing 7 gigs of digital scrapbooking stuff. I still have 3 gigs left, although I did clean out over 15 gigs of freebies that I never bothered to unzip/use in anyway. I've about decided that I'm only going to download what I'll use and that I can't download something else until I use what I downloaded last. Not sure how long I'll last with that mindset but I fully admit that digiscrapping is an addiction. I knew that I was taking a chance five years ago when I started paper scrapping and now I'm three years into digiscrapping. But I have well over 200 pages completed (although I've only printed about 50) and have started a Family Scrapbook for one branch of my family.
Now hockey season is starting up and I've decided that the constant "scheduling" we do during those 8 months help me stay on task and as a result I get more done. Go figure I guess I need the structure not free time.
Although I do admit that I get more scrapping done when we go camping during the wintertime. I think it's because generally it's just my husband and I camping without anyone else and we just relax and don't have the internet to distract us.
Now about those big projects....I think I need to make sure we complete at least one of them before the end of the year. I need to make a New Years Resolution in the middle of August to complete the garage roof this year - since we've talked about getting it done for the past two years - and now that I've made a resolution I need to get to work on it.....well after I finish organizing/tagging two more digital kits and worked on the mental planning on the next layout I'm going to complete using some photos we took at the Corn Maze about 5 years ago.

I completed the first page of my Smith Family Scrapbook project. This is the first "album" I will have completed that has a recurring theme. I have done pages here and there for my family but never have I tackled a project of this magnitude. I am going to be creating one page for each family that covers five to six generations of our family. This is giving me an opportunity to update our family history and share it with the entire family. Lucky for me our family has consistently held family reunions bi-annually for the past 26 years so we have a contact list that is pretty extensive and current. The finished book will be auctioned off during our family reunion this summer. Every year there is one "Big Item" and this will be that item this year. Money from our auction gives the reunion committee for the next reunion some seed money to make deposits for venues and other administrative costs like printing and stamps. Each family will get a copy of their page before the reunion.

I did manage to do a little scrapping this last week in between work, hockey practice and working on genealogy. Played around with a photo of my niece that I snapped of her the night we had our family photos taken. I used a great ATC kit designed by Tangie Baxter and SherrieJD called Curious Adventures. If you look close you will see that I had a little fun with the butterfly's. I was invited to join SherrieJD's Creative Team a couple weeks ago. She does some real great ATC kits. I haven't explored the whole "Altered Art" style since I quit rubber stamping a couple years ago but I really like her designs. So I haven taken her up on her offer, joined her team and am going to start exploring some altered imaging techniques digitally. Her designs are available at ScrapOrchard.
Well...hockey season is almost over!! We played at a tournament in Bremerton...we didn't win but the kids had a blast anyways. People think it's weird that when it comes to hockey you can lose a game yet still call it a good game. Our coaches have consistently approached each game as a learning experience. Three out of the last five seasons we lost more games than we have won. When the kids were younger their coaches made a point of finding three positives from every game and that is what they would focus on afterwards. Now that the kids are in high school they find those positives on their own and still focus on them instead of beating themselves up over it. Our second game on Saturday was the best hockey the kids played all weekend. All the games from this tournament were streamed live on the internet. Anyone could listen to the audio play-by-play live for free or for $5 you could also watch the game online. The company doing the broadcast offered a CD of the game for $10 w/o the play-by-play or for $25 you could get a DVD with all the play-by-play. We are going to pick up a copy of the game to send to Mikes family in Indiana.
I managed to get a halfway decent photo of the kids in yesterdays game. It is so hard shooting action shots through the "glass" at the rink. Alex is on the right while Christina is the short one watching from the bench. Jeff who does the timeclock at our Jr. A games happened to be one of the linesmen during this game. The guy in the red helmet is one of our star players this year. He is actually an exchange student from Hong Kong. We really enjoyed having him play with our team and the kids will miss him next year. He is heading to Minnesota for the next three years where he will be in hockey heaven.
A bunch of players on one of the teams (not the most respectful nor well loved teams locally) caused some chaos at their hotel on Saturday horsing around in the elevator (boys will be boys I suppose) jumping up and down. Somehow they managed to trigger some earthquake sensor doing that which caused the elevator to lock up while they were in it. Their coach had to call the hotel manager, who in turn had to call 911 to get the fire dept to come reset the elevator sensor to get it moving again. We put in a request to have "Love in the Elevator" played during their game but alas it was denied by the management as they felt it was in poor taste which in retrospect it would have been.

The second challenge for the Amazing Digiscrapping Race is being hosted by Elemental Scraps where we arrived to find an intersection. Which means that Brandie and I have to work together to create one layout.

The challenge was to do a layout about Cabin Fever. At first I thought about having a photo of a house with the kids looking out the windows or photos of people "thinking" about things they wished they were doing. What I ended up with turned out to be totally different though. I got looking through my photos I decided to use some of the crazy looking photos the kids have taken over the last couple of years when they were "home alone" and bored.

I used to get mad when they would start playing with the camera or camcorder. I would pick up my camera days later and find photos they took in the act doing stuff that they would never do if we were around. In some cases it ended up getting them in trouble. But for the most part I don't complain when they "borrow" my digital camera anymore. Some pretty funny and priceless photos have surfaced as a result of their "Cabin Fever". We have ended up with some pretty good photos of them hanging out with their friends that we wouldn't get otherwise.

It will be fun to see what Brandie comes up with, her part of the challenge will be the journaling and title. Although I just realized that I missed a bunch of stuff that needs to be added to the layout .....AKKKK!!!