Flinging Myself Back Into Scrapping This Spring

After a bit of deliberation this past week I decided that I was spending way to much time on Facebook. Don’t get me wrong – I enjoy seeing what friends and family are up to, reconnecting with old friends and getting to know distant cousins allover again or for the very first time. But I can sum up the time consuming portion of it in two words – Facebook Apps ! Two apps in particular, a virtual farming  and a virtual fish tank. I got rid of the fish tank last month and by Thursday night I came to the conclusion that the farming was being done more for the benefit of others not for me. I was not getting any digiscrapping outside completing the challenges for ADSR 5. So I went ahead and eliminated the distraction of virtual farming.

So first thing this morning while waiting for my hubby to wake up. I decided to check my email and read a blog update from Hummiesworld. Hummie mentioned that this months Designer Challenge was being hosted by Christine Smith and mentioned that there were some beautiful items that people were designing and  contributing to the challenge. The color swatch was actually the  first thing to catch my eye and seemed to be just the thing to get my scrapping mojo back!

Christine started it off with a wonderful contribution and the ball just started rolling from there. I quickly popped in, downloaded the files. I can’t wait to see what else is going to be contributed to this free kit because new items are being added almost daily!!

Here is the first page I created with the kit!

As for the garage remodel…we took the day off. Tomorrow we are going to wrap the front and get ready to shingle it next weekend.

ADSR 5 Inspires A Quickpage

Well ADSR 5 is down to the last week and it flew by this year. I just realized that we were only a week away from it being all over. Scrap Orchard was the host of challenge #10 and after completing it I realized that the layout would make a great freebie quickpage.

So after completing the original layout I decided to create a quickpage version to share with everyone. Many thanks go to Sweet Digi Scraps  for her wonderful Berry Ice Mini Kit which I used to create the quickpage.  If you like her stuff you can find more info about her on her blog: www.sweetdigiscraps.blogspot.com.

Download Link is HERE

My Crazy Life

Well, I have been real busy lately and haven’t had a chance to update my blog in what seems like forever. In fact I was shocked to see that it’s been almost a month. That always seems to happen this time of the year though. Hockey season is starting to wind down, new semester at school for the kids, mid-winter/pre-spring yard work, the kids birthdays and Mike and I have birthdays coming up. Toss in a cold and the Winter Olympics and life tends to get a little crazy. Oh and I must not forget that the Amazing DigiScrapping Race is going on too. So here is the run down on what’s been up.

Hockey: The kids had a tournament in Bremerton over the holiday weekend and they played some of their best games ever. Our house tournaments get pretty competitive here because the Canadian teams love coming down. They are way more skilled than the American kids so they pretty much dominate our tournaments. The kids love playing against them, they know that winning will be hard but they love being able to affect the Canadian’s standings by not allowing them to run up the score too much. There were 6 American teams and 6 Canadian ones in this tournament and the Canadians won every game until Sunday morning when they finally play each other.  Our final game ended up being against one of the Seattle Jr. teams that we played and tied with during our regular season and it came down to a shootout to determine the winner alas they beat us in the shootout. The kids have two more games to go before playoffs. We are currently placed right in the middle of our division for playoffs so it could be one of our best playoffs in years. Both teams that are above us in our division we’ve either beat or tied with this season and the two teams below us we have beat both times we’ve played them.

The Junior Team I work with finished league play this weekend. They didn’t make the playoffs this year. It came down to the very last game of the season. We literally had to win just one game in order to make it to the playoffs. If we had made it we would have had to play the first place team and they have beat us almost every game we’ve played against them the past two years.

School: Christina started college in January. She is pursuing a degree in Criminal Justice with a focus on Law Enforcement.  She is enjoying it and getting ready to pick her classes for the next quarter. Alex switched from a traditional high school to an online high school. He is doing really well, it has eliminated the “distraction factor”. We spoke with his counselor and his adviser this past week and they are actually impressed with the amount of time he is spending and quality of work he is doing.  He has set a goal to get caught up on his core classes and would like to go back to Foss for his Senior Year.

House/Yard: We have had some crazy weather this year. Most of the plants think it’s early spring because it’s been so mild. We had frost a couple times in November but mainly rain. In fact it’s been in the 50′s the past two weeks. Today I mowed the lawn, cleaned all the recycling out of the garage and have everything ready for overseeding the side yard that we planted with grass in October. This is the year that we are going to do the garage roofs. The little one needs a pitched roof (currently has a leaky flat roof) and the big one needs completely roofed. It’s leaking like a sieve and I’m beginning to think that we may have to rip off the entire roof, build new trusses and put in a new window. I’m having a hard time not tearing into the project right now and have to constantly remind myself that spring tends to be very rainy and it’s only mid-February.

Back to Scrapping!!

I have finally gotten my laptop back and everything reinstalled so I can start digiscrapping again. It has been a long 6 weeks, thank goodness I was able to get it all done before Season 5 of the Amazing Digiscrapping Race (ADSR5). Alas getting my laptop repaired involved replacing the hard drive. Not thinking when it came time to swap out the hard drive I totally spaced off backing up ACDSee. Which if anyone who has used it knows that I have a ton of tagging to do. You would think that if you take into consideration I have completely retagging/reorganized my digital scrapbooking stuff twice in the past three years that I would remember to run a backup of the database. It just means that I can tweak my “organizing style” and clear out stuff that I’ve never used.

So the first layout I worked on was one using Rebecca Labbe’s Urban Chaos kit which I downloaded mid-November as part of a Creative Team Assignment over at Divine Digital. The Alpha is from her Urban Decay Alpha Set. You get three different alphas in the set.

I’ve got two more assignments in the wings that I’ll try to complete tonight or tomorrow. Of course between working on the CT assignments I’ll be tagging and sorting through over 71 Gigs of digital scrapbooking kits.

A rare weekend with no hockey!

Go figure, it’s a holiday weekend during hockey season and we have no games!!! But it will all be back to normal next weekend. Actually we decided to forgo going to a tournament this weekend because we have two next month plus playoffs. The kids have playoffs the first two weekends of March and the juniors have first round playoffs starting next week. Our association is hosting the State Squirt Festival the third week of March, we have a tournament in Bremerton the fourth weekend and host the Midget Daffodil Tournament the first weekend of April. Which means that our camping trip this weekend was the last one until Mid-April when we go to the International Crab Races in Westport.

This was also the last week of the ADSR for Brandie and I. The final challenge of ADSR4 was hosted by We Are Storytellers.com where we were challenged to create a layout with at least half the page being made up of journaling about why being a storyteller is important to us. We had to collaborate and were limited to two small photos in the lower left corner, at least five elements, no more than two papers and had to incorporate a piece of word art supplied by the challenge host.
Brandie sent Laura a photo of her and why she thinks storytelling is important. Laura took her own feelings about storytelling and combined it all into one story. We decided to keep it simple so that the journaling could be the focus of the layout as requested.
Journaling:
For the past six weeks Brandi and Laura worked together as a team to preserve twelve stories
as part of the Amazing DigiScrapping Race. They have now completed all twelve challenges and may or may not win the Grand Prize. Winning the Grand Prize is not the most important aspect of the race, it’s the satisfaction of knowing we have preserved almost a dozen individual stories for the enjoyment of future generations. These are priceless stories that we all have within us ready to be told.
Both Brandie and Laura as individuals have a passion for preserving information, photos and stories of their ancestors for future generations. When Brandie comes across a story about one of her ancestors she tries to create a scrapbook page so that future generations may know what that person was like. This is very important to her because she doesn’t know what her father’s family is like and her mother’s family is from Germany. When Laura comes across family photos and family stories she adds it to her genealogy program and posts the intormation on various family websites so that other family members can enjoy it too. Eventually Laura gets the information preserved as a scrapbook page. We both feel that when you have a story about an ancestor it becomes a way to know that person a little better, even though you have probably never actually met the person in real life.
The simple stories we record about our day-to-day life now, are the stories that future
generations will cherish for years to come.

Kit Credits:
Treasured by Liella Designs for the Trash to Treasure Freebie Hunt

Word Art provided by We Are Storytellers.com

Slow Computer and Home Improvement Saturday

It was “Home Improvement” day at the Burress house yesterday. We divided our time between reformatting my laptop and working on a couple “home improvement” projects. We spent most of yesterday ripping out the toilet and putting in a new one. The old one turned out to be the original toilet from when they built the house. The supply line was “copper” and we had to add a flange to anchor the new toilet to the floor with…the old one had four bolts coming out of the floor that held it in place. We also put a electronic, keyless deadbolt on the front door so we don’t have to worry about the kids losing their stormdoor key anymore. We can’t unlock our front door from the outside because it’s the original (1946) hardware and they can’t make a key for it without taking the whole thing apart and taking it to the locksmith. Luckily we have a good solid storm door that locks. It’s wasn’t infallible but was basically one more step a burglar would have to go through then get past the alarm system. Now Mike can quit worrying about us when he is at work and we both will rest easier when the kids are home alone.

In between runs to the hardware store and working on the toilet and deadbolt we reformatted my laptop. I spent the morning transferring files to the EHD and figuring out what programs I was going to need to reinstall and which I really didnt’ need. After we got it reformatted I remembered that I needed to find my PSE 5 disk so I could reinstall it. This didn’t stress me out at first because Mike figured it had to be around here somewhere, well after we got thinking about it we realized it was missing.

Normally it wouldn’t be an issue because I’d just go buy another copy off ebay (I don’t need to have the newest version and would be happy with PSE 5 again) We looked on ebay and he suggested getting PSE7 but I got looking at the requirements and it would use up all my RAM which I wasn’t willing to give up and don’t want to go buy more RAM at the moment. But this morning my hubby came through, he found the copy of Photoshop 7 for me. I have been using Photoshop Elements 5 so I figured it was close enough and I could manage to get my layout done. He got a copy of it way back I was just getting the digital bug. Back then instead of going on a digiscrap kit downloading spree I went on a bookshopping spree. We had three different Photoshop 7 books laying around. Back then I ended up using Elements instead of the Photoshop 7 program because Hummiesworld had great tutorials for PSE and I couldn’t find any that were geared towards using Photoshop for scrapbooking.

Long story short…it’s 4:41pm and after 3 1/2 hours of working in PS7 I completed challenge #11 for ADSR 4….YAHOO!!! I’ve posted it below. Thank goodness it was a fairly easy one…we were limited to one photo and the journaling was limited to one question and you couldn’t answer the question with the journaling. No other journaling or words other than the question. I decided to use a photo of my great-uncle Ed and his garden. After finishing the layout I’ve come to the conclusion that Photoshop 7.0 is a little different than PSE 6 but I can work around the quirks and will probably like it better in the end. Since I have the books for it I will probably be able to do way more (if I was so inclined) than I ever could have done with PSE.

Now that I have challenge #11 done and #12 won’t come out for a day or so(and both aren’t due until Sunday) I get to tackle some serious tagging in ACDSee. When we reformatted I completely spaced of backing up the database. This is the second time I’ve accidentally deleted the tags. The last time I did it was last summer and it wasn’t that hard of a project because I cleared out alot of freebies that I didn’t use. So it’s going to be another “clean out and tag weekend for me. Doesn’t that sound like soooo much fun. It also means I can reorganize the categories in ACDSee. This time around I’ve decided to sort papers by color only not colors and patterns.

You know what….I just realized that we didnt’ take any photos of the guys working yesterday!! What kind of scrapbooker am I?

ADSR Challenge #7

Well Sunshine Studios challenge for us should have been easy since all I had to do was use everything in the mini-kit they supplied. We could also recolor and/or use items from other kits if we wanted to but we still had to use each item in the kit at least once. So…I figured “No Brainer”…then my creative juices got flowing and I decided to experiment with drastically recoloring something for the very first time. I turned a dark purple mulberry paper into a turquoise mulberry paper. Of course this was after I “feathered” the edges to make the background paper look like torn mulberry paper. All said it took 4 hours to create the page!!!

I ended up documenting a day at Summit Lake this past summer where the kids were being goofy as all get out. In one of the photos the three of them are actually wearing lifejackets like diapers. There are teenagers for you! Of course they had to “pose” in their “diapers”.

Can you believe I had to redo it again….

I finally got a chance to sit down at the computer last night and was totally flabbergasted. It turns out that we were only supposed to use 3 photos and 8 elements (including the frame) well….I used 8 photos and 10 elements (including the frame). Luckily they gave me an extra 24 hours since I hadn’t realized that there was a “no more/no less” requirement on this challenge. So I ended up redoing the entire layout with three different photos of Alex. I used Brandie’s journaling and title but had to change the alpha. I like both layouts but feel that the first one is more representative of cabin fever.

Challenge #3 and #4 are already posted, so I need to crack the whip and would like to finish them both before we head out to the ocean on Friday morning.

Cabin Fever Corrected..

When I was creating the link for my previous post I realized that I totally forgot that there was an element requirement as part of the challenge. So I quickly went back to my original and added some elements and papers to it. I had the opportunity to practice using the marquee tool in Photoshop in order to make the purple and burgundy papers look like they were behing the photos.

Now it looks almost like one of those “what’s missing” puzzles with these photos being right next to each other.

Cabin Fever

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!!!