CK special guest blogger AND a video link

Today I was reading the Creating Keepsakes blog, which I usually read at least every other day. Today their guest blogger, Allison Davis was talking about how she always uses two-page layouts, because she takes so many pictures and how she can never narrow them down. Which then leaves little room for her journaling. This is TOTALLY ME!! It was like I was reading my own feelings on this!! I can never narrow down my pictures because they all mean so much to me and tell the story that I want to get out in my layout.
Well, Allison came up with a solution for the journaling. Making a mini booklet to fit on a small area on her scrapbook pages, so that she can keep all her photos she wants and still have all the journaling for that page, SO COOL!!! And while I'm pretty much an all digi scrapper this won't work so well for me. However, my solution, which I came up with a while back, is making separate journaling pages either before each page or after, but having them different sizes. I haven't done it yet, but I have lots of plans to do so.
Maybe one of these days I will get around to doing all the things I have ideas for and have been waiting to do.

On another note, a friend of mine posted THIS on facebook and I thought it was so cool! Why didn't I think of something that creative?? I did have everyone run down the isle at the end of my wedding. :)

For a color challenge-TOO LATE

We were up at my parents place for a few days, and while we were there, I asked my sisters if they wanted to make some cards with me. I brought some of my stuff and along with all the stuff my mom has we were able to have some fun!! My intention was to make a card for Dawn's recent color challenge she had up. So we were up VERY late Monday night working on cards. I tried convincing my two younger sisters to make a card for the challenge too, but they didn't want to. So I went ahead and tried making one. And when I say "tried" I mean that it was very hard for me trying to come up with something I liked using these colors. It WAS a challenge for me. I'm not totally sure, maybe just trying to incorporate the red into the color mix was a challenge for me. The colors were: bright pink, celery/moss, cream, and dark red. The end result wasn't pleasing me. And even though I'm not crazy about this card, I was going to enter it anyway. However, I didn't take a picture of it the next day (just kept getting caught up doing other things throughout the day). I took the kids down to the pool to swim, and we decided to stay an extra night at my parents. I also ended up making dinner for everyone. So I missed the deadline for the challenge. Anyway, there will be more and I guess it's just as well since I wasn't too happy with my card I made. But thought I'd share it on here for your viewing. Leave a comment, let me know what your thoughts on it are! ;-)

P.S. Eating homemade vanilla ice cream while posting, ***DELISH!!!***

Chicken cards

My mom has this really cute chicken set called "Best of Cluck". I thought it would be fun doing some cards with it. So here is what I came up with. I colored the rooster in with watercolor crayons I believe they are called.

This chick stamp is really cute and I just had to do something with it! I again used the watercolor crayons for coloring them in.

A recipe- Bruschetta

Summertime makes me hungry for light and cold foods made with fresh veggies and fruit. And since you can get lots of fresh garden veggies this time of year, this will be a real treat for you to make with your own fresh stuff out of your garden! Last night I had a craving for some Bruschetta. So I thought I would make my own version. It was SOOO good, I thought I would share my recipe!

What you'll need:

1 French bread loaf/baguette

1 8-oz cream cheese ( I used the cream cheese that comes in the little plastic tub, which is more spreadable, but the regular kind would work great too. You just might want to let it soften some for spreading).

Fresh garlic- I LOVE garlic so I used a LOT, maybe like a tablespoon or more minced, and my cloves were huge. So just use to your liking, if you like things really garlicky like I do then go for it! If not, you may just want to make it slightly garlicky.

Fresh basil leaves- cut fine. This will go in the cream cheese spread and the tomato salad part- I used maybe 6 large leaves for each thing I was adding to, but you can use more or less depending on your liking. I didn't mince it, but if you want you can. I like the bigger pieces throughout it.

1 large whole ripe tomato- chopped in small chunks

1/4 of a large onion or half of a small one- chopped up small

1 cucumber- chopped in small chunks

Olive oil

Sea salt & ground pepper

Parmesan cheese

In a small bowl, mix your cream cheese with the minced garlic and fresh basil. Set aside. In another bowl, combine your chopped onions, tomatoes, cucumber and fresh basil pieces (your kitchen should have a WONDERFUL aroma by now!). The fresh garlic and fresh basil really make this dish!! I LOVE lots of both in it! At this point you can add some balsamic vinegar (or if you have a favorite homemade balsamic dressing) to the salad. I left it out of mine and just had it without the vinegar and it was great! But today I did have some with my husband's homemade balsamic dressing and it was yummy as well, so really with or without is great!

Ok, now you take your french loaf/baguette and slice diagonal slices off. Lay slices on a cookie sheet, sprinkle with olive oil, sea salt, ground pepper & parmesan cheese (in that order). Place on the top rack of your oven and broil until tops of toast are just crispy and golden brown, but DO NOT burn them! Once your toast is ready, you now spread the cream cheese mixture over them, and then spoon the tomato salad on top, eat and enjoy!!

Note: You'll want to make these up as people want them, you don't want to make them up ahead of time and have them sit. Otherwise they'll get soggy. You want the toast to stay crunchy and just right. So eat them right as you make them!

Another 4th page

This is the page I wasn't settled on whether I liked well enough or not. I changed a few things on it and like it a little better, but I'm still not certain.

4th of July

Instead of showing random pictures from the fourth I decided to just go ahead and scrap them. And since I wasn't that crazy about the pictures we took that day I figured maybe it'd make them look a little better being scrapped! Seriously, I don't think I can take decent pictures anymore (or maybe I never could!). The only ones I really got of my son Isaac turned out slightly blurry, but I am scrapping them anyway. These are two pages from that day, there will most likely be about 5 pages from that day. I did make a 3rd one today but I'm not certain I like it well enough and don't want to show it till I'm settled on a look I like. I think I was on a good role with the first two pages and then the creativity started to die out during the 3rd page! Haha! I need to figure out something to help my creativity to stay longer with me! I think I get impatient. And after spending an entire day on the computer just doing these pages and not taking care of my boys like I should, doesn't make me too thrilled to continue scrapping like this. I just need to manage my days and time better! But I feel like sometimes when I feel in a creative mood and have ideas floating through my mind that I better take advantage of it when I can! Anyway, enough rambling! My friend Rebekah sent me a link to a bunch of freebies yesterday! There was a TON of stuff I got for free and two of the downloads had a lot of 4 fourth of July themed stuff. I used a few elements from the sets on the above page. Gotta love freebies! Thanks Bek!!

HELLO!!!!

Ok, I know it's been almost a month since I last posted anything on here. Things are slowly settling down here now. It seems things have been so busy and crazy lately. And plus my sister, Jackie, her husband and their children came down last week and got here just the day before the 4th. My husband took some time off while they were down here. So we were pretty busy last week staying at my other sister's house and doing things as a group while they were here as much as we could. While the time seemed to go WAY TOO FAST we did have alot of fun! It's been weird for me because I've been away from creating anything for so long. But the break has been nice. Sometimes it's nice to just get away and have some fun family time. And while I haven't created in so long, I did get to have some fun at a scrapbook store and purchase some new things that I can't wait to use!! (See post below).

This is a picture (sad to say the one and only one) that was taken of just me and my sister Jackie while she was here. Why does that always seem to happen? I hope she's okay with me posting this. It means a lot to me to have this picture and since it was the only one really taken of just us two it means all the more to me. It had been 9 months since we've seen each other!! We were blueberry picking here. I am going to try and post more pics of what we did throughout the week, but I may not do it all at once, maybe a few here and there. I really didn't get anywhere near as many pictures or nice pictures taken as I wanted to. Sometimes it's hard trying to spend time with people, take care of your kids, keep up with all that's going on plus take pictures amidst it all! I'm sure some of you can understand that! I really want to work on taking better pictures and taking ones that really capture what's important.

***New stuff***

While my sister was down here from Michigan. Last Wednesday several of us sisters went out shopping for a bit. We went to a scrapbook store that is right near where my sister Jamie lives that I didn't even know about or realize they had much of anything. It's a decent size store and had a enough selection of things to get me drooling!! Haha! I have been wanting to purchase some transparent stamps for some time now, and I was thrilled to see that they carried a pretty wide selection of them!! It's not very often I get to go to a scrapbook store where I can actually "TOUCH AND FEEL" things in person!! The internet is nice, but there's still nothing like being able to touch and feel the products! Here are a few things I purchased.

I was super happy to find some cute happy birthday stamps as I do not own any stamps that just say "happy birthday!". And I loved that you can buy these cute little stamp packs for just a couple bucks!! Soo cool! The happy birthday ones are by Imaginisce. The CUTE butterfly and bugs are by Basic Grey, and then I got a Color Box fluid chalk ink pad in dark brown. I also got those rhinestones by Kaiser Scrapbook.

And check these out!!!!
I REALLY liked these birds by Inkadinkado. And I just had to get them!! Plus I think that I can pull off making some guy cards with these instead of using flowers all the time! Ha! What really caught my eye when I saw these was that adorable owl down in the left hand corner! Isn't he cute!? I bought another set I gave to my sister for a belated birthday gift, and I wished I would have taken a picture of those, they WERE more girly and flowery, but they were soo pretty! AND, I'm thinking I might just have to go back and get that set for myself as well!! Heehee! The only other thing I need now is an acrylic block, which they had there, but I will need to get a rather big one for that bigger bird and Walmart has one that's cheaper than what they had at the scrapbook store.

Hollyhocks

We have these green plants that started growing up and we noticed they started to get little buds on them. Last year we cut them down cause we just thought they were weeds. Then we were told they would have flowers on them if we let them grow up. Well, they've been growing and they're SUPER tall now and have such pretty bright pink and white flowers on them! My mom informed me they are hollyhocks! They are so pretty!
Isn't this bright pink one beautiful?!

As you can see the tallest one grows above the roof of the spring house, probably about 10 feet tall.

I think the bugs like them alot and have been eating the leaves and petals a little, darn little bugs!