The Gratitude Journal

For November on Scrapping the Moments, we have been working on a gratitude project which involved us using a photo and journaling for 23 days this month about what we were grateful for. I decided to do a mini album. It took many more hours than I planned, but here are the results.

Until next time...

Happy Thanksgiving to All!!!

My family and I hope you and your family have a blessed day. 

Take lots of photos and make memories to last throughout the years!!!

Until next time...

November Ad/Art Challenge at Scrapping the Moments

November has arrived, the beginning of the holiday season for many of us. I wanted to find an artist to inspire us that created pieces that represented family and tradition.  Of all the artists I looked at, I kept coming back to Norman Rockwell’s painting known as “Freedom From Want”. This piece represents family life with the traditional turkey dinner shared by all. It is an oil on canvas piece and one of 4 pieces known as the Four Freedoms; Freedom of Speech, Freedom from Fear and Freedom of Worship being the other three.





How will Norman Rockwell inspire you? I am going to share this one link with you, although there are many out there on the web.
http://www.art.com/gallery/id--a32/norman-rockwell-posters.htm?ui=3DF0E4625C1749EEAD1995A3B35A03CB

For this project, find a Rockwell piece and see how it talks to you. Will it touch you through his use of colors,  the graphic designs he uses in his magazine covers, or the subject matter.

Personally, I was going for that family around the table look and here is what i came up with.



Be sure to post your project back at Scrapping the Moments telling us which Rockwell piece inspired you as well as in the gallery. You have until December 14th to finish your project. You can do digi, cards, any paper craft as long as it meets the criteria of the challenge. If you would like to combine this challenge with another challenge at Scrapping the Moments, please feel free to do so. However if you are playing for a badge for a challenge then please do not combine with another challenge.

Hope you enjoy exploring Norman Rockwell this month!!

And from my family to yours, we hope you have a Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Happy Halloween!!!

Hope you all have a frightfully good time tonight.

Don't let the ghouls and goblins get cha'!!!

Until next time...

New Layouts to share

My hubby has been out of town this weekend. So I had plenty of time to do just what I wanted to do. (Come home honey, I miss you!!! LOL!!) So here is how I stayed out of trouble spent my time. All the layouts were created with the challenges on Scrapping the Moments. New challenges come out on the first and fifteenth of the month. I can't wait to do some more!!!!

The Scraplift Challenge

The Sketch Challenge

Friday Night Fast Track

Card Challenge

I've got a few more ideas in mind, but I am running out of time this weekend. Hope you all did something crafty this weekend.

Until next time...

Fun at the Pumpkin Patch

Personalize your own free photo slideshow

October Layout Tag was revealed!!!

And so I can now share what I submitted:

I was pretty excited when I tuned in at Scrapping the Moments to see the reveal. Every month we have a sign up for Layout Tag. When it begins, sometime during the month you will receive an email from our Tag Queen showing you a layout someone else has submitted and you have to use it to make your own layout. You have three days to complete your project and pass it on to the next person on the list. At the end of the month, the tag game is revealed. It is really cool to see where the original layout started and where it ended up.

For October I was the last person on the list to receive a layout to copy. AND better yet, apparently I was the first person in the chain as well. The Tag Queen chose my layout listed below as the start!!! And it's actually one of my favorite layouts from my books too.

Until next time...

Sickness nearly over, bring on the fun!!!

Finally after  a week I am beginning to feel better after being attacked by "The Cooties". Now however, hubby has developed the illness. So this will be a weekend of staying home and recovering. Since I am staying away from Mr. Sick so I don't get those darn cooties again, I did some scrapping!! Yay Me!!! Wanna see?

 

I used this photo once before for a Mother's Day project my niece and I completed last May. Now it is my turn to make something cute out of it. I participated in Friday Night Fast Track on Scrapping The Moments this evening. Our fearless leader Pat provided us with a sketch and told us, have at it!! I love that the color blue in her shirt really pops with the papers and girly touches. Stop by next Friday night and join us. You will have two hours to create and upload a layout onto the forum. Can't wait until next week myself.

Also on October 15th, I listed the Ad/Art Challenge on Scrapping the Moments, but in my illness have not been able to list it here or even create a sample. But it's updated as of today. Read on or better yet, head over the forum and join in. I'd LOVE to see  what you would do with the artist featured this month.

October Ad/Art Challenge

at Scrapping the Moments

I have been reading a book on taking chances and making your life have a deeper meaning lately. One of the “assignments” has been to create a motivational poster of how you see yourself one or two years from now. I was searching through photos of exotic places to travel as that is one of my long term goals and I stumbled upon the art of Kerne Erikson.

Getting to know our artist, from his website:
“For the past 30 years Kerne Erickson has worked as a full-time artist, primarily producing freelance commissioned art and landscape paintings …. In a day when sterile, flat, computer-generated art has become the norm, it’s refreshing to see an artist like Kerne Erickson who can work his way from a well composed pencil drawing, through transparent layers of under painting, building depth and tonality until finally he adds the finishing touches that bring the work of art into focus. His work is a perfect blend of traditional technique and modern painting mediums.”

Your Assignment, should you choose to accept it:
Create a project (layout, card, mini album, etc…) using the art of Kerne as your guide. You can use the ever so cute Banana Baby advertisement or any other piece listed on his website.


  
Will he inspire you to paint, layer, draw, or advertise your photos. I can’t wait to see what you do with this challenge.  Post your project in the gallery as well as here when you have completed it. Don’t get lost in the travel brochure posters and forget to do your “homework”. Have fun!!

 My layout is based on the TWA advertisement above

Stay tuned. I hope to make a real dent in my photos this weekend.

Until next time...

W...W...W... Wednesdays

 
To play along, just answer the following three (3) questions…
• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?

I am reading Before I Go to Sleep, by S.J. Watson. So far, it's a great story about a woman who wakes up every morning not knowing who she is or how she got to where she is. Along with the help of Dr. Nash, she is keeping a journal of what she remembers trying to piece together her past, present and future.

I recently finished The Kitchen Counter Cooking School: How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices into Fearless Home Cooks, by Kathleen Flnn. This was a book I won on Goodreads. The book is a combination of a real life story of a chef who finds purpose for her Le Cordon Bleu training through a class she teaches to real home cooks. Included are the class recipes plus more.  I really enjoyed the book. And while I consider myself to be pretty savvy in the kitchen, I learned a thing or two I did not know.

My next book will be The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood. We will be reading it for our book club soon and I am anxious to start it.

Until next time...

One the first day of Halloween......... BOO!!

Sign up for the 12 Days of Halloween at Scrapping the Moments!!! 

We will be creating a Halloween layout by following 12 days of instructions. Each day our fearless Halloween Diva will post a new thing to add to your layout......and on Halloween we will reveal our layouts.  Get it?!  Got questions?  Sound fun?!

There is even going to be a prize!  

We will be starting Oct.20 with the reveal on the 31st!  

Head over to the Scrapping the Moments forum now and sign up!!!

I'm on a roll!!!

After months and months of having no energy and no mojo to do ANY scrapping, I finally had a good day. Well, really, a good 24 hours. Along with heading out to the Barnful of Quilts in Waxhaw, NC today with my hubby, I also completed 4 layouts. I tried to hit the challenges that were posted on Scrapping The Moments in September. Some of the challenges run from the 15th until the 14th of the next month. Since today was the  8th, I did not have much time left to get to them. There were some really good ones and a few more I did not get time to do yet. But tomorrow is another day!!! Hope you enjoy.



Patterned Paper Challenge
featuring the Cutie Pie Jeremiah!!



Recipe Challenge
Featuring the ever cute Ethen, Alex and Sami

Scrap That Tune

Die-cut Challenge

Until next time...

The Kitchen Counter Cooking School

The Kitchen Counter Cooking School: How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices into Fearless Home Cooks by Kathleen Flinn

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is a small but practical cookbook within a story. Kathleen "stalks" a grocery store patron seeing how and what she buys when she shops. Within a very short period of time, she approaches the woman and volunteers to help her pick out some healthier options for the prepackaged choices she has made. This experience leads to Kathleen's idea of helping others using her Le Cordon Bleu training and food experiences.



The book follows Kathleen as she finds 10 volunteers who allow her to interview them in their homes on their food choices and culinary skills. After a series of informative classes, Kathleen's plan is to go back into these homes to see if the classes inspired change in the lives of the volunteers and what those changes were. The classes focus on basic culinary skills such as knife skills, choosing cuts of meat and how to prepare them, and making sauces, breads, salads, and cakes to name a few. 



As I read this book, I found myself going to my husband and telling him things we should do to improve our cooking skills. I found information that I was not aware of such as the shelf life of dried spices. I also enjoyed some of the flavor recipes she taught her class in the book.



The cookbook portions are scattered throughout the book and are the recipes in most cases that the cooking class used to learn new methods and try new recipes. All of them look delicious and I am anxious to try the Artisan bread recipe in particular.



Overall, I feel the book was a good read. It was very informative and provided some nice recipes to try. It was written in a lighthearted sense of humor and is written for the cooking novice. It definitely made me stop and think about the choices I make to feed my family.



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The Help

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is about segregation in Mississippi in the 1960's. Eugenia Phelan gets together with a group of black women who work as hired help to the prominent white women in the town of Jackson, Mississippi. They decide that they can affect the segregation movement by writing a tell all book detailing how the help's lives are affected by their jobs and how their jobs affect the ladies they wait on. There are many tense moments in the book as well as love and tenderness in a moment of time in our history that was violent and dangerous for black people living in the south.

I feel the book was well written as it was playing in my head like a movie reel with each turn of the page. It made me feel sorry for the women who had to endure these struggles and ashamed for how they had to endure it all in the first place. This was a wonderful book and I will suggest it to all my friends as a wonderful read.




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