Veni Vidi Visa

I was taking a lovely nap on the couch after the big meal on Thanksgiving when Second Child decided to mold my face as if it was play dough.  When she finally went away, I could drift back into z...z..z.... land with the sound of football playing on TV.  Then came some insistent disturbance around my ankle and foot, oh I was annoyed!!  Would someone please stop her already?  Completely irritated, I decided to open my eyes, it was DH trying to wake me up because it was 3:50 and time to go to Michael's!! 

The roads were completely deserted as I drove to the store.  Funny to see a cluster of cars parked in front of the store and a group of women and men standing outside waiting for the door to open!  They were ready for us, the store associates.  I am sure that she could see my hungry eyes as I came to a screeching halt in front of all the Cricut cartridges.  She cautioned us, "You must buy two cartridges to get this free one."  That was equivalent of saying to me, "You must eat the turkey and the sweet potatoes before you can have pecan pie!"  Where's the challenge?!  Thirty minutes later, I was home with my five new favoritestestest cartridges.  lol. Now fully awake, Second Child and I made more "animals" and she didn't seem nearly as irritating to me any more. 

The next morning on Black Friday, I headed out the door to Menard's (a hardware store) for more Cricut cartridges. This time, they had the Cricut Lites for $14 a piece!  Normally $40 and only "exclusively available" at Walmart or ebay, I don't know how this hardware store chain got ahold of these cartridges!  There was a limit of eight per customer.  I was reminded of this fact by several shoppers who saw what I had in my arms.  I just wanted to get them all and find a place far from the madding crowd (yeah right) to decided in peace :) 

So yes, veni, vidi, visa!! I am well stocked for Cricut cartridges for the year.  I cannot be more pleased!

I will leave you with a layout I created a few days for no good apparent reasons :) If this is random, I don't ever want to be methodical, lol.  It's a little busy I know, but I enjoyed cutting into this gorgeous Crate Random collection!

Just a little chipboard banner from October Afternoon.  Gosh, I do love to pile on the patterned paper and loath to use up precious embellishments! lol.

The Color Room 86

What a wonderful Thanksgiving this has been! I must say that my sweet potatoes and my pecan pie turned out quite well! DH made the most wonderful turkey combining techniques from Alton Brown and a couple of other recipes. The stuffing was a complete miss but there was way too much food to cry over dried bread :)  I am completely full and very happy that our first Thanksgiving meal turned out so well! It certainly helped to have taken a day off yesterday for some prep work! Ironically enough, as much as I enjoyed the sweet potatoes and pecan pie, I really can't imagine eating them again for a long while, lol.

I am finally back with a Color Room layout! It seems hardly possible that I went from doing every palette to skipping nine palettes in a row!  I felt tremendous relief when I finally shook off the dust and faced my colorless wall and made this layout.  For that, I am also extremely thankful! 

Apples of Our Life

Today I am sharing a layout I was asked to create for a special issue of the Creating Keepsakes: Scrapbooking with Fabric and Notions. I admit that I totally wanted to balk when I got the request to incorporate fabric into my journaling. That required some thinking outside of my box. In the end I was glad to have taken on the challenge because I am very happy with this layout.  I was so happy with it that I actually stuck everything down before I submitted it for review, lol.

As seen in special issue of Creating Keepsakes magazine: Scrapbooking with Fabric and Notions. Copyright Creative Crafts Group. Posted with prior permission from the publisher.

You can see a close-up of the fabric lined journaling here.  These are AdornIt fabrics that Carolee gave me when I visited her booth at Winter CHA this year. I thought they coordinated very well with the rest of my layout.  I trimmed very thin pieces of fabric and folded them in half lengthwise to make them even thinner.  Then I stitched them directly onto the paper. 

The label is a digital cut from Laina Lamb, you can find it in the 2peas store.  Isn't it awesome?

Thanksgiving in the U.S. is fast approaching and I am very thankful for this hobby and all the wonderful people I have met along the way, whether in real life or in the virtual blogsphere.  Thank you for visiting and your comments always brighten my day! 

I am excited for this Thursday because I am actually planning to make food! I have big plans: candied sweet potatoes and a pecan pie.  I've never baked a pie in my life, so my parents-in-law are bringing a back-up, lol.  That and no one else in the family likes pecans.  How un-American to not like pecans?! lol.  Anyway, I will finally have a Color Room project to show on Thursday so I will update you on my attempt at cooking and the aftermath :) 

Painted Face

A week later, all the furniture we bought at IKEA have been assembled, including two storage units for my scrapbook room.  As DH so wisely quipped on my purge effort a few months ago, my attempt at subtracting from infinity, while successful, is not visible.  So now I must resort to hiding some of that infinity.  I have a lot of work to do to get all the stuff on my tables and floors arranged and put away. 

This layout was up this week on the Doodlebug's blog so I can share it here now.  I used the Doodlebug's Colorwheel collection, a very bright and cheerful collection with flowers that look like the ones painted on my kids' face at Flint Hill Children's Arts Festival.  That was an event we went to in June when summer was getting into full swing. The most "memorable" thing about it was the horrendous rash I experienced due to apparently sun allergy! These pictures and layout are nice and everything but I can't help but cringe every time I think back to this day and the weeks that followed! 

I tell ya, I do love stickers and Doodlebug's cardstock and glittered stickers really make me happy.  Here is a cluster of flowers and my title in close-up:

The weekend is here!!  Hip hip hurray!  Have a great one everyone! Thank you for visiting!

Mid-Autumn Festival and Mooncakes

The Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival is usually sometimes in September. I remember as a youngster, we always had to eat four thing: mooncake, duck, potato, and egg.  Of these things, the moon cake is the most prominent, the de facto food of the mid-autumn festival.  The more famous type of moon cakes are the Cantonese style. They are glazed outside and usually sweet.  My favorite filling of moon cake growing up was a sweet mixture of brown sugar and pork fat.  It was as amazing to me then as it is revolting to me now. 

Then there is the Souzhou style mooncake, a dough that is pastry like with meat fillings.  They are baked on the stove top and always served and eaten hot.  I remember how amazingly delicious they were when we would buy them from street vendors.  Even now, every time I visit Shanghai, I return to the famous stores on Nanjing Road where I would buy a couple: one to inhale, one to savor :) 

These are the types of mooncake that my parents learned to make a few years ago. What's amazing to me is how authentic they are!  It's not like someone gave them a recipe.  They just figured things out by trial and error, and they are absolutely amazing from that perspective.  I appreciate their traditional culinary efforts and admire their abilities in the kitchen. 

So here it is a layout documenting them making mooncakes in 2010.  Using Doodelbug's Welcome Home and Bon Appetit collections and a pagemap.

She Got Style...

Today is Veteran's Day in the U.S..  We salute all our veterans and armed services members. Thank you for your services to this country!

I am still working my way through the Sweet Peach Crop Shop's November kit. Here is a layout using a couple of favorite photos of Second Child.  She really is adorable, especially when her hair is just pristinely done by Nabu :)

This layout was started because I wanted to try a flag banner like this.  It looked pretty much as I envisioned it so that's good. They are layered with 3-d foam adhesives and then I added the buttons, the rubon butterfly and bits of pearls. I am happy with the results!

Here is a close-up picture of the little title.  These Sassafras letters actually came in the October kit but they work very well here for my layout :)

The weekend is upon us and I am actually having a day off.  We are headed to Ikea to hopefully find some furniture for the kids' room.  I might get a few things to organize my scrapbook room.  At this point, I need to purge more than I need to organize.  I am not good at either of these two things!  sigh...  Happy weekend to you all!

Got Stuff? Confessions...

The October WIP's add-on kits came with two 5x5 Kraft boxes.  I liked the school theme so I altered it into this and gave it to Second Child to store her crayons.  She was very enamored with this box and for a few days all was well as she used it for her crayons.  One evening, First Born decided to "give" her sister all her crayons in a container (French's French Fried Onion sans lid).  Instead of transferring the crayons in the hideous Fried Onion thing into my glorious box, Second Child proceeded to take crayons out of the box to fit into the Fried Onion thing!  In my award-winning Mother of the Year moment, I dumped out all her crayons from her box and told her that I'm taking back the box and now it's her older sister's. 

You can all imagine how well that went over!  So the only solution left was to alter another box to maintain world peace and redeem myself!  I did just that with WIP's November main kit.  This time, I even bothered to label the box!  And of course, now that there are two boxes, no one really wants either of them any more!  It figures!

I also created this card using the WIP November kit. I dedicate this to my wonderful blog readers and friends!  Thank you for reading this silly post (a.k.a. confession of an unfair mother) and for visiting so faithfully!  Have a wonderful week!

The Knitty Gritty

Some layouts I can't wait to share on the blog and this is definitely one of them.  It's never easy using only 4x6 sized photos on a layout and I thought this is well done, so I'm totally stoked :) Check out the Work in Progress kit that I used to create this layout.

How about that, eh... I can't believe she is doing a little knitting now, and that my mother was the one who started her doing it.  There was a time when the only sweaters we wore had to be knit by my mother.  What we consider a hobby activity today was once upon a time a necessity to do (or have no sweater to wear in the winter).  When I was First Born's age and asked my mother to teach me to knit, I was told: "Study hard, get good grades, go to college, get a good job, make money and buy all the sweaters you will ever need."  I did all of that, so today, my children have the luxury of learning knitting from their grandmother, yes, it's come full circle and I appreciate that.

I'll be waiting for that scarf First Born has promised me... my neck will freeze for decades I imagine but I'll be waiting...

This adorable yarn cluster comes from the Country Life cartridge. The scallop circle is cut from Elegant Edges cartridge.  I bought an Expression 2, I just couldn't live without my Cricut any more.  The new machine actually cuts better than my previous one, so I have a new side hobby now: making Cricut cuts for the sake of making cuts :)