Bad cat!

It's been a while since I posted, mostly because things have been really busy for me lately, but also because the last few times I tried to post, I was not able to log into my blog! But I'm here now, and I wanted to share about my cats again. Well, really, I want to share about one cat in particular, Spike.

You can see that she likes to go places that she shouldn't. And most days, if I hear a suspicious noise in the apartment, I know who to blame. The other night, I was fast asleep in my bed. Suddenly, I was in agonizing pain. Why, you ask? Well, because Spike went after a strand of hair that had fallen over my face. And the result?

Yup, I got my first shiner! I haven't had her declawed, yet. But if I wake up with her patting my face or staring at me anytime soon, she may find herself taking a quick trip to the vet's for a little snip!

Inpsired by Jenni Bowlin

About two months ago, I attended a class taught by Jenni Bowlin at the Inspired! workshops in Charlotte, NC. I've put off posting my project because I wanted to show some 'before and after' photos.
Jenni was so much fun to learn from! I love the fact that she doesn't have a step by step plan for creating the entire project. She gave us a bunch of product, showed us what she had created with the same materials, and basically turned us loose. We learned to make the cute little tissue flower you see on the front of the folio, and I got my first opportunity to play with some of her Coredination paper line, and, most interestingly, glass glitter.
It's the glass glitter that I've been waiting on. It was bright and shiny when I first applied it to this chipboard butterfly:

Mmm, so sparkly! But as time goes by, the glitter starts to tarnish and develop this gorgeous patina. With the help of my toasty little apartment, this is what the butterfly now looks like:

See how the edges have started to blacken? (and see the tissue flower I mentioned?) So cool! I think I may need more of this glass glitter. Ha ha ha. I decided to fill the folio with images of my mother and her parents from the late 40's. Here's a couple of photos of the finished project:


I had so much fun at the mini workshops, and I really hope that I'll have the chance to attend even more of this fabulous event next year!

Vintage photos and paper roses

I've been making more of my favorite paper roses! This time, they were for a layout I made for this month's challenge at Webster's Pages Inspire Me site. http://websterspages.ning.com/ (sorry, you'll have to copy and paste) The challenge was to make a layout using vintage photographs. I found that WP's Life's Portrait line was perfect for the soft look I wanted for this photo of my mother's parents on the day of her wedding.
The background was a little too strong for my tastes, so I used a layer of gesso to blur the pattern. And I thought the little chandelier rub-on made a great addition to the upper corner of the photograph. Of course, the flowers are my favorite part:
It's preview time at all my favorite scrapbook companies. Webster's has released a peek at one of their lines already:

Doesn't it look yummy? I can't wait to get my greedy little paws of some!

I'm surrounded

As I'm sitting here trying to beat the heat, my eyes are drawn to my furry little friends. They're sprawled in various locations throughout the apartment, snoozing away until it gets to be a little cooler in here. And, because I feel like it, I thought I'd post about my little rats.

Princess is the first cat that 'adopted' me. She showed up in my backyard one day. And slowly but surely, she started working her way into my heart, then into my house. She's quite fat, and very dignified. Ha ha, she's fun to harass sometimes.

Miss Priss is a rather elusive creature. She's one of several feral cats that I feed on my back porch. She'd lived there since she was a little kitten. On one of the hottest days last summer, I walked out onto my back porch to discover that she was birthin' some babies right there on the corner of my deck! I couldn't bear to think of what was going to happen to them as the day wore on, what with the heat and the stray dogs, so I somehow managed to scoop her and the two kittens she'd just birthed into a kitty carrier and then into my bathroom. I put them in a cardboard box that I just happened to have on hand, and they lived beside my toilet for 6 months. She wouldn't let me touch her, and often threatened to bite me while I was using the bathroom. I figured she'd run outside one day after the kittens were older. She did, but then oddly enough, she came back inside at the end of the day. And she started to rub on my legs, and ask to be petted. Yup, she's a pet now. Who'd have thunk it? Of course, if anyone else comes inside, she's nowhere to be found, and she still freaks out if I try anything crazy, like picking her up. But nonetheless, a pet she is.

Spike is a fearless little creature. If anything is drug out of place in the house, she is ALWAYS to blame. But she's also so darned cute and affectionate. Spike comes from Miss Priss's litter. Her most annoying trick is climbing on top of the curtain rods and surverying the world from up high.

More kitty posting later (yes there are more kitties, sigh!).

Roasting in Robeson County

Boy was it a hot, hot June around here! And the heat seems to have sucked the scrap mojo right out of me. Thankfully, it's been much cooler the past couple of days, and I've gotten a little bit done. I made a card for Dad for Father's Day. Nothing too, too fancy, but it does combine two of his greatest loves: golfing and steam trains.

I also made a second page about Duke's National Basketball championship celebrations. This one is about the people I was able to share the victory with that night.

I also finished a layout about my trip to DC during the Cherry Blossom Festival this year. I'll have to get a photo of that soon. Well, I'm off to enjoy the holiday in NJ with my sweetie. Happy Fourth, everyone!

Burn, baby burn!

Man oh man is it hot here in sunny North Carolina! As I sit here in my living room, the ceiling fan is spinning above, and I have another fan going full blast straight at my face. I'm comfortable in this little space, but if I move into other parts of my apartment, it's rather miserable. My poor a/c just can't keep up on a scorcher like this! And as I look at the long string of 90 plus days in the forecast, I can't help but worry whether we're going to make up for the incredibly mild weather we had last summer. Sigh!
Early this morning, in the pre-sweat hours of my day, I decided to 'turn up the heat' in my scrapbooking. In this layout, you can see Duke students and alumni celebrating our latest basketball National Championship. I used Pink Paislee papers from a kit they recently offered online. The flowers are all colored with Glimmer Mist. I tried to capture the school colors and the colors of the flames. Unfortunately, I really struggle with capturing the colors of my layouts without getting sunny glare in the image, so this is close to how it looks in reality, but not quite there. Soon, I'm going to make another layout featuring the people I celebrated that night with, but today, it was all about the flames!

PageMaps Challenge

Since finishing my mini-album last week, I've felt a little lost as to what to scrap next. Thank goodness for sketches! PageMaps (http://www.pagemaps.com/blog.php)is giving away a Webster's Pages prize pack to one person who submits a layout based on one of their monthly sketches. The photo at the top of this post is my take on this sketch:


I took the photograph in this layout last Labor Day weekend on Hilton Head Island. Just looking at this picture makes me start to feel calm and relaxed. The background paper is one of the new Basic Grey Basics papers. I inked the heck out of it with some Distress Inks, and then added a little glimmer mist (and some glimmer screens) to finish it off. The other two papers are from Websters Pages, as are the flowers. The "netting" is actually just white cheesecloth that I glimmer misted and then stretched and played with. I was stuck in the home improvement section of Wal-Mart a couple of weeks ago while my boyfriend was searching for something or another, and when I spied the cheesecloth, I thought, "ah ha! Who says you need to be at a scrapbook store to find scrapbooking products?" And sure enough, it worked PERFECTLY for this layout.

The chipboard luggage is from Tattered Angels. I misted, then ran ink over the top to bring out the embossing, then stickled and glittered it. The quote is from Quick Quotes. The letters are WP letters. I covered the letters with Glossy Accents and then sprinkled a sand colored embossing powder over each letter before they had dried. The result is a nice, sandy finish. I got the idea from another scrapbooker who did something very similar, but for the life of me, I cannot remember where I saw it.

And there you go! A nice, fun layout about a wonderful weekend relaxing at the beach. And the scrap mojo is back! Check out the Page Maps blog for a chance to win a great prize pack, or just to get some inspiration if you feel like you're in a scrapping funk. I'm still struggling with embedding links into my posts, so I'm afraid you'll have to copy and paste if you wanna find them from here. Again, it's http://www.pagemaps.com/blog.php .