Bo Bunny giveaway!

Here's a niceBo Bunny  giveaway at  Roberts Blog.

Lifelong Love

I have been scrappy obsessed lately and have been doing alot of scrapping and not so much of anything else.  Shame on me, LOL!

I got a wonderful collection of old photos from my Mom and its been so fun going through them.  I don't think I'll ever run out of pictures. It's just a matter of scanning and printing them.  Some require a fair amount of enhancement through Photoshop as some are old and faded.  It really amazes me what can be done with a $100 program.

Here's my latest, its a little different from what I've been doing with these old photos but I really like this.  These are the beautiful Graphics 45 Le Romantique papers.  They are just perfect for these photos.

I love these beautiful Prima flowers.  There's a vine in there plus several different single blooms.

I'm having lunch today with my high school girlfriends.  We always have so much fun!  It has been great reconnecting with these friends some, well many years later!!  More years than I care to admit to, LOL!!

Thanks for stopping by and let me know you were here!!

Are we there yet?

I love to tease Dick and usually start asking him if we're there yet about an half hour down the road!  It is a looong way to Alaska from NC, well from most anywhere for that matter!  Dawson Creek, Canada is the beginning of the Alaska Highway, built during WWII to get troops and supplies to Alaska to defend the US from the advancing Japanese.  The Japanese did occupy part of the Aleutian chain during WWII.  Well this is not a history lesson, LOL.  Google it if you want to know more!!  At this point in our trip we had been on the road about 10 days and still had 4 more to go.  Of course we did make some stops along the way.  We did drive from VA to Alaska in 7 days in 1995, but that's another story.

 I used BasicGrey's Curio collection for these LOs plus a sheet of DCWV Bon Voyage Travel.  The stamps on the circle were done with Tattered Angels Time Traveler stamps.  I hand colored some vanilla paper with Fired Brick and Wild Honey distress ink,  and misted with water, to make my flowers that were cut from an Alterations die.  The title is a Dusty Attic chipboard piece (they must have made it just for me :-) colored with glimmer mist and smooch.  I cut the leaves out of Core'dinations CS with a Marvy punch that embosses and punches at the same time.  That's one of my favorite punches at the moment.

Same papers on this one, Kaisercraft chipboard letters, Dusty Attic chippie at the bottom overtop a Martha Stewart punch.   I used a corner punch to punch around the circles, love that technique, thank you Lisa G at Swirlydoos for that.  I really like the nostalgic look of these LOs, there is lots of nostalgia along the Alaska Highway, lots of relics left from building the road, I thought this portrayal was appropriate.

Denali

Here we are in front of Denali in all its splendor and glory!!  It is really a treat to see Denali as the mountain is often hiding in its own weather system.  I think only about 25% of the visitors to Alaska actually get to see Denali.

This is another of the layouts I made using the January Swirlydoos kit.  Oh this kit has really stretched me as the it is so colorful and I have found it fun, but a bit difficult to work with.  But, it has been a great challenge.  We always have butterfly challenges at Swirlydoos and I love this big butterfly that came on a card from my friend Daphne.  It is so pretty and went perfectly with the January kit. 

The blue papers are GCD Arsty Urbans pps collection  and the yellow is from the Glitz Scarlett collection as is the journal tag.  I made the red flowers at the bottom, the top one is a velvet Petaloo.  MM bling on the butterfly and GCD Artsy Urban border strips.

I have to give a shout out to the Kreaxions circle cutter I am using these days!  It cuts such nice circles and is such a small compact tool.  I love it and suggest you take a look at it if you're looking for a circle cutter.  It basically is a compass with a blade in it. Kreaxions circle cutter link.

Engineered to Perfection

Another Steampunk LO!  Loved doing this as I've had that yellow beer coaster forever.  It is really neat b/c Dick is an engineer and it has a train for the logo of Railyard Ale.  Cool since RRing is our other hobby!

All those gears I cut using an Alterations die and then painted them with Ranger bronze crackle paint.  Just a note of interest, the paint was way, way too thick - it was drying up, so I added a bit of water and stirred vigorously and it still crackled as it should have.  Good to know as I have several bottles of that paint and would hate to loose it all!  Anyway, those are G45 Steampunk Debutante pps and the red/yellow houndstooth is a G45 scrap.  The wings and heart are Tim Holtz grunge board inked with white ink and the heart with brickyard red.  The tag is Jenni Bowlin and the clock is Heidi Swapp.  Tag says:

My engineer is the best!  There isn't anything that Dick can't do.  In this photo Dick is working on the upstairs where we added 1600 sq' of living space that included a BR, bath, TV room, train room and poodle groom room.

TFL!

Capture the Moment

I did this one for a Steampunk challenge at SB.com and its my first Steampunk.  I love these G45 Steampunk papers!!  The picture was taken in Fairbanks at the very excellent auto museum they have there.  The hat is a vintage hat they had for visitors to play with !  Along with autos, they had quite a bit of vintage clothing on display to keep the ladies interested and I appreciated that!!  In addition to G45 Steampunk, I used alot of Tim Holtz  and 7 Gypsies embellies.

I've got an idea for another perking in my head too!  I love this line of paper, it's so whisical  and the colors are so rich.

Snow Dance

I just love the pictures I got of Chena and Nika playing in the snow and can't stop scrpping them!  I have one more, think I'll save it for a really hot day this summer!

  I used a real mix of pps here, black, white and gumbo Bazzill cardstock and the diecut is Webster's Pages Your Life with the center cut out.  The black and white piece is GCD Cosette collection and the swiss dot is Heidi Grace Floral with Definitions -  I cut the snowflakes with a MS punch.  Just about everything is sprayed with TA graphite glimmer mist.  The lace is Recollections.   Those great sparkly letters are from Creative Imaginations and the flowers are layered Petaloo Color Me Crzay with a punched snowflake center and rhinestone.  Also rimmed the flower with some puffy paint.

More Denali pages!

Breaking out of the mould and trying to get a bit funky with this LO.  I love collages!  Its hard to believe that is was June 28th by the looks of what we are wearing in this picture!  We had alot of cool days while we were at Denali and alot of rain so on most days you would find me bundled up in a polartec with this windbreaker over top!  Dick is a bit hardier than me and wasn't always so bundled up! 

Again, using up my stash and some new pps too from DCWV. ( the background paper and the brown)  There's some old Bo Bunny and Crate Paper, Karen Foster and MAMBI stickers. 

Journal:  Our slice of heaven, here on earth is located 29 miles deep inside Denali National Park at the Teklanika Campground where we had the good fortune to be campground hosts for six weeks. There was no telephone, no cell phone service, no computer hookup and electricity only if we generated it, and even then, generators were allowed only for 2 hours in the morning and 4 hours in the late afternoon into the evening. What’s not to like about that??


Well, I guess it’s not for everyone but Dick and I embraced it 100%. We had so much fun and just enjoyed lots of walks through “our” campground visiting with all of our guest campers and keeping a watchful eye out for wildlife in the campground. Fortunately we did not have any large wildlife like bears or moose visiting, but we did have the occasional lynx and wolf. We never saw the wolf but he left his calling card near our camper, his scat!
Ok, never thought I would find “scat” interesting, but you know if was ‘cause it was full of hair! Could have been rabbit, squirrel or even something larger such as a moose calf. One of our campers showed us a video they had taken from the bus of a wolf strolling down the road with a caribou hindquarter in its mouth. No doubt he was taking it back to the pack to feed the pups. There was a pack of 12 wolves with 7 cubs visible from the road that were spotted quite often during our stay there. We heard from a ranger that two of the pups were gone and assumed they had died. Life is tough in the wilderness even if you are at the top of the food chain as the wolves are. There is no human intervention, nature takes its course.

TFL!

Our Heaven on Earth - Denali National Park

We will never forget the six weeks we spent at Denali National Park  as volunteer campground hosts.  It was such a great experience, we met so many wonderful people from all over the world.   Here are two LO's I did using some old BasicGrey pps  - trying to clean out my stash!

Tags says:  Scenes from the campground that we hosted in Denali National Park.  The river is the Teklanika.  That is the Alaska state flag flying with "Old Glory".

Journal says:  Once a week we went deeper into the park to the Toklat work camp to do laundry; this was another 24 miles deeper into the park. The drive to Toklat was through prime bear viewing territory, and we did see some bears; but what we saw nearly every week was this group of Dall sheep hanging out at Polychrome Pass. In all the years that we lived in Alaska and visited Denali, we only saw the sheep up close and personal once. And here we were seeing them every week.

The sheep were almost always on or near the road. One day they were walking towards us right down the middle of the road. All we could do was shut down the engine and wait for them to amble on by. They stopped right in front of us and peered in our windows. I could have easily touched them. One was no more than two feet out my side window. I guess we spent 15 minutes or more waiting for them to get by us. Meanwhile behind us were some professional photographers that I bet were just so envious of us! Yay, score one for the average Joe, sometimes the professionals can be really rude trying to get their photos.

The Pass is aptly named for the brilliant colors in the surrounding hills and mountains. The pass sits up high and overlooks glaciers and the valleys they left behind. The road through Polychrome Pass is not for the faint of heart! It is a series of sharp curves and steep hills. The entire road through the park is gravel and Polychrome Pass is extremely narrow! There is just enough room in some places for two school buses to pass each other with maybe a foot to spare. As we drove through there, I was chanting, “No bus, no bus, no bus” for my fear was meeting an oncoming bus and having to squeeze by. It was scary when we were on the side of the road with the drop-off like you wouldn’t believe! I closed my eyes a lot!

Here's another LO of those Dall sheeps from Denali. Again using up some old stash, BasicGrey Origins and T Holtz Lost & Found.

Thanks for stopping by!!



View from our Heaven

This was a really quick LO and that is really atypical for me!  I actually put it together in about 10 minutes.  Then I played aroudn with it for 2 hours trying to add something to it and finally just decided its clean and simplistic view was perfect for the photo so on to other things.  Used BasicGrey Curio pps for this and that is an old BG rubon on the left.  The birds are a Timmy stamp.  Love Timmy's  stamps!!

I think I will make a companion page for this LO and call it a two pager!

It's a new year and a new look!

I have spent the better part of this day working on my blog.  I thought it needed a facelift and some added something.  Haven't figured out what that "something" is but I'm getting there!  If you have any ideas, leave me a comment please!!

Photoshop

My goal this year is to learn Photoshop and I have spent alot of time this week playing around.  I thought this was quite an interesting effect.  This is a photo I took from our campsite in Denali this past summer.  It was kind of dark so didn't really get much pop from it.

I was playing around with different lighting effects and applied the solarize effect and came up with this.  I think it looks really cool even though it looks obviously edited.



I'm back on my game!

LOL, yesterday was not a good day.  For the first time ever, I actually tore a LO apart 'cause it was just plain ugly.  I salvaged what I could from it.  Today was better.  I was trying to get this picture on a layout and it just wasn't working for me yesterday!

Dick took this picture this summer at Denali.  I had fun photo shopping this photo, I must admit.  It really was a stormy day but I accentuated that feeling by using some effect, I forget now what it was called.

Used GCD Studios Artsy Urban pps for this.  The main floral sheet was hard to design with but I actually am pleased with this.  I think it has that old fashioned post card look to it. 


Journal says:  Denali National Park, July 2010. The Eielson Visitors Center is 66 miles inside the park and generally, the only way to get there is on a shuttle bus. The visitor center sits on a steep slope overlooking glaciated valleys that were carved by the glaciers that still flow from the Alaska Range. On a clear day, Denali will be out towering over the rest of the Alaska Range rising 18,000 feet from its base. Unfortunately, this wasn’t one of those days, and instead, bone chilling winds and dark storm clouds greeted us. Still, whatever the weather, the sight of the landscape at Eielson stays with me always. On this day, I was taken with the beauty of our flag standing at full attention against the dark foreboding skies and the snow capped mountains.

I am happy to working on our Alaska pictures now.  I think I need to go buy an album just for all the LOs that will be forthcoming.  Between Dick and I, we have hundreds of photos from the summer.  It is really hard to pick out just a few to tell the story!!  TFL!!

Vintage love

I simply love this photo of my Aunt and Uncle taken during WWII before they were married.  This LO turned out really well I think- I love the simplicity of it.  The pp is from the January Swirlydoos kit, and is GCD Artsy Urban green bird.  I love this piece of pp, I only have two sheets, wish I had more!!  The border punch is a new Martha Stewart punch and  I cut the swirls on my Cricut, HomeDecor Cart I think.  Oh I printed the photo in PSE9 using an antique oval frame.  Here's a link to a  mini tutorial on how to do this that I posted at Sisterhood of Scrap.  Oval print job  It's quite easy to do and  I think really lends a vintage flair to a photo.  Thanks for visiting my blog!!

Bears!!

Oh these were fun LOs that I did for the January  sketch challenge and the Odds challenge at Swirlydoos using their January kit.

The pps are from GCD Designs - Artsy Urban collection and Glitz-Scarlett Collection. The velvet flowers are Petaloo and the others are Prima.  The yellow circle mat I made using a MS circle punch.  I love this technique and thank you Lisa at SD's for showing us this!  It's easy to do, here's a link, give it a try!

These are photos I took this summer in Hyder, Alaska.  Hyder is a little bitty town of about 72 on the coast.  It is completely surrounded by Canada.  There isn't even a US border station there.  It seems sort of like a lost part of the US.  They do have a post office but no law enforcement.  Its a strange place!!

Happy New Year! Snowing & GO

Wow, 2011.....that last decade sure flew by.  Seems just the other day it was January 1, 2000 and I was wondering how I would refer to the new century, you know two thousand sounded so odd!

I am done with Christmas - took the decorations down yesterday and scrapped my last Christmas layout, at least for a while.  I am over red and green!  LOL, love this layout of Nika in the snow though.  The papers are from the Swirlydoos December kit and are Bo Bunny and IOD.  What a gorgeous kit!!  I added the platinum Prima flower and colored the center rhinestone red to match.  The snowflakes are from my stash and they are brads covered with icicle stickles.

Bo Bunny - Noel Joy and Noel Rejoice
IOD - Holly Stripes
Bazzill cardstock
Prima flower, Rossetti Roses Lula
IOD tags


I've really been itching to dig into the Swirlydoos January kit, it is soooo colorful.  Well I took alot of photos on Nika in the Christmas foot of snow that we had.  I could have titled this one Dashing Through the Snow but decided on "Go" as the journal tag has a quote from Confucious.  It says "Where ever you go, go with all your heart." 

Swirlydoos has an action photo challenge going on, so this picture was perfect for it!

Bazzill dotted swiss cardstock
GCD Artsy Urban blue floraland Postcard One
BasicGrey yellow lace
Petaloo Magnolia blossoms
GCD Artsy Urban border strip and blue transparency flourishes
Dusty Attic chipboard vines painted white with touches of pale yellow.