Finally back home

We spent a wonderful summer in Alaska.  See our travel blog if you want to know more about that.  Road trip - Alaska Bound.

Now that we are home, we have adopted a poodle puppy.  She is delightful and so, so pretty!!

What happened to my blog????

Geez, while I was running around in the wilds of Alaska, some gremlins changed the look of my blog!  Looks like blogger has changed the templates - I need to reformat and I will one of these days! 

Not much scrapping going on!

I've been a crazy woman lately getting ready for our trip to Alaska!  We leave tomorrow.  First we'll have a few stops in the US and then we'll head north.  I am taking scrappy stuff with me but I don't know how much time I'll have for it.  We'll be back mid-August.  I hope everyone has a great summer full of fine weather, friends and family!

Visit our travel blog to see pictures from our trip and find out where we are!

http://alaskaroadtrip-maggi.blogspot.com/

Another paper bag album

I just love making these little PBA's.  They are just so fun!  This one was a real challenge as I chose to feature the artwork of Salvador Dali.  So no lace, no flowers, I didn't think that look was right at all for Dali.  I did use G45 pps and thought they worked quite well. 

Cover:

There are tags tucked into a pocket on the left.

The right side has a flap that opens up.

Flap opened.

The left side striped pp is a pocket to put tags or photos into.

The right side has a pocket for holding photos.

The left side has a pocket.

Sorry, this is a bad photo, the blacks are appearing as gray.

Tags to put in the pockets.

Thanks for taking a look !!

Me at 20!

There aren't that many pictures of me that I like but I really do love this one and was quite amused when I came upon it.  What you can't see is a bottle of Chianti tucked in on my left side, and the cigarette. oh my, glad I gave that up in my 30's!  This is me on the train in Europe bumming around.

When I was twenty…

Life was a box of chocolates for sure!! I did find the occasional nutshell in my chocolate because like any 20-year-old single gal, life had its ups and downs with boyfriends and all those things that are so important at that time in your life.

At twenty, I was just drifting through life absorbing all that I could and having a good time. I was in and out of college; I just couldn’ t figure out why I was there so I quit, numerous times! I started out as an art major at East Carolina University and it took about six weeks for me to discover that I was not going to make it in the world as an artist so I dropped out before I flunked out and moved in with some girlfriends in Raleigh. I worked at Hudson Belks through the Christmas holidays in the hosiery department. Then I took a temporary job at the Department of Motor Vehicles checking annual vehicle registrations. Talk about BORING! It was a proofreading job and I hated it but it was a paycheck! After that job ended, I became a telephone operator and that was kind of fun especially in a college town where the drunken college students would call in to call the White House or something equally silly.

However, my heart was in the mountains and after only a short time as a telephone operator I moved to Cherokee, NC. I went back to college at Western Carolina, this time as an English major I think. That didn’t last long either. Then I think it was history. In 1974, I finally decided to be a business major, but that’s another story.

I met a great gal, Susan, in music class and we became fast friends. She and I decided to save our money and go to Europe to see the sights. Europe was crawling with American young people as the Vietnam War was raging and there were lots of draft dodgers there. In retrospect I’d have to say we were probably an embarrassment to our country but, oh well, we were having fun, making love not war and all that.

So, I spent $600 for a six-week stay in Europe. That’s hard to believe isn’t it? I bought a Eur-Rail pass for $125 that gave me unlimited travel in most countries in Europe for 2 months. Susan took this picture of me on the train. As you can see, I am diligently studying my Europe on $5 a Day book. That really was an invaluable aid as it told us where we could get cheap eats, safe lodging, and student discounts. Of course, there were youth hostels but you had a 10 pm curfew. Hello?? At 20, I want a 10 pm curfew?? I don’t think so!

One thing that helped us out was that my Dad was stationed in Augsburg at the time so we had somewhere to go to get our laundry done, a nice long bath, a good hot meal, and a refill for the peanut butter jar.

Being twenty was not easy, but it was fun!

 I made the little travel journal in the right corner using some bazzill cardstock, lots of distress ink, Karen Foster stickers, and crackle paint.  I added journaling pages inside.  The rest is just different things from my stash, K & Co, Little Yellow Bicycle, TPC Studios, Jenni Bowlin letters, MME letters, Tim Holtz film strips, Stickeroos,

God has Another Angel

Thank you my dear friends that have sent us messages about our sweet Chili.  You'' never know how much we appreciate your caring words.

Our angel has gone over the Rainbow Bridge

We had to say good-bye to our dear Chili today.  Her pain was more than she should have to bear and her body was so debilitated by the autoimmune diseases.  It was time to let her go to the Rainbow Bridge to be with our other animal friends that passed before her. We miss you and love you Chili.  You brightened our lives for 7 years.  We will miss you always.

Cards for Lennon

Please take a moment of your time and brighten the life of a little boy, Lennon, and his family.  Lennon has 3 cancerous brain tumors and has a 20% chance of living.  Lennon is the grandson of Karen, at Pages in Time, and we are all banding together to spread the word and bring a little cheer into all of their lives.

Lennon has had a tumor removed but unfortunately, when he went for his MRI and check up, they found 3 new tumors.
The DT at Pages in Time is starting a project, "Cards for Lennon". I don't know if any of you have seen the movie "Miracle of the Cards" which is a true story, but it shows what just a card can do to make someones day. Just to know someone is thinking about you, praying for you, giving you hope is a blessing in itself.

Please take the time to purchase or buy a card for Lennon and his family so that they will know that people everywhere are praying for him. Let us ask God that Lennon be in that 20% of survivors!!!
You can send your cards to:
Amanda and Lennon Hunt
c/o Pages in Time
5221 South 48 St
Lincoln NE 68516

I truly hope you take the time to touch this little boy's life. It would be greatly appreciated by his family.

Chili update

Well things are not looking so great right now.  It appears that she may have 3 or 4 different auto-immune diseases, although we are still waiting for test results to come in.  She is really weak in the rear and has to be helped to a sitting or standing position.  Once she is on all four paws, she walks fairly well but has to helped up and down stairs.  the doctors so far are saying that cortisone treatments will change things for the better for her and that we need to give it a month to see how it goes.  Right now I am not feeling like she's improving much but I must be patient.  she's such a little trooper as she very seldom vocalizes her pain but I know she is experiencing some degree of pain.  Hard to say how much, dogs are absolute masters at masking their pain.  Please say a little prayer for our little girl.

Update on our sweet Chili

We went back to NCSU vet school on Friday for a follow up visit and had a much better visit I think.  We saw one of the neurologists there whereas last time we saw an intern and a resident.  The nuerologist has decided that the cerebellum problem is just something she's always had and is not related to her current problem. We go back next week for a spinal tap, joint taps and muscle/nerve electrodiagnostic study. They are thinking it is most likely polyarthritis which is different from osteoarthritis. More like RA I think. Anyway, onset can be quick (it was), often doesn't show up on Xray or MRI - it didn't, Can be autoimmune or infectious. Treatment will be either steroids or antibiotics. I'm betting its auto immune as she has allergies which are autoimmune. If it is polyarthritis, it is manageable and she should have quality life again. Could also be some other itis, meningomyelitis, or polymyositis/polyneuritis, although the doc is guessing polyarthritis.  So I guess things are looking up if this is what the diagnosis turns out to be. I think they got side tracked initially by the weird brain scan that they were all amazed to see.

I feel so badly for my sweet Chili as I know she is in pain.  The vet described it as just generally feeling very miserable.  I can relate somewhat when I remember the summer I went through before I had my back surgery-I was in pain most of the time and quite miserable. 

Do pray that we have found the cause so we can work on the cure now!

Bark!

Of course I can't go very many days without scrapping the dogs!  So here's one of Chena to go with a page I did earlier of Chili.  It is really hard to get a decent picture of a black dog and I have  gotten several good ones of Chena lately so you know what tht means?  LOL, more Chena layouts!!

The papers are BasicGrey Sugar Rush and I do love them!  I especially love those glimmer glass wings from Tattered Angels.  Thanks for stopping by!!

More vintage scrapping

I'm on a roll!  Did these 2 pages using the fabulous Feb kit from Pages in Time! 

Papers used include 7 gypsies - Walk and Pandora, Graphics 45 (blue from On the Boardwalk collection), BasicGrey Lucky, Prima Firefly, Adornit tags. 

This is my mother's side of the family.  The journal is long, but here it is if you want to read it:
I have so many fond memories of times spent at my Grandparents house. We were a big family and it was so fun having so many aunts, uncles, and cousins. Aunt Elsie didn’t have any children and so she, in particular, really doted on us. Her husband, who we called either Uncle Alex or Uncle Everett, would bring us silver dollars or 2-dollar bills and of course, we loved that!
Papa Greene had a country store and in the summers, we would play kick-the-can or hide and seek down by the store with the other children who came to the store with their folks. The store was a meeting place and you’d always find someone there sitting on the bench dipping snuff and talking about their crops.
Papa Greene was such a fun grandpa, he really loved his grandchildren. When we’d leave from a visit, he’d give each of us a small brown paper sack filled with penny candies. He was never too busy for us.
Mama Greene loved us too but she was always busy. In the summers, she cooked all the time as she made dinner (which is lunch to most of us) for the tobacco hands. I remember the help coming in from the fields so well. There was a big dipper out by the well; they’d all go there and have a big drink of water. Then on the porch, she had several wash pans set out, one to wash the tobacco gum off their hands and another for rinsing. Now they were ready for dinner! Dinner was usually lots of fresh vegetables from the garden and cornbread. She always had snaps – those are green beans that she always cross cut after cooking so that they pieces were about a half inch in size. My favorite dish was Grandma’s potatoes, which were chunks of potato in a cream sauce that she made from the cooking broth and butter. They were so good and I make them now but they aren’t as good as Mama Greene’s. There might have been a little pork but usually there wasn’t much meat. Of course, no meal is complete without dessert and she always had one.
Before we ate, she always announced what was for dinner. I can still hear her in my head, “Now there’s Irish potatoes, snaps…”. For years, I thought she was saying ash potatoes! She was distinguishing between Irish potatoes and sweet potatoes.

When she wasn’t cooking, she was working in the garden or canning and freezing for the rest of the year. There was always something from the garden that needed to be shelled. Sometimes we’d sit outside under a big shade tree and shell field peas and butter beans.

Vintage

Several years ago I got into a pile of photos of my family that dated back to when my parents were teenagers.  Ah - ha, I thought, let's do these photos in a vintage style.  Well the market was seriously lacking in vintage type materials so I didn't get too far....
Fast forward several years and wow, vintage is the absolute rage.  I was ahead of my time, LOL!!  Graphics 45 does some awesome vintage papers and so I've done these two pages using G45 collections:  A Proper Gentleman, Domestic Goddess, Le Romantique and Fashionistas.  I loved doing these two pages, its so fun trying to imagine my parents as young adults!!

journal says:

This man grew up to serve proudly his country in the US Army. His service began during WW II where he went to the European theater. He spent 28 years traveling the globe, sometimes with his family and sometimes not. He served in South Korea, Nepal, and in Vietnam twice.
This man married a beautiful woman and together they had three children who are so grateful that their parents have such an enduring love for each other. They dote on their children and have given them the most important gift of all, unconditional love.
This man is my father and I am very proud to call him my Dad.

Journal on this one just says that Mom and Dad were married in WWII and then Dad left for England to prepare for D-Day.

I had some fun making the title for both of these pages.  First I painted grungeboard circles with copper alcohol ink, then dabbed a bit of mushroom alcohol ink to age the copper.  Added the letters and then  painted the whole thing with Ranger Crackle Accents.  I thought it made for a nice finished looking embellished title.  Thanks for visiting my blog!

ATCs - Artists Trading Cards

These are so fun to make and I 've done a couple  vintage ones.

This first one is using Graphics 45 Romantique papers, I just laove the old fashioned ladies.  I just layered several pieces that I cut out.  Then I added some Frosted Lace Stickles to the bodices and gold Stickles to the butterfly, the button is Dress it Up.  And of course, lots of inking.  Hmm, just looking at it, I might add some crackle finish to the rose picture in the background, what do you think?

The Ladies

This one was for a challenge at SOS to do a spring ATC.  Its been so cold and rainy around here I just felt dark and vintagy!  LOL, is that a word?  Anyway here is:

Vintage Spring

This is real simple, the bird is a stamped image that I covered with a Tim Holtz fragment, embossed the scallop which is a Martha Stewart punch, added the Prima flower, K & Co paper image and MM flet rick rack.

Thanks for visiting my blog!!  Appreciate it!

Now I must go do something creative, like dye my hair, LOL!!

Chili - my princess

I was at the vet school yesterday until 2 pm and I guess things look a little better, at least for the short term.  Seems Chili has some fluid on the brain from a condition that may have been present from birth.  There is no way of knowing if the fluid is forming now or if its been an ongoing slow process throughout her life.  They think this is what is causing the weakness in her hind quarters.  she also is having some neck pain and they think that is unrelated.  She has a new pain med to take for 2 weeks and we'll see how that works for her.  One day at the time, who knows what tomorrow will bring. 

With all my worries of my sweet Chili, I was compelled to scrap a picture of her.  She is so pretty and girly looking so I thought she'd look good in pinks and laces!

This is the BasicGrey Sugar Rush line and I do love it!!  The scan is a little wonky 'cause that flower is so bulky....sorry.