random reflections

Project 64: Red Orange and more LOAD

Last week's color at Project 64 was Red Orange. It was much easier to find that Orchid, although I was delighted to find my one and only orchid photo as last week's pick. The number of folks still posting has dwindled since the beginning of the New Year, but by my count there are only 8 weeks left, including this one. LIke L.O.A.D. I am somewhat amazed to find I have kept up with this project every week for 58 weeks!

Before we left on a road trip last spring, I made little cards for each color so I could carry them with me. I take each one out the day the new color is revealed, and lay it on my desk. One night I looked down and there was the card laying next to a file folder. Perfect match:

But the photo I'm linking up is this macro shot of one of the flowers in a beautiful bouquet I was given. It was a great excuse to get out the tripod and the macro lens again.

Today is the last day of February and my 29th layout is done (but not photographed). I'm relieved to be finished. It's taken a lot of time, and I have other projects that need my attention. I'm getting a tutorial on Lightroom this afternoon which, hopefully, will clear up the difficulties I have getting my catalog organized. I've also started purging and cleaning in my studio (again), and want to clear out a lot of old stuff. My anniversary package from Papertrey arrived yesterday, and I'm anxious to get back to some card making. Nonetheless, L.O.A.D. fulfilled one 2012 goal:  get back to scrapbooking. Now my goal is one layout a week, which after one-a-day seems pretty reasonable. So here are three more:

I'm pretty sure this is another Ali E. template, but I forgot to write it down. When we were in California in November, Adam was ordained as a Presbyterian minister. All the photos were taken by Ron Tripp, a member of the congregation Adam served in Livermore, and a wonderful photographer. The template took up so much room, I ended up making a circle embellishment from a tiny Basic Grey alpha with the title on it. The cross came from an Amy Tangerine alpha.

I made a scrapbook album for Sarah after her baby shower, but never scrapped any of the photos of all our wonderful friends and family who were there. Once again, no room for a title, so the photo of the cake will have to do. I hid the journaling behind the photo.

This layout came from a prompt about neighborhood friends. The journaling reads:

Freddy Samples was one of my first friends, and one of two that I remember from my  years in Kansas.  There are several photos of us together, but I love this one in our cowboy/cowgirl outfits. Toy guns were definitely banned later in my childhood, so this outfit is amusing. I do see that Freddy has a toy gun in his hand, but I do not. 

Cathy (I wish I could be sure of her last name) was a close friend later during my elementary school years. I loved to go to her house because her family had a television and mine did not. Despite the fact that we were friends for quite a few years, and I visited her in her new home in New Orleans when I was in fifth grade, I cannot find any photos of the two of us.

 

L.O.A.D. Days 19-21

I'm getting close to the end of this class, and I do believe I will have 29 layouts in 29 days. It's been a lot more fun than I anticipated, and I've scrapped a lot of stories that I wanted to tell. Here are three more:

This one was based on the day's prompt:  a birthday from the past. I knew I had a great photo of me and my friends with our mother's hats on, but I didn't know I had a copy of the birthday invitation in my mother's handwriting. It was a great find!

Another prompt-based layout. I had just organized some of the old photos by theme so I knew right where all these photos were. I discovered (happily) that a really faded color photo was easily scanned, color-corrected and then turned to black and white with just a few clicks. I used a Cathy Zielske template for the photos and journaling. The journaling reads:

Getting dressed up ws always a big deal growing up. My father loved to shop and I always had several nice dresses. When I was a bit older, I went with him to choose the dress. I had a Sunday dress for church and an even fancier dress (often velvet) for the theater. None of these photos are taken with little white gloves which I remember as an essential element for dressing up, especially for Easter. I remember the purse in the photo on the left. I imagine my mother kept it for awhile and that's why I remember it. I almost cropped the radiator out of the last photo, but decided it spoke to the times.

And indeed she is. I have a lot of scrapping for both Skylar and Caleb yet to do! The template is a Keri Bradford Storyboard.

Project 64: Orchid and some more L.O.A.D. 16-18

It's link-up time for orchid at Project 64. Aside from a tiny pack of Post-It notes I couldn't find anything that was orchid in the house or around the neighborhood. Fortunately, Wegmans came to the rescue again with, you guessed it, an orchid.

I'm behind again in getting my L.O.A.D. layouts posted here. The last few days, that's the only creative time I've been able to squeeze in. Scrapbooking is definitely NOT a fast activity for me. 

After I photographed this page, I had to go back and do some more distressing of the journaling panel. This prompt was music from your past. Most folks did a layout on the music they listened to as a teenager, but my mind went right to my father, who was a music professor. Once again, there were almost no photos of him at the piano. What a pity! Journaling reads:

It’s times like this that I realize the importance of memory-keeping. When I read the prompt about music for L.O.A.D., I realized I’d never done a page about my father and his musical ability. This is just one of two photos I can find. The better one of just his hands and Sarah’s reflection in the piano is already in a scrapbook of favorite photos I did years ago. When I was talking to Tracy about the lack of photos, he commented that  he doesn’t remember my father playing that often when we were there.

 That certainly wasn’t true as we grew up. My father was a music professor, a wonderful pianist, and a conductor of choirs. He gave private piano lessons in our home several nights a week, and taught both me and my brother how to play the piano. Sadly, neither of us inherited any of his talent. I played until my junior year in high school, but Dane quit as soon as Papa would let him. 

 I loved listening to him play. Some of my favorites were show tunes, but the standard classical piano solos were also favorites. Not only do I wish I had more photos, but why didn’t we ever make a tape of him playing the piano?

 Photo taken: December, 1982

Story recorded:  February 16, 2012

Took this day to get my Take Twelve photos scrapped. The journaling came right off this blog post.

I need to find an appropriate piece of patterned paper for the first layout that came to mind with this prompt about old friends. I decided to take a Keri Bradford Storyboard and fill it with photos of my long-time friends. most of the supplies were from a Studio Calico kit. I'm really happy with this one. The journaling reads:

I am always envious of people I meet who have close friendships with kids they met in kindergarten or elementary school. Most of my best friends are ones I’ve met as an adult. I think moving twice (once as a third grader and once as a junior in high school) contributed to the lack of long-lasting childhood friendships. I still exchange Christmas cards and notes with a couple of friends from Amanda and New Paltz, but for the most part, my friendships were formed once I moved to Rochester. Of course, some of those friendships have lasted for well over thirty years now, so they truly are old friends.

 The four years I spent at Cornell didn’t result in many lasting friendships either. My mom got sick my freshman year, and died between my junior and senior years so I spent a lot of weekends traveling home to support my father and brother. And I spent an incredible amount of time studying and keeping up with an amazing workload. I do have two good friends from Cornell who luckily live right here in Rochester, and now that we’re retired (or working independently) we have lunch together just about every month. I’m still in contact with my boyfriend from those years and one of my roommates, but we rarely see one another.

 One of the things I hoped for my children was that they would develop some lifetime friendships during their school years. It hasn’t worked out exactly as I hoped, but both of them do have good friendships with kids they met growing up. Being in the same family daycare situation, going to a large and diverse church, and attending school in the same district all contributed to that. In the end, I’ve come to realize that it’s not when you made the friendships, but the very fact you have a supportive network of friends that matters.

 

Photo Shoot

My friend and I went to the Memorial Art Gallery today to take photos for an upcoming Photo Critique on mininalism. We found a few objects that may work well as our contributions, but the most interesting piece of art we saw was this one by Devorah Sperber called "After Grant Wood (American Gothic). The piece was created with 4,596 spools of thread.

From this angle it's easy to see the images, but when you are in the gallery looking at it straight on, it's not as clear. As soon as I looked through my viewfinder, the images popped out at me. The gallery provided viewers with a glass ball on a handle. When you look through, this is what you see.

Here are three close-up views:

The first thing that amazed me was the creative thought behind the art work. How does someone come up with an idea for something like this? Then, what must it have taken to execute it? Amazing.

More L.O.A.D.: Days 13-15

I am frankly amazed that I've managed to keep up with this project, and I must admit, I'm enjoying it quite a bit. Reading, doing the lessons in Photo Flow, and starting a daily practice with Copic markers, however, have taken a back seat. I keep up with all my commitments (which have been pretty heavy recently), but scrapping definitely takes me a LOT longer than cardmaking! Here are three more:

This might be the simplest layout ever, but it's one of my favorites so far. (The mat is straight IRL; for some reason I couldn't get the scan to straighten out.) The prompt was about earlier hobbies, and I don't think I've ever scrapped about starting out with sewing. I had some articles and several other photos I could have used, but went with this one from a Project 64 prompt and one simple embellishment from Pink Paislee. The journaling reads:

I started sewing when I was ten years old and joined a 4-H club. Long before I was a 

• a cardmaker
• scrapbooker
• photographer
• cook, or 
• gardener

My mother taught me how to sew. She was a wonderful seamstress, but she was also colorblind so from a very early age, I can remember helping her match the thread to the fabric. I sewed for many years, and  made winter coats, suits, my prom dresses, both men’s and women’s shirts, and lots of kids’ clothes. About 15 years ago, I realized it cost more to buy the fabric and notions than it did to buy the garment. Now my sewing machine is used primarily for papercrafting, but occasionally I break it out for curtains, or to turn up a hem.

I wanted to get my Take Twelve photos scrapped. I used a template from the Ella Publishing kit Take Twelve, and cut it out by hand to add to the layout. The patterned paper is old Jillibean, the cardstock American Craft and BoBunny dotted. The only embellishment is an acrylic "button" from my stash with a camera cut from a Hambly transparency layered on top. Journaling:

We woke up to the first major snow of the year. I haven't missed it! The walk into church was beautiful, but the drive was slippery. We did stop for breakfast at the South Wedge Diner. The Youth Presbytery Worship Service ended up being cancelled, but the roads were clear enough for us to get to dinner at Lynn's. It was good to see Sharon, Jeff, and Barb, and dinner at Lynn's is always excellent. I spent the afternoon working on L.O.A.D.  and going through more of the  family photos Dane gave me last summer. I also found an old recipe book, published in 1894 with notes and recipe cards from my great-aunts inside. The bright and cheerful tulips are an antidote to the gray skies in western New York in the winter. I made a German Chocolate cake for dinner on Saturday night and took the rest to Lynn's today. Love my Happiness Project calendar!

This layout came directly from the day's prompt: Love Lasts:  what love of yours has endured the passage of time. I knew I had this cute photo of me at 15 months, and decided to make my own background paper with a photo of the bookshelves in our bedroom. The embellishments are both stamps from "All Booked Up" by Papertrey Ink. The journaling reads: 

My love of reading started at an early age. I am exactly 15 months old in this photo, and I’m sure I’m modeling what I saw every day. My parents gave me books every year for Christmas until I was an adult myself. I remember how disappointed I was, at 40, the year my father didn’t include a book in his gifts to me. We are surrounded by books in this house, and now I have quite a collection on my Kindle as well. I never tire of reading a good book.

L.O.A.D. Days 11-12

The theme for L.O.A.D. is "Past Perfect," so many of the prompts deal with memories from one's childhood. I have a box of photos and several albums my mother put together that my brother handed over to me last fall. For some of the prompts, I started going through the photos looking for specific photos, and then coming on some I'd never seen. This first layout uses one I don't think I'd ever seen, a photo of my mother's sixth grade class. There were also photos of her first and second grade classes as well, but one of them had suffered quite a bit of damage over the years.

Patterned paper:  Lime Twist (MME) & Skate Shoppe (Basic Grey); number die & buttons: Papertrey; circle punches; sticker: October Afternoon

The prompt for the next day was Then and Now. I didn't have anything particular in mind until I came upon this page from one of the photo albums. The pictures were taken on February 12, 1951 and my mother commented that the temperature that day in Kansas was 82°. It happened that February 12, 2012 in Rochester was one of the coldest days we've had all winter, so I went with that. Both the photo above and the album page were scanned with my new Canon scanner. I've been wanting one on my desk for awhile, and this one is perfect: very small, stands on it's side behind my computer monitor when not in use. It was also relatively inexpensive (less than $100). 

Patterned paper: "Fresh" by Pebbles; calendar: Jenni Bowlin; alpha: Paper Studio; twine: Canvas Corp; tag from stash; handmade flower from a PTI challenge a few years ago.

Journaling: 

As I sorted through some more family photos, I came across this page in one of the albums. The photos were taken on February 12, 1951 in Hays, Kansas. The baby is my brother who would have been just two months old. I was not quite three. My mother made a note in the upper right-hand corner that the temperature that day was 82°. 

 Today, February 12, 2012, in Rochester, New York, it’s 19° with gusty, bone-chilling winds. It was nasty enough earlier that we canceled the Presbytery Youth Worship service for this afternoon. It makes me wonder about global warming. 

L.O.A.D. Days 8-10

I've managed to keep up with L.OA.D. but not with getting them posted here. I'll try to get a few up every day until I get caught up. I'm enjoying this far more than I ever imagined, and getting through some old family photos at the same time.

Here are days 8-10:

I know I wrote about it here, but I never scrapped the story of the day Matt and Sarah graduated on the same day, one in Georgia and one in New York. Supplies are almost all from Studio Calico kits. I'm so happy to finally be using these.

This was for a prompt "Home Sweet Home." It's a lot of journaling for me, but another story I'm glad to have in our albums. This one went in my HOME album. I need to get back to working on it again. The patterned paper is an old 7Gypsies paper that was just perfect for this. The journaling reads:

I grew up in Amanda, Ohio, a tiny village of some 700 people. We moved there when I was beginning third grade to live with my Great-aunt Edith. She was 85 when we moved in with her, and she had lived in this house for nearly fifty years. It was a great house.The house sat on Main Street which was also, at that time, a main trucking route. The trucks slowed down to go through town, but guests always had a hard time sleeping. I never noticed them.

I loved the wrap-around front porch. Aunt Edith had a long row of rocking chairs and since we lived next door to the major grocery store in the village, lots of folks stopped to rock and chat on their way to the store. The oddest thing about the house was the second floor which had four bedrooms, but no hallway so all the rooms ran one into the other. My bedroom was the smallest because they had taken part of that room to add a bathroom when indoor plumbing finally became available. 

It was, in general, a relatively poor community, and after we moved to New York when I was a junior in high school, I only returned once when Aunt Edith died at age ninety-eight. I never had any desire to go back because I was afraid the reality of the place would be depressing, and I really had fond memories of growing up here. We had total freedom to roam the town and the neighboring fields. Everyone watched out for you, which I’m sure could have been a hassle, but was nice as a kid. Tracy tried to talk me into going back, but I just kept resisting. Finally, three years ago, on our way home from a cross-country trip, I relented. And I’m glad I did. The house is now rental property, and it needs some loving care, but it and the town are much the way I remember them though the grocery store is now a medical center, and the school where I attended grades 3-6 and 9-10 has been torn down and replaced by a beautiful new elementary school. In fact, Amanda is probably in better shape now than it was then.

When we were in California in November, I asked Sarah where I might be able to get some good photos. She suggested The Palace of Fine Arts, and we enjoyed an hour or so there. But the real find was Baker's Beach in the late afternoon as the tide came in. I was thrilled to get a decent photo of the Golden Gate Bridge. It's not often that we've been in San Francisco on a clear, sunny day. Edited to add: I used a template for the photos and the journaling from Weeds & Wildflowers, January 365, by Gina Huff.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Project 64: Sky Blue

Sky Blue is the color being posted at Project 64. I wasn't sure what I'd be able to find, but one day I brought my new Five Year Memory Book into my studio and the color card for Sky Blue was a perfect match.

And then I remembered the little necklace I ordered on a whim before the holidays. Another good match.

You can find more inspiration with Sky Blue here.

Papertrey Anniversary Challenge: Part 6

There was no way I could pass up the most recent challenge at Papertrey Ink:  use hearts. I think this is my last valentine, and just in time!

I punched hearts from Pure Poppy, Raspberry Fizz, and Hibiscus papers, and added a sentiment from "Sending You."

Papertrey Anniversary Challenge: Part 5

I'm back again with a second post (Ten on the Tenth is posted below) and another valentine, thanks to the ongoing challenges at Papertrey Ink as they celebrate their 5th birthday. Today's challenge was a sketch challenge, and if you visited yesterday, you'll notice the same color scheme. I had scraps laying on my desk and went from there. Here's the sketch:

And here's the valentine. I almost have all the valentines I need now, thanks to all the PTI challenges.

Everything on the card is from Papertrey Ink except the heart buttons which I've had in my stash for years. I love the Wonderful Words dies and stamps and used both for this card. A very CAS card, my favorite kind.