Scrapping Saturday!!

I spent all day yesterday, National Scrapbooking Day, in Phoenix at this lovely place: the newly opened Phoenix Scrapbook Cottage!! I was lucky enough to be one of the winners of a free 12-hour crop at this cute, cute, cute bungalow cottage yesterday, for their grand opening weekend. This was a great opportunity to get some pages scrapped, since I haven't scrapped for quite a while (sad to say it's been well over a year, since the last post I wrote about scrapping!) so I packed up my paper, printed out some photos, and headed into Phoenix. The proprieters are a very nice duo of women who had gone to scrapping retreats in San Diego, and decided to bring a similar weekend getaway idea to the Phoenix area. The house is available for weekend getaways, Friday afternoon till Sunday afternoon, or for 12-hour day crops. (You can even tack on a Thursday or Monday, to extend your weekend even more!)

This is the dining room with its beautiful built-in china hutch; it's now the tool center, containing a huge selection of stamps, ink pads, idea books, and tools, including a Cricut cutter and a computer with a wide-format printer. (That's Kathy there, one of the very nice owners.)

I took a little photo tour of some of the rest of the house, too, while I was taking a break to stretch my back. This is one of the super-cute bedrooms: pillow-top mattresses with 300-thread count sheets! So, if you get exhausted from all that scrapping and working, you can actually sleep, in comfort.

These two pictures are the upstairs bathroom-- it is gorgeous!! There's a second full bath on the first floor, which is just as gorgeous.

( I had a claw-foot tub like this in my very first apartment, but it didn't have a shower. ) This renovation is a great way to update a bathroom and still respect the architecture of the room; you can still enjoy the window in the room, and the shower head is beautiful.

These are a couple of my fellow scrappers-- we each got our very own 6-foot table with our very own Ott light! I've been to a number of all-day crops back in Illinois and Wisconsin, and lots of times we had to share one of these tables with someone-- that makes for some cramped quarters, for sure. (imagine sharing one of those tables in the middle of the room, so you couldn't even back the chair away from the table, either! not fun, especially since I tend to spread out when I work, as you can see below.)

Here's my workspace-- pretty messy, and the inspiration was coming rather slowly-- It actually took me a couple hours to get into a groove; this picture still shows the first page I was working on, and it was about 1:30 in the afternoon. In my defense, though, I did have to unpack and get set up, along with having to cut and crop my photos before getting to work. (The first finished page is below; it just needs the journaling printed out, which will be folded and tucked into the library pocket.)

This is the picture of us that was taken at our 7th anniversary brunch; I think it's one of the nicest pics of us, and wanted to showcase it.

This page was a fun one to do-- this pic of Tom was taken a few years ago when we were in Seattle for a long weekend. I bought the paper specifically with the idea of using it for this page; I loved the hearts and fun colors. (scrapbooking paper is somewhat addicting, but shopping for it can sometimes lead to pattern and color overload.)

The pics above and below are from a trip we took a few years ago at Christmastime-- we stopped at the Rooster Cogburn Ostrich Ranch , which was certainly a memorable experience! The ostriches were kind of scary to me, actually, and the lorikeets (pic below) really did feel a bit like a scene from the Alfred Hitchcock movie The Birds. I knew I wanted to play up the colors of those birds, which are really vibrant. (these pages took a couple hours to do, actually, because I kept thinking of more little details I wanted to add: I really need to work on my speed; plus, I am a bit picky-- it took me at least 1/2 hour to get the ribbon tied the way I wanted it on that first page.)

The pics below are from the same trip, taken when we took a day trip to Tombstone, but they're not quite finished yet. I finally got into my scrapping groove about 8 pm, but then had to start thinking about picking up, since the crop only went till 10 pm. I did already make a reservation for a weekend getaway, though; that way, I can work as long as my inspiration (and my caffeine supply) holds out!

Well, hopefully it won't be another year (or longer) before I show you a new scrapbooking layout, although I can't promise anything! And if you want to plan your own crafty getaway, for scrapping or other crafts, I highly recommend the Phoenix Scrapbook Cottage... maybe I'll even see you there! (I'll be the one with the paper scattered all over, looking for something I just set down and misplaced-- lol!!)

Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day to my mom, who was always happy with whatever I brought home for her, whether it was a boquet of dandelions, a pocket full of rocks, or an interesting looking plant, leaf, or bug. She let me keep an aquarium full of tadpoles on the dining room buffet or a mason jar of caterpillars on the kitchen counter, and even encouraged me to do these things as long as it led to me learning something new-- thanks for everything you've done for me ver the years, Mom!

(somewhat) random photos

yes, I know this one is difficult to look at, but that's what I've been working on tonight-- cropping, editing, and printing pictures. Because, this Saturday (May 7th) is National Scrapbooking Day!! What does that have to do with the price of beans, you might ask? Well, it's because I won a drawing to attend a free all-day (10 am to 10 pm) crop at a brand new scrapbooking retreat in a renovated bungalow in downtown Phoenix (Phoenix Scrapbook Cottage)-- it looks really cute, from their website, by the way. Anyway, I need some photos to work on! (yes, you can laugh here, if you want: I have made a few pages here and there, like these pages from our trip to San Xavier Mission, but since using the digital camera regularly, I get them from the printer to the computer, and mostly they just stay there. ) I am looking forward to this event, though-- the place looks really nice, and it should be a lot of fun-- if I can just get the photos printed, that is!! (and, sad to say now that I looked up that post, those pages were made at the end of 2009-- what is really pathetic about that is I thought that I made those pages recently!! Time flies, I guess...)

by the way, the pics above are from ArtFest-- the dog on the left was a model in Carla Sonheim's class "The Art of Silliness" (I think he's cute!!) and the pic on the right was of our dinner guests, who made an appearance outside the dining hall every night. They seemed really tame; they didn't care about us snapping away with our cameras, at all!

this was a fun journal page I made in the last week or two-- the page itself is a brown paper lunch bag, and the figures came from some "child life insurance policy" junk mail we received. I snagged the envelope quick, before it hit the recycle bin. (see?!? anything can be art fodder!!)

I think I stamped the bag with some handmade stamps (one of my favorites, wine cork!!) and then went to town with the gel pens and some glitter, too, for good measure!

even more journal pages!

a few more journal pages, both finished and not:

Yes, I can do a simple page! This one is done.

Another page full of random images that just seemed to "go together" somehow, even though they're really not related at all.

This page was scraped paint leftover from some other painting project; I attached a glassine envelope with decorative tape, and used it to store some of my ArtFest trades. The flag bunting strung across the top is also an ArtFest trade; I need to make some of those-- they are seriously cute!

This page isn't anything special in terms of its design or the elements I used. What did turn out kind of cool, though, is the texture I got when I painted the background. I painted the page with gesso and paint, then scraped across it with a piece of corugated cardboard, which gave it kind of a combed look. (totally by accident, but those are the kind of accidents I like!)