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I played all day (with scrapbook paper)

This past weekend, my sister and I participated in an all day scrapbooking event given by Shelby of Embellish IT! in Charlotte, NC.  The weekend started with a bang as we had to move up our original travel plans to avoid the sleet and freezing rain that were forecast for Friday afternoon.  We didn't exactly miss it, we drove through it early Friday morning.  It was not fun, but we made it to the hotel in Charlotte iwthout incident.  We spent the rest of the afternoon/evening relaxing in the hotel (plus a nice dinner at the Cheesecake Factory with our aunt who also came to the event) and were ready bright and early the next morning for a full day of scrapbooking.  

I had not scrapbooked in several months.  Between the discomfort of standing on broken toes, and just a lack of motivation, I simply haven't felt like creating with paper.  Happily, this weekend really seems to have broken through my loss of scrap mojo.  I finished about 14 pages for our honeymoon album!  I won't share all of them today, just a few.  I used a lot of Basic Grey's "Soleil" line for these pages.  The bright, sunny colors were perfect for a tropical trip.

This first layout will be the beginning of the album.  I won't repeat my story about the leis, which is what the journaling covers:

I loved those pretty flowers.  Personally, I think we should wear leis on a more regular basis.  Next up, a layout showing off two of my favorite photos from Oahu.  The statue in the vertical photo is of Duke Kahanamoku, who considered to be the father of modern surfing.  We hung our leis on his arms on the day that we left Oahu.

Next, we have a two page layout covering our visit to Pearl Harbor.  I used a postcard and our admission tickets as part of the decorations for this page.  

This next layout covers our visit to 'Iolani Palace in downtown Honolulu.  We couldn't take pictures inside the palace, so there's just the one outside photo for the layout.  I did include our tickets, which are reproductions of invitations to a royal ball at the palace.  The main reason that I wanted to visit the palace was to see Queen Liliuokalani's crazy quilt.  She made it while held prisoner in her palace by the United States.  It is a beautiful work of art.  

A closeup of the admission tickets:

Finally, here's a layout that I made using one of our class kits from that weekend.  The colors and layout of photographs was perfect to capture the walk Alton and I took through Honolulu's Chinatown in the afternoon after our visit to the palace.

I have to say that the entire day was very enjoyable and relaxing.  Shelby is a fun instructor, and the fact that we were all sitting in one room for so long, not rushing from class to class, made things feel much calmer than they normally do at a convention.  Shelby has said that she intends to return to Charlotte for another "Play all Day" event in the future.  I really hope she does, because I definitely want to do that again!

I'll share more of the layouts in the near future.  Til then, I hope everyone has a wonderful, creative day!

TUSAL and BAP, how about that?

Yup, it's time for my monthly TUSAL update:

That Prima jar is filling up nicely!  If you want to learn more about the TUSAL, follow this link to Daffycat's blog.  I've started thinking about what I'll do with all these orts at the end of the year.  I believe I've seen a couple of fellow TUSALers stuff theirs into clear glass Christmas ornaments.  Given my adoration of Christmas ornaments of all kinds, I'm thinking that might be the way for me to go too.

I've spent most of last week and all of this week working on my Giraffa sampler for BeckySC's BAP challenge, which you can read about here.  I'm quite pleased with my progress.  However, I'm about 4 lengths of thread shy of being completely out of the pale yellow thread, and I've got yellow all the way around the border.  Guess I'll be making an emergency stash run of some sort here in the near future!  Which is bad because emergency stash runs often involve the purchasing of non-emergency patterns.  Anyway, here's where I am on Giraffa as of this morning:

Look, there's a man leading a giraffe in this sampler!  And even though it's kind of hard to tell from this photo, there's another robe floating behind the giraffe, waiting to be filled in with a head and body.  Then it's palm trees and the borders.  Lots of palm trees and lots of border.  I will probably set this sampler aside at some point over the weekend and pick up Soleil again for at least another week.  

Lest you think that the scrapping bug has left me, let me share the two layouts I punched out yesterday afternoon and early this morning.  This first one is a layout about my many trips to Biltmore Estates for their Christmas candlelight tours.  That house is gorgeous on an average day, but in the evenings at Christmas, there's something magical about it.  I caught this picture of the guardhouse at dusk, and it's one of my favorites of the estates.

And finally, I made a multi-photo layout inspired by Lisa Andrew's layout.  Among the many CHA-related scrapbooking challenges going on at Two Peas in a Bucket, was a challenge to create a layout based on her lovely work.  And here's what I made:

Look at all the pretty little fishies!  Of course, I realized this morning that the song I'd been humming while I made this layout (and slapped that lovely little title on the page) was actually "Under the Sea" instead of DOWN by the sea.  Which makes a lot more sense given the subject of both the songs and these photos.  Sigh.  I can be such a dingdong sometimes.  Regardless, I'm excited to have made the first of many layouts documenting our honeymoon in Hawaii.

I guess that's it for today.  I'm off to put some more stitches in Giraffa.  Til next time, I hope everyone has a happy, crafty day!

I'm baaaack!!!

Hello everyone! I am officially returning to the land of blogging. I am happy to report that the wedding on April 14 was absolutely beautiful (at least from my point of view). The weather was gorgeous, the site was gorgeous, my husband was gorgeous... you get the picture. And speaking of pictures, I will be posting some, but there are something around 800 wedding photos to go through, so it might be a while. In the meantime, I do have a few photos from our honeymoon that I am ready to share. We left for Oahu two weeks ago today (much cheaper to fly on a Tuesday, and we really needed that resting time between the wedding and our trip to rest and pack). What a beautiful part of the world! We were greeted at the plane with beautiful, fragrant leis:

I went into the bathroom immediately after receiving my lei, and heard a voice from a nearby stall, "I smell a bride! Is there a bride in the bathroom?" Although I knew that meant she could smell the fragrance of plumeria wafting from my direction, in retrospect, that is a really awkward question to be asking in a public bathroom! Our hotel was in Waikiki, across the street from the actual beach. After having dinner at the local Hard Rock Cafe (what can I say? I'm in love with their Haystack Chicken Salad!), we wandered along the beach:

Gorgeous, right? We walked around for a bit, then settled in and watched the sun set. It was so relaxing. And yes, very romantic. The next morning, we headed to Pearl Harbor. We were up bright and early to make sure that we got tickets. Turns out, we didn't need to be up quite so early, because it wasn't all that crowded. Pearl Harbor is really a beautiful place. In some ways, that makes the horror of what happened on that December day all the more stark in my mind. It must have been so tranquil until the drones of the Japanese attack planes filled the air. We watched a short film about the attack, walked through several exhibits about what was going during that time period and what led to the Japanese decision to bomb Pearl Harbor, and rode the boat out to the Arizona Memorial. We chose not to pay to see any of the other museums.

From Pearl Harbor, we drove into downtown Honolulu. We visited 'Iolani Palace, where I got a fabulous, up-close view of the Queen's Quilt. No photos allowed, but I did buy a small book lots of detailed information about the crazy quilt. We also wandered around Chinatown, buying our lunch from a stall in one of the open markets. A little grotty, but quite tasty! One of the places that we walked by was the State Supreme Court. Does anyone else start humming the theme to Hawaii 5-O when they see this?

We finished our first day with a short scenic drive up Tantalus Drive. It was an amazing, tropical drive up the mountainside, topped with a beautiful view of the valley and Diamond Head Crater. A good first full day of our honeymoon. Well, that's about it for today. I realize that I've missed both the WIPocalypse and the TUSAL updates for April. Since very little stitching was done, I think I'll just save what little updating I have for May's regular days for updating. I started a new project yesterday (new project for a new marriage, that's my rationalization). I'm going to be working on La-D-Da's "Spot the Cat" for the next little while. I don't have a job right now, so I'm focusing on trying to put our house in order. There are boxes everywhere. The kitchen is almost completely arranged, but that's the only room that's close to done (unless you count the downstairs half bath, which I don't). And my poor craft room is jammed full of boxes. I need to get it at least half sorted out so that I can do some scrapbooking this weekend in honor of National Scrapbooking Day! We'll see if that happens. Til next time, happy creating, everyone!