Monday, July 31, 2006

Ribbon Central

We had a great time scrapbooking in Des Moines this weekend. My parents' cat Alice was in our hair alot - here's a shot of her trying to get a piece of my ribbon!
Speaking of ribbon! I picked up the IKEA jars while I was home and loaded one up with ribbon. They're huge! I don't even have enough ribbon to fill 2 of them. Oh well, I guess I'll have to buy some more ribbon!
Last night I worked on a deco page for a "fibers" themed deco. Just thought it was a fun one. Tonight I helped Wendy set up her blog. Finally! Check her out!

Thursday, July 27, 2006

It's the small things...


...that make me happy. Like cleaning out the drawer of my art desk just now. I started by looking for my glasses prescription (I know, why would it be in the drawer of my art desk?) and I realized it was full of junk that I never use. So I tossed a bunch of stuff in the garbage, put away the rest in appropriate places, and used my shop-vac to vacuum out all the seed beads, glitter, and paper cuttings at the bottom of the drawer. Ahhh... now if I could do the same to the rest of our home. But for tonight, I'm just enjoying the one clutter-free drawer.

And my sister just sent me pictures of her boyfriend kissin' on my new
glass jars that my mom picked up for me at IKEA today. Man, I love me some IKEA. These will be the new homes for my ribbon and buttons. yea!

Honeymoon album

Wow - another week of summer has flown by. I've been busy working at Reminisce this week. They just got back from CHA, which is a big trade show in Chicago where the new season of scrapbooking/paper arts products are unveiled. Woo-hoo! Lots of new paper and ribbon in the store from American Crafts already. Loving it.
I used my day off yesterday to start on the honeymoon album. I actually got quite a few pages done. I'm using an 8 1/2" x 8 1/2" album, so it comes together more quickly than a 12x12, but there is more space for pictures than in the smaller albums. Now I'm all fired up to get it finished! Going to Des Moines this weekend for some more scrapbooking action with my mom and sister, so that should be helpful.

Friday, July 21, 2006

This and That...

Tonight I tried out image transfers for the first time. I've been planning to do it for a long time, so I picked up a blender pen. The image was a b&w photocopy of a sketch I did on our trip. I put it face down onto the moleskine journal spread, then rubbed the blender pen onto the back of the paper in small sections. Then I used a popsicle stick to burnish the back of the page to create the transfer. It worked pretty smoothly, once I figured out to do a small bit at a time instead of a big section. Looking forward to trying again soon.
Yeah! We have a red tomato! Salsa here I come...

I also updated the blog for my moleskine journal, which is en route to Beth.

*And* I managed to get Bill hooked on the new season of Project Runway! woo-hoo! As if we really have time to add another t.v. show to our schedule. But it is just so entertaining...

Trio of Deco pages

I finally had a little time to work on some artwork tonight and I finished a few deco pages, as well as worked in my travelling moleskine journal a bit.
All three of these pages are for Single Image round robin decos where the deco-maker encloses many copies of an image, and the artists use that image somewhere in their pages.

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Honeymoon pictures

Back from the land of the tikis - our wonderful honeymoon in French Polynesia. We were there for a whole week, and spent time on 3 different islands - Tahiti, Bora Bora, and Taha'a. It was incredibly beautiful. The pictures really don't do it justice, but these are just a few of my favorites. If you'd like to see the whole batch, check out my flickr album.
Every time we arrived or left a resort, we received flower leis (which smelled incredible). You can see a little bit of the water in the background here. It was SO clear and blue, turquoise, sapphire, cerulean - you name it - unbelevable.

We visited the Gaugin museum in Tahiti. Vastly disappointing by the way, they didn't even have one original painting, just lots of narratives, color copies, and painted copies. I'm still glad we went, though, since I did learn alot about him while we were there.

We also went scuba diving in the Pacific and saw a huge manta ray called an Eagle ray. One of the other highlights was getting a side-by-side massage at the spa on Bora Bora. but mostly we lounged around and enjoyed the ocean breeze... ahh.... heaven. Now back to reality after travelling about 27 hours to get back to Iowa. Phew!

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Tropical Fusion



I've been busy this week, working at Reminisce and at school tying up some loose ends. Also, I was working on finishing up an example for a mini-book class that I'm teaching in August. Yesterday we celebrated the 4th by sleeping in, lounging around, and going to see Superman Returns. Which was very entertaining and well made, in my opinion. The casting was excellent, the story was surprisingly compelling and the action scenes were very action-y! Also, I spent some time scrapbooking photos from our St. John trip to use some of the brand-spanking-new Reminisce paper line, "Tropical Fusion".