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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!

My Bachelorette party

If you're looking for stitchy photos, you can skip this post.  It's all about scrapbooking today.  For the past couple of weeks, I've been working on a small, 8x8 album documenting my bachelorette party last March.  The party was a total blast, and the album was fun too make too.  I made the album using the "Fashionista" and "Let's Celebrate" lines from Websters Pages.  I was able to use loads of bright, fun papers for this album, more so than I usually seem too, and I really enjoyed the change of pace.  So without further blather, here are a few of the layouts:

We all posed for one photo at the end of the adventure:

 We started with a limo ride from Lumberton to Fayetteville.  It took a ridiculous amount of time to get there, but we didn't care.

We were quite jammed into the limo.  We sang along to 80's music, played at full blast.

 Fortunately, we had some delicious drinks to enjoy during the long ride.

 At the spa, there was delicious food, massages , mani/pedis, and gifts.

 You can't tell from our expressions how much fun we were all having, can you?

Not all of the layouts are posted here so as not to overwhelm you, but I wanted to share a taste of our fun, silly afternoon.  It was just what I needed to relax from the stress of wrapping up my caseload, moving, and planning a wedding in such a whirlwind.  I love these women.  They took such wonderful care of me during my 10 1/2 years in Lumberton.

That's all for today.  Scrapwise, I'm moving on to another mini album for my Hawaiian themed shower.  Stitchwise, I've been doing a good bit of model stitching.  I think everything will be released by the middle of next week so I can hopefully share some photos by the end of the month.  Til then, I hope everyone is enjoying a wonderful weekend!

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!

In the mood to scrap

Hi everybody!  I thought I'd share some of the layouts I've made this week with my blogging buddies.  This week is the biannual Craft and Hobby Association show where all the big scrapbooking companies go to show off their brand new releases for the second half of the year.  Looking at all those beautiful papers and products online has gotten me in the mood to use some of my own massive stash.  No theme to this group of layouts, they're just stuff that I felt like scrapping.

First up, The Lake.  A couple of summers ago, I was able to spend a couple of days out on Lake Waccamaw with some of my RobCo friends.  We had a house directly on the lake, with its own dock.  It was a wonderful, relaxing time away from the stresses of work.  I tried to capture some of that lazy tranquility with this layout:

I also made a layout about a certain rotten little cat that's still scampering around my house:

And then I made a layout using some old photos of me in my little parade costume for my baton twirling group.  These were taken in Mississippi, so I was not very old at all.  I can remember how much I loved marching in parades though.  The cold weather, the anticipation of the start of the march, and the joy of spinning that little baton around and around as we move along.  Good times.

Hmmm, I just realized that I have been on a Basic Grey tear here recently.  That's a good thing.  I own waaay too much Basic Grey product, and I haven't even acquired that much in the past few years!  I need to create a bunch of BG layouts so that I can buy some of their new releases.  They've got some really great stuff coming out later this fall.

Moving on, I also created one 12 x 12 layout showing the ladies who threw/attended my spa party back in March.  I have decided to create an 8x8 album about the entire event, but I wanted one of my usual sized layouts as well.  We had the most fun on the limo ride to the spa and then getting our nails done once we were actually there.

While I'm sharing paper crafting stuff, I thought I'd show you a photo of a banner I made a few years back.  It's been waiting for a cat-safe place to display it, and I think our bonus room had just the place:

Of course, even if they can't reach it, the cats are still interested.  I'm not positive, but I suspect Lucky is thinking about those lovely dangling pearls as he lounges in the window sill here:

Tigger, on the other hand, is too busy looking for embellishments (or rolls of glue dots) to chew to be wasting his time looking at a silly banner:

Sigh.  He even sits outside the bonus room door when it's closed and tries to convince me to let him in there to go play.   Little stinker.

Well that's it for today.  I'll have a stitchy update tomorrow or the next day.  Til then, I hope everyone has a lovely, crafty time!

My Egypt album is finished!!!

Hooray!  It's only taken me a year and a half to do it, but I'm finally done.  I've loved every minute of reliving that wonderful trip, but really, this was a ridiculously slow album.  I guess planning a whirlwind wedding is not conducive to daily scrapbooking, huh?  Anyway, this is going to be a picture heavy post, because I think I'm going to share every single one of these last layouts in this one post.

We visited two mosques during our last two days in Cairo.  The first one was in the old citadel, and is known as the Alabaster Mosque due to the large amount of alabaster used in its decoration.  It was a beautiful piece of architecture.  I have no idea what the religious significance of most of the elements of the building are, but I  was at least able to admire the beauty of the building itself.  The second mosque we saw was the Sultan Ali Hassan Mosque.

Such beautiful, colorful, geometric designs!  We had to remove our shoes to enter each mosque, but weren't required to cover our heads or western clothing, despite the fact that our tour guide warned me that I might be asked to cover up my arms (I think he meant my cleavage but wasn't comfortable saying it).  I did see a few other women who had been put into these long green robes, but no one from our group had to.  We squeezed our visits to these mosques into the afternoon of the day we flew from Luxor to Cairo.  There really wasn't any time alotted for lunch, so our guide jumped off the bus on the way back to the hotel and came back with falafels for each of us.  I don't know if it was because I hadn't eaten in so long, but that falafel was delicious!  I've tried several falafels here in the US since we came back, but nothing has matched the yumminess of that meal.


The next day, our last full day in Egypt, began with a visit to the Cairo Museum.  I think a month would not be long enough to explore the treasures of this amazing museum, and the few hours we had certainly weren't enough.  No cameras were allowed inside the museum, and there were way too many people for me to get a decent photo of the front.  So I made a layout using a backside view taken from our hotel room.  I also used my ticket as an embellishment on this page:

Just driving around the city provided so many interesting things to look at.  (this layout is a QuickQuotes layout that I got at last August's convention... I just waited til now to share it so it wasn't way out of order)

This layout was designed to fit a lot of photos in it.  The following pics are of all those photos.  It shouldn't be hard to see what I mean about there being so much to watch from the bus windows.

 That last, sideways photo shows the entrance to then-President Mubarek's palace.  And in the photo below, those lips you see were on the front of the key card to our hotel room.  Odd, but totally memory-worthy.

From the Cairo Museum, we went to the Hanging Church, which is certainly the oldest church that I have ever visited.  It's the home of the Coptic Church's Pope, and it was beautiful.  It's called the hanging church because it's built over an ancient watergate.

 Our hotel room had a great view.  In addition to being able to see the Cairo Museum, and the site of future demonstrations, we had a wonderful view of the Nile.  In the late evening, the river was filled with the red sails of feluccas, and later, there were dinner boats alight with hundreds of multi-colored lights.

 As you can see, there is some hidden journaling on this layout.  I decided to include a little bit about the revolution and how my experiences in Egypt affected my interest in the whole proceeding.

I also devoted one layout to the wonderful dining experiences of our trip, including the last night when we chose to eat at a local McDonald's to get a break from the spices that are so different from what I eat back here at home.  There are two hidden photos in this layout.  One is of a glass bottled Coke sitting in the window of our boat cabin (I have a special fondness for glass bottled Cokes, and I was thrilled to have one every day at tea time on board our cruise boat).

Well, that's it for the Egyptian album.  What's next?  Wedding albums, pre-wedding albums, and the honeymoon album, of course!  I just hope that I'll be able to get these albums finished a little more quickly than the last one.  Only time will tell, I suppose.  Til next time, I hope everyone in the US has a wonderful 4th.  I'm looking forward to spending some time relaxing with my hubby, who has spent a lot of time on the road here lately.  Happy crafting everybody!

Patriotic finishes and a bit more Egypt

Is everyone managing to stay cool?  It was ridiculously hot yesterday, and today promises more of the same around here.  But the humidity was unusually low yesterday, at least.  Felt more like Egypt than it did home!  Until my recent move, I have suffered from a poorly functioning air conditioning.  If it was in the 90's or 100's outside, my apartment would also be around 90 or so for a few hours in the afternoon every day.  What a blessing that my new home has real a/c units.  Downstairs stayed cool and comfy all day long, and upstairs was only off by 3 or 4 degrees.  Not bad when it's 105 outside!

Moving on to the real purpose of this post, I have two stitching finishes and three new layouts to share.  Since I've already mentioned Egypt in this post, I guess I'll start with the layouts.  This first layout shows some of the pretty sailboats we saw dotting Lake Nasser.  The boats are called feluccas and we were supposed to get a chance to ride on one during our stay in Aswan.  Unfortunately, our guides declared that winds were not strong enough and canceled that part of the trip.  We did see several of the sailboats being towed by small motorized boats later in the day, so I guess they had a point.  Who wants to be stuck on a hot lake with no wind?  But they were beautiful to watch, especially late in the day like in this photo.

From Aswan, we headed back up the river towards Luxor.  I enjoyed my last views of the pastoral river life.

Once we reached Luxor, we boarded yet another airplane and flew back to Cairo.  We checked into the Ramses Hilton for the last few days of our stay in Egypt.  (BTW, our hotel was looking directly down on the square where much of the protesting took place 4 months after our return to the US.  It was fascinating to watch history unfold in a place that we had been just a short time before, and weird to imagine what it would have been like if we had chosen to delay our travels until February.)

We spent the next two days riding around in a tour bus, taking in the sights of Cairo.  One of the things that has always struck me about Islamic decor is the beauty of the geometric designs with which they embellish their buildings.  So I devoted a layout to some of the marvelous architecture and decor that we saw:

That's it for the layouts.  Not too many left for Egypt.  Maybe I'll get them all finished up soon.  Maybe.

I've also had the time this week to finish up two of the patriotic pieces I shared in my last post.  This first one is stitched from a freebie pattern from Chessie and Me using the recommended fibers on a piece of 32 count Silkweavers Cookie Dough linen, and trimmed with Candy Cane R&R Chenille:

It's a pretty small little piece, so I just finished into a little pin pillow.  I'll add it to my pillow basket that sits on one of the living room bookshelves.  This was a really fast, fun stitch.  

The second piece that I have finished is Blackbird Design's "Land of the Free" from one of last year's issues of Cross Stitch and Needlework Magazine.  I stitched it on 36 count Mellow linen from Picture This Plus.  I used the luscious Belle Soie silks that the pattern called for, but I ended up switching colors for the white, blue, and green.  The recommended colors just didn't look anything like what was in the picture (or like what I wanted my piece to look like).  I guess that's just one of the hazards of using overdyed fibers!  I am pretty happy with the end result: 

Again, I used R&R Candy Cane chenille for the edging.  This piece I'm using as a door hanger on our coat closet in the foyer.  I used some pretty fabrics to back each piece:

I don't have any progress photos to show yet, but I'm stitching away on my last patriotic piece for the summer, Penny America.  I hope to have the stitching done by the end of next week.  That might be a stretch though.  We'll see.

Til next time, I hope everyone has a creative and cool weekend!

A family layout and, of course, more from Egypt!

Is everyone ready for Christmas yet? I know I'm not/am, well, a little bit of both, really. The mad rush at work is (mostly) over. There are a few last minute gifts to acquire, and our annual charity event to get in order. I made a point over the weekend and the first half of this week to find some time for a few layouts, but this may be it until the year is done and over.

Websters Pages has a monthly challenge on their Ning board. This month, the challenge was a fairly simple one: create a layout using their Western Romance line and some of their stick pins. I pulled an old picture of my sister and I and one of our first cousins. We're hugging Champ, who was a great dog, and standing in MaMa and PaPa's barnyard. We're so young! I used the fussy cut flowers and stick pins to cover a funny glare on the right hand side of the photo.

I also made 3 more layouts for my Egypt album... The end is in sight! This first one is a layout about the challenges of negotiating the barter system. I have to say, this was one of the most overwhelming things about the trip. At every temple or monument, you must run a veritable gauntlet of shops and touts, all of whom will try to catch your attention and press you to enter their shop or make a purchase. And they name some crazy prices! And if you aren't careful, they try to trick you... switching the nice display item with a poorer, wrapped item, claiming that a price in pounds was in English not Egyptian pounds after several minutes of negotiation, telling you banana leaves are more expensive papyrus, painted concrete is basalt or alabaster, and on and on. To be honest, I'd have probably bought, but sometimes, after a few hot hours in the sun, I just couldn't handle the mental stress of driving a hard bargain with these veterans of hustle and deals.

On one of the evenings that we were in Aswan, we enjoyed dance performances by a whirling dervish and a belly dancer on board our boat. The dervish guy was really cool. Round and round he spun, and when he turned on the lights in his skirt, it looked really cool, especially in the ceiling mirrors of the boat's lounge. The belly dancer was interesting, but she wasn't nearly as skillful as the dervish was.

The afternoon of our to the High Dam, we boarded little, shaded motor boats and headed for Kitchener Island, also known as Cat Island, to visit the botanical gardens. We were actually supposed to take a felucca ride, but this particular event was cancelled due to low winds on the lake that day. We actually saw one or two feluccas being towed by motor boats after they got stranded on the lake.

Once on Kitchener Island, we had some time to wander through the gardens. We saw lots of cats. I was kind of surprised that they were so small. Based on the stories Elizabeth Peters told about her fictional family's cats, I expected huge animals, but none of the cats I saw have anything on the beasts I'm harboring in my apartment! It wasn't too long into our stroll through the gardens that we noticed something odd: there were a lot of men with submachine guns walking around. After one of them kindly pointed out a couple of birds nesting in a tree, we concluded that they were some sort of hybrid docent/security guard. Alton's imitation of a guide pointing out a bit of vegetation by firing his gun at said vegetation still makes me giggle.

Although I have no photos to show, stitching does continue apace. I hope to start and finish an ornament for a co-worker over this weekend (ha! This may be an EXTREMELY ambitious goal). I am also going on the hunt for some fabric to back a large pillow that I'm working on and want to finish by Christmas (again, probably an overly ambitious goal). Til then, I hope everyone is able to take some time to relax and enjoy some quality family time.

The calm part of the trip

Okay, I figured it was about time I shared another story about our trip to Egypt last year. I can't believe it's been over a year and I still haven't finished my album! It's good that life keeps me busy, I suppose, but this is the longest it's ever taken me to finish an overseas vacation album!

The evening of our Galabea Party, we docked in Aswan, which was the southernmost part of our cruise. The differences between Aswan and Cairo (as well as most of the rest of our trip) were striking. The stall owners were less agressive, things seemed less hectic in general, and it was a wee bit warmer (okay, a lot bit warmer). Goods were cheaper, and there were items for sale here that you didn't see in the north like woven baskets and camel bone jewelry. Most of my favorite parts of the trip took place in and around this city.

We started our first day in Aswan with a boat ride to the island temple of Philae:


It was a beautiful spot in the middle of the lake, with pretty plants and flowers on the edges of the island. The temple, on the other hand, looked pretty much like most of the other temples we had seen on the trip. The novelty was starting to wear off. Just a little. Turns out, this temple, well, really, the entire island, had been transplanted when the dam was built to save it from being completely flooded. It's kind of weird to be someplace that's so old, looks so old, but really, hasn't been in its current location for even a full century.

Aswan is situated on Lake Nasser, and much of our time in Aswan was centered on the lake. I'll post more about our other trips on the lake in another post, but here's a layout I did trying to catch some of the color that I think of when I remember the lake:

Once we returned from Philae to the mainland, we boarded our bus and headed to the Aswan High Dam. We stopped for just a few moments to walk around on the top of the dam and take a few photos. The lotus style monument you see is a gift from the Russians in honor of the workers who built the dam.

From there, we walked through the Aswan rock quarry and took a look at the giant unfinished obelisk, still stuck in the ground after all these centuries. It would have been huge, but it cracked before they finished their work. The small picture of what looks like a little city is actually a cemetery. They built these little miniature homes for their dead, and will come out to their relatives' tombs to have picnics with their dead family. Quite different from what I'm used to back here at home!

I also made a layout to memorialize our tour guide, Mohammed. He was a true fount of knowledge, although there were times when I suspected he made a few things up. He definitely made the trip as wonderful as it could be. I never felt like he was rushing us, he was funny, and he was an excellent source of medicine for tummy troubles! Alton and I still quote him from time to time, our favorite phrase being "yummy shrimps" something Mohammed talked about repeatedly during our time in Cairo.