Project Life - Week 8

Welcome to Project Life 2013! If you are new to my blog, welcome! I hope you will stay a while. I'm Jessica, wife to Juan, mommy to 1 year old Maddie. I am also an electrical engineer by day and I am participating in Project Life, a different way to record our lives by taking one photo a day. This was inspired by the fabulous Becky Higgins who has put together a wonderful kit to make this challenge easier.

I am using the digital kit on shutterfly (hopefully Olive once it has been released), find more info at http://www.beckyhiggins.com/blog. This digital version uses Shutterfly and is SUPER easy to use! See my completed pages for 2012 using the Shutterfly Cobalt kit HERE.

And finally, my POTW (pictures of the week):

Tuesday - Juan made a delicious dinner tonight, salmon with lemon butter sauce. Yummy and very nice to have a night off! Juan said that Maddie pooped in the potty chair today. He could tell that she was starting to poop, so he ran her upstairs to the potty chair. She had already started, but then finished in the potty chair! This evening, we were playing in Maddie's playroom and I was digging in her closet and found a wooden alphabet puzzle that Maddie got for her birthday and Juan put in the closet for when she was older. I opened it up and Maddie could not only match every letter to its space (although she hasn't figured out how to turn them to get them into the space) but she also picked up 5 letters and told me what they were. "O" which I knew that she knew, "B" which I thought maybe was a fluke, then she said "Q". That was definitely not a fluke. She also said "P" and "I". Wow! I was quite surprised.

Wednesday - Juan added new weather stripping to the front door and Maddie "helped". She was very into helping stick the screws in the baseboard for Daddy to screw in.

Thursday - Maddie found Daddy's watch and said, "neck, neck" and proceeded to wear it like a necklace. She is so goofy.

Friday - Once again, Daddy found Maddie in her doll crib instead of playing with it. She gets stuck and then hollars for help to get out.

Saturday - We took Nana to the new Perot Museum and then to lunch at Genghis Grill for her belated birthday. Maddie LOVED the kids area and played for over 1-1/2 hours. When we finally dragged her out, she cried until she saw that there was sooo much more to see. We will definitely be going back soon.

Sunday -  As I opened the garage door to head out to the car for church, Maddie ran by me and was instantly in the alley playing with the neighbors rocks. She loves being outside and looking for "bugs". When we dropped her off at church today she was crying and fighting me the entire corridor walk, but when we walked away we could tell that she had already stopped crying. When we returned, she had a sticker on her nose and was eating an animal cracker. I think she is starting to adjust a bit.

Monday - Daddy was working in the yard today, getting the garden tilled, weeding the rock garden and picking up after the dogs. We let Maddie run free while I made dinner. She loves the backyard and ran to the dogs many times shouting, "Mia, Mia, Mia." She also let the dogs lick her face and then tried to lick them back. She loves those dogs and they are getting really good with her. I am always afraid they will knock her over, but they do pretty good.

Have a great week!

New Layout - Be Grateful

After a beautiful afternoon, playing outside I finished up a layout this evening from long ago when Maddie was only 28 days old. She was so small and fragile. The journaling says "After heartbreak upon heartbreak, we gave up the hope of every having you. God was simply telling us, "Be patient, be grateful!"

I used this month's sketch from Pamela's World of Scrap. 

My title came from the February challenge over at Scrappy Friends - Scrappin N Happy. This month's challenge was to use a sentence from this piece of WordArt as your title or in your journalling.  I used "Be Grateful".

I also played along with the February challenge - Counting  Blessings over at Colorful Creations.

February is the month of love!!  Scrap about someone or something you love having in your life!  Obviously little Maddie is my love!

Requirements for this challenge:
1.  Use a minimum of 2 photos on your page;
2.  Use at least 3 hearts . . . they can be punched, brads, misted, cut from paper . . . anything as long as I can count at least 3;
3.  Handwritten journaling;
4.  4 or more brads

Here are a couple of close-up photos:

Materials Used - Paper - Authentique & Prima; punches - Emagination & EK Success; stickers - EK Success; title - American Crafts Thickers; brads - Basic Grey; Spellbinders - Nested Pennants.

SYTYCS #8 - Family Mark

Happy Saturday!  We spent a fun and EXHAUSTING morning at the new PEROT Museum with Nana for her birthday. Maddie had an absolute ball in the children's area. What a great place to take little ones! We have a membership now, so we will DEFINITELY be returning soon!  

I finished my layout this afternoon for the SYTYCS (So You Think You Can Scrap) Round #8 over at Colorful Creations! I'm still hanging in there along with 20 other crafty ladies. This week the requirements were: create your own pattern paper. You can use cardstock as your base for your paper, matting, borders, etc….  NO STORE BOUGHT PATTERN PAPERS!!!

In addition to your made pattern papers you MUST use ALL of the following:

Journaling card

Punch

Metal (any type of metal)

Mixed alphas

I stamped and inked the green background cardstock and the blue cardstock matt.  For the ticket paper, I used washi tape and cream cardstock.  I just ran strip after strip of washi tape in all directions and then trimmed the edge of the matt and inked the edges in brown.  The journaling card is the "tell me a story" card.  I used different heart punches of red cardstock. The metal that I used was the word "Family" in the title, the arrow on the journaling card, and the letter K in the tittle. Finally, my alphas in the title are a mixture of different fonts, colors and materials. The M is a fuzzy, the R is a chipboard, the K is metal, and the A is paper sticker with a metallic border.  

I used this month's sketch from Scrap Much Sketchy Friday.  

I moved the layered embellishments to the left side of the photos to work with my journaling block. 

Finally, I played along with both The Paper Girls challenge to "use Washi tape" and the Studio Challenges February challenge to create a layout with no pattern paper and get creative with washi tape!  As I mentioned, I created my own pattern paper out of washi tape.  I layered multiple strips over and over in all directions on a piece of cream cardstock, trimmed the edges and then inked it with brown ink.

Here are a couple of close-up pictures:

Materials Used: Paper - Bazzill; ink - CTMH; stamps - CTMH (Love Life & Wicked); washi tape - Tim Holtz; metal - 7 Gypsies; arrow - 7 Gypsies; heart punches - Emagination & EK Success; jounaling block - unknown; letters - Pink Paislee, Pressed Petals, American Crafts, & Cloud 9 Design.

Thanks for visiting me!  I hope you are having a scrappy weekend! 

Project Life - Week 7

Welcome to Project Life 2013! If you are new to my blog, welcome! I hope you will stay a while. I'm Jessica, wife to Juan, mommy to 1 year old Maddie. I am also an electrical engineer by day and I am participating in Project Life, a different way to record our lives by taking one photo a day. This was inspired by the fabulous Becky Higgins who has put together a wonderful kit to make this challenge easier.

I am using the digital kit on shutterfly (hopefully Olive once it has been released), find more info at http://www.beckyhiggins.com/blog. This digital version uses Shutterfly and is SUPER easy to use! See my completed pages for 2012 using the Shutterfly Cobalt kit HERE.

And finally, my POTW (pictures of the week):

Tuesday - Maddie figured out how to put on Mr. Potato Head's glasses today. She is such a crazy little thing.

Thursday - Valentine's Day is today. We are very tight on money right now with him still out of a job and trying to pay two mortgages. Juan and I got each other cards and Juan surprised me with cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory. It was a sweet little surprise. We tried to let Maddie have a taste, but she wanted no part of it, instead preferring strawberries. My White Chocolate Raspberry cheesecake was delicious!

Friday - Now that Juan is without a job again, this is my morning sight, his accord in lieu of my new CRV. Oh well, I guess that's just part of life. He was very sweet this morning. It was cold, there was even ice on the windshield. He got up early to go study and took the Accord to fill it with gas for me and scrape the windows so I wouldn't have to. He really is sweet to me on a daily basis.

Saturday - Another busy day. I made muffins for breakfast, Maddie was quick to help put the muffin wrappers in the muffin pan and then take off running with the entire pan! I also let her paint for the first time. She loved it, but was more interested in opening and closing the paints and putting her fingers in them. I think we should have tried finger painting first. She also spent quite a bit of time putting the window stickers on the windows and playing "bang, bang" with the spoons and bowls I gave her. She is definitely a non-stop little tornado right now, but soooo cute! Maddie is officially a little parrot. She mimics EVERYTHING we say, "Boon" for balloon, cold, hot, blow, "p" for penguin, Mia, dog, car, soooo many more.

Sunday - Daddy took Maddie to Central Market this morning to get spinach for her breakfast. She came home with a "Boon" - balloon and was quite excited to show me. We took her to church again this morning. Maddie screamed uncontrollably and forcefully held onto my shirt this morning when we dropped her off. Thankfully, Ms. Gerrie said that she only cried for about a minute and then played the entire time. She was not crying when we picked her up, but she came running and teared up the moment she saw us. She did say bye-bye to Ms Gerrie and to her little friend in her class. I am hoping she will eventually adjust.

Monday - I am still hanging in there on the Colorful Creations (So You Think You Can Scrap) Challenge. It started the first week in January and we are now on week 7. The layout I completed this week for the first page of Maddie's 1st album was selected as a "Featured Photo", pretty cool! Tonight when I gave Maddie a bath, she ran over to her potty training toilet saying, "poop, poop". My mother-in-law opened it up and put it in her bathroom a couple of weeks ago, but we haven't started trying to potty train her yet.  I was a bit surprised when she ran over to it, so we quickly stripped her down and sat her on the chair.  After a couple of minutes she got up. I started running her bath and she was alternating between sitting on the potty and getting up. I finally turned around to put her in the bath and realized that she had at some point pee'd all over the floor. So I guess she really did need to go. Looks like maybe we should start potty training her.


Thanks for visiting this week!

New Challenge Blog Launching - Scrap Your Story

Hello scrappy friends!  There is a new Challenge blog launching in 12 days. It will have weekly challenges with a variety of themes. Check them out at HERE!

SYTYCS #7 - & Then There Was U

Hi all!

I am still standing in the "So You Think You Can Scrap" challenge over at Colorful Creations.  This is week 7. This is a layout for the first page of Maddie's baby album. 

The challenge was to use the following sketch and all of the following: Hand Stitching, Misting,

Fussy cutting (List in the gallery what items you fussy cut), and Use these colors ONLY red, yellow, blue, & green, you are not required to use all of the colors. 

I used only red, blue, green and a little bit of yellow in the bugs. My colors look funny as I took this photo this evening with flash inside. The background is green, the pattern papers are all either blue or red. I inked the edges of the blue papers with blue ink and even stamped blue for the journaling and used blue ink. My misting is done with blue chaulk mist and is on the horizontal blue pattern paper, seen best behind the journaling block stamp. The red in the fussy cut bugs was orange, so I colored all of it red. The yellow in the bugs looks a little orange in the photo, but it is yellow.  The flower and brad center is all green, the title letters are blue, green and red. The stitching is done with blue DMC floss horizontally along the red paper strip and vertically along the right hand side at the edge of the paper punching. I stayed very true to the sketch, only modifying slightly for the title. Finally, I fussy cut all of the bugs vertically along the left side and in the top right corner and used pop dots to give them some dimension on the page.

Here are a couple of close up photos:

Materials used: paper - LYB, title letters - Heidi Swapp, pink Paisley and thickers; welcome home journaling tag - LYB; thread - DMC floss; punch - Creative Memories; chipboard - Maya Road; paint - Making Memories; ink - CTMH; stamp - CTMH; brad - MME Lush; flower - unknown; pop dots - unknown.

Thanks for visiting!

Project Life - Week 6

Welcome to Project Life 2013! If you are new to my blog, welcome! I hope you will stay a while. I'm Jessica, wife to Juan, mommy to 1 year old Maddie. I am also an electrical engineer by day and I am participating in Project Life, a different way to record our lives by taking one photo a day. This was inspired by the fabulous Becky Higgins who has put together a wonderful kit to make this challenge easier.

I am using the digital kit on shutterfly (hopefully Olive once it has been released), find more info at http://www.beckyhiggins.com/blog. This digital version uses Shutterfly and is SUPER easy to use! See my completed pages for 2012 using the Shutterfly Cobalt kit HERE.

And finally, my POTW (pictures of the week):

Tuesday - I made Shepard's Pie for dinner. We were not too impressed with the recipe, although I was missing a couple of ingredients so who knows. Maddie LOVES taking a bath in the big bath tub. I can fill it up to the brim and she swims in it. I just can't stand how cute her little bottom is! 

Wednesday - I walked into Starbucks this morning to see my hubby sitting in one of the chairs, studying on his Ipad. ID Group didn't need him this week, so he is trying to get a bunch of things done around the house.

Thursday - Maddie and her boots, I think she inherited her mama's legs! She has also become interested in her bead puzzle lately.

Saturday - Another busy day. First Maddie and I went to a play date at Danna's with her kids, Kaitlyn and Ryan, and Janet's kiddo, Audrey. Janet is going to be induced with her third, a little girl, on Thursday. Maddie was not quite sure what to make of all the wild and crazy antics of the 3 bigger kids, but she tried to keep up. Then we came home to a play date with Joy's little girl Noel. Maddie started crying and throwing a little fit when I held Noel. I think she is getting a bit spoiled. Noel is 4 months old and quite the little cutey!

Sunday - We took Maddie to church again this week and they put her in Ms. Gerrie's class. She was waiting for Maddie. Maddie wanted no part of walking into the room, although the promise of stickers did make her pause to contemplate it. She cried a bit when we left, but when we returned, Gerrie said that she played the entire time; mostly peek-a-boo with another little girl. They even made a craft. Maddie was definitely ready to see us when we arrived, but at least she didn't cry through the entire service which was an improvement. Maddie had been trying to climb into her highchair lately. Now the only problem is that she gets stuck in this position and can't get down. It is only a 3" step, but for some reason it frightens her. Nana came over this afternoon and watched Maddie while Juan and I went to a movie, Silver Linings. It was a great movie and a nice little break for us. Maddie is still working on her last incisor and her other molar on the bottom. She seems to get them all at once. 

Monday - Daddy took Maddie for a walk and since it was cold outside, he put her in her coat and hat. Such a little sweetheart.

Thanks for visiting!