iNSD ~ why is it important?

iNSD.

What is it? 

Where have you been?!

iNSD stands for International Scrapbook Day.  (The actual name is National Scrapbooking Day, but who wants to leave out the rest of the world? I don't!  I have friends in Australia, England, and all over- I want everyone to be included!)

Anyway....  what does that have to do with me?
SHOPPING! 

Many digital scrapbook sites have amazing deals, chats, freebies, and all sorts of fun stuff. 

Umm, when is it, you ask?
Saturday, May 7th is the official "holiday" but at Digital Designer Shop we're celebrating all week! Today it was announced on the DDS Blog- and there will be freebies, a fun photo scavenger hunt, and the chance to win an entire (huge) digital kit!

Well, will you join us?  Pretty Please?

CLICK HERE to go to the forums and check in!

Valley of Fire Park

My family went exploring in our new backyard last week- before it gets to hot to play in the desert. We ended up at the Valley of Fire State Park.  Want to see?

 I was surprised to see so many flowers.  They were small and sparse, but they were there!  Gotta love spring. :)  I have a feeling there won't be any flowers in July.

 I thought this was neat to look at:

 I climbed up into a tunnel and took this of myself, at a wide angle (18mm, probably) with my XTi. I was so warm that day that my face was all splotchy, so I desaturated it in ACR and then used Pioneer Woman's Sepia action- and then lowered the opacity of that layer.

 I saw a couple of creatures.  I guess I'll have to get used to the idea that I won't be seeing moose and bears anymore- but I'll be seeing creepy crawlies.  As long as they don't startle me, I'll be fine. :)

 Except for scorpions.  Yuck.

This below is very cool.  The cabins are made out of the sandstone rock.  They're so pretty up close. (I had to wait almost a half an hour to get a shot without people in it! When I was down to waiting for one family to leave, the Mom sat down and kept telling her kids she wanted to go see Elephant Rock. They kept running around. I kept thinking "Get them out of here, Mom.  You're not mean enough." lol

 This one was planted in the parking lot of the visitor center. I'm not sure if it is native to the area or not.  Guess I'll have to find one of those "plants of the Desert" guides.

 Gotta love when the family makes it easy on you to take pictures!  Especially after taking one or two with the settings wrong! "Wait!"  "It's too dark- hold on a sec!"  "Don't move- I need another one!" 

I'm sure you understand. :)

 I almost had to get on my knees to get the flowers in the bottom of this next shot.

 And I gotta give credit to my son!  I love having a child old enough to handle my camera (once I dial down the aperture so he has a better chance of getting us in focus).  We went a few years without hardly any pictures of the two of us.  It's nice to have pics of both of us in the scrapbooks. :)

Well, thanks for joining me on our trip to the Valley of Fire State Park.  :)

Happy Easter!

Ready for Easter?

This Easter will be the least celebrated for us so far. I bought a ham, and the Easter Bunny has received the change of address cards. ;)  But we're still living in the travel trailer, and it's a little too warm for a full fledged cookfest.  I think my oldest will miss the gravy and mashed potatoes- I told him we're having ham sandwiches and deviled eggs. ;)

On that note, I started thinking about how we celebrated Easter when I was a kid.  We'd get up to find a basket full of candy- and it always included a large chocolate bunny.  In the afternoon we'd dress up in fancy clothes and go to my Grandma's house for dinner- where the Easter Bunny would leave us another basket- always with my favorite thing ever- a bird's nest made out of coconut and chocolate with 3 jelly beans in it.  I loved those nests.

Mmmmmmm.  I can still taste the sweet coconut now.

I need to find a chocolate shop in this town. :)

I made this layout with new fantastic Easter Scuffy Overlays by Honey Scraps (some have bunnies, and others have flowers- so it's not specific to Easter), and these cool new Stitches Grids.  I think I'll get a lot of use out of them!

Here's the layout:

Supplies:
 Paper- just a color chosen from my great-Aunt's dress- I used the paint bucket tool.
Overlay: Easter Scruffy Overlays by Honey Scraps 
Stitches: Stitches 02 Grids by Cilenia Curtis (link coming soon)
Water color brush (for the egg photo)- Art Box 04 by Cilenia  Curtis (do you notice I use this set A LOT?!)
Tag & String: Tiny Tags 1- Basics by Cilenia Curtis
All of the above products can be found at Digital Designer Shop.
Fonts: Pea Kate, Tw Cen MT (I swear!) & Smiley Monster (for the title)

(Do you find reading that kind of Supply list easier than the way I did it before?)

Happy Easter, everyone!

Simple Things: baseball glove

Here's to new hobbies. :) 

Than & Now (keeping track of your stories)

Normally the first things I do in the morning are grab a bowl of cereal and read DDS, my email, Facebook, and a few blogs that I am addicted to. This morning my wifi was out (do I complain about that a lot?) so I didn't really know what to do. I opened Evernote, where I store everything I don't want to lose- recipes, tutorials, and stories about my family's life that I want to scrapbook someday.

I came across this paragraph that I wrote in May of 2010 about my car reminding me of the green van my Dad had when I was a kid. I was inspired to get it on a page right then. Don't you love when that happens?

So this is what I ended up with:

 Supplies:
papers: Relax kit
tabs: Fasteners 02_Tabs kit
clock brad: Creative Musings March 01 kit
all by Cilenia Curtis at Digital Designer Shop
Fonts: Big Caslon, CK Ali's Hand, and 1942 Report

It's not fancy. It doesn't have the artsy brush style that I like to play with now, but my story is on paper (well, it will be... that's another thread... chkl), and I can delete it from my Evernote notebook.

I love when things work out like that..



How do you keep track of the stories you want to tell?

First day of School

If you follow my blog at all, you know we just moved. I wanted to write down the feelings and experience of the first day at a new school before I forgot anything. The title of the page that I saved to print has the actual name of the school, but for public purposes, I wrote "New School" in the title.

That will be a one page layout in my older son's album. But for my younger son, he has an extra story to tell from the first day of school, so this will be the right side of the layout in his book:

{Supplies: Creative Musings Kits 02, 03 and 04; Altered Art Ledgers, and Art Box 04 Watercolor Brushes, all by Cilenia Curtis at Digital Designer Shop; font: GeoSans Light}

Simple Things: Cactus

I recently moved to the desert. I saw this walking to the park. :)

Country Music concert

My family is lucky enough to be living in Las Vegas now, and yesterday the USO and the Academy of Country Music awards program put on a concert at our Air Base, which was totally awesome! 

(I didn't take my own camera because the last USO concert I went to was packed, and we stood the whole time, and my camera is pretty heavy. So I used DH's P&S for these.  Not TOO bad, but next time I'm taking mine!)

Brett Eldridge

Blake Shelton

Luke Bryan

Sunny Sweeny (whom I'm not sure I'd heard of before)

Little Big Town

Craig Morgan

Miss Willy Brown (whom I'd also not heard of before but who sang a lovely Thank You song to those troops overseas protecting us. I hope they record it someday. So many more military folks need to hear it.)

And, finally, Montgomery Gentry

Thank you USO and the ACMs. Thank you to the bands and singers who came and gave us a little treat. Thank YOU for supporting the people who fight for our freedom. They're awesome. You're awesome. (And if I don't already have your albums, I'm SO buying them now!


And, if this works... here is a video that the ACM put on their website:



See this screenshot?

We were sitting on the bleachers in that oval! Bet you think the pics are pretty good now!! :)

Pokemon Obsessed layout

I should have made a layout about this obsession a long time ago. It's been a couple of years since Brett discovered Pokemon.

{Supplies: Relax kit and Art Box brush by Cilenia Curtis at Digital Designer Shop; template by Tiffany Tillman; distress brush by Nancy Rowe Janitz}


Brett took the pictures of his drawings on his iPhone. I love that he's old enough to help me with his pages. :)

What is a hobby or obsession that you or your kids are into right now?