Happy Anniversary!!

I just noticed that today is my blog's anniversary!  I started it in 2007.  Holy  moly, it's been 5 years??!!  WOW!

I thought it would be fun to share some of my blog headers through the years- well, the ones I can still find!! ;)

May 2008

May 2008

October 2008

Christmas 2008

Winter 2008-2009

March 2009

June 2009

July 2010

And the current header:

Well, that was fun!!  Here's to another 5 years!

Remember

Ever since I moved- well, months before we put the house up for sale, my scrapbooks have been boxed up.  When we moved into this house, after a long waiting period, I opened a few boxes of scrapbooks- just the kids' books and our Places, Things, People, and Us albums, really, and put them in my bedroom closet.  It's the only place I had room for them.  So for well over a year, no one but me has seen those albums. 
 Last week I brought out half of those albums and gave them a prominent place in the living room. Ever since then, they have been well loved and enjoyed.  My boys have pulled them out numerous times, laughed, told me stories I had written in there, and remembered things they had forgotten.
  And guess what?  My mojo has come back.  I've been scrapping again! :)
It's amazing how that happens!

Supplies: Shades of Blue kit by Cilenia Curtis at Digitals. 

Fonts: Hoefler Text and Nicky Script (custom font by Darcie Baldwin)

Take the time to enjoy your scrapbooks!

Color Confidence class- color schemes

Today my friend Cilenia's class started at Renee Pearson's site!  I'm so excited for her! The class is called Building Color Confidence and week 1's lessons are great!

I watched all 4 lessons for the week today. Lesson for has us making color swatch cards using our own inspiration. I started to do a card or two to post in the gallery there, but once I started I couldn't stop!  I kept finding more photos in my collection that I wanted to play with! I ended up with 7 color schemes.

This one is my favorite color scheme.  I took this picture when I still lived in Alaska. I LOVE those blues and greens. :)

During the lesson I started thinking about how much I love bright, happy colors, but how my house has white walls (it's a rental), beige carpet, and wood furniture, either mid tone or dark woods. That's it.  No color except in the laundry room with the red washer & dryer, and in the master bath with the red, brown, and beige shower curtain.  Some of these color schemes would be awesome abstract paintings or pillows (or both!!) in my house!!

So I found this picture from the Bellagio Casino in Las Vegas from this past Christmas. I got a great Christmas color scheme out of it.

And I also got a very pretty blue color scheme from the same photo.  Whoever chose the wall paint at the Bellagio did well!! ;)

I think there is still time to join in on the fun!  Come join us!


**All photos on these color schemes are taken by me, Nicky Hurt**

More of the Ice Castle

My friend Lynda asked in the comments on my last post about what in the world this Ice Castle really IS, so I quickly made some of my day photos web-sized to show you more. 

Warning- this is a photo heavy post.


As we drove up this is what we saw:

 I'll admit, my first thoughts were that it looks like the piles of snow and ice that the snow plows leave in parking lots in Alaska. I was not impressed.  Yet.

 Once we got inside, we saw a huge wall of ice- lines of icicles everywhere!  There were tunnels and caves that adults could walk right through.

 The photo below is from inside the Ice Castle, looking over the wall at the mountain.  I kind of love it!

 I only have a few photos of friends here at the Castle.  I know others took tons, but as I said before, I don't have the nine thousand six hundred of the photos that were taken in these 4 days yet!
This photo below is Marcie taking pictures of Kendra and Tamara taking pictures of Marcie. :) Yes, you would have been sick of us by the end of the weekend.

 Near the end of the hour we spent in the Castle, a man who works there started talking to us, and explained that this is how they built the Ice Castle- this photo below is the "icicle farm." (or was it icicle garden? I can't remember.)  Anyway, they use water to make icicles here, then at night, they use slushy snow to make a new layer on top of the walls of the castle, and stick the icicles in the snow, and let it freeze, then they turn on sprinklers overnight to get the castle to grow.  This process is trademarked, and there are only two of these castles.  The man started it in his backyard for his kids years ago, and now he has "built" two castles. Very cool!

Here is a section that was just "made" the night before.


What do you think? Here are more- these were taken the second time we went to the Castle- after dark. Maybe seeing the full photo (rather than using masks like my scrapbook page yesterday) it will be easier to visualize.

So here are the pictures of the Ice Castle at night.
We knew it was lit, but I expected colored lights, because of the website photo.  These were tungsten blue and white lights.  Many of them had the lights INSIDE the walls, which made them glow.

All of the  night photos were taken at super high ISO (6400) and handheld- so they aren't perfect, but they were pretty darned good!

This is what it looked like from the parking lot.

 This shot below- I was inside a tunnel taking pictures of the icicles - then I noticed those stars and tried to get the icicles AND stars. I got a couple, but this one had the stars in the best position.

 Me :)

 My partner in crime, Monda.  :)
(I just realized how funny that line is in these circumstances.... )

 I loved the tunnel shots at night.

 If you get the chance to see an Icicle Castle at night- go for it!
Here is a link to the website for this Ice Castle.  We got our tickets on Groupon- so take advantage of those deals!

Ice Castle at Night

While we were at our retreat last weekend, two of the hostesses planned a surprise for us. All we knew ahead of time was that we had to be at the house from 2-5pm on Saturday.  That's it.

I have to admit I guessed what the surprise was!

The surprise was that Anna Aspnes, digital designer, teacher extraordinaire was coming to the house to deconstruct some layouts for us!  It was really fun listening to her explain how she made the layouts, what she was thinking when she put that element there, and so forth.  The one really memorable moment for me was when someone asked her exactly what she was thinking when she made her title the way she did.  She said "honestly, I was thinking I had to get my son to soccer practice, so I needed to get done fast!"  I said "so in other words, you people stress yourselves out over nothing!" lol  Pick a font and color and go with it. ;)  I also enjoyed chatting about being Air Force wives.

Her visit was very inspiring (for the mojo as well as the credit card!) so I bought her newest kit to play with.  Here is my first layout. I think I went a bit overboard with those masks!  I can barely see the background paper!

 I just kept adding masks and photos until I had used all the photos I wanted!

Supplies:
Artplay Palette Adventure kit
ModGrunge FotoBlendz No. 4
both by Anna Aspnes

Journaling:
 When we bought the Groupons for the Ice Castle in Silverthorne, we knew the tickets were for 24 hours and we intended on going during daylight and again in the evening when the castle was lit. As we left the restaurant after dinner, the other three cars drove away- two going home and one going to the grocery store.  That left Monda and me to drive home. Monda remembered the Ice Castle and asked if I wanted to go back.  Uh, yeah!!
  We excitedly drove back to the ice castle, not knowing really what to expect. Monda’s camera batteries had died, so she grabbed some walking sticks to make walking on the ice and through the slush easier, and I took most of the pictures.  She likes the one that looks like some sort of flower. After we walked through, Monda spotted a man with an SLR camera, and we asked him to take our picture together. (Tip: You have to scope out the people you ask to take your picture!  You want one that knows what he is doing!)
  Monda and I were so excited that we remembered to go back at night, and were excited to tell the other girls where we’d been!
  When we got back home we were the last car there, and no one asked where we’d been or if we got lost.  We held off a while before we told them, and once I had my pictures uploaded to my laptop, I showed a couple of people in the living room, then everyone was jealous that they hadn’t thought of going back.

Cupcakes and Vacations

Hi friends!

I have a few updates:
I went on a FABULOUS retreat with my Digisisters to Breckenridge, Colorado last weekend. There is so much to tell you about: a photo scavenger hunt, posing techniques, learning Lightroom, white balance, and flash, spending 40 minutes trying to get a good sun flare shot, a sleigh ride that the musher and singer will never forget....  Oh yeah. Lots to tell. But I have to wait for my EHD to come back to me in the mail so I can have all the photos taken over the 5 days. 

Guess how many photos we took......

Between 12 women, who are all photographers and digital scrapbookers, we took 10,122 photos in 4 days! 

No I won't bore you with all of them.  *chkl*

 *****

I finally updated to Lion and iCloud!  Yes, it took me a while!

 *****

I have ordered Lightroom! I was using iPhoto, but it takes a full 10 minutes to load now, and since I got my new camera, I decided I needed something that works better for more and larger files than iPhoto.  I have been uploading my photos into folders and it's not a pretty sight trying to browse through them that way! I'm super excited!

*****

Yesterday I went to a squadron Burger Burn (we in normal worlds call it a barbeque.) I made mini cupcakes to bring.  I'm glad I did, because there were only two deserts and well over a hundred people!

 Let me tell you these were not easy to photograph!  I started off shooting in Aperture Priority but either the chocolate buttercream was too dark, or the white buttercream was blown out, so I ended up in Manual.  Once I had a few pics I thought were okay, I still had to adjust the "fill light" and "recovery" settings.

But they sure went fast!  I'm glad I saved a couple at home for us!