Monday, March 15, 2010

Can you believe it's wallpaper?

It's been a while since my last post. I thought life would be quieter since I am no longer working. I think that I have LESS time at home now. Oh, well. At least I had a little bit of time to make a few cards tonight.

A couple of years ago someone gave me several wallpaper sample books. I found out that they could not be used in scrapbooks, since they are not acid free, so I put them away and forgot about them. Now everyone is making cards, and "acid-free" is not a real issue any more.

I was cleaning out my scrap area trying to find some stuff to sell at a "What was I thinking?" sale at Scrapbooks!, and I came across the books again. I decided to sell some of them, but I made the mistake (?) of thumbing through the pages first. I got hooked. You would not believe the texture and awesome color combinations that I found!

These photos do NOT do justice to the cards. Those stripes that you see have almost a courderoy feel to them. The dark blue paper resembles hand-made paper, but with deeper, richer color variations. They are truly beautiful papers.

Wallpaper adds a touch of elegance that you just won't get from ordinary paper. The paper is a little heavier, so you get a very sturdy card when adhered to cardstock.

I did another "variations of a theme" set of cards. All were done using the same 2 sheets of wallpaper (in blues). I can't wait to dig into the pile of pages and do some more.


Thursday, March 4, 2010

A little card



I found some Whisper Strokes markers at Crafts2000 in Monroe, MI. They are supposed to be pretty good for blending, which should be interesting, since I have never done anything like that before.
Here is a little card that I made. The blue rose inside was a sad attempt at blending. Maybe I will get better with time. Sigh!

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Variations on a Theme

My scrapbooking group has been sending blank cards to a troop in Afghanistan (my husband's cousin is their commanding officer). We try to mail a box of cards that the soldiers can sign and send to family members for holidays. They don't have a local WalMart or Hallmark store to buy cards for special occasions.
The last box contained Valentines, birthday cards, and "Thinking of You" cards. Right now we are working on Mother's Day and Father's Day cards. There are 100 men in the troop, so we need to send LOTS of cards.


Here are 5 cards with the same basic Father's Day layout. The only difference is the stuff on the far left. It's amazing what just one change can do. They are pretty basic cards, but I hope the guys still like them.

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Just Getting Started

OK.... So my friends are saying that I need to start a blog about my scrapbooking. I am not too sure about this, so please excuse me if my postings seem rather naive or simplistic. I guess that the most obvious thing to do is just get started.

Just a little bit about myself before I get to the "meat" of my story. My name is Reta, and I am married with 2 children. My husband and I just celebrated 32 years of marriage in December. Our daughter is married and has 2 beautiful children of her own. Our son is still single.

My job officially ended on Jan 4, and I have no current prospects of employment, but you never know. I work with computers - have been for more than 20 years. Ugh! I am SO trying to get out of computer support. I don't know much else, though, so I will probably return to it sometime soon. It just depends on the job market. In the meantime, though, I get to scrapbook!

I love all things scrapbooking and will take every opportunity to indulge myself in it. I am a paper junkie. I have so much paper that I could easily fill at least 50 scrapbooks, but I still find myself glancing through each new stack that I find at the stores. I love the new prints, the textures, the shapes... Oh, yeah... I am hooked.

It all started way back in 2003 when my little sister and I decided that our mother's "magnetic" scrapbooks were doing more harm than good to the photos. You know the kind of scrapbooks... those old, yellowed, sticky, gummy, not-so-gummy, peel-the-cellophane-back books. Each time we visted my mother, we carted off one or two of her albums. She had about 30 of them, so we figured that she wouldn't miss a few here and there. Our intent was to fix them, then give them back to my parents as a Christmas gift.

We carefully removed the photos from those horrific books, categorized them, identified everyone in the photos (now THERE'S a unique idea), and scrapped them with AF/LF papers and albums.

My dad was 3rd from the youngest of 13 kids, and my mother was the baby of 11. Both of their parents and many of their siblings had passed away already, and I found their obituaries, funeral cards and photos tucked away in the books that I had "pilferred." I decided to do a special photo album for each of my parents, dedicated to their family members. I even found some cousins with photos that Mom and Dad had never seen before. I did a page for each family member and included their obits and funeral cards with photos and maybe a short saying or memory about each one.

We ended up with 14 VERY full albums by Christmas. The big day came, and I was all excited about the gift. My sister and I presented the albums to my parents. They both cried when they opened their special family albums. I will never forget my mother's hushed comment when she saw a photo of her mother that she had never seen before. "That's my Mom... THAT'S my MOM!" Tears glistened in her eyes, and she softly touched the photo. In my dad's book, I had included an 8-page panoramic spread of my 16-year-old nephew who had been killed in an auto accident in 1999. It had photos from birth to the last photo taken just weeks before the accident. On the back was the obituary and funeral card. I was worried that my baby sister would be offended by the pages documenting her son's life, but instead, she said that she was honored to see the pages. My dad just sat quietly and cried. Everyone spent time going through the albums, pointing at this one or that one, remembering old times.

My sister and I spent many hours on those books, and it was well worth it. I love my parents, and my family. What better way to show it than to give honor to the images of their loved ones and the many wonderful family times through the years?

I have continued to scrap ever since then. Sometimes I do more talking than scrapping, but I do ok. Friends gather in the scrapbook room in my garage every Monday night, and we scrap, eat chocolate and talk. We have a good time.

I guess I'm done talking for now. I know, I know.... Keep the posts short and sweet. I promise that all future posts will be MUCH shorter. I just wanted to share the origin of my scrapbooking obsession.