Sports Sports Sports!

The most recent Willow Traders LEO Challenge was to use more pictures than what we normally use. Well, I thought sports pictures right away! With 3 kids in school, and each always in a sport (x-country, volleyball, basketball, wrestling and track) so I have lots of sports pictures. These lo's feature pictures from the 2008 season.

I used Nuts About Sketches Week 75 Bonus sketch. Isn't it a great one!

Winner Winner Chicken Dinner!

Go ahead say it! When I say it's like music to my ears! Winner Winner Chicken Dinner!

When I first heard it was back this spring when Willow Traders was having their Anniversary Party and there were winners galore! (It's such a fun place to be, if you haven't checked it out, you should!) So I'm wandering here.....oh yea! Winner Winner Chicken Dinner! I had won and didn't know it so my friend Heather emailed me Winner Winner Chicken Dinner! (like I said, I love saying it!) Ever since when one of us has won something we email each other that...

This past month over at Willow Traders I won again! I won the Sweet Heirloom kit from Blue Moon! I recieved it this past week and it is gorgous! The kit was packed with goodies, I was one happy Winner! (and quite frankly glad it wasn't a chicken dinner!)

Friends and Tattoos

Our family has a tradition that every August the truck is loaded up and we head 8 hours up to our friends cabin waaaay back in the woods in the U.P. (Since you may not know what the U.P. is, it's the Michigan's Upper Pennisula, you know over the bridge and thru the woods.....) This year I really looked forward to it because I was going to have some friends meeting me there for the weekend with their families. These were friends that I met over the internet and I think we have a pretty close friendship! Heather's husband Dustin, does fantastic tattoos and he had agreed to give my son one while we were there. I was kinda' dared (and you know who you are!) into getting a small one also. I've always used a little squiggly on my lay outs and envelopes so I choose that. (and no! to you people that think it's a cult sign!) When my daughter Angel asked if she could get one just like that I thought it was very kewl of her to want to do this!

I'm still hanging in there getting every challenge done at Willow Traders, this is the 9th one. The challenge was to lift a lo from selected DT Galleries. I chose to go with Zoa Barker's Friendship from the September ScrapBook Sussies and I used the Sussies August kit to complete it. I tried to cut the red paper to resemble the little squiqqly mark.

Flower In My Garden....

This has been a busy busy week, and I'm not sure why. I always thought that when the kids got older that I was going to have all this time to do whatever, well I was sure wrong! I'm busier than ever, of course now that "I'm" older along with them being older, I'm moving much slower! O.K. enough about my age....

I'm so loving all the challenges over at Willow Traders! The challenge that was due today was #8 and it was to make a home made flower. I had never done this before and wasn't too sure that I wanted to either, but a challenge is a challenge. (We are allowed 3 skips but this time around I'm really trying to do them all with no skips!) I used one of the flowers from Scrap A Little's Blog and used pictures of my beautiful daughter Angel.

Someone asked me what was she doing in the pictures, and I laughed and told them she's doing everything she can not to look at me because she knows I don't like it when they (the kids) look right at the camera....she's good...she follows directions.

I used a kit from October 2007 Sweet Pea for this, and while the paper and embellies are old they are still beautiful!

Smile

It's Blog Hoppin' time at Willow Traders again! It's my second week following along and posting and I think it's so much fun!

The LEO Challenge over at Willow Traders is to use an edge. I used the Martha Stewart Elegant ZigZag. I thought it fit in with Ruth's dress very nicely.

Ruth is our granddaughter that I previously posted pictures of, you may recongnize them if you are one of my blog followers, and she was just the cutest little thing the day of the reunion, but then she is just the cutest little thing every time we see her! Let's all say, "awwww, she's so cute!" Thank you very much!

I used the August kit from Scrapbook Sussies, and it was easy to find papers and embellies to go with the pictures. (I had kicked around the idea of trying to make the page look like a watermelon because that was what her dress looked like, but these papers just jumped out at me!) I don't know if you can see it or not but the stamp says "A little birdie told me"! How fitting to use it with these stickers that are Lime Rickey element stickers from the kit.

School Started Yesterday

As I have every year since 1985, which was our first year in this house, I lined the kids up one by one in front of the counter and took their pictures. Rick is a senior this year, Angel is a junior and Brandon is in the 8th grade. Since this is Rick's last first day of school, I dug out his first first day of school picture (preschool) and slapped together a lo of the two pictures. I cried more with this year than I did Rick's first year, I cried for me having my baby grow up, I cried for my friend who lost her son and won't have a first day of school this year and I cried out of pride for Rick. It was a pretty emotional morning for me!

I used the very fun kit, "Recess Main Kit" from

Color Me Miki and a sketch from that wonderful sketch site Nuts About Sketches!

Floyd

Floyd was my dad, and he was a very quiet man so I never really knew alot about him. I would say from the perfect attendance record that I found that he believed in if you do something do it with all your might. I know that my dad was a hard worker, while I was growing up he was gone all during the week working on construction jobs only coming home on the weekends. The weekends were always filled with working for him also, tending the small beef cattle farm that we had, putting up and harvesting crops for them to eat, both the cattle and the family. One of the pictures shows dad fishing as a young man, and I do know that the man LOVED to fish! In the early spring when the ice had begun to go out around the edge of the lake he would put planks out over the open water so he could still get out on the ice to fish for pan fish. I do think that river fishing was his favorite tho, bringing home those wonderful rainbow and brown trouts. My favorite picture here is the one of him having the drink, I sure would like to sit down and share with him today.........

Baby Ruth

We had a chance to visit with Ruth at the Rice family reunion. What a sweetie! Ruth really knows how to cuddle.

Remembering.......

I went searching thru my papers looking for something to create a zoo page with for the Willow Traders LEO challenge, which was to include something that you would have normally thrown away. I came across this newspaper clipping of when Rick (now 17) and I were featured in the local paper as "cooks of the week". After wiping the tears away, I quickly ran downstairs and grabbed bags of what would be two ingredients in one of the recipes and slapped this one together. Not any embellies, other than the chip and M&M bags which were the recycled items.

My mom really was a great cook, and like the article said she could whip up a mean in no time at all. There are a few things that she made that I have never been able to duplicate (such as those wonderful baked beans that she was requested to take everywhere or that pork roast with dumplins) but I do think I picked up alot of cooking skills from her. Gosh these are such happy memories and these are happy tears that I'm crying, happy that I had a mom like her!

This layout was done for a LEO challenge on Willow Traders. It was to scraplift a lo, and I chose to lift one from my friend TracyL's gallery. (She did one of her son eating sardines of all things!) These fun papers and embellies came out of Scrapbook Sussies August kit, which I just love!

I'm blogging?

Hi! Glad to see you've made it to my blog, who knew "I" would ever have a blog? It's going to be sparse for awhile because I'm working on a very important project, (a t-shirt quilt with t-shirts from a special person) but I want to get in on the fun over at Willow Traders Forum's blog hop and so here I am!