Scrap Girls Digital Scrapbooking Adventures

Daily Blessings

Recently I experienced a difficult loss. As I was going through this experience I was able to get receive love and support from friends and family but also from members of Scrap Girls. I never realized 3 1/2 years ago when I joined the Scrap Girls team that I would make friends from around the world and develop a great love and appreciation for my own team members. They were a great support and strength when I needed it a few weeks ago.

This experience has helped me be grateful for so many things and so many people. My wonderful children, my amazing husband, good friends, my health, God's plan and his strength in my life. Often times I forget to contemplate and really express gratitude to God for these amazing blessings.

I've been wanting to make a few simpler basic layouts in 4x6 of these blessings. Little reminders of all that I have, and all that God has blessed me with. I don't have a lot of time to digital scrapbook with my young kids around, but I do love the fact that I can easily do a 4x6 anytime, which lets me record these blessings in my life more frequently.

Supplies Used: Caleb and Stacey Collection Biggie, and Josh and Megan Collection Biggie.

A Summer of Camping

At the beginning of every summer we mention to our friends that we need to plan a few camping trips for the summer. Before we know it the summer has come, the weeks are packed, and we find ourselves too short on time to squeeze in a camping trip. Somehow this summer has been different. I don't know if it has to do with my husband being over the scouting program in our area, or if we just lucked out this summer. We have now officially made it camping 3 times as a family, 4 times for Isaac, and 6 times for my husband. We've had a great time. This is the expression you see on the faces of our kids most of time. Smiles, happiness and just pure enjoyment. They love being out in nature, going on hikes, collecting things and spotting wildlife. It's made me realize that we really do need to make camping a larger priority in these upcoming summers than we have in the past.

Supplies Used for layout: Assemble Your Own Zoom Pages: 4x6 Campfire

Colors of New Mexico

Recently our family took a 6 day vacation to New Mexico. On the way there we stopped in a tiny little town looking for their local cemetery. Friends traveling with us had ancestors who had lived there and they hoped to find possible some old tombstones for their family history records.

We found ourselves winding up washed out red dirt roads and through various old church grounds, passing this old church with its three crosses and come upon the most amazing old Spanish cemetery. The colors were beautiful and the mosquitos unbelievably thick.

We snapped some pictures, but this one came out as my top favorite. I fell in love with the rich amazing colors. The bright bold greens, the purplish hues and colors of the far mountains, and the rich reds of the adobe and earth. It's colors like these that get me excited about designing something new.

Beautiful Long Hair

One of my little girls loves to have long hair. Since her sister has cut her hair and she has also taken scissors to it, she has yet to experience her own long hair. Because of this she is constantly creating her own hair.

Her most tried and true hair is to wear a pair of pants upside down on her head so the legs fall down into two ponytails. We had an old witch wig attached to a witch hat that she has worn to threads. Her other option is to strap her sister's Hawaiian grass skirt around her head and have it fall down creating thick long green hair. (She doesn't care what color it is, she only cares that she can toss her head, making it brush back and forth.)

A couple of months ago for her birthday, I had sewn her a play Indian girl costume she wanted, and decided it would be fun if she had matching hair to go with it. Since money was tight and I was determined to do most of her birthday by making it by hand, I set out to make a wig that had long thick dark hair. It wasn't as hard as I though it would be and in no time she had her own, beautiful, long, thick brown hair. She ate it up, and you'll find her asking all the time for me to put on her long hair.

Someday I hope she'll get to experience having her own 'real' long hair.

Supplies Used: Assemble Your Own Zoom Pages: 4x6 - Life's Canvas

Magical Moments

The other day I was in the front room when I heard my little boy holler at me from the kitchen. I went in to find that he had climbed on the counter and was sitting on the edge of the sink with his feet inside. "

Bubbles myself!" he exclaimed excitedly and pointed to the little bubble pan that was dripping in liquid dish detergent.

He had somehow made the connection that the liquid dish soap would make bubbles. He had somehow lifted the large container, squeezed it into the dish pan and was excited when bubbles actually came out of his wand.

He was a wet mess and there was dish soap everywhere but I couldn't help but smile at his proud moment. I helped him thin the soap out a bit so the bubbles would blow better and let him go at it. Soon his sister joined him making a soapy slippery mess all over our kitchen floor.

It is time like this that it's so easy to get upset and mad that he's wasting the soap or making a huge mess, but in reality who cares. It can be cleaned up. He can enjoy his proud moment of doing it all by himself and enjoy the fun and magical moment of blowing bubbles all over the kitchen.

I used ScrapSimple Digital Layout Album Templates: 12x12 Photo Book 1 to create the layout of our bubble moment.

Menu Planning

I have been trying to become a little more organized in my life so that I can be more thrifty, save money and make my life easier. One of the things I've been trying to organize better is our menus. I've been trying to determine menus that we can make from things that we already have on hand. I also want ones that are fast and easy for me to create. I also want to create meals that are healthier for our family.

This morning I decided to try Thaos' digital scrapbooking 4x6 layout templates, to see if I could find a quick easy fun way to organize weekly menus. I'd like to have 6-8 tried and true weekly menu's that I can swap and mix up throughout the month. We'll experiment with it and see how it works for us. I'm determined to find a solution that works for me and my family. While trying out her template though I realized how versatile it is, and easily I could move things around and rearrange it more to my preference. I love how easy it is to do that in digital scrapbooking.

Supplies Used: Dreamer Collection, Art Journal Collection Biggie, ScrapSimple Digital Layout Template - 4x6: Organizer, Little Birdy Collection, Overlayed Collection & Fully Alive Collection Biggie.

Month in Review

It seems that often times my life gets too busy to digital scrapbook as much as I would like. I have folders full of hundreds of pictures for every month, and I'm getting farther and farther behind with getting them "scrapped". I finally decided to take Thao's 4x6 Digital layout template "In Pictures" and plop in some of my best pictures for the month, write a small caption and at least have something to show for one month of our lives. It's been great!

We can still remember what happened that month, we can flip through it in our photo album and it can jog memories that need to be written down in more detail. I can always go back and choose to scrap some of them in bigger, more detailed layouts when I finally have a chance to create a layout. If your a little bit behind, try it out you'll be amazed at how much pressure it relieves. Here's an example for our month of July.

Supplies Used: Freedom Collection Mini, ScrapSimple Digital Album Templates: 4x6-Organizer

A Family Favorite

One staple meal in our family is biscuits and gravy. I grew up hating this meal and Mom would never cook it. Somewhere between then and now, I realized how good they are! Most likely when I was a starving student. Since then, I have found an amazing baking powder biscuit recipe that our family has grown to love. It's fast, easy and tastes wonderful. In fact, my kids love it. They literally cheer when I announce we're having biscuits and gravy for breakfast or dinner.

Here are a few tips that I've figured out with the recipe. It's easily dividable into 1/3's, which makes it easy to cut it to a smaller recipe if you're only feeding a few. We usually do 2/3 of the recipe, which is enough for our family of five to have a couple biscuits. You also can make the recipe without cream of tartar, since usually I don't have it on hand. But, if you do have it, they'll be more fluffy. My husband rants and raves about how much better they taste if they're made with real butter instead of margarine. It's true, they do. If you're not much for gravy, they still are amazing with jam and butter while they're hot.

If you're a gravy fan... you can make a pretty mean gravy by making a white sauce (milk, butter and flour to thicken.) Season with a little onion powder, salt and pepper. Throw in some sausage if you like it as well. Mmmm. Maybe when I finish writing this, I'll make some for breakfast!

Digital scrapbooking supplies used: Life's Canvas Collection Biggie, ScrapSimple Digital Layout Album Templates - Layered: 4x6 Recipe Card

My Little Garden

One thing that excited me most about owning our own home was the chance for me to finally plant my own garden. I grew up with a huge garden that had fresh vegetables and fruits all summer long. I wanted one of my own.

Even though we moved into the house a few weeks after the planting season, I wanted to try it out anyway and see if we could still get something before the first snowfall. Our yard is not huge and I knew that I only had a small part of it to work with. My husband helped me build a little 4X16 foot raised garden bed and I planted our little seeds and plants in hope of something to reap come fall.

Three months later, I am now enjoying the fruits of my labor. We've been able to enjoy lettuce, spinach, mixed greens, cucumbers, zucchini, squash, beans, carrots, tomatoes, dill, parsley and soon to be pumpkins! We even have a couple of small watermelon growing and a few cantaloupe. I don't know if they'll mature before the first snow since we planted so late, but I was actually able to grow a few!

It's also been exciting to watch my children get excited about the garden, too. They'll always come in all excited to tell me that they found another vegetable or to tell me how much "bigger" the watermelon or pumpkins are getting. There is something very satisfying about reaping what you sow.

Supplies used in this digital scrapbooking layout: Farmer Joe Collection, Illuminate Collection, Affection Collection, Garden Plot Collection Mini, Becoming Collection, Scenic Route Collection Biggie, Commotion Collection Biggie , ScrapSimple Digital Layout Album Templates - Layered: 4x4 Brag Book , Dynamic Brush Set: Basic Stitching 4901.

Fixer Upper

We recently purchased a small home. It's older and has a few things that need fixing up. The first thing that we were excited about when looking at the home was a room that was built on the side of the garage. Even though it wasn't a finished room and was looking pretty rough we could see the potential of it becoming our office. In the past, the office has taken up one bedroom in our apartment, making it a tight squeeze for our kids in their room. This gave us the possibility of giving Isaac his own room.

We moved in and Beau got right to work on fixing it up, putting up new sheet rock where it needed it. Mudding, sanding, prepping, painting, adding trim and finding an air conditioner for $25 to cool the room down in this heat. Today, we started moving things inside.

I'm so excited to have this new space and to have it outside my house. Too often I can get sucked into the message boards, working on a digital scrapbooking layout, checking emails, digital scrapbook design projects and letting other things (like cleaning) slide. This forces me to have to actually leave the house to check the email or work on the computer, which means either dragging all the kids with me or leaving them to themselves in the house which would prove to be disastrous.

Having it out of the house will give me the chance to design new products without the interruptions of children while my husband watches them. It'll also be a place to escape and have some peace and quiet when needed. I'm looking forward to seeing what creative products I can come up with in this new space and how it will help me better manage my time with the computer.

Supplies Used in this Layout: Decorate Collection, Bursting Collection, Brush Set: Stamped Dates, ScrapSimple Digital Layout Templates - 4x6 Album: Blessings.