You Amaze Me

I can’t believe it been 9 days since my last post. At times life just gets to busy and I don’t get as much scrapping done as I would like. I’ve been working on a layout for the June Month Long Challenge over at Let’s Scrap. Becky at Pagemap’s is letting us use one of her sketches.

Here is the pagemap

As you all know I like to do twe page layouts so I used one of Cheri O'Neils sketchs over at Let's Scrap.  If you have never seen Cheri's sketches you are really missing out so why not hop over and join Let's Scrap.

The layout I did is about my 22 year old son Jason.  Two years ago he severed his spinal cord at the neck in a car accident which left him a quadriplegic.  He is totally paralyzed from mid chest down and although he can move his arms and flex his wrists his fingers are also paralyzed.  Before his accident Jason’s loved playing hockey. When he found out he was paralyzed his first comment wasn’t that he wouldn’t walk again but instead that he would never play hockey again. He looked into playing sledge hockey but unfortunately you need the use of your hands to play so it was not possible for him. But he didn’t let that get him down he just started looking at alternatives.
While he was at the Rehabilitation Centre learning new skills he would go down and watch other quadriplegics play wheelchair rugby. He became friends with several of the men there. He was not strong enough at that time to really play so since coming home he has been working hard with his physio therapist to regain his strength and to use a manual wheelchair. In May of this year he returned to the gym at the Rehabilitation Centre to join his friends in a game of Rugby. He absolutely loved it and has returned each week to play. For now they are just playing and practicing as there are no team games during the summer but he hopes in the fall to join an actual team.
Two of the men he is playing with are on Team Canada and they have been wonderful in teaching him many of the techniques. He now has a dream to get a chance to play on Team Canada and with his positive attitude and determination I have no doubt he will make that happen.

So here is the layout I did about him playing rugby.

The journaling is taken from part of a note his Aunt Cathy wrote him on facebook after seeing pictures of him playing.  It reads "Jason you amaze me with your positive attitude and determination to live life no matter what obstacles are put in your way."   This truly describes Jason.  The tags say Inspire, Believe, Imagine, Hope and Courage. 
If you are interested in learning more about Wheelchair Rugby just google it and you find many sites that talk about it.  Another name for it is Murder Ball because it can be quite rough.  That's not really the name of a sport a mother wants here son playing and when I expressed concern Jason with his sense of humor just said "What's wrong Mom are you afraid I'll break my neck, I've been there, done that and bought the t-shirt.  So don't worry" LOL
I hope you liked the layout and Happy Scrapping.

Dog Tired

Sorry I haven't posted for a few days. I've been waiting for blogger to help me with the problems I was having.  A very nice gentleman gave me some suggestions some of which worked but couldn't figure out why I was still having trouble with correctly spelled works being highlighted.  So he has referred in on further.  I haven't heard any more so thought I would go ahead and try posting again.  You can be sure I won't be touching any spell check buttons. So here is what I was up to yesturday.

The challenge last week over at Let's Scrap was to do a layout about an ordinary day.  I decided to do it on my two dogs Harley and Daisy.  An ordinary day for them is sleeping, sleeping and sleeping some more.  Often they can be found curled up together on a chair or our bed but if one or the other isn't available they  well  sleep with my  pink puppy slippers.

I followed one of Cheri's great sketches to do the layout. Here is her sketch.

And here is the layout I did about my two lovable pets.                

   

Although posting still wasn't as easy as it had been under the older version of blogger it looks like this time it has worked better.  Hopefully it will continue that way.

I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend and Happy Scrapping.

                                                              

Father's Day Cards

I've had some suggestions on fixing the problems I have been having with blogger so we will see if we can get this post to work better. ADDED NOTE - As you can see not all the problems have been fixed.  Now I can get my pictures in the right place but it is now highlighting words it believes are spelt wrong.  Grrrr - wish I had never updated it.

I recently went to a couple of workshops my friend Verna was giving at her store Memory Lane.  The workshops were for making masculine cards for Father's Day or a man's birthday. We used Rosewood Stamps which are made here in Ontario, Canada.  Verna has started selling these stamps in her store and I just love them.

Here are the first two cards I made.

First we stamped the images on the cardstock and then using Distress Ink and our blending tool we colored in the card.  I goofed on the first card because I stamped the image on the textured side of the cardstock which didn't give me a very clear image so made sure to use the smooth side on the second one.  We used a scalloped shapeabilities die and the cuttlebug to cut out a section of the first card and then mounted that section inside the card.  For the second card we just cut the stamped and colored cardstock into an oval shape and along with a bit larger oval gold glossy

The last card was made using gold glossy cardstock and three different colored alcohol inks to make the rectangle and diamonds. I haven 't had much practice using alcohol inks so it was great to give them a try and just loved how it turned out. I'm going to give this card to my husband on Father's Day.  He collects duck decoys so I hope he will love the card. 

I hope you like all the cards.

Blogger giving me trouble.

Sorry for not posting lately but I updated my blogger the other day and have been having trouble ever since. At first it kept telling me that Blogger was unavailable even though I could see others were posting on their blogs. That problem seems to have stoped but now I'm having trouble with inserting images. Before when I uploaded images the html would go to the top of my post and I could copy and past it where I wanted it. Now there isn't a image button in the html part and I have to go to the compose part. In the compose part when I upload the image the actual picture shows up in the post I'm working on but it won't let me move it anywhere. If I upload the image first and then try typing before the image it starts my typing in the centre instead of to the left side.
I wondered if any of you have had this problem and what you do about it?

Adorable

I've had fun this week doing a couple of layouts with Cheri's Sketch from Let's Scrap. Here is the sketch
This first layout is for my Grandson Jacob's album. Most of the paper and embellishments were made by Crate Paper - Little Sprout Collection plus I added a few other embellishments in my stash. The clouds were made using my cuttlebug, spiral folder and stickles. I'm very please with the way it turned out.
Here is the layout


The next layout was completed using the same sketch. The difference is that I also incorporated the Let's Scrap Design Team Challenge which was to do a layout with torn cardstock as the background. The pictures are of me (aren't I cute lol) between the ages of 3-8 taken while I was camping with my family at Silver Lake Park here in Ontario. I did some extra journaling which is on the tag hidden behind the last picture. I have many fond memories of my time spent camping there and did the page to put in my Book of Me album. I had never torn cardstock for a layout before so it was a new experience for me. I decided to do the whole background with this technique making the grass, beach, water and sky with the torn paper, most of which was the core-dination paper line. I also had fun using up a bunch of my stash of stickers and camping embellishments.

Here is the layout I made.

I hope you enjoyed both layouts and Happy Scrapping.

Wow My Blog Was Featured On Paper Craftorium

I bet you didn't expect me to make another post today but I was to excited to wait until tomorrow. I was just checking some comments that were made on one of my layouts and saw a note from Dawn from Paper Craftorium letting me know that they had featured my blog on their site today. Wow, how cool is that!

For those of you who have not heard of the site this is what Dawn has to say about it "Paper Craftorium was created in May 2010 as a way to showcase regular papercrafters and bloggers, who may not always get the chance to be showcased otherwise. It was created as a regular place for regular people to help promote "the little guys" much like ourselves." I became a follower when the group first started and have been enjoying checking out the many sites that they have shared. If you're not already a follower then you should check it out, you won't be sorry you did.

Thanks Dawn and Penny for featuring my blog, it really made my day.

Mom's 75th Birthday Layout

Recently they had a challenge on Let's Scrap to do a layout in honor of Mothers Day, this challenge was to make a LO having to do with mothers. Either yourself as a mother, your mother or mother in law, could be a Mother to a litter of puppies or even Mother nature! I've had pictures of my Mom's 75th birthday from the year 2000 that I had really been wanting to scrap. The pictures mean a lot to me because Mom had been very ill prior to her party and we didn't expect her to be well enough to be discharged from hospital. Fortunately a couple of weeks before her birthday things turned around and she not only was able to attend the party but would have 3 more wonderful years with us.

I used this sketch from Let's Scrap as my inspiration.

Here is the layout






I used SEI's Juliette paper line to do the layout. I just love their paper especially this line. I also added some pearl bling and little fabric flowers that I had picked up quite some time ago. I was really please with the way the layout turned out.
The other part to the challenge was to make a card from the scraps left over from making the layout and this is the card I made.
It always feels good when you can make something from your scraps.

I hope you enjoyed seeing my layout and Happy Scrapping.