Holy Cow!

Time flies doesn't it?


So what's new in my life? Well not a lot, but as usual, I have been busy. Next weekend I'm off to Amsterdam with the kids to do a retailer's openhouse at Heidi's warehouse. I've been designing new projects for various manufacturer showcases and I designed a workshop too. I'll be teaching a card workshop, complete with an ADORABLE house. I call it...get ready for it..."House of Cards." LOL. Genius, right! Josh says I'm a goober. Anyhoo, during the workshop we will build this cute house from scratch:



And there are 6 cards inside. 4 of them have an interactive element to them and I'm really excited about it. It also seems I will be teaching the house part of this workshop for the November retreat!


I took my car to get an oil change today and then dropped it off at a Honda garage to have the timing belt changed. Well, that won't take place until Monday, but I was in that city anyways, so I figured to save gas, I might as well drop it off. I had to walk 35 minutes to the train station with the kids. They were excited to ride the train....it's been a long time. Monday afternoon the car should be fixed. Cross your fingers that my new tires come in this week too.


On the way home, we stopped and played in a semi-wooded area to play with the leaves that have fallen. It's so pretty. Being from south Texas, you don't get to experience a true "Fall." I took lots of awesome pics of the kids. I"ll get them edited and uploaded later.


Josh is gone on a field mission for 3 weeks. :( It's so lonely without him. The kids keep asking where he is every 5 minutes. When he was deployed for the year, they were too little to really realize he was gone, so I wasn't asked about his whereabouts. Now...aye aye aye. They're driving me batty.


Well, I don't have much else to update. Oh, I didn't talk about my birthday last month. It was lowkey, as it seems to be every year. Josh got me a Wii fit! And it arrived on my birthday (I was so happy). My parents bought me an awesome Singer Curvy Sewing machine. It's pink. :) I've used it a few times. I have a cute little sewing project that is for the environmentally conscience...or for those who want to be. Hope to share it soon. :)


Here are some of my latest projects:

These are using the Daisy line from Love, Elsie.


I am in love with this little mini. I used a 7Gypsies enveloped mini (thanks Liz!!) to hold all of the postcards I've collected from the various cities we have visited in Germany so far. It's also kinda a Heidi Swapp spotlight, as all the embellishments (minus the MM metal tag and the hat pin) and papers are from her World Traveller line. Inside the envelopes are obviously the postcards. On the front is the city name with just a few pics from that partiular trip. Then on the back of each envelope, I used a library card/pocket. The library card has information like a brief history, food that is unique to that city, what to see, and where to eat. I also have a deck of playing cards that has all the sites of Germany, so I added the city card in the pocket. Those postcards that are too big to fit in the envelopes, I added to the wired binding.

A friend (Kristi) pointed out that one of the great things about this mini is it uses older product, but it's still really cute. I have a bad habit (as do many scrappers) of letting my stuff rot with age in my scrap area. I'm trying to get better about it and rediscover what I have. I mean, things are so old, they become new again.

Here is a Birthday layout from Sebastian's 2nd Birthday. See, you can use flowers on a boy layout! lol. I've been asked how I store this in my album. I just slit the side of the page protector so the chipboard can stick out. Once it is in, I made a few stitches to close the protector up.
This is my 2nd layout for my "Say it in Scrap" guest designer spot from last month. The topic was envy, so I chose to do a LO about MJ's visit here. It outlines the 9 days and what we did. The photos were taken at the Bamberg Residenz...Man, I need a haircut.

Awwww, my little Anberlin! I don't really know what she was supposed to be that Halloween, but she sure was cute. The dress was entirely too big. I waited until the last minute to try and find a costume and it was the only thing I could get my hands on. I pinned up the sleeves a bit and safety pinned the back so it would fit better. This layout uses a lot of the "Little Yellow Bicycle" halloween line, plus loads of embellies from a Jar of Whimsy miss Mandy Kay sent me. I am so in love with that jar.
This is from the first week of the "Project Catwalk" finals! I made it to the top 25. There's alot of tough competition, so cross your fingers for me. I really want to win!! This challenge we could not use patterned paper, so I cut circles from a magazine to make the Dahlia flowers. The woodgrain tape is from CER who is the bomb for sending it to me. The photo is of Anberlin playing with the colorful tissue paper Mandy used to protect my Whimsy Jar. She played "ballerina" all day with it. :) Such an active imagination.

2 sets of ATC's for a swap. The last one I discovered a new technique. I'm holding out on sharing that for now simply because I might need it for a challenge/dt. But it's pretty cool.
Super quick card for our neighbor's little boy. Super old paper and stickers put to good use. :)

Ok, that's it! Anberlin fell asleep in my arms and Sebastian is snoozing on the couch. Think I'll use the quiet time to work on a pop-up book!

xoxo
Jess