January ends

So this is the last day of January, I like going into another month this time of year, because that takes us a little bit nearer spring. Oh, I know I´m tiresome talking and talking about spring, I´m sorry.
So let´s put another twist on a new month, I have my birthday in February! That is usually the best part of that month, together with all the others in the family who have their birthdays then, of course. But this year the best part is naturally the wedding. And being a scrapbooker, I will enjoy that for a very long time, reliving it again and again. Nice. It will be so nice showing you all the results of that too.

Today I will show you a couple of layouts I made for my boys.

This first one is Master E showing off his first lost tooth and the money he got. Here in Sweden the children put their lost teeth in a glass of water and magicly the tooth turns into a coin... He told me when he saw the coin: "I know it was you who put the coin in there." Can´t fool my little man!

I have special albums where I put layouts about my grown up children and what´s happening in their lives, even though they, of cause, end up in the family album as well. But this was about all the working Master A´s doing here at home and a way of showing gratitude for that, so that will end up in the grown up children album. 

"jobba" is the everyday word for "work" (the more formal word is "arbeta") and there were this swedish comedy tv-program called Hipp hipp that had this sketch where some people stood around a hardworking person cheering him on by singing "Jobba, jobba, jobba!". Really enoying! But Master A loved this sketch, so I thought that was a fitting title to put on this page.

I like keeping the pages I do about the males in ny family rather simple, they don´t like a lot of frill. I scrapbook for my own pleasure but it´s nice if my family likes them too.

I do hope you will all have a lovely day and a good week.

Beauty

This new (or is it new, it feels just like the one I had two weeks ago...) cold´s got me in it´s hold and I am not amused at all! I´ve made lunch and dinner and that´s about it.
 I´ve listened to These happy golden years by Laura Ingalls Wilder while I´ve been resting today. I love her books, they give such a wonderful perspective to your life. They had so little but was so grateful for what they had. And they were happy because they had each other and loved each other and they tried their best to what was right. That is so wonderful.

But actually I managed to do a layout today too! It´s about my two oldest daughters and their beauty, on the inside and outside.

Aren´t they beautyful?! It´s Miss S to the left and Mrs L to the right. I´m so very proud of them both. I´m a very lucky woman, I really like my children. I mean, I think they are such nice persons and I enjoy their company very much. It could happen that you love your children, but don´t like them, so being so lucky that you´ve got eight children and you think they are all very nice is a blessing. AND I have one very nice son-in-law and will get another one in three weeks time, and that´s wonderful too.

A new season

I´ve sown my first seeds of the season! Two kinds of chili, one hot and one sweet, and hollyhocks. The chilis take long to grow big enough, so they must be sown early, and if I´m really lucky the hollyhocks will get flowers this summer when sown this early, they are biennial. Soon I will have a lot of these

and that is so exiting! In a couple of weeks I will sew tomatoes too and the whole spring I will sew more and more things inside so that when summer finally comes we can enjoy this again:

Oh, summer, how I love you! But since it´s a long time untill then, we will have to enjoy today and today a scrapbooking company, who makes their own stamps, will re-open their shop in town today. Yeah! And since I am actually going to town today I hope I will have time for a stop by there too.

My cold ensisted on coming back, but I try to ignore it as much as I can, though I´m afraid I will be quite tired when I get home from town tonight. 

 I hope you will all have a nice day today!

Back to school

cOur telephone line is having problems, which also means that both our internet and the cable tv is only working when it feels like it, or whatever it is. So the post I should have posted yeaterday I just couldn´t. But I hope the internet will cooperate long enough for me to get it done now.

So back to school was in August, but I made the layout on monday. And here it is.

I love school related things, like Tom Hanks talking about "bouquets of freshly sharpend pensils" in You´ve got mail. You´ve got mail is one of my favorite movies. I never get tired of seeing it, it almost makes me want to move to New York... No, not really. I love the country and NY has more people than our entire country, so no. But they sure have managed to create a cozy small town feeling in the movie.

Enjoy your evening/day!

DIY 5

Did you think I was done with the Do it yourself? Not so. Today just a few tips on how to use those things that just comes along with the things you buy and which can be very easily neglected. Like when you buy this:

You also get these:

The print always goes a little bit outside of the cutting, so you can cut these out and get such nice frames. Here´s an example of how I used it to lead the eye to the persons in the photo.

Another funny story from the life of Master E. Well, it is actually a little sad, or at least it started out sad.
When he was born Miss S and Mrs L was 21 and 20 years old, and when he was 4 they hadn´t lived with us for years. And he didn´t know who they where! We weren´t aware of this ´till one day when he said something that made me realise that he didn´t know they were his sisters. So I told him "they are your sisters". No, he didn´t buy that.
So I took out my scrapbooks, began to show him our story from the beginning, with me and daddy getting married and then I showed him the photos of all our children being born. And that was it, then it was OK, so they were his sisters! No one can say it´s not a good thing to scrapbook!!

You can use the same method when it comes to letters, like this:

It helps you strech your supplies a little further. This is another layout from Miss angel V´s album, about her second family, the family of her best friend, the mother there is also one of my dearest friend. They meant so much to her.

I finally picked up my new photos and made my first layout with some of them yesterday and I was really pleased with it, I´ll show you it tomorrow. Have a wonderful week!

Spring fever

I made two layouts last night and I believe they both came to be out of my longing for spring and summer.

"Dream & long for" I called this one. One photo of reality and one of how I´d wish it´d been. Master E came in and when he saw the finished layout he asked me: "Why do you have a cross on the winter picture and a check mark on the summer picture?" "What do you think?" I asked. "Because you wish it was summer insted of winter" he answered. "Exactly!"

I love hearing what he thinks and letting him find out the answers for him self so that he can see that he can figure things out all by himself. That is my biggest hopes as a mother, to incurage my children, in a thousand different small ways, to grow and become their own best selves, being confident and able to handle their lives and whatever will come in their way. It makes me so happy to see them doing fine. My goal is for them do manage without me, knowing that I will allways be there for them when they need me, always loving them.

The title of this layout is "My friends the perennials". We knew we would be leaving our old place, but we didn´t know when we would actually get it sold, so to be sure to get my dear perennials with me I dug them up and put them in potts. And now every year I´m so glad they all came with me. Aren´t the pionies beautyful?!

I love October Afternoon... If I had to choose one company as my favotite it would definetly be them.

 And tomorrow is saturday and no alarm clock to wake me up, how wonderful that is! Have a nice day!

My scrap space

Want to see my little scrap space? Here it is!

It´s just a small desk with a shelf and some small IKEA drawers. I store all my unused papers to the left. And above them I have three binders with stickers and die cuts, both shapes and letters. Above them I have all kinds of things, stamps and templets and ordinary papers I use to scribble down thoughts about what to say on my layouts and use as proction when I glue things aso.

The small drawers are full of foamstamps, ink, pens and all kinds of small things. On them I have albums I am working on, the big brown is our family album, the turquoise is my BOM album, the small blue is a 6"x12" album about my scrapbooking life and sewing projects, the black one is a year in rewiew album I started in 2009 and the red one is one I haven´t started yet, but it will be about my mother-in-law. I will also start one about my parents. There are two more that you can´t really see and that´s Master E´s album and my gardenbook.

The small binders to the right of the drawers is for small sticker sheets and other small things. Beside them I have small glass jars with buttons and other small things. On the window shelf I have my two big circle punches and a black box with journalingcards. To the right on the desk I have a Making Memories storage which hold all kinds of things and beside it I have an old wooden holder where all my scissors live.

The left desk drawer is also full of all kinds of stuff, mostly small favorite things that I use often, and in the right one I store all my papers that´s been cut in. On the shelt to the right of the desk (you see the side of it) I have big glass jars full of ribbons.

Well, that´s were I do my scrapping! Oh, I have to tell you about the small picture on the wall, to the left of the shelf, Miss S made it for me, it´s Jane Austen´s Elinor Dashwood. Hold on, I just have to show you a close up...

Beautiful, don´t you think?! With this lovely picture I bid you an amazing day!

DIY 4

You can make other kinds of temlets than letters. I have made me a bunch of border temlets and I will keep adding to them. So far I have these.

And cut out in patterned paper they can look like this.

And if you are careful cutting them out you get two borders at once, as you can see here. The upper red and the striped one above it is from the same paper but different sides, so that way I got two in different papers in one cut! This is the kind of thing you can do when you want to do something scrappy, but you´re out of ideers or just don´t have enough energy to actually scrap.

Here´s a layout I did today, using one of my border templets as well as the templet I made out of the Wild Asparagus lettersticker sheet. It´s about Mrs L and her husband and his two children moving to Canada about a year after they were married.

Tonight I´m taking Master A and Miss E to church for activetes and while they are there I will go to the library to, hopefully, get some more CD-books for the Misses E and I. Right now they´re listening to Eregon. But I hope they have some of the english Harry Potter CDs too, I never get tired of listening to them, the books are great and Stephen Frye make them so much alive.

 Have a lovely day, or evening, depending on where you live. I´d love to read a comment from you telling me who you are, if you like.

DIY 3

 So we have talked about templets and I have still some idees about that.

Here I´ve made a templet out of an old Basic Grey die cut sheet, it´s actually two which I have glued together to make it sturdier and I have also glued small bits of black cardstock where it seemed to be risk it could be torn, maybe you can see it. I love these letters and now I can make them in whatever paper I want and one things for sure, we always get a lot of paper scraps left, in all different sizes.

Here´s an example of how I´ve used it. It´s another LO from Miss angel V´s album and it talkes about how much she liked having fun.

Here´s another templet I´ve made out of an old sticker sheet.  It´s from My Mind Eye´s lovely line "Wild Asparagus".

Here I´ve cut out the negative space around the letters and stuck them to a sheet of paper and then I´ve cut out the letter from the paper. As you can see I´m not finished with it, I had´n used any B or H yet.
Just a totally unrelevant observation, talking about letter sheets: sometimes in magazines they make an article about using up all those letters that´s never been used on a sheet and when I see them make words or in other ways use A (and others) I just think "duh!!". How much chance is there for a letter A to be left, I´m constantly short of As, and Ss and some other letters that we use much more in swedish than is used in english.

Here´s another thing I´m working on. You may have letterstamps that you really like and why not make them into templets? That opens up a whole new way of using them.

End of todays lesson! Have a nice day!

Sunday scrapping

Today it feels like I´m almost well again, feels great. But yesterday was a soft day, with no church or anything. I did scrap a little, but I was kind of stuck, making a layout in a style I usually don´t do and that often don´t come that easy. This is what I was struggling with.

It´s a layout about Miss I´s 10th birthday and to match her, and the pictures, I wanted it to be pink and girly. And I wanted to have the doilie with the big flower, the sweet girl and the pink, flowerish letters, but I just couldn´t get it together in a nice way, no matter how I moved it all around. The two borders was in place, that much I was sure about, but how to get the other things to go together, without looking just thrown out on the page.

They kind of floated around for them selves, the different elements and thats never a good thing. I just had to ground them in some kind of way. So I took another doilie together with the first, put the girl on a journalingcard and put dark pink cardstock behind the letters, and I moved the photos from both being at the bottom of the page, and suddenly it all came together quite nicely and I was satisfied. Good.

After that I wanted to write about my plans for the garden this year. I have a garden book, in which you are supposed to write, but I can of cause not only write in it, there have to be some scrapping there too. On the right is my first page, where I write about the arbour I want to make.

On these two pages I write about the work we are doing to get more space to grow things and how to make it look nice and neat, and what I intend to grow in the greenhouse this year (tomatoes, chilipepper and basil). I jazzed up the pages with some old Winnie the Pooh-sticker I had. There is always a place for them old things...

And then there wasn´t more time for scrapping, having to make Master E ready for bed before Bones started on TV...

I hope I will be able to make a layout today too, but I´ve already been out for quite a few hours to fill up on our emty (or almost) shelves with all those foods you want to have plenty of at home, like dry foods. Feels really good to have done that. And there are a thousand things to do since I was ill all last week AND tonight the swedish handball team is playing another match in the world championships on TV, so...

Anyway, I hope you have a nice week!

DIY 2

When you buy chipboard letters you end up with this:

And they make perfect templets. I actually hadn´t used all the letters yet, but took them all out to be able to use the templet. I store the inner circles of all the a, b, d, e, g, o and p in a small box if I want to have proper letters, but you can of course use them without cutting them out if you want to.
You most often buy letters because you like the font so this way you can get this font in whatever paper you want - nice!

Here´s an example of how I´ve used it.

This layout is from the album I made about our sweet Miss angel V´s life and it tells about how very happy she was to get a baby brother when she was so big that she could take care of him. Unfortunatly it didn´t last long, she died when he was nine months old and she got more and more tiered while he got bigger and bigger so it wasn´t that easy, but still she was so happy and loved him so much. And he loved her and I keep telling him that as he can´t remember her.

Have a nice scrappin´ day, I will!

Do it yourself 1

CHA is coming up, as you can see proof of in different blogs. New lines are being realised and people are exited over new stuff. And I can understand them, I love scrapbooking stuff too.
But it got me thinking. If we already have so much things that we could go our whole life and not buying anything new and still have material for all our pages and minialbums, wouldn´t it be a good idee to try to minimize the new stuff we buy and try to actually use what we have?

So because of this, I´m gonna have a little series about things you can do by yourself while you use what you have.

I started scrapbooking a long time ago when you still used your scissors a lot and when a diecut ment a cut out shape in just plain cardstock without any print and when templets was very much used for both letters and shapes. This was the days when a layout didn´t have to be so quickly made or have so very much on it.

So today is the first entry about DIY. Hope you will like it.

This is a templet! Obviously... I´ve had it for years and I still love it. With this one I can get all kinds of different looks on the letters, depending on what kind of paper I use. And if anyone wonders, I like sitting cutting out all this letters by hand, it´s kind of therapeutic... and who doesn´t need that?!

Here´s some examples of what I´ve done with this templet.

This is a page from Master E´s album, which I make quite simple. Here the words are at center stage, because of the story. Him and me had a little game we used to play when he was younger and this is my documentation of that.

 Let me explain a little about the word "love" in swedish. To love in swedish is called "alska" (which is not all correct since we have nots over th first A and it´s pronounced "ae".) In swedish this is a very strong word which we use in a quite restained manner when talking to other people. On the other hand "like" in english is a much moore casual word than our "tycka om", which we use often insteed of "aelska".

Anyhow, we had this game where I began singing this little verse "Jag tycker om dig" ("I love you"), over and over again and he started sing with me and suddenly he put in a "inte" ("not") afterwards and then I began tickling him. Sometimes I was faster than him and put in a little "alltid" ("always") instead and that´s what this page says.  He absolutly loved this little game and when I made this page about it he was thrilled, so that was one of my most successful pages ever.

Here I´ve used the templet with patterned paper. This is a LO about our chirstmas baking in 2008. The words is from a baby rhyme saying "Baking, baking little cookie", but in swedish it obviously is rhyming...

My last example with this templet is using no paper at all, but just following the letters with a pen when you want a simple look. This LO is about how very much Masters A and E look alike.

That´s it for today. Have a nice weekend!

The last

This is my last layout of my 10 best, but this is also the very last layout I made in 2010. So that is quite suitable, don´t you think?

This is my Miss S. She´s getting married in February and this was a layout I did celebrating that this long lived dream is finally coming true and I´m so very happy for her. She´s been my right hand raising all this children.

 She has a blog of her own, where she writes about all her sewing projects. Sewing for her is what scrapbooking is for me, we need it like the air we breath. But she likes scrapbooking too, like I like sewing too. You can find her here: http://amostpeculiarmademoiselle.blogspot.com/

As soon as I´m well enough I will pick up a package of 500 wonderful new photos! Oh, isn´t that something to look forward to?! Think of all the wonderful things you can do with them...

Have a marvellous day!

Embrace Life: A new online ad with a twist

I just saw this video at my daughters blogg and it was really touching. Be careful out there!

10 best of 2010 part 7

Any one else who feel this 10 best thing is going on too long?!  I should have taken two layouts per day, as I started, I guess. O well, we´re soon done with that. The cold has me in a tight grip and that is no fun at all. It´s so boring wanting to do things, but just not having the strength to do it. And you never see so much that needs to be done as when your ill.

Here´s my sweet little boy again, this time on his 5th birthday.

The border strip with the candles, at the bottom, is a really old thing, and that´s the way it is with me, I don´t use everything when I get it, but it can lay around for years and then suddenly it finds it perfect place. There are no such things as too old scrapbooking things.

 There might be things that you don´t like anymore, but that must not mean they are too old as such, rather that our taste changes. Then again there are things you don´t get tiered of.

So how do you know which things will make the test of time? Well, I guess it depends on how well you know yourself and I think that most of us have a style that is "us" and that those things will never be old to us, but then there are those things that catch our attension for a short while but are not really us and those things are those we should use when they are new, to make them not be lying around for ever.

 Well, that´s how much philosofizing it will be for this day! Have a nice day!

10 best of 2010 part 6

I love pancakes and beause of that my children have eaten a lot of pancakes in their lives... And Masters A & E are BIG pancake lovers, so I just had to make a page about pancakes, didn´t I?

Everyday life is what our lives is mostly about and seemingly small things make up a big part of them, doesn´t it, so if we miss to document those small things, we miss the real life and that´s a pitty. And it is also small things that tells the story of who we are and I have found that my children like it very much when I tell the small stories that shows who they really are. They feel, I guess, that I really see them, when I do that. And that´s a very good thing.

Have a happy week!

Let´s forget the winter

Let´s dream about summer today! Since scrapbooking is not my only way of being creative, today I`m gonna show you some things from my garden. I had longed so for a garden where I knew I would stay, so I could put my soul into some projects that I would be sure to be able to enjoy for years.

My no 1 thing I wanted was a kitchengarden and with help from my family this dream came true:

I`m so lucky being able to grow all kinds of food here every year. It`s such a joy. But I like flowers too and since we dug up a LOT of stones when we made this kitchengarden, Miss S and I made a raised flowerbed near the house and it looks like this:

It makes me happy everytime I go outside in spring and summer. Right now you can´t even see it since it`s totally buried under the snow. But winter won`t last forever...

Have a lovely weekend!

10 best of 2010 part 5

How are you all this morning? As for me, I´m a little low today, I think I´ve got a strike of a cold, but I´ll ignore it as much as I can. So why not cheer me up with a layout I found really fun to do?

This is me and Mr A at our best - or not! The photo of me was taken a couple of years ago when I was painting the walls in one of our livingrooms and Mr A thought that I had to document the whole thing, including myself... Well, what do you not do for the sake of documentating your life! I gave back when He and Master A was insulating our attic and he didn´t look his best!!

The title of this page is "A beautiful couple" and I used a background paper and decorations to emphasize the word "beautiful" to get a contrast to how we look at the pictures, and the text tells about what I find so beautiful with us, that we have the same desire to make our home a pleasent place to be, a safe haven for our family and others.

This is not my usual style, with a lot of flowers and so (which in it self is quite strange since I love flowers), but it was great fun making it as a contrast to what I usually do.

I´ll be off in a short while to take Miss S on an errend to town, so I just wish you a pleasant day!

10 best of 2010 part 4

A game we used to play in the car is what´s on the menu today.

There is a game called "Yellow car!" that you play sitting in the car to have something fun to do. When you see a yellow car you shout "Yellow car!" and hit another person! As slightly or hard as your caracter allows you to... This game is what I documented here, even though the photo was from a year before we started this game, but to me that is not important, it´s getting it down on paper that´s important to me. I have a lot of stories with no photo to go with it, so I eighter use a photo from another occasion or make a page without a photo.

To this page I later added another note, telling that we grew tired of this game since yellow cars became so frequent, so we decided the new coulors should be orange, pink and purple and every now and then you see a car in one of those coulors. But really, in reality the game stopped  when we stopped looking for yellow cars, but it was a nice thing for a while.

 And that´s life, isn´t it, and that is one reason for scrapbooking, to remember all those things in life that come and go and that we think we will always remember but doesn´t.

Thanks a lot for stopping by. Have a wonderful day!

10 best of 2010 part 3

This is one of the nice things to do and enjoy while winter is going on outside. I love gardening but live in a place where summer is short and you can´t be sure it won´t freeze in the night until a week into June. And last year the snow was still here in April. So there is a lot of time when I can not work in my garden. So wintertime is scrapbooking time and blogging is my new hobby related to that, it´s so much fun.

Today I´m gonna show you something I really like. The look of divided page protectors is so nice, but you really can get the look  on an ordinary 12x12 cardstock and that´s what I´ve done here.

Here is a page about mine and Master E´s visit to the local zoo the summer of 2009. With six photos the whole side is full but I still managed to squeeze in a title and journaling AND decorations by putting it all on the photos. I really like this look. I´m not that much into wordstickers, but when they really fit in it´s nice. Here they are a big part of the journaling.

This one shows my sweet little grandson and I´ve worked after the same pricipal as in the first layout, with a lot of small decorations on the photos. There will surely be more layouts after this fashion. And by the way, I LOVE October Afternoon labelstickers! And I like arrows too.

I will soon be off to town to pick up Miss E and Miss I, who´s been spending a couple of days with friends,  and do some shopping, on my own and with them, so I´d better rush.

Have a nice day!

10 best of 2010 part 2

So, which one am I gonna show you today? I think I´ll choose this one, that will be fun, you will surely wonder why on earth this one made it to my top ten, it sure isn´t because of the amazing design... but there is a story...and you know, the stories is no 1 for me. So here we go!

Miss E and I were sitting in the dining area one day when her eyes fell on the little calender that Master E has there sitting on the wall. We put up small pictures there to help him keep track of what´s happening the different days. This time Miss E saw something that shouldn´t be there and the following conversation followed: Miss E: "Why is there a nail in E´s calender?!" Mom: "Proberbly for the same reason there is a nail in one of the pumpkins och there is a nail in one of the tables in the livingroom..." At the bottom it says "Gilty: a cersain creativ little boy..."

 I was so glad I still had that sticker with a drawn boy put up a with a nail, it was so perfect for this story. Sometimes you just have the perfect thing for a layout and when you have had it for a long time you´re so glad you hadn´t used it already.

Have a lovely day! Don´t forget to enjoy all the small things.

10 best of 2010 part 1

So on to new things in the new year! I just ordered a big pile of new photos, which will be so yummy so work with in a little while. It´s from summer, autum and winter of last year and I didn´t want to order them before beause I still had some older photos I wanted to scrap first and it´s kind of hard not to dig into the new ones if they´re there...

I promised you my ten favorit layouts of 2010 and I have to admit it was a hard one. My style is quite simple and might not be so fun looking at at all times, but my main focus is telling our stories and since we are a big bunch there is often a lot of photos which doesn´t leave a lot of space for decorations. And there is also a lot of stories I want to tell and I´m kind of impatient and don´t spent too much time on each page.

So there I was, having to choose what to show you, and finally I made up my mind and here we go! Today is two pages from my BOM, with one of my happy coulors - orange.

It looks like a fall page, but it´s not. I made it last spring and it´s about enjoying every day of spring and summer so when autum comes, you can enjoy that too, and not feeling that spring and summer just went by too fast (which it kind of does anyway...). And there is also a little note saying "Can one be without pumkins? No way!" I thought that I shouldn´t grow any pumkins last summer but I just couldn´t not.

I had been gone one evening and sweet little Master E went to bed when I wasn´t at home (which I usually always am) and he had written me this little note asking me to kiss him when I got home. He´s such a darling and I just had to make a page about it.

That´s it for today and next time I´ll show you something different. See you!

Goodbye 2010

The very last of my Christmas Album.

Not very christmas like at all, I kind of lose that after christmas and this page is not about anything to with christmas anyway. It´s about Miss S buying material for the veil she´s gonna wear at her wedding.

Bye, bye 2010. Here I sums up my feelings about the whole Christmas Journal thing, how fun it´s been and how much I enjoy having it.

Well, that´s it and now to other things. Nicole Harper showed her ten favorit layouts of last year yesterday and that was a good idee, so I think I´m gonna do that too. I will not show all ten all at the same time, though. Maybe one or two at a time, we´ll see. I will kind of have to decide which ones are my favorites first! I hope you will follow me on this journey. 

I wish you a very happy 2011.