Using Scrapbook Products for Inspiration

I'm taking an on-line class at Creative Passions called "Finding Your Inspiration Station." In lesson three there was a discussion on using Products for inspiration. I didn't think I ever used products for my inspiration but then I realized that's exactly what I'd done for the cards I'd made for the ladies of my TOPS (Take Off Pounds Sensibly) Chapter. Easter was coming and I wanted to make some quick cards for them. So, while on a shopping trip to the new Walmart in Santa Fe, I found blank note cards with a cute little bunny sitting in a watering can and the word "Hello" on it. Then, in the craft section, I found a package with four different colored foam alphabet stickers and in the greeting card section I found a package of flower-and-flying-bugs (butterflies and dragonflies) stickers. On another trip I added ribbons from Michael's.
I decorated the inside of the cards instead of the outside like I'd normally do. I used small dixie cups to form the circle around the stickers and serve as a guide for the letters. I used a glue runner to lay down the glue for a single strip of ribbon on the bottom. Once I had the stickers and letters stuck down, I erased the guides. Aside from sorting the letters I'd need, it took about 20 minutes per card to make.
Scrap Supplies used - Papers are by Amy Teets; fancy swirls are Photoshop Brushes by BSilva

Leftovers (i.e. Freezer Surprise)

Wednesday I thought we'd have left-over chili for dinner. So I opened a freezer container sniffed and thought I smelled chili. Then I defrosted it and stirred it up and wondered what the white things were but went ahead and added some Bush chili-pinto beans. Also the meat didn't look quite like ground beef. Then I stirred it up some more - that's when I realized that the white things were apples and the ground beef was really sausage. I had mixed the chili beans into the apple orchard bean bake. Wasn't the best we've had but it could have been worse I suppose. I think I need to get a grease pencil so I can write what the left over is.

Apple Orchard Bean Bake - I got the recipe somewhere so don't think it's original with me. Basically you cook up some bulk sausage - we like Jimmy Dean Mild Pork Sausage. When it's cooked up nicely you stir it together with some canned baked beans and a can of tomato soup. Put all this in something that you can bake in - I don't like to heat up the kitchen so I put it in a microwave safe dish. Then core, peel (if you want to) and slice one or two apples and lay the slices on top of the beans and sausage mix. Sprinkle the apples with cinnamon or a cinnamon-sugar mix. Cook until the beans are heated through and the apples are cooked. If baking it's something like half and hour at 350 degrees.

My family will definitely understand how this got mixed up with leftover chili.

Incidentally

This morning we woke up to 3 inches of snow.
The high today is supposed to be 54.

That's Spring in North Central New Mexico.

Two Scrapbook pages - 1 digital, 1 paper & glue

Here are two scrapbook pages of the same subject - the Hotel Galvez in Galveston, Texas.
The one on the top is a paper&glue layout, the one on the bottom is digital, done in Photoshop CS5. They both have a picture of the front of the hotel and a picture looking out our window. I like the paper & glue one better. Now to figure out why.

Just some thoughts

Don't know if I can keep this up but I'd like to blog a bit more. It will probably mean some changes to the design of the page - I'm still hoping to design some scrapbooking supplies. But - I noticed this last week that although I'm doing better, my digital lay-outs still don't look quite like paper-and-glue scrapbook pages.

This is what brought me to that realization. The last two weeks I've been trying to get my cruise scrapbook more up-to-date - especially the cruises we've done with a local DJ, Bobby Box. I got the ones for 2009 and 2010 and then couldn't find the pictures for 2008. I finally found them on my laptop (why there I'm not sure.) So I started building digital pages. But I had this nagging feeling that I'd scrapped at least part of the cruise before. I searched all of my scrapbooks and while I could find two devoted to our Disney Magic cruise in 1988, I couldn't find the one for 2008.

You have to also understand that my 'craftroom' is in a state of flux (it's almost always in a state of flux but more so now that my mother passed away in November and I've got a lot of her stuff to still go through.)

So I finished the digital scrapbook pages - had about 10 of them. I put them in my new "Just Cruising" album with the 2009 and 2010 cruises. Then I was cleaning up the craftroom, finished up St. Patrick's day cards, when I wanted to put away a magazine case full of cardstock. This belonged on top of a bookcase and was difficult to reach, so I moved some things out of the way. I moved one wheeled storage unit and came across an album that had kept falling down and getting in my way a few months ago. And yes, it was the 2008 cruise album. I started looking at it and decided I liked those pages better than the digital pages I'd created. They just seemed more warm and personal. So I transferred the pages (I had close to twenty of them) to the cruise album. I'll have to condense the digital page and I'll take a picture of the "matching" paper page to show the differences. But all the time I was making the digi-pages I could remember the first pages of the album I'd created before. I remembered using a tape with a wrought-iron fence on clear background that I'd used for the Galveston pictures. I'm glad I found them.