Red White and Blue Blog Hop

Welcome to the Independence Day Blog Hop. If you didn't start at Amanda's Blog, you can follow the link and see everyone's projects. You should have arrived here from Adele's Blog.

Our challenge for this blog hop was to use the colors Red, White, and Blue. I really didn't know what I wanted to make for this challenge, but this paper from the Echo Park Collection-Wintertime, was perfect. I've been working on winter pictures lately, and this paper is just gorgeous.

This page is all about a sledding trip this past winter. We had a lunch break between classes on Tuesday. One of my friends is from California and has never went sledding before. This was our senior year of college, and we had a lot of things to do on our bucket list. So we decided one day instead of eating that we were going to pack up our sleds and snow gear, and sled on campus. Except we only had two sleds and four people.

We quickly realized why you can't sled on campus. The hill is very steep....and drops right down into a faculty parking lot. We had fun making trains on our sleds and falling off before flying over the snow banks. We made the most of our last winter in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

A little more about my page. The patterned paper is from Echo Park. I embossed the red and navy card stock with my Cuttlebug. Then I sanded them down with my Tim Holtz Sanding Tool. I dressed up the circles with some snowflakes and embellished them with glitter and my i-Rock. The snowflakes trail is stitched with my Sew Easy and embellished with Liquid Pearls.

Thanks for visiting my blog. I will draw for a prize on Sunday night (7/1) at 8pm EST. To enter become a follower of my blog, and tell me your favorite memory of Wintertime. Your next stop will be Robyn's blog.

Stay tuned for lots more of my winter adventures coming soon!

Flowers

One of my other passions besides scrapping and cooking, is flowers. We have lots of beds around the yard at home, and I also help my grandma take care of hers. Grandma has lots of beautiful lilies, she gave me some, but the rabbits got hungry. At home besides flowers we also have a veggie garden with tomatoes, peppers, beans, and cucumbers.

I'm looking forward to my sunflowers blooming later in the summer. I'm so thankful that it has finally rained and we are no longer out watering every day. Now to figure out how to keep the rabbits from eating the lilies.

Christmas Fun!

Christmas is normally my toughest subject to scrap. Lots of people, lots of colorful outfits and lots of wrapping paper. Last year I won the paper line Everyone Loves Christmas, by Echo Park. If you haven't figured it out yet, I use a lot of Echo Park's products.

 I actually enjoyed scrapping this holiday. I have decided that using one paper line has helped stream line the process. Some of the papers were really wild, so I had fun fussy cutting and making embellishments out of them. I love that Echo Park has double sided papers and always has one paper with strips of different papers.

The rest of my Christmas pictures are in We R Memory Keepers sleeves. I put some pictures in the sleeves, along with journalling and other cute embellishments. I am vowing to keep the process more streamlined and use these sleeves more often. I initially struggled with this process of scrapping, but I used this as an area to journal more.

We have the best Christmas celebrations. Two extended family celebrations and one with just the four of us. There is never a dull moment, and everyone enjoys themselves. Our Christmas this year finished up with a broken down van on the side of the highway before the Packers game.

Christmas Dinner with the Girls

Every year, my friends and I go out for a Christmas Dinner. We go out to dinner and exchange presents. The last few years, we have done it after we got back from our Christmas Break. That way we all have some time over break to make some money. This year we went out to Buffalo Wild Wings for dinner (our favorite) and then to a fancy restaurant for dessert.

I am seriously in love with this paper. Its from MyMindsEye. I played with some distress ink, to chance my brown and pink papers. They were different shades before. I even alcohol inked the buttons on the flowers, to make them gold.

I'm going to miss my group of friends. We are now spread across three different states, and one is on the opposite coast. We have so much fun, and it always seems to be related to Buffalo Wild Wings.

Happy Fathers Day

I'm a day late, but I still need to show off my Father's Day Card. I will admit, I'm not much in the card making department .Cards stress me out. The only thing I can really do is alcohol inks, cuz they are super hard to screw up.

I will admit, I am a total Daddy's girl. We are great friends. We cook together, bike ride, and play ladder ball. He's always there to talk to me...and takes my side.

Guy cards are super hard for me, because I don't have many supplies. Thankfully my local scrapbook store-Creations Galore, lets us use their workroom stamps during the crops. We just have to bring the ink and cleaners. I was able to find the perfect stamp-a covered bridge. My dad is an engineer, so he loves that sort of stuff. I've seen random bridges all over the US.

I love the colors on this card. We love autumn, so this just seemed like the perfect card. I'm lucky to have a great LSS that lets us use their supplies!

Fall Favorites

If you haven't figured out my favorite place on earth, its Door County WI. Regardless of the season, I seem to find myself up there. Flowers in the spring, swimming and boating in the summer, biking and hiking in the fall, and skiing in the winter. I absolutely love to scrap fall pictures. I love the rich colors. I love the oranges and yellows. I fell in love with the Little Yellow Bicycle Hello Fall Line this year. It worked so well for my pictures.

These are the last two pages of fall. I've been waiting to use a score board so I can make the accordion flowers. They were in a package I won, also from the LYB line.

 The first page is on a bluff in Peninsula State Park. Its up on one of the top roads in the park. The views are spectacular in the fall. I always make sure to make my way up there in the fall. I fussy cut some of the busy paper, to pull out the big flowers that I loved so much!

This second page was taken around Egg Harbor and Fish Creek. We visited the fall festival during our trip and ate at the White Gull Inn. They always have the most beautiful flowers and seasonal displays. I really like the picture on the right page, with the Pukin' Pumpkins.

I've finished my fall pictures, and I'm onto Winter. Seems weird, since it is 90 out again this weekend.

Baby Its Cold Outside....Not

Nothing like scrapping Christmas pictures when it is 94 degrees outside. It was another hot and humid weekend. I wonder if this is just the start of a warm summer. I'm enjoying not mowing the lawn. My poor flowers need lots of watering. I've finished student teaching until September and now I'm back to work.

Since it was hot, I used it as a good excuse to scrap. My scrap area is in the basement, with no windows. So I don't feel guilty hiding down in my craft cave when it is too sticky to do anything else. And I just happened to be wrapping up fall and beginning on my Christmas pictures.

Making Christmas cookies is always one of my favorite activities. So much that I did it once with my parents and sister, and again with my cousin and her 5 kids. My sister and I love to have flour fights, eat the dough, and scrape the frosting pan. Cookies with 5 kids....well that's just a little crazy.

My entire Christmas season I am using the paper line Everyone Loves Christmas by Echo Park. I got this line last year, so it is retired now. But it works well for the multitude of un-matching outfits. I actually broke out some We R Memory Keepers Divided Page Protectors. They are like picture sleeves, but you can slip in journalling and other embellishments. I just get overwhelmed with how many pictures I accumulate at this time of the year.

I fussy cut out the ornaments, and jazzed them up with Stickles and i-Rock gems. I'm on a new kick for black background paper. Out with the kraft of fall and in with black.

I'm looking forward to a crop this weekend and my Local Scrapbook Store. I'm excited to meet a new group of scrappers. I will leave you with a picture of my other summer hobby-gardening. Thanks to my Grandma for the new lilies.