Wow – another week between posts! I know, bad blogger – but life has an amazing tendency of redirecting my plans! Let’s see, what’s happened in the last week… Nadya went for her 4 month check-up and shots. Poor girl – she did really well, but didn’t feel good for most of the weekend. My parents came to visit so that DH could work on their pick-up – we thought it was going to be a straight-forward rear-end swap, but alas, Murphy kicked in. The gear ratios were the same but the wheel bolt patterns were not and neither were the shock mounts…so plan B, replace the pinion bearing and see if that will suffice – many hours later – no, better but not going to fix the situation. Plan c, order new ring and pinion set and rebuild existing rear-end. Poor DH was exhausted when he was finished with Plan B. The parts have been ordered, but I’m not sure when they will arrive and when he’ll have time to work on the rebuild. Then yesterday was his birthday, so in addition to the usual grocery shopping and errands, I needed to bake a cake and try to create this amazing buttercream frosting from his childhood. The cake baking was easy – and the frosting is good, but not quite the same…and the recipe made a ton of it, so now I have leftover frosting in the fridge…which means more baking in the not too distant future. During all of this, I had discovered some “old” negatives – so I scanned them in to see what sort of treasures they held. Turns out my 16th Birthday and some shots of the coupla times I modeled for a formal wear shop were just waiting for me. Of course, I “needed” to scrap, so here’s what I came up with:

I used Lynn’s new Cranberry Crush kit that was part of her grab bag – it should be in the DSO store when she returns from vacation. I also borrowed the flower and flourish from Kim Broedelet’s Gift Template 1 (one of her blog freebies!). The colors were really weirded out from the scan, so with some help and advice from Kim Hill, I converted them to B&W. I used her Photoshop Actions sets 3 and 16. The template I used is one of Teriann’s for the DSO September template challenge- which is still up and running through the end of the month! Since Lynn is on vacation and she’s one of the infamous “Humpday Hunnies” – I’ve created a little mini using some of her Commercial Use items that coordinates with her freebies from the last 2 weeks. Check back tomorrow for a preview and the link!

This is the layout I did for the Scrap-n-Chat at DSO – we had 24 hours, so from 7 pm last night to 7 pm tonight to get a layout completed and posted in the Gallery to earn a really cool gift from Darlene – in this case a quick page. So, I worked like mad on my layout today, and this is what I came up with. The photo is one taken by my good friend, Aaron Jackson, of Sprague Lake, Colorado. I played with blend modes and layers masks to have the Aspen in full color and the rest of the photo black and white. For the background I blended the same photo with one of the papers in Lynn’s new Pumpkins kit (which is on sale right now!). The green paper was created using the photo as texture (see Lexi’s tutorial at Scrap Your Art Out). The stamp frames are from Lynn’s new Stamp Frame Clusters kit and the WordArt is from Traci Thompson – it coordinates with her Rejuvenation kit (also on sale).
Have a great evening!