It's Official!!

I set a goal for myself last June to make Executive before seminar this year. Well, I got word this morning that I have officially been promoted to Executive!! The poor woman from The Angel Company who called to tell me is probably deaf in one ear now because I was screaming into the phone when she told me! I have been close for months, but was starting to think that I wouldn't make it because I pretty much took most of April and May off with having been sick with the gallbladder thing. But at the last minute things fell into place. Thank you so much to all of the customers and hostesses and new angels who joined my team this year and made this possible!

Tagged!

I opened an email this morning from my friend Awna and discovered that she had tagged me. So now I'm supposed to share with you the first thing that comes to my mind about each of these. Whew, that could be scary!

Yourself: tired and busy
Your Partner: gone (he travels for work)
Your Hair: needs cut and colored
Your Mother: haven't heard from her in a while
Your Father: hardworker
Your Favorite Item: my computer
Your Dream Last Night: seminar (only three weeks and I have no trades completed -- yikes!)
Your Favorite Drink: water
Your Dream Car: anything with a partition that I could close off to not hear the kids squabbling!
Dream Home: a farmhouse on two acres near town with four bedrooms and a studio (I'm not asking for much, huh?)
The Room You Are In: my studio, which is a mess and needs to be cleaned before tomorrow night's class
Where You Want to be in Ten Years: wow, I don't know the answer to that
Who You Hung Out With Last Night: my kids
You're Not: staying up late tonight because someone forgot to give the kids the memo that summer vacation is for sleeping in!! Hence the tired answer to question #1.
One of Your Wish List Items: a new tv for my husband
The Last Thing You Did: checked email
You Are Wearing: shorts and t-shirt
Your Favorite Weather: 70 and sunny
Last Thing You Ate: a piece of Dove milk chocolate, yummy
Your Life: is good
Your Mood: content
What Are You Thinking About Right Now: whether to order pizza for dinner
Your Car: gets me where I'm going thank goodness
What Are You Doing At The Moment: typing this! geez!
Relationship Status: Married
What Is On Your TV: kids' shows
What Is The Weather Like: mucho windy -- 30 mph gusts
When Is The Last Time You Laughed: at some silly thing the kids said this morning

Has it been a month already?!

Wow, I just went to crop the pictures of the pages that I made at the National Scrapbooking crop and realized that it has already been a whole month since I was at that crop!! Time flies, huh? I do want to share these pages with you. I wish the pictures were a little better, but I don't know how to get a great picture of a 12x12 double page layout so this is the best that I have!

All of the pictures on these pages are from my daughter's birthday party last summer. Yes, I'm working way, way behind on pictures. I don't worry about "getting caught up". I know that will never happen and I just kind of work on whatever event I'm inspired by at the time that I decide to scrap, which as I told you below isn't very often for myself. I enjoy scrapping much more this way -- not putting pressure on myself.

Here's the first page that I did that day. It was inspired by the picture on the top right of the second page where my daughter is sitting in a big plastic bin surrounded by the mini beach balls that we had at the party. I used paper from TAC's Kaleidascope Brites collection for these pages and also the Sizzlin' Summer stamp set, which I had used on her party invitation.

This page shows the cake that inspired the entire water theme to the party. My daughter spotted this cake on the cover of a Woman's Day magazine and asked me to recreate it for her. I'm telling you that I LOVE that kid to have spent all the time I did on that cake -- including decorating the teddy grahams with icing so they looked like they were wearing swim suits and sunglasses!

While I was working on this page, my friend asked me if the paper had been made to match the little girl's bathing suit! I love how they do look like they were meant to go together. And all of the fun colors in the pictures are in the paper too! (And no, I haven't done any of the journaling on these pages hence the big blank white spots.)

This is the one page that I went to the crop with some idea of how I wanted it to look. My husband, not being a scrapper, sees no need for zooming in when he's taking pictures. So we ended up with tons of pictures that once they were cropped in to show the details of the picture were very small (some less than 2x2). I wanted to include them because they all show different aspects of the kids playing in the water that day. So I had this stair step kind of layout in mind. After I finished the layout I wasn't sure what to do with the big blank white space on the top right. I decided to make a flower. I stamped the tag from the Label Words set on several parts of the cover sheet from the Kaleidascope paper pack, cut them out and stacked them together. Then I added a large brad that I borrowed from my friend (thanks, Tiff) for the center. I stamped the stem and leaves from the Artsy Elements flourish set that was a hostess reward during Jubilee and added the Fun in the Sun saying from Label Words.

It's a Party!

It's a party! A Lego party! My son is obsessed with Legos and his birthday is coming up so we are having a Lego party. Actually, I kind of "suggested" the idea because I had a super easy invite and cake in mind. Here's a picture of the outside of the invitation. My son helped me with these last week by punching out all of the circles. It's hard to tell from the picture, but each circle in raised up on a pop dot so it looks like the pegs of the Lego block. Pretty cool, huh? And it was fun to do with with him rather than me doing all of the work!



Here's a picture of the inside of the invitation. I used one of my other favorite sets from the retiring list -- Party Words -- along with two of my other favorite sets -- Simple Bet (to spell out Lego) and You're Invited. I love these three sets combined because they are all the same font and the possibilities of the types of invitations that you can make with them are endless.