Now That's An Owie

Last winter my nephew (then 6) attempted to do a karate kick off the kitchen counter.  What ensued was a scene that I (I'm kind of twisted) wish I witnessed. It started with him landing in a way that caused his glasses to puncture the skin right by his eye and cause an extreme amount of bleeding.  A loud scream filled the air and my brother-in-law Eric came running to his aid.  My sister followed soon after, the description I got was "spurting blood."  My niece, then 3, didn't know how to handle the scene and immediately panicked and started screaming as well. My sister went to call the paramedics while my brother-in-law attempted to stifle the bleeding.  Now the funniest thing about this whole story is that Eric doesn't do so well with blood.  So as he was trying to stop the bleeding on his son's head he started to pass out. So the paramedics showed up to a scene with a semi-conscious father laying on the floor, a little girl screaming in a corner, a mom trying to stifle blood flow and a little boy saying, "I'm OK guys, it really isn't that bad."

This is my contribution that fiasco:

Crate Paper-Season

I am on a buying kick right now.  But let's be honest, when am I not on a buying kick?  However my buying recently has been based on discovering older lines I like that may not be available in my favorite stores anymore so I've been heading over to Ebay.  Most recently I got the Crate Paper Season line.  It's cute but not too cutesy, I like the fun and funk to it. It was perfect for this layout, my niece and nephew with their new little sister at home.

Bonus Days

The one thing about my job that is cool is that my company recognizes how hard we work.  We are required to work a lot of weekends in the summer and they give us additional bonus days off during slow seasons.  Yesterday was a bonus day.  I was out of town for one of those weekends of work last weekend so yesterday I spent the entire day at home.  Spending an entire day at home is pretty much my favorite thing in the world.  If I am not traveling the only place I want to be is home.  So on top of some cleaning on organizing I got a couple layouts done.  I'm getting a little tired of doing our wedding scrapbook so I started on my 2011 book as well (I'm a bit behind).

I find myself buying more and more Crate Paper lately, beautiful collections

I've had the Hopscotch line sitting around forever and didn't know what to use it for, perfect for the birth of my niece!

Big Sur Roadtrip-Back to Nature

I am catching up on posting and realized that I never wrote about my birthday trip to Big Sur with the hubs.  This was my back to nature trip where I reconnected with camping. I have not really been camping since I was a kid when we took an annual trip to Forked Lake in the Adirondacks, aaah the memories.  We attempted to camp last year on my birthday in San Onofre but that was a disaster as the campsite was lame.  This year we decided to venture further up the coast since we now finally have a car that can do road trips.  We hopped in the car on a Thursday morning and drove past Santa Barbara to El Capitan State Beach.  While this campground is on the coast (and therefore has the noise from the 101) it was much nicer than San Onofre.  We managed to snag a corner spot with a view and while the sites were close to each other they did a good job of separating you from your neighbor.  Some photos from El Capitan:

View from our site, gloomy but pretty

Water fingers

Beach art

Some later afternoon sun

All you need for camping is a box of wine and a tent, right?

We stayed at El Capitan for one night and then drove up to Big Sur.  I've been raving for years about this coastal drive to my husband as he's never done it.  However I was a little disappointed this time as that famous blue Big Sur water wasn't showing due to the gloomy weather.  We stayed for 2 nights at a place called Fernwood Big Sur.  This is a combination campground/RV/cabin rental site right next to Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park.  Purists like my brother definitely wouldn't consider this real camping but come on, you're talking to a girl who wears stilettos at least 4 days of the week. So I loved the fact that they had a little store and a bar (that we actually never went and got drinks at). The site was a bit rowdy and noisy but everybody quieted down around 11 so this old lady could sleep. In our two days there we hiked in the national park next door, took a nap in our new tent when the temperature plummeted and drank around the campfire, because that's what I do when I camp, drink too much wine...from a box. Photos from Big Sur:

Ragged Point view

A Walk in the Woods

Our campsite at Fernwood

View from the top of our hike in the gloom

Happy Birthday to me! ♥ Chronic Cellars

There's a peek of that famous Big Sur water

The fruits of my labor from the last couple of nights.  I think my husband gets kind of bummed at me because I disappear into my own little world of crafting every night.  So I've been making an effort to at least plunk myself down in front of the movie he's watching with him while scrapping.  It drives him nuts that I can't just sit and watch a movie but I've faced the fact that I'm way to ADD. for that. Besides, most movies these days suck.

K&Company's Poppyseed is one of my favorite lines, love the colors.  I recently found some new embellishments at Michael's that I had never seen before.

Love the new chipboard word embellishments

Torn & layered paper

Basic Grey's old Boxer collection is still an elegant favorite of mine.  Unfortunately I'm coming close to using up all my papers from that collection, time to hunt on Ebay for more.

Worked great for a wedding layout

Trying to start making my own dimensional embellishments

My newest layout using Basic Grey's Hello Luscious line:

Las Vegas, Nevada

I'm pretty sure I'm one of the only people out there that despises the city of Las Vegas.  I have been there a million times, and the reason I probably hate it so much is that I am always there for work.  I think I have been there twice for fun.  Once was my first time there with an old girlfriend.  We were 21, got super-drunk off stupidly expensive drinks at Studio 54 (even though we were broke) and somehow ended up in some swingers suite at the Luxor where they tried to convince us to take a bath with them at 3am. While I consider myself a pretty open-minded person we hightailed it out of that suite pretty quickly. The second time I was there for fun was for my mother-in-law's 50th birthday about 10 years after my first experience there.  That was a decidedly mellower visit to Sin City.  All my other trips there have been for tradeshows or work events.  I just got home from the Dew Tour finals and I think I've ironed out my Vegas gripes:

1. The Food-Everybody raves about the amazing food and all these famous chefs have restaurants in Vegas.  Well I think their food is shit.  Nobody ever has vegetarian options and it's as overpriced as the drinks.  I think the best meal I've had in Vegas was at PF Changs, that's pretty pathetic (though I do love PF Changs).

2. The Douchebaggery-Holy shit I have never seen more d-bags in one place (though I have never been to the Jersey Shore). It's like every tool from every city in the country descends upon Vegas every weekend.  The girls try to outdo each other with their slutty outfits and the dudes use far too much hair product. This is all magnified by the fact that all these people think they are incredibly cool.

3. The Air-You can still smoke inside?  Really?!  I'm a former smoker and I think this is grossgusting.  The only reason it might make a little bit of sense is because it's nearly impossible to find your way outside when you're in those damn casinos.

4. The downright seediness of it all-Vegas is billed as this place of luxurious excess.  But really it's the place where people do things they are ashamed of.  Vegas smells like cigarettes and shame.

5. Hangovers-No matter WHAT I say ("I'm going to stay in my hotel room and work") every time I go to Vegas I end up with a least one hangover.  The only positive about this past weekend's hangover is it involved hanging out with 2 friends I hadn't seen in ages.

I didn't take any photos from my most recent trip except of autograph signings for work and that's just not very interesting.  The end.

A not so prolific weekend and a new camera

After last weekends great success in scrapbooking this past weekend was not so successful.  I had plenty of time but the pages I accomplished weren't up the the standards I had in my head after last weekend.  I think some of them might get re-done.  Below is the only one I ended up being happy with.  I also managed to get myself a new camera last week!  After talking to many people, including a couple professional photogs I settles on the Canon S95.  I had considered getting myself a DSLR but I don't feel like I'm quite ready to go down that road.  I also can't afford the expenditure right now due to my somewhat aggressive plan of visiting 3 different countries on 2 different trips next year (more on that later).  So far I am loving the S95.  This handy-dandy little cam is the size of a point and shoot with many of the manual settings of an SLR.  I am mastering the aperture priority setting and then will move onto more advanced settings.  I'm having flashbacks to my college photography class days complete with the fear that my shots are not art (as deemed by my photography 101 teacher at the University of New Mexico who shall remain nameless but was a prior idol of mine...bitch). My weekend is in summary in the below photos.

Friday's sunset from a friend's place in Del Mar, taken after waaaay too much happy hour wine

My "new" in-laws, the Coutts family

Fancy pants C cut with my favorite, Silhouette SD

Ollie is rather photogenic with the right camera and angle

Working with my husband

My husband and I work for the same company, in the same office building, with desks no more than 20 feet apart.  Today he walked into my office and I asked, “Can we just share an office, that way we’ll NEVER be apart.” He raised his eyebrows, looked at me like I was nuts and walked out the door. I think he’s jealous because I have my own office and he just sits in a cubicle, score one for Amber.

A prolific weekend

This weekend was my first weekend at home in quite a few weeks, my first weekend where I was able to sit and scrapbook for more than an hour.  The free weekend allowed me to ponder and take more time on my layouts then I normally do and I am loving my results.  I wish these weekends happened more often. Here are my favorites.

These girls featuring American Crafts Garden Cafe

Ribbon flags

Father & Son featuring Basic Grey Oxford

Scott & his Groomsmen featuring Basic Grey Marjolaine

Beautiful embellishments

Just Married

Isn't it funny how your favorite photos end up being the ones that aren't the formal posed ones?  I created this layout using the SEI Oasis line which is an older line. I have been really frustrated with my layouts lately because when I finish them I feel satisfied and happy with them.  Then I photograph them and I think they look boring and don't have enough going on.  I know my photography skills are rusty but i didn't think they were that bad. However somehow to me there is a huge difference between how it looks when I feel it's complete and how it looks when it is on a webpage.  I was thrilled with this layout when I completed it but now I look at the photo of it and I don't like it.  I'm thinking maybe it's because you can't really pick out all the details in the photo; like the together rubon on the lefthand side of the photo and the metal corner accent on the bottom left. So my next step (besides buying a better camera) is to attempt to improve the photography of my layouts, found a good tutorial here.

Echo Park Happy Days-Mr. & Mrs.

I found inspiration for this layout from here, there and everywhere.  I am learning that dimension adds so much to my layouts.  I love the new Echo Park line Happy Days.  It's an incredibly fun and surprisingly versatile line. Everything I used was from the collection with the exception of the black string and the red brads.

An attempt at Sketching

I was reading Kelly Goree's blog post on scrapbook.com yesterday outlining the main things she uses for inspiration. She is hands down my favorite scrapper so I took in every little detail.  Last night when I got home from work I decided to try sketching.  I have never approached scrapbooking that way.  I'm the kind of person who picks a photo or two for a layout and I will sit, sometimes for way too long, shuffling photos and paper around trying to make it all come together.  I even have a big "inspiration book" of layouts I admire from many other artists that I refer to often for help.  But sketching worked out for me pretty well.  I was able to get my idea down and execute it pretty quickly.  I definitely changed a couple little things and added elements as I went but the sketching really helped the main layout idea.  Here's my end piece, one of my favorites yet.

The photo of my husband and I kissing on our wedding day is one of my favorites.  My best friend said it "makes her heart happy."

Using Crate Paper's Random collection definitely helped.  I love contrast but often find that my layouts are a little too "matchy matchy."  I tend to stick to collections and have a hard time mixing things up.  But this collection mixed it up for me. Some of the details:

Pearls and Ruffles seem so wedding like.  The ruffled ribbon reminds me of my dress.

Heart/Flourish die cut made using the amazing Silhouette SD machine.

I had these brads forever and never can find the right layout to use them, here it is!

Good old American Crafts Thickers always add awesomeness to a layout

Kelly's post also gave 2 sites with ready made sketches. Page Maps seems particularly helpful as it shows a sketch and an end layout.  I'm loving this sketching thing more and more because even if you use a page map made by another artist your layout will reflect your personal taste and your tweaks on their idea. More to come with sketching.