Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Fighting the Sickness, Procrastinating the Layout

I know I'm getting a chest cold but I refuse to b elieve it. My solution for sickness is to keep as busy as possible so that your body forgets that it's getting sick.  I swear it works...except if you are too sick to move.  I'm not at that point yet, but I wasn't up for creating a full layout just yet.

Besides the cold, I'm procrastinating because I really want to scrap my Berlin pictures but I find scrapping vacations crippling.  There's so many pictures and souvineers and so much to put together.  I want the layout to be as great as the vacation...so I'm putting a lot of unnecessary pressure on myself.  There's another project floating around in my head but I don't want to talk about it yet.  The person I'm making it for might be reading this blog...I mean you never know right?  People think no one will find their blog so they start writing about their sexcapades and pretty soon they're fired from their job as a preschool teacher.  It happens.  Not that this project in my head is about sex or any kind of romantic gift for that matter. Imagine? Here is a scrapbook of sexy pictures of myself wooo.  Yea, ok.

Anyway, one thing I knew I wanted to incorporate into my Berlin layouts is using a picture as the background for the layout.  I took a shot in front of the tallest building in Berlin and I really wanted to emphasize the height of it, so I decided to print the picture full size.  The only problem is it's hard to use a glossy print as a background so I instead printed it on canvas paper.  I've yet to do anything with it, but here's the picture printed on canvas:

Thursday, March 24, 2011

An Entry for Those who Love Rambling

I often want to make scrapbook pages about people who I love and make my life better but aren't necessarily my family or friends.  I love my family and friends, but they are becoming the Jane Lynch of my scrapbooking.....they are in every single one of my layouts and the subject of everybody's layouts (for those of you none tv watchers not getting the reference first off maybe you should stop reading this blog but also, Jane Lynch has been a guest star on every single TV show made in the last decade or so...IMDB it..seriously). 

Anyway, as I often do, I did a little dranking tonight so I didn't create anything new. I was, however, thinking of things that make my life awesome. Things that would be really amusing to scrapbook....

1. The lady who threads my eyebrows in less than a minute - My eyebrows are one of those things that always embarrassed me when I was younger...along with the fact that I had braces, coke-bottle glasses, bad acne and frizzy hair (and I memorized the Ugly Duckling fairy tale).  I didn't have a uni-brow, but they grow in all funny and curly and there's some weird sparse spots (to which the lady always asks, how'd you get that scar?..I make up a new story everytime, I wonder if she notices...maybe she just likes to hear my imagination run wild). I convinced myself that they could never be fixed until I walked into the threading salon for the first time and my life changed.

2. The Stuffed Dog I Sleep With Every Night - Most people see the adorable floppy creature on my bed and think he holds some kind of sentimental value--a gift from an ex bf, my childhood toy that I carried around everywhere, a gift from my grandmother who has since passed on....but no.  I bought him at a King Kullen at 1AM on a Saturday night (also how I pick up most of the men I date...jk..not really..no really I am). 

3. The lady who does my laundry who still can't pronounce my name - I hate hate hate hate hate doing laundry so it was awesome when I moved to an apartment, with a drop off service downstairs.  The only problem, although not really a problem so much as amusing, the lady who does my laundry can not pronounce nor spell my name.  I always thought Heather was one of the easiest names but I was wrong. She usually pronounces it Heter, and it's been spelled on my receipt, Heter, Harter, Heda and at one point Heartehr.

4. Wireless Internet  - I work for an internet company and wireless still surprises me.  Right now I'm writing this entry from my bedroom, something I never do (partly because there's no TV in here and partly because it takes too long to untangle the plug from beneath the desk..I'm the Van Gogh of laziness).  It always amazes me that my wireless works in my bedroom because the wireless router is so far away from me...behind WALLS.  How does it work through WALLS.  I don't know. It's magic.

5. Facebook..Yes I would love to do a scrapbook layout about facebook. People can make fun of me or it all they want but if it wasn't for Facebook, I probably wouldn't be in touch with anybody from high school or college, I wouldn't know what my ex boyfriend is doing at every moment in the day and I wouldn't be able to see pictures of my friend's cousin's friend's boyfriend's sister's wedding.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

I'm Not Doing the Robot, My Neck Just Hurts

I'm finally able to move around again today after injuring my neck this weekend. How did I injure my neck? Very, very, very stupidly..headbanging.  Yes, you read that right. I transported myself back to the early 90s and tried to shake my long hair like a rock star, only instead of feeling incredibly awesome, my neck experienced a terrible surge of pain.  26 is too old to headbang.  Now I know, and knowing is half the battle.

Anyway, because I've been unable to bend forward the last few days, I haven't worked on anything new until tonight.  My neck injury reminded me so much of my age that I decided to finally finish my birthday layout.  I even sketched and measured my photos! Looks like I'm growing up.

I wanted to have a border around my pages but I didn't want to waste an entire piece of patterned paper making a photo matte so instead I sliced thin strips of the patterned paper to glue them into a border. When I type it out, it seems really simple and obvious, but I thought I was a genius when I was doing it.  After everything was placed and started gluing though...I still went straight to improvising.  Sketching just isn't for me.  I'm not sure I love the finishd product, but surprisingly my neck doesn't hurt as much anymore...
All Patterned Paper: Me and My Big Ideas, Stickers: K&Company, Stamps: Unknown

It's obviously a two page layout, still hard to show together. Here's a close up of each page:





Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Stick em up

There are probably many many many embellishment tricks I can learn for scrapbooking but my favorite way to embellish is good old fashion stickers.  Sure I want to learn how to heat emboss things or use chalk to make paper look aged but stickers are easy...and fun..and Michael's has 4 aisles of them.  I'm pretty sure I black out slightly when I purchase stickers. I find ones in my sticker basket all the time that I have absolutely no recollection of purchasing.  Did I mention my sticker basket is a magazine holder overstuffed with disorganization. I began to work on my birthday layout tonight but I couldn't find what I was looking for so I dumped the entire thing on my coffee table.
Ack! Looks like I now have some organizing to do....birthday layout will have to wait another day...or two..tomorrow is St. Patrick's day afterall. I try not to scrapbook when I'm drunk although it could be an interesting experiment.....no I'd probably end up slicing my finger off. Also can someone tell me what the deal is with blogger...it seems like it really really wants to be in times new roman font, if I leave it alone for one minute it switches back.  You will be Arial damn it!  Ok..time to clean up the sticker mess that I created for myself, if I don't get distracted by Criminal Minds first...oops too late!

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

And I'm Baack

I'm back from vacation, miss me? Probably not but that's OK.  I missed home and bagels. Europe doesn't know about bagels but they should because they are delicious. Besides the lack of the most delectable of breakfast foods, the trip was great.  I can't wait until I go on vacation again.  I'm so tired I feel like I need a vacation from my vacation.  I don't know if it's possible to be jet lagged for so long but it definitely feels that way.  I haven't slept through the night in the last two days. Sigh.

Anyway, enough about me...actually wait, more about me.  This is my blog.  I printed out a sketch from another scrapbooking blog that I really want to use for my birthday layout.  I'm going to get to bed early tonight (there's nothing on TV at 10pm anyway...yes my life revolves around the television and I don't apologize for it) so that tomorrow I don't feel like someone slipped sedatives into my food. Then hopefully my brain will be back from vacation and I can get started on the layout I've been thinking about. 

Monday, March 7, 2011

Away We Go...

Sorry I haven't been posting! Last week was my birthday (26 ack!) and tomorrow I'm leaving the country! My first trip to Europe - Berlin! I'm really excited.  So much packing to do still though. I'll definitely have some scrapbook pages of my birthday and the trip when I come back. Until then...Auf Wiedersehen!