Month: May 2011

I’m starting a new felt project.  Get excited.  🙂

I bought some organic potatoes the other day and they started to sprout.  Michael, the cook in our family, was a bit put out by this, but I thought it was kind of cool.  He suggested that I plant one with Kate so that she could watch it grow.  He even helpfully found these directions as he knows that I have a bit of a black thumb.  No really, I kill every plant I touch.  But I figured, how hard can it be?  It’s already sprouting.

First I gathered our supplies: potato, skewers, cup, water, scissors.

Then I cut the skewers down to size.  I know the directions called for toothpicks, but we like to improvise here.  Also, I have no toothpicks.  Kate was fascinated with the skewers.

Then I let Kate explore the potato.  Hey, it’s her science experiment, right?  I cut it short when she started trying to eat the raw potato.  A picky eater she is not.  🙂

Then I stuck in the skewers.  I decided to go with a nice star pattern.  (I sound like such a snob here.  I’m really not.  I am, however, a bit neurotic and OCD.  )

I decided to let Kate pour the water since she’s obsessed with pouring water.  Plus, I wanted her to feel like she was involved.  She loved it and would have happily poured the water back and forth for an hour if I had let her.  Then she got to help set the potato in the water.

Seems easy enough, right?  Wrong!  The black thumb strikes again.  We did this weeks ago, but our potato never sprouted.  It just dissolved.  There were trails of potato snot in the water.  I thought about changing the water, but Michael suggested that maybe the potato knew what it was doing and it needed the starch.  We waited and waited and waited until tonight we finally threw it away.  Maybe we’ll try again with a different type of potato because Kate thought that it was pretty cool to check on our potato every day, but she (and I) lost interest when nothing every happened.  Has anyone successfully done this?  Care to share any tips?

I completed 15 layouts on Friday and Saturday, many of them 2 pagers.  None of them anything spectacular.  They were all just blah throw down layouts.  While I was at my crop on Saturday there were some ladies there who were passionate about their scrapping.  They had come from all over Texas and they were obsessed with Tim Holtz.  Now that’s not really my style, but their stuff was amazing and it reminded me of how much fun I used to have scrapping.  When I would get *maybe* one layout done a week, not 15 in 2 days.   When I used to spend hours adding layers of fun goodies, not just slapping some pictures on some cardstock and calling it a day.  I was inspired.

Today, I got one layout done.  It was only a one pager.  I spent hours on it.  I love it.  Now it is far from perfect, but I felt like I finally got to play again!  I’ve decided that I can’t keep on at the pace that I was.  Good lord, I have something like 19 layouts slated for January alone.  I’ve decided that I am going to be much more selective about the layouts that I choose to scrap- as Michael says, I don’t need to make a page every time Kate goes to the park.

Without further ado, let me take you through the 16th layout.

First I trimmed the photos slightly, maybe 1/8th of an inch off of each side?  Then I matted 3 of the photos very thinly with some patterned paper before I busted out the big guns, the hubby’s sewing machine.  I have had several scrapping buddies who are intimidated by the thought of sewing on paper and I just don’t get it.  Of course, I learned to sew on paper way before I learned to sew fabric so maybe I’m biased, but I think paper is easier.  It doesn’t bunch or shift and you can glue it together instead of messing with pins.  I didn’t even change the bobbin.  🙂  Don’t put glue right where you’re going to sew though.  It tends to gunk things up.  For these pics, I sewed a slightly crocked line around the edge 3 times.

Then I decided to ink the edges of the paper, because, hey why not?  I got nothing but time here.  This was right about the point that Kate woke up from her nap and I realized that I had basically gotten nothing done during her whole nap except for matting 3 pictures.  It was fun though!  I went ahead and slapped those 3 pictures down while Michael was getting her up.  Have I mentioned lately that he’s awesome?  🙂

Now what to do with the one remaining picture…  I decided to frame it with some of the die cut ribbon tape stuff that came with the patterned paper I was using.  It’s kind of a pain to use, but it sure is cute.  It wasn’t really popping against the paper though so I outlined it with a brown marker after I had it down to give it more definition.

Then I decided to use some of my stash of chipboard glitter letters.  Of course, I only had 1 of the 4 letters that I needed, but I’m not one to let that stop me.  I just cut up an “h” to make an “l,” a “g” to make an “o” and an “a” to make an “e.”  The “e” doesn’t look perfect, but I’m going with it anyway.  I went ahead and outlined these too.

I also made a little tag to slip behing one of the photos to add some journaling.  Not that it needed to be hidden, but it didn’t fit on the page anywhere.  Then I threw on some rubbons and a bottle cap.  Speaking of, who knew bottle caps were back in style?  Not me, but I saw them out at Archivers this weekend.  Lucky for me I never throw anything away and I still have several from the last time they were popular.  I had even already flattened and painted this one.  🙂

Here the finished layout!  I decided to get all artistic with the background.  Well, that and the fact that it was rapidly getting dark and I wanted to take these photos with natural light.

Here’s a close up of some of the details.

Questions about any of the supplies?  Leave a comment and I’ll try to dig out the packaging.