Scrapbook page topper...

Oh boy, do I love to scrapbook. I don't know why I don't fit it into my paper crafting more. I think it takes on a craft of it's own separate from the card making at times. But when I dig into my photos and scrapbooks, I am one happy camper. Months back, I had enough photos of Josey and her friend straightening Jordan's hair that I needed more than my 365 Daily Album single photo for the day.

I used some blended scrapbook methods(combining traditional scrapbook with divided page protectors where you just slip in photos) for a quick(er) layout than a full two page traditional layout.

I love scrapbooking kits. For this layout I chose a scrapbook pad and some matching embellishments from We R Memory Keepers.

Love these textured tags and borders, etc that go along with it. Makes for easy accents.
For the page protectors I chose, I only needed a topper portion since my photos were going into the other slots. I chopped a sheet of 12 x 12 paper down to fit my toppers. The decorations were mostly complete since the paper had a nice pattern to it.
I simply added some computer generated journaling and fancied up the patterns with some Papertrey stamps. For the loopy half circles, I used Pine's Mini Scrapbook Series: Tabs stamp set. A perfect fit.
Next, I took one of the pre-made tags with the butterfly image and added a strip of paper with the *good times* sentiment from the tabs set stamped on it. I also added a rainbow striped paper that I die cut with the Small Scalloped Border die. A snippet of Terracotta Tile Bitty Dot Satin Ribbon finished of the tag nicely. A perfect little accent with just a few fancifications.
The finished page blends in nicely with the look of my 365 Daily Album. The page on the right is my first page....
....and the page on the left is my second page. I added it on the next page because that's how it fit. Sure I'd rather have them side by side, but this is what works layout wise so I just rolled with it.
By the way, if you happen to zoom in on the photos, here's the story: Josey and her friend Megan wanted to straighten Jordan's oh so curly hair. She reluctantly let them and it looked adorable. Jordan hated it and made sour puss faces in every photo I took. Good times....great memories. That's why I love the scrapbooking so much. Gotta get some more scrappin' dates on my calendar. Yoohooooo........Carmen????

February Personal Day...12 Days of Me

Edit: For my Australian reader who doesn't have tater tots......here is a link. Do you have hashbrowns? You could probably use those. If not, make homemade fried potatoes and put them on top before baking. Also, someone asked about my canned green beans. My mom helps me can them...we just stuff green beans into jars, add canning salt and water and pressure cook them so I don't have a recipe.

Hey everyone, I actually got to feeling better yesterday so I did my meal planning day. This post will get long as I add in recipes, etc so settle in for a good read.

Hey everyone, it's about that time again. Time for my 12 Days of Me Personal Day. You can read all about my 12 Days of Me concept and my January Personal day right here. I've chosen the 19th of every month to be my personal day. This month I am concentrating on meal planning and a little organization in my kitchen. I have all my groceries bought and stacked on my counter so I'm itching to get started.

My meal planning will consist of a full day of cooking meals or partial meal items to have on hand. With all the girls' activities, my working from home and good tv on now at night (American Idol and Survivor), I don't want to spend anymore time in the kitchen at night than I have to. I LOVE to cook, don't get me wrong. But getting in and out of the kitchen at night means all that more time I have to relax and spend quality time with the family.

With that said, I am not a huge fan of freezing meals. I tend to forget what's in the freezer and then I always think stuff tastes funny if it's been in there too long. So I'm planning a few casseroles, some pre-cooked meat, some cookies, etc that will provide a few week's worth of meals. Everything about this month's Personal Day will be added to this post. So it may get long but check back for updated recipes, photos and more.

To pre-plan for my personal day, I started off by scouring my recipe books and the internet for tasty menu items. I made copies or bookmarked my recipe books with my final recipe choices. Next I made a huge grocery list of the items I needed for each recipe. The girls helped me shop this week for all of my grocery items. I made a trip to our local butcher shop for some meat too. It's thawing out so I will be ready to start cooking.

I'll post more about my personal day later but in the meantime I wanted to show you some other stuff that's been cookin' in my kitchen. I am bound and determined to get this house of ours in order. I have taken after my mother and have become very good at *collecting* things. And those piles of *things* are now organized into what I call *organized clutter*. It's not good. It drives me nuts. I'm not as bad as those hoarder people on tv but there's a lot of room for improvement. So I've decided to tackle small areas, otherwise it gets overwhelming.

Here's a project I did to spruce up a corner of my kitchen, one of my favorite rooms in the house because I dearly love to cook. I had this spinning, wooden spice rack that we received as a wedding gift. I love to use it but over half of the spices in it were weird ones I never used and some had never been opened. Those spices were over 15 years old, eww.

So I dumped out all the spices, washed the glass spice jars and soaked the lids to remove the old labels. New spices were added to the sparkling clean jars.
I also made new labels for the lids using my computer and PTI Kraft cardstock. I punched out the circle labels and adhered them to the jars with clear packing tape. Fancy huh? I could have done some laminating or some other method but the packing tape worked for me.
I cleaned up the wood spinner and gave it a coat of mineral oil just like I do my cutting boards. Spiffy!
This is the corner of my kitchen that I cleaned up. I have been reading lots of articles on organizing and decorating and there is one phrase/rule that keeps sticking out in my mind. Here it is: Only keep the items you really love. Get rid of the rest. That's a pretty big statement for me because I've collected a lot of stuff over the years. I like my stuff. Stuff is good. But I applied my new rule to this corner. I got rid of a cutting board with a drawer that I really liked. Liked, not loved. Now I can honestly say that I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE everything in this corner of my kitchen. There's still lots of stuff, but it's the gooder stuff. I will never be a minimalist, let me just say that. I need my stuff sitting out. I'm probably more of a maximumist. Is that a word? More stuff is good. But I'm working on it.
Here's what I love in my new kitchen corner. I love my newly spiffied up spice rack spinner. I used it today and and it was so organized and clean and shiny! I love my glass sugar and flour jars that I got from Walmart. I use these two cooking items a lot so they have earned a place out on the counter. I love my fluted cookie jar with the silver lid that I got from Nell Hill's in Atchison, Kansas. (Note: Cabinets are natural cherry and countertops are a laminate called concrete...cookbook is The Amish Cook's Baking Book)
I even love the old tin measuring cups that are in my flour and sugar jars. Plain ol' cups wouldn't do, I had to find just what I loved.
I love this new cutting board I got at Bed, Bath and Beyond. It's made from renewable tree source and has a very rustic wood pattern. I've searched for one like this for a long time. To spiffy it up, rub in mineral oil about every 30 uses. I also love my Longaberger baskets that hold my cooking utensils. Many of my utensils are from my days of being a Pampered Chef lady and some of the old wooden spoons are from my Grandma's stash. I also love Bath and Body foaming hand soap.
And these items don't sit out but I love them so they're worth showing. I love my pepper grinder, nothing compares to freshly ground pepper. Don't used the canned stuff. Sometimes I love it so much that I need mass quantities. So I take a bunch of peppercorns and grind them up in coffee grinder. I found this old tin pepper shaker at an antique store and knew just what I'd use it for. So now when I need a teaspoon or so of ground pepper for a recipe, I reach for my shaker. I only keep a quarter cup or so in there so it stays nice and fresh.
So there you have it. I did it. I organized something. It feels good. What's next? Get this, Becky Higgins showed a little part of her kitchen on her blog and she uses glass jars as canisters too. Love it!

RECIPE SECTION(some of the recipes I'll be making):

Restaurant Style Salsa from The Pioneer Woman.....link is HERE. Oh is this good. I've searched for a recipe like this that you can make with canned good. This is THE ONE. I'm going to can whole tomatoes this summer so I can use those. I'm making this to go with some of the Mexican food I'm making.

Veggie and Cheese Bagel Sandwich from The Pioneer Woman....link is HERE. This is what I'll be making for my lunch on my personal day. I used to get these kinds of sandwiches with my girl coworkers when we lived in the city. Yum. Edit: I made this for lunch....so awesome!!

Mom's Pork Green Chili from The Pioneer Woman's Tasty Kitchen section....link is HERE. I'll serve this with tortillas, sour cream, my canned jalapeno slices, some of that Restaurant Style Salsa and my mom's hot corn bread recipe. Edit: All of this is going with Eric to poker night...the fellas all love me. :)

Tator Tot Casserole recipe from my mom:

In a 9 x 13 pan, layer 2 lbs seasoned, browned hamburger, chopped carrots, small chopped onion, 1 can whole corn, 1 can green beans (I used our home grown, canned variety). Mix 1 can Cream of Chicken Soup and 1 can Cream of Mushroom soup and 3/4 cup milk. Spread over veggies. Top with bag of tator tots. Bake 350 for 1 to 1-1/2 hours. This went into the freezer with the baking time and duration written on the foil with a Sharpie.

Other recipes that I'm making are White Chicken Enchiladas, Three Cheese Stuffed Shells, and Chimichangas. I'll also be baking some chocolate chip/cream cheese cookie bars and browning up a bunch of ground beef to freeze for recipes. Good eats, indeed.

February Personal Day Plans

Hi everyone. I'm busy working on projects for upcoming releases so I don't have a project prepared for today. Instead I thought I'd talk about my February personal day coming up on the 19th. Now I could easily spend each of these personal days just working on my scrapbooks. But I thought it would be fun to change things up a bit.

So this month I'm going to work a little bit on my scrapbooks, catching up on some journaling I need to do and work on a few layouts to finish up 2009. For the rest of my personal day, I'm going to work on some meal planning. I know many of you might be saying, *What, you wanna cook on your day of fun?* Actually yes, I love to cook. And I love to collect recipe books and search for new recipes. I just got a new cookbook from Books Are Fun that comes to our library so I'm excited to try some new recipes. And maybe some from my Pioneer Woman cookbook too.

So what will I be doing? I'm not much on freezing meals because I fear that what goes in the freezer will get forgotten and then will get freezer burnt. So I do a little bit of freezing and then prepare the rest of the meals fresh on the day we eat them. I don't' know exactly what meals I'll pre-plan but I know that I'll be browning up a lot of ground beef seasoned with onion and spices.......to use for tacos, spaghetti, Mexican food, etc. I'll probably bake up a lot of seasoned chicken breasts too for these little pizzas and wraps I like to make. A few baked items like brownies, cookies and muffins will be on the list too. I might make a double batch of my mom's BBQ meat balls to keep in the freezer...one of the few meals I like to freeze. I also like to chop up a bunch of onions to keep in the freezer.

Between now and the 19th I'll be collecting recipes, making a grocery list and developing my menus in some sort of printed format that I can keep on hand. I plan to share some recipes with you too. And if you have any great recipes that use basics like ground beef or chicken, I would love for you to share them. Low fat meals would be a bonus.

I'm excited about my personal day this month. It feels good to be on top of the game and have some menus planned in advance. So tell me, did you take your personal day in January? If so, please feel free to share what activities you did.

Okay, heading out to basketball games now........have a great day everyone.

More 12 Days of Me Kits

The third and final round of The 12 Days of Me kits are up in my shop now. Please take advantage now because this will be it for these kits....unless I have a huge demand for more but it would be a while til I got to them. There are 16 kits listed in the shop. Have fun with this concept!!

The second round of kits are going up in my Etsy shop now so I can go watch American Idol with the family. :) Enjoy!

Hello everyone. I have more 12 Days of Me kits ready to ship out this week. You can read about the concept behind my kits HERE. The kits will vary slightly from the one you see below. Some of the base cardstock is Papertrey Ripe Avocado and some of the bases will be Dark Chocolate. And some of the twill ribbon will be Spring Moss and some will be Ripe Avocado. The pieces with the numbers are now Rustic Cream. Patterned papers will be from the PTI Turning a New Leaf collection. I'm going to package them all up and mail them out randomly because it's the quickest way to package these up and get them in the mail to you.

With each kit, you'll get the paper supplies, ribbon, buttons, notepad, clothespin and inserts to make one finished notepad and clothespin. All you 'll need is adhesive and twine....and a border punch and sewing machine if you want to embellish your pad like I did.

Here's a look at the inside of the notepad. I have no idea why it's underling as I type...so if it shows up that way...who knows.

And here are some very basic sketches for you on how to assemble your notebook. It's pretty easy to do just by looking at the photo but these sketches provide you with a few visuals.

1. Adhere circles together.

2. Trim patterned paper to 2-5/16" x 5-1/2".

3. Trim the numbers piece to the desired with you'll need to leave an appropriate amount left over for punching. You'll have to test this on a scrap piece first because it will depend on what border punch you use. Sew along the left side of the numbers piece, if desired.
4. Trim base cardstock (it will either be Ripe Avocado or Dark Chocolate) to 5-1/2" x 8".

5. Score in from the left edge at 2-9/16".

6. Score in from the right edge at 2-9/16". Fold up notebook base. Adhere notebook to inside at this point (I use Scor-Tape for this).

7. Adhere patterned paper piece and scalloped circle piece to the front of notebook. Any adhesive will work for this.

8. Adhere twill ribbon to front of notebook(I use Scor-Tape for this). Trim edges.

9. Adhere two buttons to front of notebook. Add twine or string to buttons first, if desired(twine not included in kit)

10. The 12 printed sheets just slide in the notebook and are loose. I use a small binder clip to hold mine in. A paper clip would work fine too.

11. Adhere *It's My Day* piece and button to clothespin. Again, use twine or string in the button if desired. I use Scor-Tape to adhere the cardstock piece to the clothespin.

The first round of 10 kits will be going up in my Etsy shop shortly. The next round will go up at approximately 7:00pm Central Time.

Have you planned any personal days? I'd love to hear about them and what you're planning for your day! I'm working on my February day and will post about that closer to my personal day...February 19th. :) Enjoy!

January 19....Personal Day #1

Edit: The divided page protectors that I use are from We R Memory Keepers. I purchase mine at my local scrapbook store and Archiver's. If you want to purchase online, just use your search engine to find a website that carries them. For the 6 x 12 pages...and any of the smaller sizes like 8.5 x 11 or 8 x 8....I blend them right in with my large 12 x 12 scrapbooks. I use the WeR brand of scrapbooks too and the pages all tuck nicely inside when closed, no pages hang over the edges. Hope that helps.

Hey everyone! I've added some photos of my personal day for you. Here I am gettin' all scrappy with my supplies. No need to zoom in.......there's only wrinkles and chubby cheeks. I did two detailed page spreads of our Christmas events at the grandparents' houses.

And the rest of my layouts were much simpler, using the divided page protectors.

I love this method of blended scrapbooking, so much faster!

And here's the recipe for the Turkey Bacon Rollups. Using a big tortilla (I think mine were jalapeno something), spread on a little bit of herbed cream cheese. I used herb flavored Alouette cheese spread. Layer on turkey slices and any kind of shredded cheese. Microwave this for about a minute, til the cheese is nice and melted. Have cooked bacon ready and I even softened up some red onion I had in the frig.

Add the bacon and onions to the wrap and roll up tightly.

Cut in half and secure with toothpicks. This makes a big wrap, I only ate half of it and saved the other half for supper. I like to dip mine in my homemade salsa or honey mustard. And it's good to slug it down with a diet pop. Enjoy!!

I'm back, good morning everyone! Be sure to scroll down for my first post today showing you how to use Papertrey's Creatively Clear Cardstock and Copic markers. You won't want to miss it.
Today is the 19th, which marks the first day of my 12 Days of Me concept. You can read all about it HERE. I've taken the day off to do something totally personal for me. My very own personal day to do whatever I want. This hardly ever happens but I'm doin' it!

Check back throughout the day as I pop in and out to tell you about my day. And in case you're wondering, I am slowly getting my computer/printer issues figured out....so I'll have the next 40 kits of The 12 Days of Me in my Etsy shop very soon....this week. I'll post a notice here on the blog for when the kits will go up.

My schedule:

January 18th, 2010
10:45pm.....need to stay up late and organize more of my layouts that I didn't get to, but thinking I'd much rather get a good night's sleep....zzzzzzzzz

January 19th, 2010
7:00am...getting the girls around for school, sipping my coffee
8:10am...showered, coffee and cinnamon toast consumed, in my scrapbook room ready to rock and roll

thought: Did you see Ali Edwards' post today? It's day one of digital scrapbook basics. I'm definitely going to review that information this week. I'm excited to learn my new Photoshop Elements 8 program

9:24 am...2 page layout done of Christmas at my folks and the inlaws. woohoo.

10:23am....used divided scrapbook pages for 3 pages of photos, so quick and easy. nothing fancy but I'm getting it done. i need a snack.

11:50am...taking a break for lunch and Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi. Yummo.

thought: Kimberly Ann said...
"I certainly hope today's posting includes turkey bacon rolls (yes, I am still here - did you think I would forget)." Oh Dear Kimberly Ann, how could I forget you? YES, I am enjoying a turkey bacon rollup with honey mustard dip. And I took photos. And I'll be posting the recipe for you too. Sometime later.

1:36pm...finishing up a billion photos I took of sledding. divided page protectors to the rescue again. time for a nice hot cup of coffee. i want to make sure i have time to clean up my mess today. watching bobby flay on the big tv.

5:01pm...finished all my holiday pages. i think i may have lost thanksgiving photo with my computer crash. dang. the girls are home early now since BB season is over but they're entertaining themselves. just finishing up an altered 25 days of christmas mini altered album. i decided to nip the daily december idea and just the album for photos of christmas gifts, extra photos and christmas card/photos we received from friends.

thought: someone asked what's for supper........i haven't thought about it but maybe french toast and leftover bacon from my lunch. i've had such a great day. i'll share my thoughts tomorrow about my personal day and how i want to approach scrapbooking now.

8:33pm...watched American Idol while finishing up my projects. i did it! Christmas/winter pages are all done for 2009. i have about 4 more layouts to complete 2009. my 365 album is complete for 2009 too. feels so good to accomplish this. so good to commit.......my word for the year, commit.