"Hump Day" with Sofia

Wednesdays tend to be seeing as the "light at the end of the tunnel" because you can see the weekend as an achievable goal. Some Wednesdays are better than others and we are just going to leave it at that. The jury still out on many things, one of them being whether or not I'll win the battle with my nose during allergy season...so far, the nose is winning by a long shot :-(

Today when I got home after a long day, lots of sniffles, a bubble head as a result of congestion and running like a mad woman to make it to doctor's appointments. I needed to decompress in a bad way, so I went to my trusty friend "Mac Baby" and started looking at pictures. I needed inspiration for a layout I want to tackle and luckily I came across a picture that I had totally forgotten I had--and that did it for me.

This adorable creature is Sofia, daughter of a good friend of mine. Sofia was a source of joy to our family the first few years of her life. We used to get her once in a while and spent time with her. Unfortunately now that she is a "big girl" we don't get to see her as often but her stories are timeless.

Sofia is absolutely beautiful and has the mind and vocabulary of a grown up that has gone through Harvard school of communication. When she was about two years old she was telling her Mom that maneuvering the complicated task of trying to go potty while at the beach was "not feasible", her facial expression conveying her level of frustration with the whole interaction.

I wanted to share a little bit of the background of this picture so when I get done with the layout you can understand it better. It goes without saying, I'm sure you'll fall in love with Sofia, because how can you not.

Girly Stuff

I'm back among the living hoping that I've won the allergy battle this year--we will see!

Since Thursday I was taking precautionary steps to ensure I didn't spend the whole weekend in bed fighting the sniffles. I vacuumed Thursday and Friday....took "nose pills" both nights and got my reward when Saturday I woke up and I could breathe--so time for some fun activities!

There is this wonderful lady I met in one of the scrapbooking groups and she shared that she was going to have her first granddaughter. She stated that she mostly scrapped for boys. I thought it would be a fun thing to be able to make a couple of things to help her get into the "girlie-frilly" stuff. This is what I came up with:

This was the perfect way to get my MOJO back because it was a quick fix with instant gratification. These are just paper cut outs done with my Silhouette using card stock. I love the level of intricacy you can get with the machine and of course, being able to make your own files is a plus. I do love my Cricut but for different reasons proving that you can have more than one love.

A few days ago I came across a prompt; "Why do I scrapbook?" Today I decided to try to see what would come out of that prompt. Even though I finally have a good set up at the house, it takes a while until the inspiration kicks in and certainly making these pieces for Betty did it for me. I seem to have the opposite problem from her, everything I do ends up very frilly. I struggle with trying to make stuff for boys/men and no matter what, I am never satisfied. I have to make an effort to be able to switch gears. I tried a more "weathered" look and made the journaling a huge part of the layout. I think I went a bit overboard to the "grunge" side....but I guess it will take some practice to reach a good happy medium. I used just white paper and went heavy on the ink until I came up with that dirty looking color...

The whole feel of the page comes from the journaling--which you can't see because the picture is pretty lame. I took those two baby pictures of the kids and wrote about the day those pictures were taken. In reality you can use pictures and words to capture those moments in time. If you succeed, you can re-visit that feeling every time you see that page. I was quite happy with the journaling aspect...and the page is not too bad...all I can do is keep on trying! I'll try to take a better picture so you can see more of the details. This layout was made with the Cricut, I love being able to have it right in my room as it makes life so much easier!