vote for me, vote for me!!

remember this little project i did about why i scrapbook?? well the voting has started! use the link here to view all of the entries in shimelle's little "contest" and vote for your favorite. hopefully mine will be your favorite ;-) you can vote once a day until the end of february....

and oh yeah...the winner gets $100.00 is scrapping supplies from two peas in a bucket...fabulous prize!! so go! go right now and vote for me! and come back tomorrow and vote again, and the next day, and the next day, and the next....

valentine's day mini, mini album

today i wanted to share a cute little "album" i made for my grandmother (aka my "mamaw") for valentine's day.

this april my grandmother will turn 93 years old. she still lives alone and even though she doesn't move around like she used to, she's doing amazing for 93. she still talks on the phone for hours every night with her friends and she can still get lost walking around walmart looking and touching everything she passes. ;-).

she has four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren and when i saw this mini album in my local craft store, the idea for this album jumped into my head - a small album with a picture of each of us. it was really easy to make and i know that she is going to love it.

this is what it looked like when i purchased it. you can see just how small it really is - fits right in the palm of my hand! how cute is that?! and it was only two dollars!



i used my heart punch and some epoxy heart stickers throughout the album. lots of hearts because its for valentine's day!





since the heart shape of the album measured roughly 2.5 inches across, i printed head shots of all of us that were 2.5 inches x 2.5 inches. i then just cut each picture to fit the shape and added some patterned paper from my scrap pile. on a couple of the pages i used my border punches and then some red ink on the edges of other pages.



so easy to make and i really liked how it turned out!!



wishing you an early happy valentine's day! lots of love, hugs and kisses!

marathon madness

a couple of weeks ago i signed up to train and complete a marathon in san diego on june 6, 2010. i've started training as a member of the leukemia & lymphoma society's eastern north carolina team in training team. (you can read all about the leukemia & lymphoma society here and even more about their amazing team in training program here.)

now i'm not a runner by any means and this will be my very first marathon. for those of you who do not know, a marathon is 26.2 miles. yikes! but as part of the team in training program, you are paired up with a coach and given an extensive training program to follow. at the first meeting the coaches said they could get me "from the couch to the finish line" by the race date if i did my part, worked hard and trained per my schedule. so i've gotten off the couch and have started training! my plan is to walk/run with probably more walking than running. did you know that you can actually walk a marathon? obviously at this point i'm not concerned about my time....my goal is just to finish....

so why the leukemia & lymphoma society? last year one of my very best friends was diagnosed with leukemia just after the birth of her second child. at the time of her diagnosis she was 38 years old and a mother of two beautiful children - a six year old daughter and a seven month old litte boy. immediately following her diagnosis she underwent six months of agressive chemotherapy and in early january she was officially in remission! but her battle with leukemia is far from over.

since the day i found out about her diagnosis i have struggled with the question of why all of this is happening to such a wonderful person. my friend is an amazing mother, wife, daughter/daughter-in-law, sister, aunt and friend. i continue to pray for her and her sweet family, but the truth is that i was and am constantly amazed with her strength, her courage and her determination. she is a fighter, a survivor, and she is my inspiration. i am training and completing this marathon in honor of her....

as a member of the team i am also raising funds to help find a cure for leukemia, lymphoma and other blood cancers. my goal is to raise $2900.00 for the leukemia & lymphoma society. you can view my fund raising website here.

so why i am writing about all this on my blog? well i plan to provide weekly updates on my training and fundraising efforts here. just little updates to let everyone know how i'm doing, how my training is progressing, my thoughts on the training updates, etc. so now through june, you can look for a weekly post called marathon mondays. i've even designed a cute little logo for the posts....

wish me luck! i'm going to need it! check back next week to see how things are progressing....

i haven't talked much about reading here, but i spend a lot of time doing it. i love to read. and i just finished a book that really impacted me and the way i am starting to view my life.

actually i wasn't even planning on reading this book - it wasn't on my radar at all. now i had seen it on ali's blog at the beginning of the year but it wasn't a blog post specifically about the book. she mentioned it in the context of her one little word for 2010. you can read her post here.

fast forward to a week or so ago...i'm in my local barnes & noble looking for another book and i walk past a table in one of the aisle's in the store. i happen to look down and there is the book i saw on ali's blog. i was suprised that it was on a table labelled "spirituality/religion" so i picked it up, read the back and decided to purchase it. boy am i glad i did.



A Million Miles In A Thousand Years
by Donald Miller

this book is about a guy who has an opportunity to write a movie. this gets him thinking about his own life and the stories he's living. he takes the chance to edit his life into a great story and explains the meaning of the little stories we live in context with The Story. the stories we live define who we are and the good news is that we (for the most part) control the stories we choose to live. it is a great read!

it is my habit to highlight passages that i really like or that speak to me when i'm reading a book. needless to say i highlighted a lot in this one! some of my favorite passages are listed below as today's ten things thursday post. if any of them spark your interest, i encourage you to get this book.

1. "If I have a hope, it's that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically, into the story, and put us in with the sunset and the rainstorm as though to say, Enjoy your place in my story. The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you."

2. "So I started listening to the Voice, or rather, I started calling it the Voice and admitting there was a Writer. I admitted something other than me was showing a better way. And when I did this, I realized the Voice, the Writer who was not me, was trying to make a better story, a more meaningful series of experiences I could live through."

3. "People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen."

4. "I believe God wants us to create beautiful stories, and whatever it is that isn't God wants us to create meaningless stories, teaching the people around us that life just isn't worth living".

5. "The ambitions we have will become the stories we live. If you want to know what a person's story is about, just ask them what they want".

6. "a story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling the people around us what we think is important".

7. "As real-life protagonists we can control only what we do and say, what choices we make, what words we say. The rest is up to fate".

8. "The thing about writing a story, in real life and on paper, is half the effort is just figuring out what the story is going to be".

9. "the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree...[I] asked God to help me understand the story of the forest and what it meant to be a tree in that story".

10. "The point of the story is never about the ending, remember. It's about your character getting molded in the hard work of the middle".

our first snowman

a quick post for today...more snow pictures...today will be day 5 of the snow and i'm sooo done with it already. but we did get the chance to make a snowman, and since he was a first for the boys it was a pretty big deal. so of course it had to be scrapped!

this layout is based on another digital template from cathy zielske. i talked about her digital templates and her design your life class here recently. and you can click on the image above to see it larger.

that's all for now. back tomorrow for a longer ten things thursday post. see you then!

one digital template, three different layouts

i'm not sure if i've mentioned it here or not, but i'm taking cathy zielske's class called design your life at bigpicturescrapbooking.com. i'm a little behind with my layouts, but because the class is self-paced i'm not too concerned. one of the things i am really loving about this class is that each week cathy provides digital templates for each of our assignments. so i'm using this as an opportunity to play around more with digital scrapping. i can work my way around photoshop elements, but i need practice on picking out digital elements, digital papers, etc. i think i'm slowly getting better with the process of creating digital layouts.

so today i wanted to share three different layouts that i made from the same digital template. i love that you can use the same digital layout - or traditional template actually - but use different photos and different papers and elements to create completely different layouts - even thought the starting point is the same, you end up with something different every time. love it!

p.s. you can select each layout to view it larger....

digital "sketch" - what i started with



layout #1



layout #2 - double pager



layout #3

snow, snow, snow

it started snowing here on friday night and we ended up with about eight inches before all was said and done. for those of us here in north carolina that's a big deal as it doesn't happen all that often. the boys were really excited when it started on friday evening and they both got up saturday (and sunday for that matter) ready to head outside! i just wanted to share some pictures from our weekend. enjoy!

he stayed busy making snowballs....



shoveling snow....



hauling snow in his dump truck....



and carrying "icebergs".



and he stayed busy trying to sneak up on everyone and plummet them with snowballs....



even though he was told to stop again....



and again....



and again.



then he ended up face first in the snow and when we decided he was ok, we explained to him the concept of karma ;-)