Easter goodness and the sun is actually shining!!

Despite the dreary weather on Easter we spent a great day relaxing and enjoying each others company. No egg hunt this year.  Miles and Emily are really just too big and the weather was too lousy to even pretend it would be fun.  Emily commented that I had bought enough candy that an egg hunt wasn't necessary. :)

 

Of course, I had to get the family to pose for Easter Sunday photos.

And this is the only time Emily stood next to me all morning.  She was just a little bothered and then completely mortified when walked into the church hall and one of the boys from her school said we looked like twins!  She avoided me the rest of the morning and high tailed it out of the church to Sunday school as quickly as she could. Ha!

For the record, when Emily decided she would just wear a dress she already had, I decided to actually buy a new dress for Easter. I went shopping and found this dress in hot pink, but decided the blue was a better color on me.  I can't help we have the same coloring and the same colors compliment us, can I? Twins or not I need the right color! ;)

After church, I enlisted the help of Richard and Emily to help me make potato salad while I made drop biscuits and deviled eggs.  I forgot to take a photo of our spread before we dug in, so this is Richard's plate.

And even with all that candy in our house, our new, favorite dessert, Chocolate Silk pie, was eagerly anticipated.  Would you look at this gang?  I think they are just a little excited! Goofy!

It was wonderfully delicious and even better with homemade whipped cream!

This week has continued to be dreary and cold until yesterday.  I made it to the trail with Tucker and we so enjoyed the sun shinning through the trees with their fresh green leaves. It was a happy run.

Now I have to get busy pricing things for a garage sale tomorrow!! Have a great weekend!

Project Life Help

I am very happy to share some Project Life pages with you today, as well as a great little tool I made to help me get caught up. 

First, here are the pages. Week of Jan 24-30.

I really do like mixing the "Design B" into my Project Life.  I think it keeps it interesting. 

Week of Jan 31- Feb 6

I have plenty of photos from the "blizzard week" I can't decide if I want to add an insert here between these two pages or do a traditional scrapbook page.  If you are doing Project Life, are you also doing traditional pages that repeat some of the same photos?

I have many more pages with the photos all planned out that just need journaling and embellishment. 

Part of the reason I fell behind is because I wasn't staying on top of my printing. I'm generally in a state of aggravation with my home printer. It either prints too dark or I seem to be constantly feeding it new ink cartridges.

I was able to get over the hump of being behind with the help of these sketch pages I created from the merging images from Becky's Blog.

This sheet is only Design A sketches.  If you click on the sketch you can download the page. :)

 

This one I call Mix Project Page. Basically it's the "Design A" with one sided transitions to "Design B".

And lastly, I call this one Transitional B Project pages.  It starts with an "A" and moves to 2 "B's" and back to "A".

Basically, I printed these out and sat down in front of iPhoto and penciled in a general description of the photo I wanted in each slot.  I then uploaded the images to a photo center, checking them off as I ordered.  To create my smaller photos, I have a template set up in Photoshop that I drop 2 photos into with the measurements of the small pockets and sized to a 4x6 photo. (I did check with Becky's Project Life customer service to make sure it was okay to share, use these images.)

I am literally all caught up with my photo printing.  I'm so excited.  I hope this tool will help others get caught up or just be able to plan your pages better. Enjoy!!!

I hope you and yours have a blessed Easter weekend. We are going to a special Good Friday service tonite at our church and then Easter service on Sunday. Other than that we don't have much planned. We are excited about our a southern Easter dinner- ham, drop biscuits, potato salad, develed eggs and Chocolate Silk pie.  Emily asked if we had to eat in the dinning room? What's wrong with eating in the dinning room occasionally?  That girl!  Hoping for a beautiful day Sunday, forecast says it will be rainy. Either way I know we'll feel blessed.

Wordless Wednesday

Admittedly, I feel a little lame for doing Wordless Wednesday when there haven't been any words on my blog in a week, but that's how I'm rolling today. :)

Spring is coming to the trail and sometimes you've got to stop running and take a photo.

Recently

1. Our big outing over spring beak was a quick trip to see Chris Tomlin in concert.

Can I tell you how much more phenomenal it was than I even imagined it would be?  It was rockin', and loud and just a fun concert with a purpose.

My new favorite song?  That would be All my Fountains. I didn't link up the video because the one in YouTube he's teaching the song to the audience so it starts slow and builds.  In the actual recording, which we purchased the very next day, it's a really upbeat song. Upbeat enough that I can run to it. :)

2. We are totally into playing charades.  We found the game can easily be played with the cards that came in the Pictionary game.

According to the family, I'm really quite entertaining.  What can I say, I think differently than most people, but that doesn't mean they don't guess my topic. lol  We certainly have gained a few new references for Disney World and other random things thanks to me. :)

3. We are getting used to having Miles as our driver.  He drove us to Fulton, Missouri a couple weekends ago.  Good way to get some highway driving in.

4. Crossing things off our list.  We've been saying for a while that we needed to go to the Winston Churchill Museum.  We finally went  and I think we all learned some new historical facts and gained a great appreciation for this powerhouse of a man in politics and history.

On the grounds, of the library there is a huge piece of the Berlin Wall and the reconstructed Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury.   The shell of the church, all that was left after the war, was shipped to Missouri and reconstructed stone by stone.  Pretty amazing.

 5. Enjoying the arrival of spring. My tulips and daffodils are up. They certainly make me smile.

The trees are finally budding too. It's a refreshing sight after this winter of snow. 

My only complaint this year is that my highly prized (by me) crab apple tree, totally skipped the flower stage this year.  Going to have to figure that one out.  Literally, it has like 5 blossoms, when usually it's so covered in blossoms you can't see the branches.

And right now, I sit here finishing up the blog with my head wrapped in plastic wrap.  Trying to get my hair color a little lighter.  In order to do so, I was advised to remove my current hair color completely with a product called Color Fix.  The lady at Sally's said I shouldn't freak out if my hair is orange in the middle of the process.  Yikes! We'll see how it comes out. lol!!

Surfacing

When life gets too crazy to handle, the blog is one of the things that can just wait.

Yesterday, I had about 20 women at my house for a meeting. Which means that right after spring break I was deep into re-decorating and then deep cleaning the house.  So glad it's over and everything was lovely. (It's amazing what you can do with $25 worth of flowers from Wal-Mart.  I now get to bask in a perfectly clean house.  Now that's a sweet reward. :)

I'm making this post short today. I still have a mountain of clean clothes to fold and other things on my to-do list that need attention.

I thought I'd share at one of my favorite photos. Pioneer Woman's readers are sharing their "brother" photos and I immediately thought of this one.

Technically, it's not great. It was taken with my first digital camera, a PowerShot G2. It was really quite an accident photo.  The kids were busy playing and my sister was coming over with her new baby. I wanted to check the lighting in this spot, so I asked them to sit by the window and let me take a few shots.

She loved her big brother like no one else, (and even though they are different now and are growing up, I know she still loves him.) I love how she's wearing her pirate bandana and how she has her arm around him.

I'm tearing up now writing this.  I miss these little people.  This is definitely an age I'd like to go back to. Such laughter and fun and make believe. It was indeed magical.

I'll try and collect myself now. :)

Be back tomorrow to share some fun stuff from spring break and a project

Art Gallery

After I created my photo gallery post for the link party at Inspired Room, I remembered I have another gallery wall in my house and wanted to share that one as well.  It's in the media room/playroom upstairs and I don't spend much time up there.  It's pretty much the kid hang out.

The room spans the whole length of the house, so it's quite long. The gallery fills the wall space between the two functional sides of the room, one side has the television the other has a game table. It has grown over the last few years as they've brought home more art.

It definitely makes a statement in the room and is a great way to show off the children's works of art. Here's a link to the party!

My Wall of Love- Gallery Wall party

I have always loved photo gallery walls.  They are a perfect fit for me as a scrapbooker and the theory I whole-heartedly subscribe to that if one photo is good, many are fabulous!  I thought I'd join the Gallery Wall Party over at the Inspired Room and re-post the story behind my photo gallery wall.

I knew it was time to tackle a gallery wall because I had frames scattered on just about every tabletop surface in the house. I knew I couldn't part with those photos, but also had realized I needed to edit them to have room for other decor. I decided this short wall under the stairs in my living room was the perfect home for my treasured photos.

I started with frames I had, spray painted them satin black and printed a few of my favorite photos in black and white.  I kept the one year old portraits of our children in color because it would be too difficult and costly to reproduce.  I started with those large portraits hung on nails I had from the previous artwork and filled in around them. I did use the tip to trace the frames sizes to paper while working on the arrangement, but didn't find that the holes created with those templates to be that accurate. (It might just be me, but thank goodness the extra holes are hidden.) 

Here's my first go at the wall.

I love, love, loved it, but the more I looked at it I knew I had to keep going.  I printed a few more photos, painted a few more frames and went bigger.

I hope this inspires you to create your own gallery wall.  Now, Go and join the link party, but if your a first time visitor here, I do hope you have a look around as well. :)

Update:  This post continues to get lots of traffic, so I thought I'd follow up with how the gallery wall looks now.

Here's a link to the post on this buffet and it's transformation. :)

I have also been having fun with replacing the "D" with seasonal pieces like this for Valentine's Day.

Thanks for stopping by and be sure to come back!