Back From Anaheim

I went to the Craft and Hobby Association trade show in Anaheim earlier this week with Jackie Ludlage and Heather Starosielski,  my friends and colleagues from Canadian Scrapbooker.  We had a fantastic trip!  The voyage there and back was on time, no luggage was lost, everything went smoothly.  This is very unusual for us.  ;-)

I took no photographs, but there are some excellent photos on other blogs on the web - one of my favourites are the links on the Treasured Memories blog, and there also some good photos on the Scraptivity blog.  There were some wonderful new products and I can't wait to see them in stores someday soon.  One of the tools I'd love to get my hands on is an electronic edge distresser from Zutter - it is fast, powerful and works on cardboard or many pieces of cardstock at the same time. 



Another innovation I really liked is the adaptor kit to make the Making Memories Slice hands-free.  You can read all about it here Making Memories blog.  I don't usually mind holding the Slice (it never takes long), but having the hands free option is very cool.

Also keep an eye out for stunning new papers and embellishments from many companies.  The releases from Websters Pages, Pink Paislee and Cosmo Cricket were among my favourites.

Here's a couple of photos I 'borrowed' from the Scraptivity blog (thanks, Barb!).  Many of the Canadians that were in Anaheim got together for dinner, including a Crazy Canuck dinner with over 30 people organized by Trisha Ladouceur (thanks Trish!).  It was an amazing time.  So nice to see old friends and meet new ones.   :-)

Dinner at Bubba Gump's Shrimp Company with Barb and Tony Starace, Heather, Katharina and Jackie from Canadian Scrapbooker, Bettina from MyStampBox and Nathalie Kalbach from Hamburg, Germany.  Happy Birthday, Tony!

Me, Heather and Trisha at the Crazy Canuck dinner

Frost

Bit nippy out there today, and cloudy, but some cool frost on the trees!  Here's a few pics:

The road from our place to the highway

the willows in the backyard

Kate McGarrigle

I was deeply saddened to read of the death of Kate Mcgarrigle yesterday.  I think I have every album the McGarrigle sisters ever released, and was fortunate enough to see them a couple times in concert.   There was just something about their songs, the haunting melodies, the amazing harmony that the McGarrigle sisters voices had together.  If you like that sort of thing and you've never heard much of the McGarrigles, listen to the album The McGarrigle Hour.  It's wonderful.  They enjoyed singing so much and were always surrounded by friend and family.  Or check out this video on YouTube .  It's a small taste of some of her music.  Rest in peace, Kate.  We'll miss you.

On a somewhat related note, the Montreal based singer Lhasa died this month of breast cancer.   She was only 37.   How very tragic.  I first heard her music at a friend's house in Ottawa many years ago and totally loved it.   Her voice was so amazingly beautiful it didn't matter that she usually sings in Spanish.  If you get a chance to listen to her music, grab it.  Here's a video if you're interested.

Canadian Scrapbooker Hands On! photography blog – January tutorial and challenge

Have you checked out our new Hands On! Photography blog ? Each month, we post a new tutorial, discussing photography terms and techniques – we also encourage you to submit your photographs taken, using the current tutorial for the opportunity to have your submission published on our blog and to be entered into a random draw to win a great prize!

Our January tutorial and challenge this month discusses the photography term, depth of field. You can read the tutorial here .



We’re looking forward to seeing your work!

Christmas pictures at the Conservatory

A little late, but still..........  :-)  Just before Christmas, my family met up with my friend Kim Gowdy and her family at the Muttart Conservatory in Edmonton.  We wandered around and looked at the plants, took some photographs, had a coffee.  Just a lovely way to spend a winter's afternoon.  Here's some of the photos that Kim and I took.  By the way, I bribed my children to cooperate for pictures by promising them a prize from the treasure box when we got home.  Worked like a charm.  The treasure box is a large cardboard box I keep well stocked with little toys and goodies (everything from Ring Pops and Pez dispensers to small Lego sets and Star Wars figures.  I highly recommend it.  ;-)). 

If I don't bribe the boys, I get pictures that look like this, where they are trying to strangle each other, but usually much worse.

Scrapbooking in 2009

I've never been one to keep track of what I get accomplished when I am scrapbooking, but out of curiousity, I counted up what I finished last year - looks like 65 or so layouts, a couple of altered projects and a dozen or so cards. Wow. I don't think I've ever scrapbooked that many layouts in a year. I think the high number was driven at least in part by the Canadian Scrapbooker Basics books that we published in addition to the usual magazine. Deadlines and assignments are very motivating. ;-) Now to get all those layouts out of pizza boxes and into albums. I have good intentions - I bought two new WeR Memory Keepers d-ring albums and a whole whack of page protectors........ now to actually use them.

Not sure what my favourite layouts were this year. I always love them when I finish them and then get more critical of them as time goes by. I do love these ones that were published in CSB #5. I had a ton of fun playing with coloured ultra thick embossing enamel that I bought once and hadn't used in ages.


For the flowers, I melted a couple of colours of UTEE in a melting pot and poured the mixture into some little tiny cookie cutters that I think originally came in a Scraptivity kit with some air dry clay. After cooling for a few minutes, the embellishments just pop out if you press the bottom of your cookie cutter into an embossing ink pad before you pour and do everything on one of those fabulous non-stick craft sheets from Ranger. The UTEE just peels right off.



For this UTEE embellishment, I just melted some platinum UTEE, poured a puddle onto the non-stick craft sheet and pressed a stamp into it. I let it cool for a minute or less, then lifted the stamp out and trimmed the edges of the cooled UTEE with scissors. The paper here is wedding paper from Making Memories and all the gray ribbon is American Crafts.  The bottom isn't cut off in real life, of course, but my scanner can only stretch to about 11 1/2 inches, so just pretend you can see the bottom of the layout.  ;-)

I liked the way this layout turned out too. Just some random thoughts and things I try to teach my children. It was inspired by a list of life lessons I saw in the local weekly paper, and I took the ones I liked and added my own.  The shapes are cut out with Spellbinders label Nestabilities.

A winter photo

Ah, glad to leave the short winter days slowly behind. This is the scene from my kitchen window at about 4:15 p.m., two weeks after the shortest day of the year. The angle of the sun is so very low, and I miss the feel of its rays. The days are still plenty short - the kids are going out to get on the school bus in the dark, but the days ARE getting longer and hope returns! LOL

book club books

whoa, easy to get out of the blogging habit over the busy Christmas season! Always seems to be something else that comes up. :-)  And looks like blogger has introduced some formatting changes during my absence, so that should keep me on my toes.

My book club met over coffee yesterday, and we all raved about our last book, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. Highly recommended - easy to read, hard to put down and many memorable scenes. This was not a book I probably would have picked up on my own; somehow the idea of reading about someone's miserable childhood was not very appealing to me. But that is the beauty of a book club - it sort of forces you to read books that are out of your usual zone and often turn out to be something you really enjoy.

The next book is The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. It's actually a teen novel, but the reviews are really good! Supposed to be pretty scary. I look forward to reading this, very different from my usual stuff.

The Hunger Games is a futuristic trilogy for ages 12 to adult by Suzanne Collins, author of the bestselling Underland Chronicles series for middle-grade readers. Published in September 2008, "The Hunger Games" was an instant bestseller, appealing to both teen readers and adults. It has appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 60 consecutive weeks since publication, and also has appeared repeatedly on the USA Today and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. Called "addictive" by Stephen King in a review in Entertainment Weekly and "amazing" by Stephenie Meyer on her website, "The Hunger Games" has captured the imagination of critics and readers alike. "The Hunger Games" was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2008, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2008, a School Library Journal Best Book of 2008, a 2008 Booklist Editors' Choice, a Kirkus Best Book of 2008, and a 2008 Horn Book Fanfare Book. Whoa!



or from Amazon:

In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the other districts in line by forcing them to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight-to-the-death on live TV. One boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and sixteen are selected by lottery to play. The winner brings riches and favor tohis or her district. But that is nothing compared to what the Capitol wins: one more year of fearful compliance with its rule. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives alone with her mother and younger sister, regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her impoverished district in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before—and survival, for her, is second nature. Without really meaning to, she becomes a contender. But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that weigh survival against humanity and life against love. Acclaimed writer Suzanne Collins, author of the New York Times bestselling Underland Chronicles, delivers equal parts suspense and philosophy, adventure and romance, in this stunning novel set in a future with unsettling parallels to our present.

Hot Glue Embellishments

This is another technique featured in CSB #5, and is kind of fun for something different! You might be able to find some coloured glue sticks around - I have bought them at dollar stores and in scrapbook clearance bins, and I saw a bunch on ebay if you're so inclined, but regular clear glue will work too. Just stick a glue stick in a hot glue gun (if you don't have one, you can pick them up at the dollar store and it's handy to have more than one if you are working with a variety of colours) and use the glue to draw a design. I'm not much of a free hand artist, I like to trace something, so I will either stamp directly on a heat and stick sheet such as the one sold by Ranger and trace that, or lay a transparency over dingbats or letters printed on a piece of paper. With the heat and stick sheet, the glue peels off easily when it's cooled; with the transparency, pop it into a freezer for a few minutes and the glue will pop right off. Trim any stray strands of glue with scissors, and rub with Perfect Pearls pigment powder if desired. This looks great on the clear glue embellishments, kind of shimmery and translucent.



So, for this layout, I just printed out the title and some big flower dingbats onto a piece of paper, laid a transparency over it and traced it with pink glue. Easy and unique. Patterned paper is by Glitz Designs and the bird/branch chipboard is by Maya Road.

Brrrrr

I guess winter is here with a vengeance. It was -36C when I got up yesterday morning, and had warmed to -33 by the time the kids went off to catch the school bus. Sigh. Of course, once we went into the deep freeze, something went wrong with my car. At speeds above 60 km/hr, the Mazda would start to vibrate very strongly, getting worse with increasing speeds so that it seemed the whole vehicle would shake apart at 80 km/hr. Since I spend a lot of time on the highway, this had me seriously freaked out. I had visions of spending many hours at the dealership while they figured out what was wrong. Sigh. Still under warranty, but still...... what a pain. Although it seemed unlikely that the tires would be balanced on Friday and unbalanced on Sunday, I started with Costco to balance the tires, since this is where I bought them from. Turned out that when the tire guy took my wheels off, great quantities of ice came out of the wheel wells. Once this ice was gone, voila...... driving returned to normal. And it didn't cost me anything, if you don't count the two hundred bucks I spent while I was killing time waiting for my car. ;-)

Anyway, I guess this is not uncommon, so if your car starts to shake and shimmy after a big snowstorm, it's probably ice in your wheels. I guess the heat from the brakes melts the snow, which reforms into ice at some point. And if there's lots of it, and it's not even, the wheels are seriously unbalanced.