A Little Bit of Snow and a Layout

I'm back.  I have been a bad blogger, I know.  Life has gotten in the way, my mother is still in the hospital, my sister and I are getting ready to close her apartment and the medical staff is trying to get her stabilized to be transferred to a long term care facility.  The problem is she keeps going into kidney failure and bladder infections, which is not allowing her to get off of the I.V.  It has been a long journey these last six months with her.  And this on top of a already full life with three very active kids, well, my blog has fallen by the side.   To say things have been overwhelming lately, is an understatement.  But I am starting to find a  rhythm in my life again. Time to regroup and get back on track.   

Today, Friday, was a snow day around here.  I awoke to this scene this morning.  Snow, and more snow.  And this was just the beginning of the snowfall, which has gone on all day.  All three kids and Dave were home since everything was pretty much shut down.  It was a nice day to cocoon, and we all had a much needed recharge of our batteries.

The layout below I created as part of a team challenge our leader Denise had given us for our most recent Team Social (sounds some much more fun than Team Meeting)  The challenge was to use the Canvas Creations in our current spring catalogue.  I found the canvas is easy to work with, our Classic ink pads work beautifully with them, as well as our watercolor crayons.   You will see the banner at the top, the elephant, and the ticket stubs along the side are  made from the Canvas Creations.  Denise dyed a bookmark piece of canvas completely in a mixture of re-inkers and water, she sewed  a cute tiny heart shaped pillow perfect for wedding favours and Margie, embossed an image on the canvas followed by water coloring, and had it beautifully framed, a stunning piece of artwork.   

The layout is of some shots I took while trying to take a group photo of my family.  We were waiting for a subway train in D.C. during our vacation there in 2011, and I had hoped to used the time to get a decent group shop.  I succeeded with one shot, and it was a hard won battle to get that one good shot.    Whenever I try to get a "nice shot" of Dave and/or kids, its always ends up as a circus full of clowns.  Bunny ears start popping up behind people's heads, funny faces are everywhere, and eventually they end up in a tangled heap laughing hysterically.

Besides the Canvas Creations, I used Sahara Sand cardstock as the base, Designer Series Paper was World Spectacular, the ticket stubs and elephant were from our "Your're Amazing" stamp set, and Baker's Twine, all found in our main 2012-2013 Catalogue. The Hearts a Flutter stamp set and framelits were used for the banner, which are found in a cost saving bundle in our Spring Catalogue.  The buttons were our Brushed Bronze buttons which was found  in our now discontinued Holiday Calendar.  This challenge was a fun kick in the creative pants that I needed to get me going again creatively.  You can find links to our current main catalogue and the spring catalogue along the right hand side of this blog.

I also would like you to mark your calendar for Saturday, February 23.  Our team will be hosting a Scrapbook/Card Making and Rubber Stamp Garage Sale.  It will be 9 am - 2 pm at St. Jude's Anglican Church, 81 Peel St., in Brantford, Ontario.  We will be selling new and slightly used items such as rubber stamp sets, embellishments, of course paper, and much more.  And the items for sale there will not be just Stampin' Up!!  There will be other products as well, as demonstrators, many of us have been in paper crafting for many years before becoming Creative Coaches for Stampin' Up!! and of course have accumulated all kinds of different paper crafting products and tools.  And it is time for us to clear out our studios of the old to make room for new and exciting products that we can showcase for you.  And listening to what some of the demonstrators were talking about selling, this is one event you will NOT want to miss.   A huge thank you to Denise and Natasha for organizing this event and of course to St. Jude's for allowing us to use their facility.

If you are interested in hosting a workshop please feel free to contact me at riajenkins@rogers.com.  And I would love to hear from you what you would like to see featured on this blog.

Thank you for stopping by and visiting my little corner of the blogging world.