Project Scrap Girls (February layouts)

For the Scrap Girls year-long project, here are my four February layouts. The first one, Zoo Day, is from the day that I went to Lowry Park Zoo with my sister, Amy, and her girls, who were visiting from Germany. I used a layout template by Angie Briggs and paper and embellishments from Trish Yochum's Mosaic Retreat collection. For all of the layouts, the February tag is by Amanda Sok, I just recolored it to match my layouts. I was excited to see this first layout was picked as a weekly layout winner in the Scrap Girls newsletter. This was the first time that's happened, so it was really cool.

The second layout is about seeing Wicked with Jason and our parents. We got them the tickets for their Christmas gifts this year. Our moms were so excited to go! The layout template is by Brandy Hackman. The background paper also was a template, by Brandie Valenzuela.

The third layout is from my first time singing on Saturdays at Grace Family Church. I felt silly having Jason take pictures during the rehearsal, but I wasn't sure if I'd be singing again (I have been pretty regularly) and I wanted to scrap it. I didn't have great quality pictures, but I didn't care. The layout template is by Syndee Nuckles. The background paper and alphabet is from Trish Yochum's Mosaic Retreat collection. The small paper is from Amanda Sok's Watercolor Whimsy collection. The music embellishments are from Amanda Sok's Appassionata collection.

The fourth layout is a collage of pictures from the last few days that Amy and the girls were here. The collage letters were made by Syndee Nuckles. The papers and other embellishments were from Trish Yochum's Mosaic Retreat collection.

This has been a fun project to participate in so far. I've been feeling pretty confident with my growing skills. Lately, though, I've felt a little more unsure of what I want to do. But I'm just sticking with it and not putting a lot of pressure on myself. I will say that I think having a creative outlet is helping to keep my stress levels down at work, so that's good. I'll post some other non-Project Scrap Girls layouts soon.

Long Overdue

It has been way too long since I've blogged. My scrapbooking has taken over for the last couple of months, but now I'm on spring break, and I wanted to update.

Things have been going well. Work has been busy, but not too overwhelming. But spring break was definitely needed. I'm trying to appreciate this week off and not look ahead to the 8 or 9 weeks of school that I have left. I know, most people don't get this much time off, which is why I want to appreciate it. I just would be completely satisfied if I never had to work again. At least I think I would be. Who knows.

I have now been singing somewhat regularly on Saturday nights at Grace. I've been put on the schedule a couple of times a month. It's a lot different than singing at Idlewild, so I'm still getting used to it. But I love getting to be a part of it. Plus I'm still singing every other month in the Sunday Blend service.

Also, Jason and I started going to a small group, which is Grace's version of Sunday school or Bible Fellowship. We actually weren't planning to go to one anytime soon because of Jason's class 2 nights a week, but we went to a weekend marriage seminar where they were advertising new small groups. We saw one that was meeting on Sunday nights near where we live, so we decided to try it. We've only met 3 times, but I can tell it's going to be a good group and a good thing for us. So I'm thankful for the opportunity to get to know some more people at Grace, which is something I was needing.

Like I said, I've been doing a lot of scrapbooking in the last couple of months. I get things done a lot more quickly than I did when I first started. This is partly because I'm buying things rather than trying to make them. Yeah, I'm not quite at that point yet, but maybe I will one day. I was excited, though, because I won something from the website I go to. Scrapgirls.com does a newsletter 6 days a week. On Saturdays, they feature layouts as weekly winners, and sometimes monthly winners. I was looking at the newsletter a few weeks ago, and one of my layouts was a "weekly layout winner"! I was surprised because I had posted the layout about a month before, so I didn't expect it to be one that would be featured. Here's the layout.

It's from when Amy and the girls were here, and we went to Lowry Park Zoo one of the days. I used a layout template by Angie Briggs, and the paper and embellishments were by Trish Yochum. The February tag was by Amanda Sok. I won $5 to spend in the store, which doesn't sound like a lot, but most of the digital supplies range from $3 to $10, so it's really pretty cool. Later that week I also got $3 to spend from the site for my birthday, so it worked out pretty well for me.

Speaking of my birthday, I turned 37 on March 23. I was a little weirded out by the number, because it's such an odd number, and frankly, it just sounds OLD. However, for some reason, my age has come up a lot lately, and it's really nice to hear that people are surprised to hear my age because they thought I was much younger. (I assume that's a compliment of how young I look, and not an insult to my maturity-hahaha). But, I guess it's probably a combination of my mother's genes and the fact that I am not a mother yet. I'm afraid that as soon as I have kids I'll immediately age :) But probably not, since my mom still looks good for her age. So, yay for good genes!

On another note, I do need to lose weight. I don't feel that heavy, but I have seen pictures of myself lately, and I am truly surprised at how heavy I look. I just have very little motivation to do anything. But, I think I'm slowly working up to it. I really would like to lose some weight before I go and get pregnant and put it back on. So I guess I better get to working on it. I think I wrote about P90X a few months ago, and we never really started it. We're talking about it again, so hopefully I'll update about that soon.