Dragonfruit & Other Produce Adventures

So, I've been going to Weight Watchers since February, and I'm down 30.6 pounds. A little slow, but steady.

At our Weight Watchers meeting last week, the topic was about trying to get more fruits and vegetables into our diet. I haven't had a big problem with veggies, but I find that I don't eat very much fruit. It's so much easier when I feel like a snack to grab one of those fiber bars or a Hostess 100-calorie pack. The "assignment" our WW leader gave us this week was to get different colors of fruit/veggies into our diets this week.

My friend and I go on these little grocery shopping adventures after the WW meeting, and we found the most unusual looking magenta fruit called dragonfruit. I also bought a guava, which I've never tried. When I was at Wegmans, I found these unusual brown tomatoes and some zucchini that were a pale green I had never seen before, and I bought them, too. So this week, I set 3 goals for myself:

1. To eat more fruit.

2. To drink more water (I don't tend to get thirsty, so I forget to drink water)

3. To exercise at least 3 times this week.

So far, I've met all three of my goals! Go, me!

Here's a layout I just made yesterday:

Poser

I was looking through some photos a couple of weeks ago and started noticing a trend. I have so many pictures of Farzad hamming it up in front of the camera. Just silly poses. Give him a prop, and he's eager to pose.

So I came up with a new album idea. I'm either going to call the album Poser or Gotta Give Him Props.

Here are the first two layouts for that book. I made this page for the How Much Is Too Much? blog. On this particular occasion, I asked him to pose nice for the camera in front of that pretty tree. This is what I got instead. It's about the only time I can get him to eat his vegetables!

We were at a candy store in Ocean City, and there were so many fun colors that I wanted to snap a picture of him in there. As I was readying my camera, he grabbed Grover to pose with him. I made this page for the Sketch This! blog.

A few layouts for Color Combos Galore

So here are the last couple of layouts I made for Color Combos Galore.

Farzad bought me a gizmo called Sing Stand for Christmas, and it's been a hit with my family. This gadget basically turns my iPod into a karaoke machine. That's my brother-in-law and me singing some Lynyrd Skynyrd, I think. He's so in love with Sing Stand that we've dubbed her his "girlfriend." He even kisses her goodbye when I take her home. (I still need to scrap THAT picture!)

Janet hardly ever gives us purple, so this was a really fun combo to work with.

I've decided to start a new album called "Poser" because I have so many pictures of Farzad in Cheesy poses. Here's the first one for this book.

I don't like the way this one scanned. The pink ribbon matches the pink paper a whole lot better in real life, and the butterfly on the bottom stands out against the background better in reality. Not to mention that dang shadow that my EXPENSIVE scanner makes. Ugh.

I recently realized that the fun tear-off strips on Cosmo Cricket's papers can be used for my hidden journaling (you know, the ones that say "flip for fun" and "over easy" and so forth... Journaling on the back of my layout reads:

When I was really little, Gram lived in a house, and I'm quite sure I played outside in her yard a lot, but that was so long ago that any recollections of my outdoor play have faded from my memory. For most of my childhood, Gram lived in apartments, so play kept me indoors. And there wasn't a whole lot in her apartment to play with, so my imagination took hold of some very strange playthings. There was a curious box in Gram's linen closet crammed with all these colorful telephone wires. Why she had all that telephone wire in her linen closet escapes me, but I was captivated by the pretty rainbow-colored strands and would spend hours fondling them and sorting them and twisting them into candy-colored braids. A peculiar pastime, maybe, but I found fascinating fun in that weird and wonderful box of wires.

Note●able

A couple of months ago, I saw a thread at Two Peas titled "Looking For..." Curious, I opened it, and read that someone was looking for a scrapper who loves to tell stories on their pages, has a fun and outgoing personality and style, and would love to get free kits. Well, since storytelling is my thing, and I think my style is pretty fun, and I always thought it would be lots of fun to design for a monthly kit, I knew they were looking for me! So I applied, and Shawna chose me to be her first designer for her new kit club, Note●able.

Note●able is a really neat concept--a kit club that caters to journaling. Products like lettering and journaling papers and stamps and pens and unique journaling spots, along with other goodies, fill the kit.

Here's a picture of the June kit, Delect●able:

And here are a few pages and a card I made using that kit (plus a few things from the May kit called Delight●able):

My turn!

It's always fun getting a color swatch from Janet to make my layouts for Color Combos Galore! But this week, it was my turn to pick the colors. Here's what I came up with:

Even more fun was naming the colors. I started with the raspberry color, and "Raspberry Beret" by Prince popped into my head. As the Prince song played in my head, the olive color came to me from the line "I think I love her," so that turned into "I think 'Olive' Her." I couldn't come up with anything else for the other colors from that song, so I went in search of other Prince songs and came up with "Diamonds and Pearsl" for the white and "Blue Light" for the teal.

Yeah, I know. Corny. But fun, I hope!

So here's the page I made with this color combo:

That's Farzad and me, from when we were dating, back in 1981. I actually had a raspberry colored beret back in the 80's, but I couldn't find the picture when I wanted to make this layout, so I went with this one. I've started re-doing some older pages from back when I started scrapping. This is one of my extreme makeovers. Wanna see the original? Really embarrassing, but here it is (the pictures were taken at the National Zoo, which is why I chose that crazy animal print):

Got Sketch?

Valerie Salmon does! And she asked me to make a layout using her latest sketch for her Got Sketch? blog.

Here is the sketch she sent me:

And here is the layout I made. I flipped the sketch a little to accommodate the elements I was using:

Happy National Scrapbooking Day!

I logged on to Two Peas this morning, always my first stop when I hop onto the computer, and to my surprise, there was my layout right on the homepage, in the banner at the top! So fun!

Here's a view of the whole page, which I made for Color Combos Galore. That's my Gram, back in 1937. On Easter, she told me all about how she worked at a chocolate factory. I'm going to write all the details of her story on the back of the layout.


Here's the color swatch I was working with: