My chamomile is just beginning to bloom for the year and I am really excited! My harvested stash from last summer has long since been depleted and I have really missed my bedtime chamomile tincture. I really like these three images and couldn’t decide which to post so I created a scrapbook page to showcase them all. I only wish I had more time so I could create annual scrapbooks of my favorite garden images… and family images… and landscape images… and, well, you get the point. Maybe someday…
With a forecast high today of 99 degrees I think we can officially say the dog days of summer have finally arrived. It’s too hot to do much outside in the garden, and I don’t really feel much like heating up the kitchen with any cooking projects so I am planning to do a bit of catching up on my scrapbooking.
This latest layout was prompted by a little “emergency” with the little one this week. The seat of his tiny two-wheeler broke off! I am not really sure what happened, but as he was getting just a bit too big for the wee bicycle it would have required more of an overhaul than was prudent.
Now that in and of itself wasn’t much of an emergency. He certainly loves to ride his bike, but because he has a couple of other riding toys at his disposal we could have made do for a little while. The real problem was the fact that I, after several years of my own personal strike against most forms of exercise, have recently taken up running again. After several years of too many good excuses not to don the gear necessary for the sweaty task, I suddenly find myself inexplicably drawn to the pavement. Perhaps this is due in part to the fact that my little one can now ride along with me, thus removing one of my many excuses NOT to participate in said activity.
The emergency you see, is that my running is contingent upon the mobility of my littlest one and, since I finally have the desire to run, the replacement bike was as much for me as it was for him!
I snapped these photos the night we picked up his bike and immediately started working on the layout. This one, like most, took a while to create since I am still somewhat new to digital scrapbooking. But I am happy with the results and even more happy that I learned something very useful in the process: how to alter digital paper using the content aware healing brush.
I love the digital paper from Katie Pertiet’s Home and Garden Kit that I used for the background. I wanted to use it for both pages, but it would have looked silly if both pages had tape in exactly the same places. I fiddled around with some ideas as to how to change the second page and then it dawned on me that if I used the content aware healing brush I could remove the tape and other distinctive markings so that they looked like two completely different papers. Joy!
Here’s the finished spread.
I could continue to tinker with this layout, but every day it seems he does something so adorable that I quickly snatch my camera so I can attempt to capture the moment. With so many photos I find I must keep pressing on. Next up, the incredibly adorable snapshot of him playing with a tiny grasshopper…
Tonight I am hosting my first ever wine tasting! I am am so excited! I am having some of my friends over to sample my a few of the very first wines I ever made. So today I’ve been racing around cleaning, racking a 5 gallon batch of Chardonnay, cutting the lawn, yadda yadda. You know the drill.
But when my feet started aching I couldn’t help but take a little creative break to finish a layout I started a couple days ago. We had some big storms blow through here a couple days ago and I was able to capture some shots of the awesome display in the sky. The sirens sounded and I sent the kids to the basement and grabbed my camera. Here are the “finished” pages. (I just made about 15 changes to the layout as I was creating this post. I must learn to let it go! It’s not like these were photos of my daughter’s wedding for Pete’s sake!)
I am off to make some Buffalo Chicken dip!
Sassy Susan Creates 