Excuse me as I blow the dust off my blog, I can't believe it has been 5 month since I posted anything! I wish I had some amazing stories to share of all of the fantastic, wonderful adventures I have been on these past several months, but I don't. I having been living the life that most people I know are living, the one that entails trying to find a work/life/me time balance that everyone seems to struggle with. So while it may seem that I am about to complain about never having enough time-yada yada; I am actually happy to say that I am at peace with where I am at this point in my life.
I have taken the past few months to try and focus on what matters, my family and for the first time me. Although I am by no means at a place where everything is running smoothly (truth be told I don't think I will ever be, and that's okay;), I am taking more time to try and enjoy the things around me rather then always trying to control what comes next and let's face it when you are a wife and mother of three, very little is in your control. However, what is in my control is how I react to things and the ugly truth of it is, it has not always (or even mostly) been with grace, understanding and forgiveness.
I still have been creating for Studio Calico and to be perfectly honest I have just recently found my love of paper crafting again. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love receiving my Studio Calico goodies every month (it seriously is one of the main things I look forward to every month and I love being part of the community there) but for a long time now I found myself only making things because they needed to be done. And while I loved what I was making I found myself only creating things for the CT commitments. Some times I would go weeks with out making anything-Gasp! I guess I just kind of burnt out, hence my silence here. I realized the other day that since I started paper crafting back in 2007 I have always had some sort of deadline that I was working on. Whether it be for various different Design Teams or coming up with projects for classes I was teaching, in some way I was always creating for some thing or some one other then just me. I needed to find my joy again, that place I was when I first held an inked stamp and discovered the magical world of card making and scrapbooking and this amazing community of crafters.
I am actually smiling as I type this right now because something happened the other day that renewed my love and passion for scrapbooking. I am not sure if it was one thing or a combination of things but all I know is that I created 3 traditional 12x12 scrapbook pages because I really wanted to, not because I needed to. I wanted to play with pretty paper and embellishments and not hoard them (this my friends, is a huge problem for me but I am working on it:) I wanted to print my photos and tell their story rather then dread having to edit and print them. So I am hoping this is a new habit for me and I intend on sharing my work here again as well as some other occasional ramblings and photos.
Well I guess after all of that wordiness I should get to sharing some projects, huh?
After loosing our beautiful Koda to cancer May of 2014 we welcomed a puppy into our home at the end of April. Our oldest took Koda's passing particularly hard, so watching her now with Griffin brings so much joy to us all. I have a ridiculous amount of patterned papers piling up around here along with tons of ephemera packages so I made sure to use a lot here. Might have over done it, but oh well,lol. Most of the supplies on the layout are from Crate Paper.
And this layout well it just makes me happy! Again used lots of patterned papers here, washi tape and tags. Even thought there is almost 4 years between these two, they are two peas in a pod and love each other fiercely, which sometimes means they fight with each other fiercely too. They are either best friends or worst enemies, but I have no doubt they will always have each other's back.
Well that's it for today but I can't wait to come back and post a few other things I have been working on.
And thank you to those that have been following my creative journey I really appreciate all of support I have received over the years it truly means so much to me.
