ami's place blog

I am honored to be the first guest on Debbie Hodges new podcast. Please check it out on "This Memory Keeper's Life" she is a very talented interviewer and made this a great experience for me.

Busy

    So much is happening right now that I am spinning. Not much time for art but I am doing a bit of Art Journaling just to stay sane. Our dear friend Frank passed away recently and Jon was the executor of his will. We ended up with all of the pictures from June and Frank and I am going through them and dividing them between two adult children who don't know each other. It has been a whirlwind. 

     I've also just acquired a new computer. This is a joy but does require a bit of work to get back to the way everything was with my old system, just faster and bigger. It is a dream to use and will most likely make it easier to blog. I was so very tired of watching a little blue circle go around and around. Now I seldom see it. This makes me so very happy.

    I joined a group last week of Art Journalers on a Ning site. It is with Journal Girl - Kira and it is so much fun. I am looking forward to being able to connect with others who love making art and keeping journals and scrapping but are learning to deal with chronic illnesses at the same time. 

    Here is the little page I finished today. I did add some outlining around the lettering today to finish it up but this is all I did to it. 

    This was done on a strathmore journal with inktense colors and scraps of scrapbook papers.  Also a few rub-ons and my chicken-wire acrylic stamp from Prima and bubble wrap with Distress Inks

Fun with She Art and Wild Abandon

I've been having so much fun with both of the Christy Tomlinson classes that I took. The combination of them is seen in this canvas that I made for the bedroom of my friend Julie's daughter, Abbie. It was great to be able to make art with my hands and not be in so much pain. The change in the weather has been very good for my joints. 

Then I did a few pages in my old book journal:

I'll write about all of this soon, but right now Jon is on his way home and we will be walking because the weather is amazing today.

Abbie's new toy

There is a cute little girl in our neighborhood and she just had a birthday a few days ago. The other day when out for my walk she came speeding by on her newest toy. These were a couple of the shots I got. She was having far too much fun to stop or even slow down. 

Tanmay's 31st Birthday

We attended Tanmy's party on Saturday evening.  His wife, Nandini, managed to put togehter a delightful surprise party at a friend's cabana. We enjoyed good friends, good food (cake and pizza) and good music.  In other words a good time was had by all. One of the most astounding events was the blowing out of the candles on the cake. Tanmay's friends loaded the cake with the type of candles that continually relight and Tanmay kept on blowing and blowing until he actually stopped all of them from relighting, which left the room in laughter. Considering how difficult it was for the guests to blow-up all of the balloons for decoration, I think they have found a new job for Tanmay at the next celebration. 

February and Tiny Templates

I tried using a few more of Cathy Z.'s Tiny Templates from Designer Digitals on my February Project Life pages and loved them. I am still having a bit of an issue when it comes to printing them the correct size. It is definetly a problem between the printer and the desk, in other words, me but I will find a way to do it properly as I love using them. Here are the two I did for February.

And then I took a self portrait that I really liked. What do you think?

January Project Life

On the left hand page, I played with two of Cathy Zielske's Tiny Templates from Designer Digitals. Then two of her larger templates for the date and my Life Jacket pictures. January started out to be mild but ended with snow. Jon spent a few days at home as we live on a steep hill and driving was impossible. The third day he managed to walk to the bottom of the hill and take public transportation. On his days at home we walked in the snow and enjoyed the beauty and quiet.

The right hand page shows a few holiday photos from friends and relatives.  A picture of Jon's Mom having coffee with us one morning at our local mall and our friend, Amrita, as she carried her newest aquisition home, a Cricut machine. 

I began using this routine for Project Life last year.  I did the complete picture a day in 2010 and now like this way of one or two spreads capturing each months activities. Then adding various other layouts and bits of our story in many different sized page protectors. I am hoping to get a pack of Becky's mixed ones soon, to help me add more variety to this album. 

 

My Many Careers

I have recently been having monthly and sometimes weekly, conversations with Tami at Creative Passions and Debbie at Masterful Scrapbooking Designs. During one such webinar it became painfully noticeable to me that they knew very little of my past. I have been scrapbooking for the past fifteen years and my life prior to that is tucked away in albums that I have neither digitized nor shared on my blog. Because of this, I sat down two days ago and pulled a few photos from years ago and made a page with a simple outline of the many careers that I have experienced thus far.

The journaling for this layout reads:

 16-26  Student, Bookkeeper, Boeing

Worker, Married, mother of two.

26-30  Homebuilder, Executive Assistant at

 Drop-In Shelter for Youth.

 30-38  Organizer/counselor of Battered Women’s

 Shelter, Director Runaway Youth Shelter,

 Vista Organizer for Light Brigade.

 38-42 Long Distance Trucker of Refrigerated Foods.

 42-57  Engineering  Art and Technical Illustration.

 42-Until present Happily married and now

 Retired.

It is a quick and simple outline, by my various ages, of the different types of work that I have done. I think that over the course of the next few weeks I may take each of these time spans and do a group of layouts. I garnered immense pleasure from revisiting these memories and realized that not all of my work needs to reflect the present time. 

 

to Share: Aunt Nan's Eclectic Inkandblabula

Please read the article on my friend Nan's blog about organizing. The one from today is about my studio space and has some great pictures. The one just prior to that is Nan's on organizing and it is very good. Julie Balzer used a part of it on her blog the first day of her organizing week.

http://auntnanseclecticinkandblabula.blogspot.com

Creative Afternoon

Today it is grey and gloomy here in Bellevue and I decided to cheer myself up by playing in PSE 9 before I change to PSE 10. I am always a bit apprehensive when I am about to open new software.

Saturday our dear friend Trudy came to visit from Olympia and I loaded a bunch of tutorials into her laptop. She is just beginning to learn PSE and so we sat and played with the tutorials most of the afternoon. It was such fun that I decided to spend the next few days doing it again.

This is a tutorial from Digital Scrapper this past March. I loved the look of the photo mask and I think that after the tutorial today I now know how to create it.  Then I needed to search for a landscape photo to use in it. I discovered that I don't take very many photos of the landscape. It seems that almost on a daily level I am finding different types of photos that I desire for my collection.  This is one I took at Pacific Beach, Washington in June of 2009.

My hands are starting to behave. The weather has been a challenge as it ignites all of the pain in my ostio arthritis. For the past two weeks I have been unable to use the computer for more than just looking at my email. Today was a delightful surprise.