September:
October:
November:
Hopefully she's got this hanging in her new space, and hopefully it's cheerful and not adding to the homesickness...
Hello again! This is getting very real! My daughter started online training for her mission this week, everything is purchased, we have flight information, just waiting for time to pass! That should mean I get a little more time for new paper crafting soon, too...!
Not at all surprisingly, she loves the calendar. She did forget I was doing this and she was so excited looking thru it.
Here are the next four calendar pages she's taking with her!
December

Happy Friday to you! Another late post... I hope this isn't becoming a thing!
I hope you're looking forward to the weekend, mine will be PACKED.
My family and I are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. You may know our church as LDS or Mormons. My older daughter has chosen to serve a mission for our church, and you may have seen our missionaries, wearing black name tags in your town. Missionaries choose to leave home and college and regular life, to serve, and are assigned to serve in a specific location. My daughter will be going to the Lubbock Texas mission, which includes about half of New Mexico as well as western Texas. She will do her training in Mexico City and she'll be primarily working with people who speak Spanish. She is SO excited. It will be a lot of work for her, for the next nineteen months, and it has been some work preparing as well. But this will be a wonderful adventure and we are all very happy for her.
She speaks in church this Sunday, as is traditional before a missionary leaves. That means we're expecting around 75 people (there were 62 people in my house plus the five of us!) to come to our house afterwards, which is fun, but a lot, haha. And that means we've been spending this entire week prepping.
I saw an idea to make a photo calendar for your missionary so they have photos of home hanging in their room. And also it's a bit of a photo album they can show their companions (something like a roommate). Well...I can make a photo calendar! (I used to do these as Christmas gifts for both my husband's and my parents.) I decided to go with 12x12 size for my daughter, so it's not a great photo album for taking around, ha, but it will be nice wall decor that will also be fun for her.
It's sort of a surprise for her, but she still contributed. For example, she selected a huge album of photos she thought she might want to take, which I selected from, haha... And I asked for some of her favorite scripture verses and some of her favorite worship songs and hymns. Also, I *told her I would make her a calendar, rather than print 90+ photos. So it's a surprise she knows about? haha.... yes.
And so! I will split up the 20 "pages" into a few separate posts, so as to not bore you to death, ha. The photos span the last three or so years, mostly of her with different family and friends. She chose the sillier ones- photos I would not have included, but clearly, she wanted reminders of the fun times too. And the nature pictures are, I think, entirely her own photography, which is fun.
My brain is scrambled with Thanksgiving cooking and cleaning and and and... but today here's a different family-themed event to inspire you if you get creative time today!
Quick and simple, especially since it was digital, ha.
Hello again! Today I have the digital images of some scrapbook pages I've been putting together.
A couple years ago, two of my children loudly complained that "we didn't even do anything fun all summer" ...and they got a LOOK, and handed our list that we had come up with to maybe do over the summer, and all the things crossed out with a highlighter were things that we had done! Sheesh!
With that in mind, I made a four page layout for my youngest (one of the complainers) of the fun she had this summer. I chose one photo a day (two photos, twice), and skipped some days, including our big trip, and it looks like she did lots of fun stuff to meeee! This does not include countless afternoons out with neighborhood friends, nor a few bigger activities she went to elsewhere without me, that I don't have pictures of.
I also used a lot of images of the sun to fit Challenge #1 on Splitcoaststampers.com to put the sun or flames on a page. It was a perfect match, ha!
I hope you had a safe and happy weekend, and if you live in the United States, I hope you had a great Independence Day!
Today I have a softball layout! And some memories.
The year I was 10, my mom signed me up for softball and my brother up for baseball. Same city league. He had an actual grown up coach and got a shirt and a hat and this style of picture. I got three 8th graders as coaches (big sisters of some of the team..) They wrote bubble letters in puffy paint on tshirts for our team. The contrast was stark, to say the least. But that was our only year playing this kind of sport. Actually...I took dance a few times but that was the only paid sport for me (that was FINE!). The only thing I remember "learning" was that forfeit meant you have to have enough players, otherwise your team loses by default. (we lost every game except the time the other team had to forfeit.) Also, I don't enjoy anything about softball. Please don't ever throw the ball at me, or expect me to throw it back. I'm not good at batting and I am a *slow runner, ha.
Several months ago, my kiddo informed me she wanted to try baseball. We don't sport at our house, other than some soccer. She never seen a game, we didn't own a single baseball related thing. She has seen the movie Sandlot, but not for a few years... haha! We bought her a ball and glove, and she was on a team that got a tshirt and a hat, ha, and pre-named teams. Her coach was a real grown up, (ha- altho he was younger than I am...) and he did a great job. My kid learned a lot! She improved at all of it! But she didn't love it. It was a HOT season and most of her games were played between 95* and 98*, with the late afternoon sun beating down on all of us. I don't know that she'll do it again, but it's good to try new things!
I created these in the long-retired MDS. I knew I had a softball image there, ha. I "filled" them in with a dot image that honestly looks like scribbled gum drops. I added a little stitching, and the Texture overlay, which makes the edges look like canvas. And I took my colors from her team shirt and her ball. And the season is scrapped!
Supplies:
MDS
Stamps: Great Sport, Lemonade Stand dots, Texture
Ink: Basic Black, Barely Banana, Night of Navy
Accessories: Stitching Thread
Journaling Font: Brush Script title, Book Antiqua notes
Still no time to make something, but time to share something!
This is a hybrid page. I scanned in this long-retired DP for the digital background! It was more than perfect, and I needed to fit a bunch of pics, so that's what I did! I actually then started scanning in all my DP for just such a reason and then stopped after two packs....I need to find a LOT of free time to work on that, ha.
Anyway, we came upon this cute little spot and decided it was a perfect time for a treat, and here's the result!
Since I opted to share the calendar covers by themselves, I'm finishing off the whole calendar in this post.
For September I usually do a back to school theme: