The Smisor Family

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of meeting with the Smisor family at the Wheatland Pumpkin Patch and shooting some photos for them. Their little girl Maya was adorable and so full of life and cute smiles. Thanks to Denise and her family for the experience. Here are the results!

A Family Reunion, of sorts

Whenever my brother and his family come to visit, we always try to get the family together. Since it's been over two years since we all were in a photo together, I mentioned in passing how I would like to get a new family photo. Lo and behold, I was committed to the new family photo project last weekend. I was stressed about it for a while but all in all, every one is used to my process by now and even the kids were very cooperative! Although I wish I had a better background to work with, I am happy with the outcome... and you really should have seen it before I Photoshoped it! But here it is... my family...minus Deanna and Devin...















And the I got a couple shots of my brother and his family who always look great!







































We had some fun times in the pool and hanging out together. And I couldn't quite tell whether Shawn or the kids were having more fun with his throwing them around in the pool! But it made for some really good photos!





















































































And my favorite of the day!


























































































































Jonathan calls this photo her "Papa look" cause she looks just like my dad when he looks at people crooked.
































































Mae Mae caught Papa squirting her with the squirt gun. He tried to deny it, of course and it progressed to this - so telling of their personalities...

Year in Review

Back in May, I went to a scrapbooking event hosted by Green Tangerines. As one of their prizes, they gave everyone their January kit including the supplies to make their new Month-in-Review page. This is something I had thought about doing previously and had a template fairly similar to their calendar style layout. But I never really got into the idea until I saw their sample layout in the store. After putting together the January one they gave to us, I was hooked. I have been wanting to do some sort of favorite photos album and this will allow me to do that, while at the same time recording events that happened during that year. I plan to use every day stuff too so when we look back on these albums, we not only see what we looked like, but what the things around us looked like too. This is definitely not taking the place of my regular layouts, but it's somewhere to have a little taste of events and allow me to focus more on the Library of Memories approach to scrapping of not feeling like I am "behind."

Unfortunately, (or maybe fortunately since it saves me a lot of money) they only allow kit club members to purchase their Month-in-review layouts, so I had to improvise. But I am totally loving my version so much more. And there is an added plus to finally using some of these papers and scraps that have sat in my stash for years! So here is the one that was provided to us from Green Tangerines with a little of my own spin since I didn't use their embellishments or hand write my journaling...













All the supplies (except the black #'s and the labels) are from Green Tangerines Kit Club
You can see their sample that it's based off of here.
Papers are: October Afternoon, Scenic Route, & Cosmo Cricket
Letters and Red #'s are American Crafts Thickers
Black #'s are American Crafts Remarks
Labels: Lynn Grieveson for Designer Digitals
Font is Ashley

And here are the ones I made on my own...












All Papers are Stampin' Up
Pink Letters and Numbers are American Crafts Thickers
Glitter Numbers are Making Memories
Journaling Blocks are Ellie Lash for Scrapbookgraphics.com
Font is CK Anecdote













All Papers are Stampin' Up
Orange and Green Letters and Numbers are American Crafts Thickers
Black Numbers are American Crafts Remarks
Labels are made by me
I can't seem to find the journaling file so I am not sure what fonts I used. Ooops!













Papers are Chatterbox and My Mind's Eye
Yellow letters and numbers are American Crafts Thickers
Butterfly Punch is Martha Stewart
The little circle ebellies with the dates in them are made by me
And I have no idea what I did with the April file to find out those fonts either. That's what I get for cleaning up my desktop!

These were all layouts I started at a crop night a couple weeks back. Hopefully I can finish another four months at our next one!

A new perspective

Sometimes I am WAY too critical of myself.

Sometimes I don't challenge myself to try new things.

Sometimes I am lack confidence in my art.

But then...

I put together a digital frame with some of my favorite photos of family of friends, all of which I have taken. It sits on my desk at work and the other day I found myself staring at it, thinking that if I saw these photos in someone else's cubicle, I would commend the photographer. And yet, I don't do that for myself. I came home and told Jonathan, "I realized today that I really don't give myself enough credit."

And so a new desire was born in me to really start photographing regularly again. To challenge myself to try new things with it, like filters, and camera angles. And above all, to gain some confidence in myself. So after yesterday's post, I was taking a look back at the photos and thought, yeah, that's a nice photo, but then I played with it and found what I consider "wall worthy."
















It's hard to tell from a small blog photo, but such a simple change made a huge impression on me that this is a really good photo. I think I will have to frame this one and and actually hang it!

Some new treasures...

I bought a new camera a couple months back. It's a Canon 50D, the latest and greatest of the semi-affordable Canon SLR line. So I set everything up the way I wanted including shooting in RAW format, which basically gives you a raw image without a lot of the automatic image editing mumbo jumbo that most cameras will do with other image types. I took it to a Mother's Day family BBQ and was very excited about my new toy. Sadly, when I got home, I couldn't see the images. After a little research, I found I should have done more research earlier. The camera was too new for my version of Photoshop (CS2) and was not compatible in RAW format. It's rather ridiculous to me that the Photoshop upgrade we bought only a year and a half ago is now outdated and won't work with a new camera... anyhow....

At least the camera came with a conversion software and I was able to salvage the images. Since then I have had to shoot in jpeg, which is sort of disappointing, but it beats spending another several hundred dollars on software upgrades. In the mean time, I was so distracted with my loathing of the software industry, I forgot I was able to salvage the Mother's Day shots and came across them again the other day. So here are my few forgotten treasures...

Bad Bad Blogger....

Again! I can't believe how long it's been since I have posted.

The last six months or so have been very hard on me and my family. I hated my job with a passion, the whole getting older and the outlook of having kids looking grimmer and grimmer, my sister getting laid off, my niece in the hospital, and on and on and on.... But now things are definitely looking up. I started a new job that I think I am going to totally love! It's a career change for me so it was really nerve racking when I was deciding whether to take it or not, but even after two days, I feel like I finally found my niche. And being away from my last job has really helped me realize how stifled I was there. But that's enough about that!

Hopefully things will look up for my sister soon too. She is a teacher and had only been in this district for two years, but thankfully, she is #1 on the seniority list, so hopefully they will restructure or someone else will quit or something and she will have her job come the new school year! Keep your fingers crossed for her.

My niece is out of the hospital but is slow going on her healing. She is only two and is being put through a lot. Not to mention how much my brother and sister-in-law are going through with spending two weeks in the hospital with their son just eight months ago. Send them lots of prayers for all their health and safety. They could really use it!

I am excited about another scrap night with Melanie on Saturday. I'm feeling inspired again so hopefully I can get some stuff done! In the mean time, here's a couple layouts I finished in the last few weeks...