My intentions for this blog are fairly simplistic: mostly I would like to use this space as a means of encouraging myself to continue creating and growing by forcing myself to share my progress with anyone who may be interested. While I may share bits of my personal life, what I really want is to share my scrapbooking with all of the amazing bloggers already out there.

25.8.10

Indie Girl Pages

For my challenge kit this month at Treasured Memories, Chantel gave me some of the lovely "Indie Girl" line from Sassafras. Score! The line is so pretty - I'm not sure my pages do it justice but I enjoyed creating them. And Sassatras is such a good deal I still have lots of product to work with. In fact, I did complete another page but it's... icky.

24.8.10

i*color

Hello World! Wonderful, beautiful, bright world that I can SEE!!! Wow, laser surgery was traumatic, though I went to a wonderful clinic with wonderful doctors and technitions (Eye Q Premium Laser) and they made it the best that it could have been. I won't go into the gory details but the bottom line is I can see. I had 20/20 vision less than 24 hours after my surgery and it has been the best thing to happen to me since sliced bread. Honestly, I still feel like crying when I think about it. Glorious! So what did I do with my new found eyesight? Well I can't do a heck of a lot at the moment. Ensuring proper healing of my eyes excludes working out and dust, excluding many household chores and going out in the sun for prolonged periods. A person who usually has multiple jobs and commitments does not do well under these conditions. My dear friend April and I were discussing the sheer therapy of coloring the other day and I became inspired. I printed off one of the first coloring pages available on Google and got to it. So relaxing! Despite my own best advice, below of a sampling of my latest most nerdy adventure.

Why not? I ask you. Color. Get out your pencil crayons, or perhaps your kid's pencil crayons as I fear most grown adults do not have their own 60 color Prisma Color set, and color. You NERD :)

19.8.10

Da Da Daaaaaaaaa...

Well folks, in two hours I will have a corneal flap, yes flap, created and the underlying layers resurfaced and reshaped. Yep. Having laser eye surgery. I have already had some major gastrointestinal and sleep issues relating to this wonderful invention. I became a biology teacher because I love things like anatomy and physiology... but let`s face it - eyes just gick me out! Therefore, the mental preparation for this surgery has been unbearable. I have not slept; visions of zombies with bleeding eyes dance in my head. This morning I am very ill which generally happens whenever I`m extremely nervous about something. Seriously, I would rather watch them remove my gallbladder or perform open heart surgery on MYSELF than this. BUT I must keep reminding myself that I WILL BE ABLE TO SEE!!! Having glasses since grade two means that I don`t ever remember waking up and just seeing. The thought is just unfathomable. And now an homage to a bygone era: last year's glasses.

The blue and lime green ones:

The pink and black ones:

The black and white ones:
I do plan to actually get some scrapbooking done when I can finally see again so in the meantime, I leave you with some pictures of my latest attempts in cupcakes. Ah, cupcakes. Why can't I just think about those? Got to go - I think I'm going to be sick...

8.8.10

Be Funky

So I'm working on some wedding invites and save the dates for a good friend of mine who is sadly living too far away from me in T-dot. I am really enjoying this new past time - I've discovered I'm really into computer and graphic design and should do this in my next life (note to self). Anywho, one of the save the dates is something adorable that I totally stole from some nice couple in the states. I will give the website credit at a later date when I show my version compared to theirs. It's amazing what you can do without Photoshop and a limited knowledge of Microsoft Word, really! While you anxiously (Ha!) await the photos on the invites, I bring you Be Funky, a website (from what I can gather) completely dedicated to 17 year olds, enabling them to make funky photos to place on their myspace page. Because I do not have Photoshop yet, I was forced to search for a free online photo editing resource. (I needed the photos to look cartoonish or hand-drawn.) And so I played around with Be Funky. It's free, easy and totally rad. I have big plans for this site - I promise to remove all notions of young girls making pouty faces in their long-arm photos. Here are some examples...

5.8.10

Yikes!

I should be in a vampire movie with eyes like this:I had to have them dilated today to check everything out for my imminent LASER SURGERY!!! That's right! I'm going to be able to see when I wake up for the first time since grade 2. As I am still waiting on a teaching job some very generous donations from the Bank of Mom and the Bank of Dad, oh and a whole lot of Atavan, have made this miracle possible. I am so excited (and also terrified)!!!

2.8.10

Grateful!

Hello Friends! I have just returned from a GREAT camping trip with great friends. Despite several severe changes in weather (we are talking sunshine to golf ball-sized hail in T minus two seconds) we managed to go on a couple hikes and enjoyed camping 20 metres from the riverbed. If you ever have the chance to visit the Bragg Creek, I strongly recommend it. The walk-in sites at Beaver Flats (where we stayed) are hugely unpopular, namely because you have to hike your coolers and all smelly articles to the car each night to prevent being eaten by a bear. We love them however! (The sites, not the bears, well I mean bears are cute and all but also hungry and strong.) They are so close to the river you are lulled to sleep each night by the sounds of the water. The pictures taken below are mere steps from our siteView to the right of our site.
View to the left of our site.

We walked down to Elbow Falls one day, an hour hike each way. Breath. Taking. We all just kept saying "this is the time when you are proud to live in Alberta". (It completely wipes away all images of silver genitalia hanging from the back of trucks; if you live in Alberta, you unfortunately know what I mean) I didn't bring my camera on the first hike as we had to cross several rushing streams but I managed to get a few photos the second time. Except for the first picture below, I literally just held my camera out on the automatic setting and clicked while I walked. Gorg!


I have some craft challenges in the works for myself... I'll be updating again soon I hope!