Catching up on August DLP unPlanner

I'm a little late getting to my August month divider.  The theme for the month is: "And Then Again, No - The Power of Saying No."

I used the Bo Bunny divider for August that was in the DLP kit and watercolored some of the chevrons in the borders. I watercolored a black and white dotted paper and sewed it to front of the divider. The pocket and title is made from a Bo Bunny "Calendar Girl" paper collection I had bought which has one paper for each of the months. 

The tag was "built" on a kraft card stock using many layers of paint and stamps.  I typed the theme and added it to the tag which I have done for all the previous months. The ribbon is hand-dyed with Distress ink.

 Here is the divider with the tag in the pocket.

The reverse side of the divider is the monthly calendar. Again, I watercolored the chevron border and used tiny hexagon number stickers from The Reset Girl for the dates. I added cupcake washi tape on all the days of birthdays this month. And there are a lot of them! My oldest daughter, her boyfriend, my son-in-law, my husband, my husband's favorite aunt and I all have August birthdays!

And, last but not least, is this week's PAC. The art challenge was to create a self-portrait. Uh, no, don't think I can draw that! So I decided to do an image transfer of a photo of me as a toddler. The background was a painted piece I'd done for something else so I grabbed it and did a transfer with gel medium. Unfortunately I only had gloss medium and I prefer matte, so the result is a bit shiny. Also, the face transferred onto green and a bit of purple paint so it looks like I'm a bit sickly with a Rudolph nose. But I'm going with it. The butterfly was from a piece of wrapping paper.

This definitely isn't my favorite PAC, but ...

The Trip to Chicago - that wasn't!

As it turned out, we never made it to Chicago last weekend! We arrived at Love Field at 6:00 am (yes, I got up at 4:30!) and as soon as we entered the airport we realized something was "wrong." There was a HUGE line at the ticket counters, the kiosks were not working and the monitor showed the first three flights to Chicago cancelled. Bill even tried calling Southwest, but was disconnected twice.

So, since we fly non-rev and there were at least 400 paying customers that were going to need to find available seats, we decided we were not going to make it! We were home by 7 and I promptly returned to bed! It was disappointing as we were going to visit our youngest daughter, Sara, and her fiancé and we hadn't been to Chicago in quite a long time. Oh well...

I'm still trying to catch up on the grand boys' scrapbooks, but I've gotten back to a few art journal pages in the past few weeks. I've missed it!

Both of these pages were "mop up" pages - where I clean off my brush or stencils when I still have product left over from another project. It gives a nice start to new pages and avoids a blank page.

Tomorrow I will be back with more DLP pages.

I've been Scrapping!

I'm in Chicago for the weekend, but thought I'd post what has been consuming my days lately.

 Back a hundred years ago when I had my children, I never had time to do much in their baby books, much less scrapbooks. So I decided when my first grandson was born I would scrap the first year, with all its many milestones, for him. Then, three months later, my second grandson was born and, of course, I needed to do the same for him.

Fast forward three years and my third and fourth grandsons came along, again three months apart, so that meant being in the middle of creating four scrapbooks!

Four years later, I am still working - on the second volume for each of the older two and the first volumes for the younger two. I think I am caught up for Carl and Drew and will only do pages for birthdays, Christmas and special vacations/trips from now on. The babies' books still have a ways 

to go!

So here are some of the pages I've done in the last few weeks. Some of them, like the Zoo page, were done times 4! I'm mostly doing single-page layouts, but occasionally need double layouts for a larger number of photos. I've also sprinkled in several Project Life-type pocket-page layouts. These are pretty simple and nothing fancy. No flowers or bows for boys!

I'm having fun but what a job! I know it will be appreciated by their moms especially and will be fun to look back at all the special moments of their lives.

DLP unPlanner - August

Can you believe it's August? Kids are starting to go back to school, but it's still super hot
here in Texas!

I've been delinquent in posting pages for the past few weeks. Two weeks ago, the DLP moderators posted the fifth week of July (since they post prompts every week on Saturday, that fell on July 29 so they considered it another week of July). I considered it the first week of August!  The only prompt was a PAC to incorporate two stencils. I didn't do one as I've done several cards with multiple stencils  in the past.

So now on to August! The August theme is: "And then again, NO - The Power of Saying NO". I have not done my monthly divider yet, but here are the weekly calendars for the first two weeks.

Week 1

The first week I went with a background of pink, yellow and orange - probably inspired by the Texas heat!

Week 2

For the current week I used a foam floral stamp and stamped repeatedly over the background with a turquoise ink and blended with ink to create the background. We are going to Chicago this weekend to visit my youngest daughter and her fiancé so I will have lots of stuff to add to
the last few days of this spread.

The PAC challenge was to use collage.  I started with a painted background and added a strip of the inside of a security envelope on the right side. Over that I added a small piece of tissue tape. The bird image is a black and white print-out left over from some other project. I lightly colored it with my new Prima water-soluble oil pastels. The scalloped border at the top is another security envelope - I love saving these pretty patterns! Then I stapled a small piece of hand-dyed ribbon to the top and doodled around the outside edge.