The Memory Box is finished....

I know that I have been a terrible, terrible blogger lately, but it's summer, and we've been busy, and well you know how it goes. Plus I haven't been that creative other than a couple cards, a canvas (that I'll post later) and slowly working my way along on this memory box...and it is finally done!! Yay!! I put alot of hours into this between editing pics, looking for quotes, buying supplies, planning and then the actual work itself. But I am very happy with how it turned out and I just hope that my cousin is happy with it too!

So here it is...

Left side
Right side

Back (there will be hinges on the back for the lid I think)

And this is the front

Catching up...

I know that it's been ages since I last posted, so I'll start where I left off and try to get you all caught up on what's been happening with us!

Here's Mercedes getting her medal for finishing the marathon, and yes I did walk the last mile with her!

After the marathon, Mercedes finished up school and we left for Edmonton on Monday June 28th and I stayed until July 7th and Mercedes stayed until July 10th. It was awesome and I had a great time the whole time I was there! I have been feeling really good since I've been out of the hospital and I've been on different meds and I'm really enjoying life and enjoying just feeling like a normal person. I'm so very grateful that I was able enjoy my time with my friends and especially have a good time at my girlfriends wedding and all the associated celebrations.

Here's me & Jackie just before we left for her stagette party...

Here's Jackie, Mercedes and I at Jackie's wedding...

This is my favorite picture of just Mercedes that I took before we left for the church.

So I had an awesome time every second that I was gone on vacation, but I did come home a couple days before Mercedes so that I could have a few days to myself. I was outside when I heard this buzzing sound and I followed it and to my surprise, this is what I found....

At first we thought it was a beehive, but we eventually decided it was just a big swarm since the next day it was totally gone. And all that was left was these few bees...

Now Mercedes is back home and we are enjoying our clean and organized house, and Mercedes is enjoying her many birthday presents...one of which was a new bike...

And one of the gifts I gave her was these gift certificates. She's already used 2 of them!! She loved this gift!! It ranked right up there with her new bike and her Wii!! It's nice to know that my daughter appreciates things that arent' just about big bucks! And it felt good for me to get to do something a little creative, to make these look cute.

So now we are trying to get back into the swing of regular summer life. I've got all the bags unpacked and the laundry is just about all caught up, so hopefully I can get back into the groove and get back to work on this memory box, so I can get it finished and I need to get some more cards made. And of course, I do have more projects lined up, just waiting to be worked on.

And hopefully I will be posting regularly again now too! I does feel good to be back though, and I hope to have lots of pics of projects to post soon! :)

I'm back...

Finally!! It was a rough road there for awhile, but I am finally back and out of the hospital and feeling much better now.

Haven't gotten back into the swing of things creatively yet, but that's mostly just because I've been busy getting back into the swing of life, and we have a busy couple weeks ahead of us too.

Today Mercedes will be walking the last mile in a kids marathon that she has participated in and she has asked me to be her buddy and walk with her, so in an hour I will be going to meet her at the school to walk with her to the finish line. I figure I have to take advantage of this opportunity because before I know it she won't want me to be her buddy anymore, so I better enjoy it while I can!

Then she only has 2 more days of school and then it's out for summer break! Woohoo!! Then we'll be getting ready as we are going to be going to Edmonton for a week or two. One of my best friends is getting married on July 3rd and so we are going up for that and also for Mercedes to spend some time with her dad and her grandparents. I will be spending my time with my girlfriend and a couple of other friends that I have up there and hopefully I'll even get to see my older kids too, if they can find time in their busy schedules, if they are even going to be around! All and all it will be a fun trip though and I'm looking forward to it.

I'm hoping to get something creative done before I leave, but that may or may not happen, but if it doesn't be sure that I will be going hard after I get home! I still have the memory box to finish and then I already have another project ready to be started as soon as the box is finished! lol So be sure to stay tuned cause lots of new stuff is in the works.

While I was in the hospital, my mom, sister and many other people all got together and totally cleaned and organized my house, so I have a whole new craft room to store all my supplies in and I'm just dying to get in there and get it all organized my way and get to work using some of my supplies that I had forgotten that I had!

So lots of fun will be happening this summer around here, so check in often and I promise to start posting regularly again! :)

MIA...

You may have been wondering where I've been. Well the last couple of days I've been in the hospital. I suffer from bipolar disorder and have been dealing with severe depression for quite some time now. It got really bad last week and on Sunday, after talking to my mom and my family dr. we thought it was best for me to spend some time in the hospital.

I'm not very happy with psychiatrist lately, so we've decided to try to get me a new one. We've also decided to do some changes with my medications and whatever else we can think of that could turn this all around for me. Unforetunately this is not an exact science so it's a lot of try this, try that...see if this will work, or that will work. The big bummer is that most meds take 3-6 weeks to start working. And before we can start me on new meds we have to get me off the old meds, and you are supposed to gradually go off those meds, so that could take a month or two....unless you do it in the hospital where they can do it alot faster since they can watch you to make sure you don't have seizures, heart problems or any other such fun stuff!

So chances are I will be spending at least a few more days in the hospital if not more. Hopefully though after all is said and done, I will finally start to feel better...for more than a week or two at a time.

So if you don't hear from me for a few days it's because I don't have internet in the hospital, but I will try to keep you all posted as much as possible, and as soon as I'm feeling better I'll be back to creating soon I hope!

Side three is done...

Well, after taking a couple days off, today I got back to work on the memory box, and just as I had hoped the end did go alot faster than the sides had! So I am now done 3 sides and only have 1 side and the lid left, so I am over half done and now looking down the home stretch....WOOHOO!! And I must admit, I am really happy with how this is all turning out!!

The weather around here has been rainy, snowy and just plain yucky this week, so it has been conducive to hanging out inside and getting some scrapping/creative work done, but yesterday I had a sick little girl, so that was NOT conducive to actually getting ANYTHING done!! lol

I might see if I can get started on the other end tonight, but we'll just see how that goes. I might also take a little break from this and do a few cards. Not sure. I know I probably won't get much done tomorrow, cause I have to go into the city and do something I dread....shop for clothes...blah! :( One of my best friends is getting married this summer so I need to go get a dress to wear and tomorrow is the day, but whatever I get done in the next day or two, I definately plan on having this all completed by the end of next week for sure!!

Although it's been a totally new kind of project for me, and it has definately made me use my brain a time or two ;), I have actually really enjoyed working on this. One of the reasons is that it's a boys project and I don't get to do boy things very often, so they are always more of a challenge for me, but also the different shape, the fact that it is a 3d project and then doing 5 seperate LO's, that are different but still co-herent. All and all it's been alot of fun!

I will post more again when I have more completed. Hope you all have a wonderful weekend!!

Side Two is done...

Although it took the better part of the day, I managed to get the front of the memory box finished! Woohoo....two sides done, 3 to go (well 2 sides and the lid)! I figure since the ends are smaller they should go faster than the front and back did, but you never know how creativity and inspiration will work sometimes. So anyways, here's a picture of the front...

Mercedes has already decided that as soon as I finish this project that she wants me to make her a memory box too. In fact last night she even found a box that we can use. I'm kinda hoping that she forgets about it for a little while cause I'm pretty sure that when I'm finished this I'll want a break from this kinda project for a bit, but I have a feeling that more memory boxes are definately in my future. Oh well, I do think it's a cool idea, and I am happy with how this one is turning out...of course, I wouldn't consider it finished until I was happy with it!

I'll post more later when I get more done on it. :)

Memory box - First side is done....

Today was pretty productive, considering that I slept in until noon! I've had nothing but this memory box on my mind, so I started working on it almost as soon as I got up and although it looked like this, this morning...

I am proud to say that it looks like this... tonight!

It is tipped up it's side, and it's not the best picture, but you get the idea. The flowers and butterflies are all Tim Holtz grungeboard that I painted with acrylic paint in the colors that is in the Fancy Pants paper that will be used on some of the other sides. The cardstock is Core'dinations & I used Distress inks to ink the paper & photos. The brads are Recollections Antique Copper. I used Mod Podge as my mail adhesive for everything except the photos which I attached with Elmer's glue stick. I think that's about everything!

Now that I've actually gotten started I'm hoping that the rest will flow smoothly and this won't take too long. I just need the uninterupted time to be able get the work done and hopefully now that I have the house back to just me & Mercedes I will be able to get my alone time again!

Happy long weekend...

It's been a busy week, so I'm sorry that I haven't been posting, but I've been trying to catch up on everything that fell behind while I was sick. And then on Thursday evening Brad came for his first visit since he's moved to Edmonton. Mercedes is thrilled that he's here and I've enjoyed a little break from single parenthood for a few days. He will be going back home tomorrow, so we've tried to pack as much into the four days that he's here as we can.

He showed up with a cooler full of a bunch of our favorite foods that we can't find down here and then spent the whole evening playing with Mercedes. Friday we went to Lethbridge and did some shopping and then we went to dinner at the Keg and still got home in time spend most of the evening with Mercedes. Yesterday we just hung around the house, and he helped me sand and seal the wooden memory box that I am starting to work on. Then last night we watched Avatar on Blu-Ray...WOW! Considering that we didn't see it in the theater, high def, was definately the way to go, and we all really enjoyed the movie. Today, I got to sleep in until noon, and then Brad and Mercedes wanted to go fishing so I tagged along and took some pics and then just hung out and watched them for a couple hours.

So I have a few pics to show off...

This is the scenery I see everytime I am coming home from the city....I just love coming home, cause I LOVE this view...I love my mountains!!!
This is a pic that I took while Brad & Mercedes were fishing. The big mountain in the middle is Chief Mountain and it looks over our town, but I loved the way it looked today with the clouds and the snow.

Here's a pic of Brad & Mercedes during the time they were fishing....it was really cold & windy so they would set up their rods and then come sit in the car to warm up, so I managed to catch this pic just as she hugged him to thank him for helping her get her rod set up. I thought it was a great pic of my little girl with her daddy.

Tnis is a wooden box that I've been hired to decorate. She wants LO's done on each side & the top and then she is giving it to her son to use as a Memory box and every year he can go through all his projects and pick his favorites to save and he can store them in this box. This is a totally new kind of project for me. I've altered boxes before, but on a much smaller scale and usually just with paper & embellishments, not usually with pictures and doing layout type things. So this is the box that Brad helped me sand & seal yesterday and I was grateful for the help, and I've pretty much finished all the pre-planning and gathered all the supplies, so now I just need to sit down and get started on the actual creating. I'm just a little stuck on which side to start with! lol

But I wanted to post the before pics and I will take pics along the way and definately post after pics since I could not find any pictures of something like this when I was looking for ideas, but I do think it was a neat idea, although I can't take credit for it, it was my cousin's idea...she just hired me to actually do it! Wish me luck!!

This is just a pic from the front. It doesn't matter that it's so scarred and beaten up since it will all be covered with paper & pics by the time I'm done!

I've decided that I'm going to be giving some of the graduates that I know this year some packages of thank you cards to use for either gifts they recieve or to give to some special teachers, so I've been working on thank you cards and congratulations cards for the actual graduates themselves. So that's what these cards are all for...

The paper is all K&Co and the stamps are all Close to My Heart. Ink is Distress Inks and the pattern for these first 2 cards is from the book Wishes from CTMH. While the pattern from the last 2 cards is one of my own patterns using Spellbinder's Nestibilities Label's Thirteen.

Gift tag I made using the scraps left over from the above two cards & a wooden heart sprayed with a couple different colors of glimmer mist.

Busy last night...

I've been starting to feel better the last couple days, so last night I actually got alot accomplished. Here are the cards that I made...

Sorry that it's been so long....

I know it's been over a week since my last post, but I've been busy using all my energy trying to fight this severe depression I've been dealing with. However, I'm happy to say that today, for the first time in weeks, I actually feel some hope that maybe, just maybe I am starting to feel better! Here's hoping, cause I've desperately missed feeling like a real human, and I really miss my creativity and enjoying using it!

So today I did manage to get a few cards made, which is good cause I've had some customer's come by lately and my supply is starting to need replenishing, so I need to get my butt in gear and get my selection built up. Plus I will be starting a new project within the next few days...I have a customer that has hired me to decorate a memory box for her son. This is a totally new thing for me, so it will be a bit of a challenge, but I think it will be fun to do something new and I like the idea of what she wants me to do. And don't worry I will post pics as I'm working on it!

And now here's the pics I have for today...
First a fun pic of my soapy princess in the tub tonight...she was just being silly and insisted on me taking her picture to prove that she really did scrub her WHOLE self clean! lol
I made a couple of these cards, since I'm hoping to use them for graduation cards.

A couple baby cards...don't ya just love that little elephant....I just think he is so cute!

Just a basic card using paper & stamps from Close to my Heart.

Still depressed, so here's just a few pics...

Well, it's been another rough week. My brother's birthday was on Wednesday and we did get together and try to celebrate it, but it was just all too obvious that he wasn't there and will never celebrate another birthday again. And he had way too many birthday's left that he should have celebrated.

But enough about that. I did manage to get a couple things done this week, although it did feel like I was forcing myself to do it, rather than actually enjoying it, but I forced myself in the hopes that something might make me feel better.

I hope this depression lifts soon or I'm not sure what to do. I am on new medication and I do have to give it time to work, but patience is NOT one of my virtues so this is a big challenge.

I did get a little mini album made using the pics of Mercedes that I took last weekend, so here it is, although I did upload it backwards. Please just bear with me.

So this is actually the back cover

Some cards I've made over the last couple weeks and finally managed to take some pics...

Photo Shoot