Creating Kris ~ a young mom blogs…

6th Grade Scrapbook Layout + Paper-piercing Technique

Well I haven’t shared a scrapbook layout in a while but it’s mostly because I haven’t been scrapbooking as much these days! I’ve mostly been sticking with the smaller crafts like card-making because they are shorter to complete and therefore less painful. But I wanted to keep catching up with my kids’ albums, so I finally got to the layout with the photos from Harmony’s first day of grade 6 (so just about 1 year ago!).

First Day of Grade 6

Materials: Riding Hood Red card stock & ink, Chocolate Chip card stock & ink, Only Orange card stock, chocolate brown ribbon, white jumbo brads, Chocolate Chip felt flower, orange flower brad, yellow mini brads, red mini brad, fall multi-colour brad, red metal frame, white Creative Memories letter stickers, various-sizes circle punches, scallop circle punch, stamps from various Stampin’ Up sets, and several different patterned paper sheets in oranges and reds.

This is actually a good time of year to do these Back-to-School and School Album layouts because we are very much getting into the Back-to-School mood these days! With about 3 weeks left of summer, we’ve done some shopping for school supplies and I have done a lot of online shopping for the kids’ clothes. I’m glad my son doesn’t mind – too bad little miss preteen is a little fussier about that! She is far more used to getting to go shopping at the mall. It was a yearly tradition that I have really had to give up the past couple years. She says she doesn’t *mind* pushing me in a wheelchair at the mall but it’s just not the same and I just can’t go as far and as long as I used to, so we can’t get it all done in one shot like every other year. Thank goodness I have some fond memories still tucked away in my foggy brain of previous trips and also some pics in her album to show her!

Side Note:I’ve re-organized the albums in my Scrapbook Layouts Gallery to show the more current albums on Page 1 of the gallery. It also made me realize I have not yet uploaded the pictures of layouts from Avery’s First Year scrapbook (one of my fave albums!) so I’ll be sure to do that soon.

Back to this layout… I tried out a new technique for paper-piercing the “6″ on the layout and my trick worked pretty well so I wanted to share it…

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Learning How to Knit!

So I guess it wasn’t “learning how to knit” as “re-learning” but since I haven’t done any knitting since I was a young girl it certainly felt like learning for the first time. I had actually kind of hoped some of it might come back to me without consulting other resources first but no go. I held the knitting needles and played around felt the wool and tried twisting it up a little and called forth the memories of my youth and… nothing.

So I did what any modern-day beginner would do and searched online. And I have one big tip for anyone else learning how to knit: skip the written tutorials and go for the videos instead. They are waaay more helpful. Unless of course you already know you are more of a learner by wrote. But I think for most of us, seeing is more helpful for this type of task than just reading about it. Or even diagrams. That being said, I did still consult a few written tutorials (see links below), but after trying those with no success, I went ahead to YouTube videos (again, see links at the end) and finally got the hang of things a little…

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Introducing the me underneath it all…

I usually don’t write much about my disabilities and my problems with pain anymore, but I’d like to step into that area a little for the sake of participating (for the very first time) in a blog “carnival”. One of my favourite new blogs, Graceful Agony is hosting the carnival and the first topic is “Let me Introduce Myself”.

For me this is an interesting topic because I have changed SO much since I started suffering from chronic pain that I feel like I’m introducing a whole other person. On the surface, I appear the same, but there’s another “me underneath” that only a few people ever see or hear from. Usually people only see that I’m a busy young mom with a home and family to take care of. We enjoy a beautiful home that makes people say “you’re so lucky!” but I can only think “if only you knew…“…

If you can look beyond the exterior of my upper-middle class family environment (with a supportive spouse, two relatively-healthy kids – a boy and girl, and a nice new house in a great family neighbourhood), my youth and attractiveness (“you don’t look like you’re hurting that much!” or “you’re too young to be this disabled”), my seemingly-set-for-life career possibilities (a couple of university degrees, a glowing CV), my talents and abilities, my previous fitness level, my previously sharp brain and amazing memory, etc.!, you’ll see a different picture entirely than what you expect:
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