What Grandpa's up to

Although this blog is about my life as a grandmother, I would not be a grandmother if I were not married to Abigail's biological maternal grandfather, Don Porter. He is the star of my life. And he is the driving force behind a new scrapbooking project I embarked upon today.

Don decided in January that it is not time for him to retire, so he has gone back to school to obtain a special education teaching credential. He is taking an introductory teaching course this semester, which has an interesting final project.

He will have to address 10 foundations of education, and present them in some sort of artistic fashion. Although this could have been a brochure, a poster or something presented electronically, the instructor showed a sample that from Don's description sounds like an art journal. Since I have just started making one for myself, I offered to make an art journal for Don as well. But we've decided instead that we will make a scrapbook.

So, today I planned backgrounds and pulled scrapbook papers for these pages. I will need to print photos and stamp or otherwise embellish some things as well. The journaling, however, will be left up to Don. I believe he will be able to get each of his 10 topics onto one page in the 8x8 scrapbook album he has chosen, but if we are mistaken, I will also need to make pockets for his journaling.

It's late, so I will begin nailing down the details of my part tomorrow.

I also worked on one more page of my art journal this morning. I used my one bottle of spray ink to create the background for this page. While spray ink is one of the newest and hottest ways to embellish paper art, I have only been able to justify purchasing one color, and that was while I was working. So there is an area of the page that I am going to have to color some other way. I'll either water color or attempt to spray my watered down baby blue paint on this.

After I finished the spray job and left it to dry, I went with Don to school. I normally do this, and then hang out in that neighborhood of Riverside until he's done with class. I spent today at Barnes and Noble reading the latest issue of Scrapbooks Etc. (and found one more idea for a new scrapbook page to do on a growing list of random scrapbook pages I might want to do.)

But when Don was done with school, he wanted to eat lunch, go to Michael's to look at art journals, scrapbooks and scrapbook supplies (although I advised him we should try to use the many papers we have at home, at least until we figured out an idea). He then got his haircut while I hung out at Canyon Crest Shopping Center. I found a cool shop where you buy and paint ceramics, which they then glaze for you. So in a week, I will be the proud owner of a coffee mug I painted myself. It's a $23 coffee mug, so I won't be creating matched sets anytime soon, but it was a fun way to while away the time.

Just as Don got out of the car to go to our hair stylist, he noticed we had run over a screw that was imbedded in our tire. Since that probably had created a slow leak, we took it over to Kurt's Auto as soon as he was done. They plugged it for free!

Don also wanted to go to the commissary, since we were in that neighborhood. We didn't get home until about 6 p.m., so and after dinner we spent until now planning his new book. So that left me no time to work on my own projects, or even house cleaning, as it is now time for bed. So good night, and happy creating.