Keeping busy

Last weekend, Don and I visited the  Los Angeles County Fair. We used go every year, but for a number of reasons, this was our first visit in three years. We picked a good weekend, as both this weekend and all earlier weekends in September were quite a bit warmer than last weekend. But, as always, we only saw about one-fourth of the fair, including the pirates and parrots show illustrated here. Before this show we also checked out the wine and the "natural resources" area behind the garden/wine building. This year, the area included displays of birds and reptiles from around the world, and information on the history of the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, and what these federal government agencies do today. This included a replica of a Forest Service lookout, a small nature trail, an opportunity (which we declined) to saw logs like a lumberjack and more. We finished the day by checking out some of the art, and by eating at the sit-down restaurant at the fair, which is something different every year, this year Italian food. I may have said on my other blog that I was going to enter nut breads in this year's fair, but I procrastinated too long, and did not mail the entry in. Maybe next year. I just have a hard time cooking nut breads in August though, when it's usually hot enough without firing up the oven for an hour or more.

These are two of the three two-page scrapbook layouts I've made about the fair.The background paper for both are from a really old stack of paper I bought in Target in 2005.The layout I have not photographed used paper almost that old that I bought at Michael's about the same time, one of those many times I've bought far more sheets for a specific project than I would use on that one project. Some scrapbookers will throw away papers they have had even for as little as a year, but not me. I love being able to mix old and brand new things for a scrapbook page that is all mine.

The page with the parrots I made with help from CSI Color Stories Inspiration, which provides free printables every week, including the wood-grain paper, the journaling card and the bird, which I enlarged 200 percent before printing. All of their printables match a specific color/embellishment/journaling scrapbook challenge offered each week. Although I have done a page for the challenge, CSIs is one of the trickiest scrapbook challenges out there, and this particular scrapbook page did not meet all of the challenge requirements. So I made another page, not about the fair, that did, but I'm still glad when the CSI weekly printables work on my "real life" pages as well.

This Saturday, Don and I were again busy, as we were interested in two events in Jurupa Valley. One of the two turned out to be a big disappointment, but I will soon scrapbook 15 photos or more from the other event, the Flabob Flying Circus.

Meet James

It just dawned on me today that I have not updated this blog to tell everyone that I am now a grandmother of TWO! My grandson, James Cronin, was born on Monday Here he is getting a hug from his big sister Abigail.  Aren't they both adorable? I am sure I will have plenty more to say about both of them - soon!

Yes, I am getting organized. Week 2 of the Organize Your Stuff Challenge

This corner of this room is the center of my scrapbooking (and art journaling) creativity. Except for one black filing box full of tags and a few other things I don't use all the time, this photo contains everything I use to create my pages. And this stuff is pretty well organized - for me at least. Obviously, there is a great deal of room for improvement. But look how far I have come already!

I took these two photos when trying to do Week 2 of an earlier round of the Organize Your Stuff Challenge. I think this photo was taken during Round 2, it actually would have to have been because I took that photo of the tractor in early 2010. I forgot I still had that godforsaken guest bed then! Perhaps you can see why I gave up. But I didn't completely give up. For four years then I had persistently been nagging my husband about my dislike of having that bed in there. Sometime later in 2010, persistence paid off. A couple we are friends with needed an extra bed, and my husband gave this one to him. That freed up room for the bookcase, which I purchased sometime in 2011.

At the time I took these earlier pictures, I drew in one of my little altered notebooks a sketch of what I dreamed the scraproom would look like. I don't know where that notebook is now, but an image in my mind of that sketch governed how I reorganized the scraproom after getting the bookcase.

I cannot remember if my sketch addressed what I knew was a growing trend among owners of the condominiums where I live, which is to convert the room that is next to the kitchen to either an extended kitchen, or to a den. The room in question in my condo is the scraproom. If the floor plan has not been altered, as is the case here, the room shares a common wall with the kitchen, but can only be accessed by going through the hall. In a perfect world, I would have enough money to knock out all or part of the wall like my neighbors have, but in my perfect world, the room behind the wall would not be more of  the kitchen or a den, it would still be my scraproom. Only, it would be so perfectly organized and luxuriously furnished I would not mind one bit if everyone visiting my home could see inside. However, even if my sketch even addressed that dream, it did not address the current reality - more so now than in the past - that the vast majority of my supplies are against that wall. It also did not address the current reality that I do not have a job, nor would have I had enough income even when I did, to afford a remodeling project or anything but this "shabby chic" mix of thrift store finds and one new but dirt cheap bookcase.

Even so, after getting the cheap bookcase, I have since taken one additonal step in the reorganization process. I used to keep all my loose scrapbook papers in the plastic shelves where you now see scrapbooks. They are now in the burgundy paper keeper next to it. This freed up a lot of room in the middle of the floor. I still also need to free up some space elsewhere for the blue storage container next to it, because right now it prevents me from putting a chair at the desk. Hence, the desk is good for storing things, like the layouts in progress, but not necessarily for creating things. And I know there are things here and there that could be improved, like what to do with the clutter on the desk, how to make the supplies pictured here more easily accessible, maybe even making that bookcase look a little less cluttered too. And is it possible to make my "shabby chic" a little more chic than shabby?

But what I have right now is a dream compared to what I had in 2010. So, I'm not even going to draw out a new dream . I am just going to go along for the ride of Round 6 and hope the finished product is way better than this Beginning of Round 6 midpoint.

Color studies

I'm going to let you in on one of my best scrapbooking secrets here. Scrapbook.com has a tool that makes picking colors easy! Just add a photo and look at the colors it chooses. Do any of those colors make a pleasing color combo? Then that's the colors you should use! Even if they aren't the colors you were thinking of.

Are those colors not making any combinations you like? Then pick one of the colors, just one, any one. Even if you're surprised to see it as one of the choices. Just make it a color you like.

Now pick any one of the schemes on the right. Because I am sure that since you liked the one color you picked, you will also like the colors that combine with in monochromatic, complementary, analogous or split complementary or triadic color schemes. At least you will like one of those combos, maybe more. But just pick one from there.

Now that you've identified two, three or four colors that you like, you will use those colors to select what else you need. Theoretically, that stuff will match the colors in the combination you just selected. But it may only inspire them.

Here is a layout that is my case in point.

The color scheme I picked from scrapbook.com capitalized on the green that is predominant in these photos, and the orange that many of the runners are wearing.  From the orange, I selected the triadic color scheme, which throws in a green a little darker than the one woman' shirt, a blue the color of Don's shorts and a little darker orange. Based on that scheme, I picked both of the green pattern papers in this page, the grass and the geometric shaped print. I was not able to find a suitable orange paper among those I already own, but I did find this yellow polka-dot paper. And yellow and green is a nice combo to me! My almost high school, Le Grand, had it for school colors. (Really glad I got to stay at Chowchilla High and its red and white though.) Because of things that coordinate with the yellow paper, I also changed the blue to a lighter shade. Although the blue is almost cobalt on the far left circle (which is not cut off in real life), in the C in camp and all the letters in Corona, even that blue is lighter than I had originally planned, and the more predominant blue, in the pinwheels, in three of the other circles, and in one of the O's in Boot, is almost pastel. But I think it works, especially since I also was able to incorporate three shades of orange in the words Boot Camp and the circles on the bottom. I have been loving the colors in this Splash collection of Echo Park (from either summer 2010 or 2011), for awhile, so I hope when I run out of Splash, something else is out there with them.

I'm working on another layout right now that took this color matching tool a step farther. The photo for that layout is of my granddaughter wearing yellow pajamas. I would have thought some kind of cheery yellow would have shown up as one of the color choices, but that did not happen. Instead, a shade of lavender was one of the predominant colors. I love lavender, and that's the complement of yellow, so I went with it!

If you use the complementary scheme with most shades of lavender, it will give you three hues of lavender and one of turquoise to choose from. To me, lavender and turquoise are lovely together, but when scrapbooking a little girl in that combo, pink is a great addition. And so, I found in my stash of supplies a few lavender things that would work, and a bunch of pink and turquoise things. I actually do have a lot of lavender things, but  how I decide which things to look at first, and which to use, is a little bit of trial and error I think most artists of any kind may be familiar with. But I still was not expecting what happened. When the page came together, there was absolutely no lavender on it. Just pink and turquoise. I love it, and I hope Abigail will too. She's getting this page, along with an entire scrapbook about the time she was ages 1and 2, for her third birthday.

Me? Organized?

Over at one of my favorite scrapbooking websites, Two Peas in a Bucket, they have started the Organize Your Stuff Challenge, Round 6. This means participants who see it through to the end will again spend 29 weeks taking serious looks at the rooms or corners of rooms where they keep their scrapbooking supplies (and where some of them, in fact do their scrapbooking). In theory, by the end of the 29 weeks, they will have some very nice scrap rooms.

This is Round 6 because different groups of Peas have already gone through the process five other times, starting back in 2009. I signed up for rounds 1 and 2 with good intentions. Both times, the overwhelming amount of CRAP I had all over my scrap room left me feeling discouraged at Round 2, and I dropped out. I mean, the first time, we still had the dreaded and used one time guest bed in there. The second time, I was able to figure out that what I needed, instead of the departed guest bed, was a bookcase where I could put some of the things I used to store on the bed. I don't think I was able to buy that bookcase until about a year later, when I finally found one at Target that fit my budget. Because it fits my budget and was purchased new, you know it's not the sturdiest bookcase out there, but it is working so far.

However, I decided the bookcase is not sturdy enough to hold the growing collection of scrapbooks. So that really left two places for them. The clear full shelf under my scrap desk, and the closet shelf. New books are all eventually going to end up in that scrap desk, you see. The closet is for the OLD books. But the books in progress needed to be somewhere easier to get to than under my scrapbook desk. For a long time that was the floor. That made my scraproom look just as messy as ever, because with the books on the floor, I sometimes had trouble getting to other supplies that were more neatly put away.

Finally, a few weeks ago, I came up with my own solution. My large but not too large collection of loose papers are now in an accordian file cabinet that was mostly just collecting useless papers, some dating back to my days in the High Desert. (We moved to Riverside in 2005, and what is now known as Jurupa Valley the following year.) Because that file cabinet (just a little paper thing) has 14 dividers, I have been able to not only sort my paper by color, but do some further sorting within each color. I only had eight places to put these papers in its previous location, which is a set of stacking trays. Instead, about 10 of my scrapbooks are now in the trays. These are the ones I work on all the time (My Jurupa Valley scrapbook, my life in general scrapbook, and my granddaughter's scrapbook are the main ones, although a recently purchased scrapbook that's now in the bookcase will be joining the others in the trays just as soon as James is born.)

I didn't know the Two Peas Organize Your Stuff challenge would be coming back for Round 6. Rounds 1-5 came fairly quick, almost one after another, but the longer-term participants in those rounds were ready for a break after the last one. And break they did, for at least six months.

But it is back as of Sept. 10. And I'm glad, because this time I know Round 2 won't make me fling my arms in despair. I'm ready to get this room REALLY organized.

Week 1's challenge is simply to make a scrapbook page. Easy enough, but then you have to analyze how easy it was for you to find the things you needed to make the page.

I've done that now too, for both the page I had created on Sept. 9, and the one that I am almost finished with today. And I am happy to say that finding the most important thing after pictures, which is paper, was very easy to find. So were all the tools I needed, which was the paper trimmer, the glue, a pad of ink and a binder full of letter stickers.  And, in the case of today's layout, so were all the embellishments. I just need to remember the adage, "Everything has a place, and keep everything in its place."

One of the other very important things on most scrapbook pages, besides pictures and paper, is embellishments. The other is lettering, which technically means the letters used to write the title of the page and the story told on the page, a.k.a. journaling. Since the vast majority of scrapbookers either handwrite or type out on computer their journaling, lettering decisions USUALLY focus on letters used in a title. I am happy to say that in both of my recent layouts, those were easy decisions.

The layout I did on Sunday (actually Sunday and Monday) was a bit less easy to complete, and that's because I had trouble figuring out the embellishments. To begin with this layout is about Riverside Road Runners. The facing page in my book that is also about RRR relied on a clip art of a running shoe I created digitally, but I did not want to do the same thing on this page. So, I was looking for generic embellishments that said "summer," but were not of any theme in particular beyond that. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, nothing I owned in the way of embellishments seemed to work. That's usually my cue to go scrapbook shopping, but I only had time to go to the stores on Canyon Springs Parkway on the far east side of Riverside ( a large Michael's, a normal sized Joann's and a normal-sized Target). While things there were cute, not cute enough to make me want them. So I ended up making some embellishments from a scrap of paper. Yeah me!

Sometimes, that's not what happens after an unsuccessful embellishment shopping trip. I end up calling the page "done" and moving on, sans any embellishments. Then a few months later, I find something in my Could Be Much Better Organized stash that I had not thought of before. I don't know if my embellishments could be organized well enough to prevent that from happening, but I'm hoping to find out on Round 6 of the Organize Your Stuff Challenge.

Such drama!

There were two layouts I had in my existing collection that fit other challenges for the crop I am working on. one of them was this one, Tarnished Gold.

The assignment was, for "Drama Class," to do a layout about something dramatic. And for those who don't know the saga behind this layout, has it ever been dramatic. Hopefully, the series finale is coming soon, and Jurupa Valley will get the stolen money back and live happily ever after.

The clincher has come, it did so Sept. 1 when the Legislature passed legislation to restore the $6 million + each year Jurupa Valley had been counting on, but has never received because the state redirected Vehicle License Funds away from cities on June 28, 2011 - two days before Jurupa Valley's official incorporation. We were supposed to build a surplus during our first year, and we did. It was $3 million instead of $10 million. We were supposed to have a budget of $24 million this year, and right now we don't. Without the VLF, it's only $18 million. We cut our police force by 10 percent, but how much can a city cut when it's just getting started? For us, there would have been no way we could have cut enough. We will be toast if Gov. Brown does not sign the legislation. He has until Sept. 30. The Senate passed the legislation unanimously, the Assembly by a more than-two thirds vote.

But there are some villians in this drama. Most county governments, except Riverside of course, are opposed to this legislation because if more new cities incorporate, there is a slight potential it will mean less money for their existing cities law enforcement programs. At this time, the legislation is Jurupa Valley's only hope for survival, and will greatly help three other new cities in Riverside County (Eastvale, Menifee and Wildomar) and 144 others throughout California that incorporated territory and would have to make cutbacks somewhere to serve all of the new people without VLF. These villians are worried about what could happen, and in their mind, the potential inconvenience of that  trumps Jurupa Valley's survival and the ill effects on 147 other cites. The Los Angeles Times is also a villain in this drama, as it callously dismisses the four most severely affected cities as "unnecessary."

So, I am asking anyone who lives in California - especially ANYWHERE in Riverside County - to go to Jurupa Valley's website (www.jurupavalley.org) and find addresses of the governor's staff to write letters encouraging his support for AB 1098. This is important in such places as Fontana (where a large annexation happened) and in east Los Angeles County (where there is perennial talk of creating ONE MORE CITY), and in Madera County where it is hoped the orderly development of Rio Mesa will eventually lead to both the much less orderly developed Oakhurst and Rio Mesa joining Madera and Chowchilla as cities. In 2008, Oakhurst said no to cityhood the day Wildomar said yes. Oakhurst probably loves their 20/20 hindsight now, but I'm sure those people want the option to revisit cityhood some day.

And it's really important for Jurupa Valley, and for me.

Update (12/15/12): I was just looking at this and realized I failed to update all that the drama continues. Gov.  Brown did veto the bill in mid-September. We now have elected a Democrat to the state Senate, he is sworn in, and fixing this problem will be his second highest priority. His top priority is getting a medical school at UC Riverside. I wish him well on both endeavors, although I wish his priorities were reversed.

And now, three months later, we've all learned the Governor is being treated for prostate cancer. I have to say I hope he gets well soon, but I also have to wonder - Karma?

Some scrapbooking fun

Hapy Grandparents' Day everyone! I was so happy to be wished one myself by my stepdaughter, who is a mom to 1.9 kids (the younger expected to arrive any day now). And it was so fun to see my friend Thena Cullen Smith's pages about her grandparents that she's been posting on Facebook this morning, especially since those are true heritage pages, as Thena is at least old enough to be a grandmother herself.

I may or may not celebrate Grandparents' Day with my scrapbooking. I have an idea to do one page about Abigail, but seeing Thena's pages makes me wonder if I should just do something about my own, now all deceased, grandparents instead.

The page about Abigail I have planned would fit in with a very fun online crop I have discovered.  Back 2 Class doesn't mean much here of course. The only person in school at this time is Don, and he was not only taking classes all summer, he was also volunteering all summer in a classroom at a year-round school, a class that went off track in September. I will be joining Don at school in October, although I will be going to UCR-Extension instead of CBU. So with the elementary school class and my class starting in October, I guess that's really back-to-school month for us.

But the Back 2 Class Online Crop is fun. It offers multiple challenges, each based on a certain subject you might have taken at some point in school. You can submit one layout for each challenge. Unfortunately, the requirement is one layout, one challenge, and it must be a new layout.

My problem is, one of my layouts fits at least five of their challenges, and I actually created it with Friday's CSIColorStories challenge in mind, not this one. Another one of the challenges inspired me to redo the page about what I did on my 50th birthday. I of course finished that page some six months ago, but the challenge helped me give it some more oomph, so for that I am glad. Sunday, I saw that it also would have fit a second challenge.

And so far, I have done one page that fits one challenge of this online crop. In addition, there were five existing layouts that fit one of the challenges. In those cases, I hope a great crop like this will inspire some new ones as well, but I usually have to have some more of a starting point than  these challenges offer. That's why I often combine crop challenges.

I'm going to share all three of the recently completed or redone pages here, as well as what I posted to CSI on Friday night before redoing for this crop. In the post after this, I'm sharing an existing layout that fit the crop's "drama" challenge, because you all need to know the state/local political drama that has been going on here for 14 months, and has influenced how I think about government.

My original Run 2012 layout as posted on CSI Color Stories

The redo, which fits the Back2Class Online Crop's Math assignment, which is to use four pattern papers, three cardstock pieces (I used four), four of one emellishment (green flowers), three of another (white flowers) and 14 of something else (brads.) This layout also fits the crop's journalism assignment (write at least three to four sentences of journaling), the recess assignment (use a photo of outdoor activity), the and the physical education assignment (use a photo showing motion). It even fits the somewhat more complicated health assignment, which was to do a layout focusing on my (the scrapbooker's) body. Although there is a group of us in this photo, that's me in the orange shirt and white shorts. The journaling I had already done tells how running has affected me physically, and concludes with my desire to run farther and faster in the rest of 2012.  I did not run today, but I did walk nine miles this morning with some of these same people.

The health assignment also specified to use things starting with the letters B-O-D-Y. This layout already had that. It uses brads, one photo, Die Cuts With A View brand paper (known as DCWV in the scrapbooking world) and yellow cardstock.

I have come along ways since this day a little more than six months ago. On that day, my actual 50th birthday, I went three miles with Riverside Road Runners beginners' group, running part of the way and sprinting into Arlington Heights Sports Park at the end of my workout. Then I did everything you see pictured here. A few days later, I made this layout, but a little differently than what you see here. It was the perfect candidate for the Back2Class online crop's Home Ec class, which required following a recipe of five pattern papers, a border punched element, "stitching" a pennant and a butterfly element. I already had two of the pattern papers and the pendant on the page, but this redo required a little bit of lifting up and fixing. The red strip 2/3 of the way down, already cut on its jagged printed lines, is now border-punched as well. Above that, and above the pendant, there is some purple fiber. Since I don't have a sewing machine and punching this background paper full of needle holes wasn't an acceptable option, I like how the fiber resembles "messy" stitching. The pendant itself was made of the same three colors of solid papers, but I like these patterns. The pink and lavender ones have been in my stash since about 2005, the Basic Grey almost as long, and the red pendant paper is something I once received in a swap. Lastly, I added a butterfly, cut from pattern paper I bought in June. Sometimes you just have to wait until something good comes along.

This is the one layout that I made so far only because of the Back2Class Online Crop. The "reading" assignment provides a list of current best-selling book titles, one of which is The Dog Stars. That book surely must be about these adorable pooches a friend (somewhat related) placed on Facebook a few days ago. So they deserved to be captured on page.

They have some more classes for me to work on today. Yearbook is my next choice. You know how some lucky students were given the superlatives like "Best Looking" or "Most Spirited?" The assignment is to make a layout giving someone one of those superlative students.

I was not awarded a superlative, and I'm not sure if my stepdaughter was, but we can hope my granddaughter will receive one in 2028. For now, she's definitely already caught onto her mom's love of Ohio State, because Holly sent me a really cute picture of Abigail in a Buckeye dress. So, she will be my subject for the next assignment, most likely. Stay tuned.