My New Lap Cat

So, of my three cats, I've had Maggie the longest--I'd say about 12 years, and she's never sat on my lap in all that time. Little Brent has always been my devoted lap warmer. Well, about two weeks ago, Maggie decided she wanted to start sitting on my lap in the evenings when I'm watching TV, and it's so funny because Little Brent comes over and glares at her and then Maggie starts growling and then suddenly, Little Brent is chasing her up the stairs. Cracks me up that he gets so jealous!

I made a layout to commemorate this new happening. I didn't have a picture of Maggie sitting on my lap, so I just used another photo of her. I desaturated the colors in the background because there was a hot pink paper bag in the background. I made this for Color Combos Galore. I loved the colors this week! But then, I always love the colors!



Here are the colors I was working with:

Color Combos Galore

A couple of years ago, a girl named Janet started a challenge over at Two Peas called the Pub Color Combo challenge. Janet came up with a color scheme each week and invited scrappers to create a layout using those colors. Anyone who knows me knows that I love a challenge. I didn't play along every week, but it became one of my favorite challenges.

Fast forward to about a year ago. Janet came up with the idea of gathering a team and set up a challenge blog called Color Combos Galore. She invited me to be a part of this color team. Every week, she chose a guest designer with whom she'd create a color combo, and she'd e-mail us a color swatch. It was so fun receiving a new batch of colors every week--almost like getting a package of scrappy goodies on my doorstep! I have to say, some weeks, I'd get the colors and think, "Ugh, what am I going to do with these colors?" But once I got rolling, digging through my paper stash and gathering embellishments, after my layout was all created, I would end up loving the color combo. I don't know how she does it, but Janet is a color genius!

A few months ago, Janet started a whole site, complete with a gallery and forums as our new Color Combos Galore home. Now it's been a year since I've been on the color team, and just last month, Janet put out a call for a new team. I'm happy to say that I'm on the team again, along with a whole bunch of very talented scrappers. Here are the colors we were asked to use:



And here is the page I made:




And I made a companion page, using the same colors, for Sketch This!:



(My [expensive] scanner has not been cooperating with me lately. I'm not sure what's going on. I really don't want to buy another scanner.)
Thank you, Janet, for letting me stay on for another year! I love this challenge!

Burn, Baby, Burn!

So, I'm down 12.8 pounds after being on Weight Watchers for five weeks. A decent start--about 2.5 pounds a week. But I want more! So last weekend Farzad and I went shopping for a recumbent exercise bike. Our first stop at Fitness Resource proved to be a bit much for our pocketbook, so we headed to Sears, where we found a Schwinn model that fit our budget. Farzad assembled it while I was at Weight Watchers last Tuesday, and the very next night I hopped on.

I've decided to start on the low tension since I'm SO out of shape and set it to burn 300 calories each day. It takes me over an hour to meet the 300 calorie goal, and I find that my butt starts getting very numb after about 150 calories, so I take a break and then get back on to do the rest. I'm hoping this give my sluggish metabolism a little boost and speed up my weight loss a bit.

On the scrappy front, here's what Made over the past two weeks...

These were for the Sketch This! blog:

This one's for my book of silly family photos. I love those swirls on the We R Memory Keepers paper. I cut them out and mounted them with pop-dots.

I've been lamenting the fact that all those cool label-shaped papers are made for 12 x 12 pages, so I was delighted when I found an 8 x 8 paper pack by Making Memories that had some of the cool shapes. I scanned one of the sheets and reduced it a little and then printed it on the back of the BasicGrey paper and cut it out. I added some Stickles to that wavy strip at the bottom and mounted it with pop-dots. These pictures are from our trip to Vegas last summer:

Here's one I made for the How Much Is Too Much? blog. My challenge was called "The Whole Kit and Caboodle," and we had to use a kit we hadn't yet used and put as much stuff on it as we could fit on the page. I used the December kit from Scarlet Lime to make this page. It's a little wild and crazy, but I wanted it to be that way! A couple of summers ago, I made a book that I called "Cheesecake" for my Gram's 87th birthday, featuring a whole bunch of sassy photos taken of her over the years. I love those pictures so much, that I decided to make a Cheesecake for Me book. Again, I used that Making Memories 8 x 8 shaped paper as a template, only this time I traced it and then cut it a little smaller. I wish I had figured out the scan thing sooner because the paper is a little crooked.

And here are my pages for the last two challenges at Color Combos Galore.

I was happy to play with the new Porcelain line by BasicGrey. I just adore those birdcages! That's my little sis and me in the bathtub forty-some years ago:

And this page, believe it or not, took me the longest. I'm not happy with how it turned out. I pushed the papers around on the page for what seemed forever. I almost gave up on it and e-mailed Janet, but I hung in there. The scan is horrible. In retrospect, I would've moved the journaling spot to the right, but I had assembled and cut the red border in pieces, so it wouldn't have worked without me reworking the whole page. At the last mintute, I punched those circles and adhered them with pop-dots. This page is going into a little book I'm making about all the little everyday reasons I love Farzad: