Photoshop anyone?

My sweet husband gave me photoshop elements for my birthday and I gave it a whirl last night. It is definitely a challenging program to use but , with a little tutorial help from http://thepioneerwoman.com/ , I was able to get started. If you haven't been to the pioneer woman blog I highly recommend it. She has recipes, photo and photoshop help and is generally just a funny, down to earth blogger. So, I removed Cameron from the background of the picture below and changed the color to make it less washed out. In the picture of Jim and I, I changed the color and sharpened the picture. Let me know what you think and if you have any tips or sites that will help me learn, please comment. Thanks and have a great holiday!

Friday night football

Friday night was Mike's first high school football game so we all went to watch. Now, Friday night games are varsity and Mike's not on varsity-he's a JV player, but we hoped he might get a chance to play anyway. And, with a losing score of 28 to 7 in the 4th quarter, coach went ahead and let him in for the last few plays. That's him- #37. He got in on a tackle and did pretty good. I love high school football games , there's so much emotion on the players and they all play really hard. Next Tuesday is Mike's first JV game, they have to go all the way to Stevenson, about a 3 hour drive. I hope he has a great season.

Creative after work

I pulled out my box of older pictures and scrapped a two page spread of Mike 's 2004 school year. That year I managed to go on a few field trips with him and spend some Friday mornings at the Prairie assembly, I still remember the Prairie Panther school song! I used some old paper too, just to keep the "old" theme going. It's hard to remember the finer details of some of the older pictures but I love looking back at how little the kids were and recalling some of the fun times. The other picture is of my "works in progress" for this week. There's a picture from Long Beach and a picture of me and my dad for Tiffany's challenge. I hope to get them both done tomorrow after work, remember I said hope.... This has been a crazy week at work, one day that started at 5 am and the next one at 3 am, yuck. I'm glad tomorrow is Friday but I have to work Saturday so it almost doesn't even feel like Friday. Now if I can sneak out early.....wish me luck.

CHA Ladies

Got a layout done from my trip to CHA with Tiffany, Teri and Susie. These ladies made the trip so much fun, even when we were getting a little "lost" on the crazy freeways of Florida. The utter lack of signs to help direct us to Disney world was amazing, we were almost on top of it before there was a single sign. We went to a cute scrapbook store that had lots of the latest and greatest new stuff. We all left there a little lighter in the pocketbook. The ladies there were nice enough to take a few shots of us, or maybe it was a few dozen shots.... Either way, we ended up with this cute one that I used for my page. I bought the mirrored butterflies at Joann's a few months back and I knew I'd find a use for them. Hope you like the page. Have a great week!

Kristi's Senior Photo Shoot

Today I had the pleasure of taking senior pictures for a super sweet girl, Kristi. We spent about 3 hours taking pictures and I think we ended up with over 500 shots all together. Kristi was a super good sport and had lots of great ideas and input. She was up for anything and always had a smile on her face, sometimes it was that "fake one" her mom doesn't like so much but it worked anyway! We met up at the capitol fountain at 9 am and the weather wasn't cooperating, it was drizzling a bit, but it cleared up pretty quickly thank goodness. The lighting was perfect for pictures, a little overcast and really just perfect. I had so much fun taking Kristi's pictures, we laughed and joked and just enjoyed the day. It was only later that I found out that Kristi had been so nervous that she had only slept for 2-3 hours the night before, you cant even tell she was sleep deprived- she looked so beautiful. I hope they love these pictures as much as I do.

Mike and Grandpa Charlie

I took this picture of Mike and my dad two weekends ago at my nephews house. It's weird to see Mike taller than my Dad, I remember being a girl and thinking he was so tall. Mike was super nice to my Dad that day, asking him if he needed anything and spending time talking to him. I was a proud Mom when I got a compliment from my Niece Amanda a few days later telling me what a nice boy Mike is. I think so too, but it's always nice to hear it from someone else. I found the paper I used for this layout at the local scrap store and went back today to get the embellishment sticker, I really like how it turned out.

So I did manage to meet my goal for the week of spending at least 3 nights doing something scrap related. I made a layout for the challenge at Scrap Tiffany this week, I sorted pictures on Wednesday night and I did this layout tonight. Whew! And I manged to get Mike registered for school last night and Rachel moved home. It has definitely been a busy week. Tomorrow I get to take senior pictures for a family friend and I am totally looking forward to it. Wish me luck!

Scrapped a page

So I finally got a page done yesterday, sorry for the poor picture of it. I really love this picture of me and the girls at the sea lions in Astoria. They both look so grown up and happy. My plan is to try to get out to the love shack at least 2 nights a week after work,I'm feeling the need. I miss playing with my paper and goodies and definitely need to get out of the house doing something creative. Wish me luck.

Thanks everyone!!

Thanks to all of the wonderful ladies that left such sweet birthday messages today. You are all the sweetest!!

This Blog has been Highjacked!!

Because I wanted to wish my dear friend Cindy....

a HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

Love, Tiffany :)

Pimp my blog!!!

I am so happy with the new look of my blog and I have two lovely ladies to thank for it. The first is my great and glorious friend Tiffany. I mentioned to her that I wanted to bling out my blog and she totally agreed it needed an update. I love that she totally just told me flat out it needed work, no sense sugar coating things- it's just a waste of time. Love you for that Tiffany.
The second thank you goes to Sheri Twing, one of Scrap Tiffany's awesome designers. Tiffany asked her to "work on" my blog and she gave it an awesome overhaul. This was no small task since Sheri didn't even know too much about me and only had a few ideas about the type of look I prefer. Can I just say-- she totally got it right!! Love the colors, the fonts, the banner, ahhhh, blog happiness.
So, thank you both for your hard work and thoughtfulness, you are amazing!! For my other loyal readers, please checkout Sheri and Tiffany's blogs, they are worth a visit.
http://www.scraptiffany.typepad.com/


http://www.auntierere.blogspot.com/

Some of my favorites

Here are a few of my favorite pictures from our trip last weekend. I took about 450 pictures and there are always a few that turn out really good that I love. The waterfall was a great spot for pictures and we totally didn't prepare for a photo shoot there but it still turned out good. Now I just need to decide which ones to print and scrap. Tough decision.