How I spent my winter vacation…

Hi friends! I am officially back and Mother Nature has welcomed us with a couple of feet of snow. So. Much. Snow. Well, it is pretty and luckily many business closed today so people could stay safe at home, they even pulled plow trucks off the roads for a few hours because it was too snowy to plow safely! When I joked from the Bahamas (on Instagram) that I hoped Maine would save me some snow when I got back I dd not expect 2+ feet of it! I hope everyone in the path of the blizzard is safe and sound, check on your neighbors and reach out for help if you need it. The kids and I did some shoveling this afternoon so hubby could get in the driveway after work and thank goodness for those kids, there is no way I could have done it alone. You don’t realize how out of shape you are until you have to shovel snow. I really think snowbirds have the right idea! As you might know our family took our first big “fly someplace far away” vacation last week. It was the perfect time to get away and we went to the Bahamas.

It was a wonderful trip! Lots of relaxing and plenty to do. I took the opportunity to paint some scenes while I was there and I will share the watercolor sketches in today’s video.

I posted some of my sketches and travel pics on my Instagram in you want to check it out. I like to post behind the scenes stuff and work in progress on Instagram so if you like that sort of thing you can follow me there:) I often post stuff I am thinking about doing tutorials on to get feedback too so feel free to let me know if you want a tutorial of any of the sketches from my vacation. In addition to helping me remember the details of places I have been I also find painting on location helpful with my travel anxiety, having that one familiar thing to spend my nervous energy on helps me relax. Don’t worry about being perfect or precise when sketching on location, nobody is going to judge you and people who come up to you are generally curious and friendly. I got some questions about what I brought to create with and what you can bring on planes and I did this quick video for HGMM before I left explaining this travel set up. Unfortunately I lost my sharpie as soon as I got there (I let me kinds use it to label water bottles LOL!) and it would have been really useful to have, at least it wasn’t an expensive pen!

Even though we had a wonderful time and we just got a pile of snow I am still glad to be back home. I mentioned in the video that we used a travel agent and I would share her info if anyone wanted to know, she is a local friend of mine, her name is Amy and her business is First Class Travel. She didn’t ask me to mention her but she was wonderful and made me way less of a stress ball:)  Please let me know if you would like tutorials on any of the vacation sketches and til next time happy crafting!

I didn’t fall out of the canoe!

Hi Friends! I’m back from vacation! We had a wonderful time. It was the first time we ever took a week off as a family. We rented a cabin on a pond. It was tranquil and relaxing with lots of swimming, canoeing and just enjoying life! I made sure to bring some art supplies (you can see what I packed at the end of this post) so I could do some nature sketches because this vacation was all about downtime. I really needed to relax and I think my kids did too because we all had a great time and I did not hear “I’m bored” once! That say’s a lot because there was no internet or cell phone service there…I was surprised at how easily I could do without the internet…I just might become a recluse one of these days LOL! So, do you want to see what I painted? Have a look at the video:

Here are close ups of a few of my favorite vacation paintings:

This painting was done from the canoe, I really like how the rock turned out thanks to my credit-card scraper!

This is a quick colored pencil sketch on blue paper of the view from our deck.

A watercolor postcard painting of the view from our dock.

Waterlily in pastel the day it bloomed.

Waterlilies in watercolor the day after the first waterlily painting, another one bloomed! The flowers only opened in the morning. I sat on the dock with my coffee and paints. My dog shook all over this painting after she went for a swim, I think she helped it LOL!

I’m calling this the “moonlight paddle painting” because I painted it from the canoe in the middle of the pond.

And here is what I packed for creativity:

Thanks for keeping everything running while I was away. I was happy to see folks helping one another out with their crafty questions here, on facebook and on youtube. I really appreciate that! Thanks for stopping by and til next time happy crafting!

 

 

 

My first “project life” {ish} layout!

I have been hearing about project life EVERYWHERE lately but I never thought it was for me. It’s like capri pants, they look fine on other ladies but they are not my style, I am a cut and dry person, I either want pants or shorts, not a combo of the two. But then I got a new phone with a camera on it (apparently I can go on the internet with it also but if I want to go online I’ll use a computer…and don’t expect me to text you, I don’t know how ha ha!) Anyway, back to my stab at project life, I used my new-fangled camera phone to snap pics of our adventures during February vacation and I scrapped them in 6 mini layouts…

…and I liked it! I started out by cropping sheets of coordinating cardstock into 4″x6″ panels, you get 6 from a 12×12 sheet! These will be handy for cards too! I printed out my photos from the week small (the camera phone’s picture quality is not good enough for enlarging, that is why I chose them for this project) on a sheet of photo paper and cut them out. The mini collage of the two pool pictures was too big so I grabbed a scrapbooking technique circa 1996 and cut the girls out of the photo (yeah baby!) now where did I put my deco-edge scissors? I have to say that the cutout swimmers was the first thing my daughter noticed and she LOVED it…so there 😛

The page protectors I used have 6 4"x6" horozontal slots so I needed to make sure I cut any papers that had specific orientation the right way (I made a mistake on one sheet!) To do this make sure the paper is the right side up and cut it in half on the 6" mark, then turn your paper and cut the 4" inch sides. This is liberating for someone who cannot bear to cut into a 12x12 sheet, I think I might do this will all of my duplicate papers!

Then it was a simple job of adding some simple journaling (I found this tag stack in the dollar bin at JoAnns) and some stamped dates, some embellishments and I was done!

I wouldn’t want to scrap project life style all the time (my day-to-day life is not that interesting) but for vacations and holidays I think it is great fun! If you are looking for divided page protectors you can get them from We Are Memory Keepers (I love their D Ring binders) or you can buy the Project Life brand.

When I was working on this page I wondered if project lifers scrap a little ever day, once a week or what? I think if you waited longer than that you might forget what happened during the week. What do you think? Thanks for stopping by and til next time happy crafting!