Wat Po

After returning from our trip to Thailand, I bought lots of gold-colored scrapbooking supplies since we saw many gold Buddhas and other Gold things there. I have since learned that there are man y shades of gold, most of which never seem to match my photos. Adding to that the huge number of photos we took and I am finding this trip very difficult to scrap. These pages are my attempt to capture Wat Po, one of the highlights in Bangkok.  It is the locations of the giant reclining Gold Buddha and many other Gold Buddhas. The Reclining Buddha was very difficult to photograph since it is so huge and the building around it is not really much bigger than it. As a result, I took photos at all different angles and hopefully we can piece the pictures together in our mind.

This first page was done for the Drill #30 challenge at S.W.A.T. (F- flower, L - Liquid Pearls, O - oversize photos, W- Washi tape, E - Echo Park pp, R - red flower centers).  

The final page shows some of the other smaller gold Buddhas around the complex. I used the April 1 challenge from Paper Secrets (J - Jenni Bowlin rub-on and sequin, O - Ombre Collection (paper used for journaling), K - Karen Foster spiral brads, E - Echo Park pp, S - Stickles). 

Thanks for looking!

Traveling without leaving the House

For my husband's birthday, Zachary and I created a Tour of Europe Dinner. This is the second time we did something like this, so it wasn't a huge surprise, but it is great fun. Zachary made a menu on the computer and all these little flags and he helped with the cooking.  In case you are interested in the menu, we had wine from France, Gravlax (smoked salmon) from Denmark, Belgian Endive salad, a cheese plate representing France, Netherlands, and Spain with crackers from Greece and peas for England.  The main dish was a home-made pizza representing Italy with dark chocolate fondue (Switzerland) for dessert.  Here is my layout about the dinner, you can see Zachary being the waiter with his French hand-towel. I used the paper-clip to attach the actual menu to the back of the page.

I used this sketch from Paper Secrets and the following items for the challenge: T- toothpicks, U- Uniball, L - Letters, I - ink, P- paperclip, papers, S - stitching.

Thanks for looking!

Earth Day

Happy Earth Day everyone! I am going to walk to my errands today, but before that, I thought I would make some cards. Can you believe it's almost Mother's Day? Once again, I used the Basic Grey Spice Market collection, it is so flexible for everything Spring. I used this card sketch from Sketch-n-Scrap.

Thanks for looking!

The Wise Children

Passover started last Monday evening. We hosted both Seders, big family dinners which occur on the first 2 evenings of the holiday. One of the readings in the Seder is about the 4 types of children, one of which is "The Wise Child."  The Wise Child loves Passover and asks lots of questions about the holiday to learn as much as possible. In addition to asking questions and participating in the discussions, my children also helped with all the cleaning and cooking.

I always feel like my son Zachary is "the wise child," but this year he did even more. My husband was out of town the days prior to Passover, and Zachary helped me with every aspect of cleaning the house, getting ready for Passover, and cooking. Of course, he especially helped with making desserts. During the Seder, he had an extra book with commentary and brought in additional discussion items from time to time. My husband and I were particularly proud of him.

For this layout, I used this sketch from Sketch-n-Scrap.

Although Benjamin helped with a lot of things, he was most proud and thrilled with these Chocolate-Coconut Meringue cookies that he made for the second Seder.

For this layout, I used this sketch from ScrapMuch? and Drill #29 from S.W.A.T. (second row: brads, stamp, 3 pictures, number die-cuts). Both pages use Basic Grey's Spice Market collection.

Linking this up to Birds of a feather at Paper Issues for a layout about family.

Thanks for looking!

Triangles, Triangles, Triangles

Purim is a Jewish holiday that is celebrated about a month before Passover, so it was in March this year. The kids have gotten too big to really enjoy the Purim carnival, and none of us are really into dressing in costumes, so the only part of Purim that we really enjoy these days is making Hamantaschen, the traditional triangle-shaped cookie. I had always learned that they were shaped to match Haman's hat, but this year my children informed me that they are actually supposed to shaped like Haman's ears. For those of you not familiar with the Purim story, it is the book of Esther, and Haman is the bad guy.

We made Hamantaschen every year when I was growing up, and it's a tradition that I wanted to pass on to my children. When they were diagnosed with celiac a few years ago and couldn't eat wheat, it was hard to find a flour that rolled well and tasted good, but we have made Hamantaschen almost every year anyway. This year, we used Pamela's Artisinal Gluten-free flour and they not only rolled well, they tasted delicious even to the one member of the family who can eat gluten (me). So, it was a huge success.

I made 2 scrapbook pages, one for each boy's scrapbook. On each page, I documented the actual flour that we used (so we don't forget) and his favorite flavors. Since the cookies have a triangular shape, I used lots of triangle shapes on my pages, using Echo Park's Ombre collection for the background. I also made little Hamantaschen embellishements by punching a circle from kraft cardstock, filling it with dimensional paint, folding the edges into a triangle, and inking the edges to simulate baking.

Here's Zachary's page, which use this sketch from Sketch-n-Scrap.

Benjamin's page is quite similar and I used this sketch from Sketch-n-Scrap. I found this site very recently and really like their sketches.

Thanks for looking!

Passover Cards

Passover is next week. While I am busy cleaning and planning the menu (or at least thinking about cleaning and planning the menu), I decided to make a few cards. Passover isn't generally a card-sending holiday, but I like to send a few, particularly to my sister in San Francisco who we won't see during the holiday. I usually use Jewish-themed scrapbooking products for my Passover cards, but this year I decided to use regular products in Spring colors and just add Passover sentiments.

This first card is my favorite, it uses the beautiful Basic Grey Spice Market collection (which I won) and this sketch from sketch-n-scrap. The sentiment is the same in both Hebrew and English and we say it at the end of the Passover Seder (dinner) every year.

I also used a well-known phrase from the Seder as the sentiment on this second card.  It's the first line of the 4 questions which are traditionally asked by the youngest child. Of course that will be Benjamin at our house. I received the papers in this card from Virginia (buttonscrapper) at scrapjazz.

This third card uses a similar design to the first one, but I used Graphic 45 French Country collection following the April color scheme from Scrapmuch?

Thanks for looking!

Exciting News

I'm very excited to be Guest Design Team member for the month of April at Memorable Seasons. I got the pleasure of working with the Bazzill Worldwide collection. Although this collection is actually quite flexible, I think it's perfect for scrapping old European cities. Luckily, we stopped in Frankfurt for a day on the way to Thailand and in Copenhagen for a few hours on the way back. Here are my layouts of our day in Frankfurt:

It was a few days before Christmas, so we got to enjoy the Frankfurt Christmas market. The market looked very much like the Christmas market we saw in Paris a month earlier, except for the German looking buildings in the background. I guess they must have these markets in many European cities. We even found a stand with gluten free cookies for the boys. 

Our stop in Copenhagen was really early New Year's morning. The city was still asleep and hadn't been cleaned up from the previous night's festivities. Despite this, we could show the boys what a beautiful city it is. We finally found a restaurant serving breakfast so we could get away from the cold temperatures for a few minutes. However, the dollar is so weak in Scandinavia that all we could afford was coffee and hot chocolate. 

Thanks for looking!