What I've Been Up To Lately

Well, I suppose the first thing should mention, is my latest reveal, which went up on Monday. I got to work with one of my favorite tools and products, Imaginisce's I-rock and new bling and stencils. This is my favorite layout of my reveal! Go here: http://www.acherryontop.com/articles/New-I-Rock-Bling%21-14467
and check it out! (Sorry, the link button isn't working for me for some reason.)
Other than scrapbooking, I am still working on my ongoing homeschooling organization project. I just got a brand new heavier-duty three hole punch and whole bunch of binders for organizing all my printed material. Now if you're a homeschool mom, I'm sure you'll understand why a new three hole punch is exciting to me, LOL! My old one I've had since college when I was studying to be an elementary school teacher. The bottom was cracked and the punch had a tendency to stick. Not so much fun to use when you're working your way through a foot tall stack of printed unit studies, lapbooks, worksheets and Dover coloring pages! The new one punches like a dream, so I'm happy.

And in my neverending search for ways to get cheap materials/books for homeschool, I've finally joined Paperback Swap. I took a good honest look at my bookshelves and was able to cull quite a bit to post. So far I've mailed out a total of 26 books. I've received 6 so far and have 13 more on the way to me. All books that I'll be using for school. And since it only costs me the postage to send out the books, it's cheaper even than buying used books. I'm loving it!

Avery and I are now in our third week of summer semester. We've been learning about plants/gardening, homes and this week is community helpers. We're also doing a summer long study to introduce Avery to the United States. We've done an overview already and now we're moving onto indvidual states. One every day, in alphabetical order. I'm excited to see how quickly Avery is already recognizing the names of the different states, whereas before now, she really only knew Washington and Montana, where most of her cousins live. We've got a fun summer ahead of us, that's for sure!

Time for a Change of Pace

I haven't blogged since the beginning of the month and there's a fairly good reason. I haven't scrapped since then, either! The time has come when scrapping can really no longer be my first priority. Avery is ready to move on to more serious schooling, so I need to be putting my focus on that.

I'm an eclectic homeschooler, which basically means that I pull my curriculum together from many different sources. I've been amassing curriculum and books since before Avery was born. Over the past few weeks, I've *finally* been putting it in order, along with buying more additional items, because just like with scrapbooking, I can also never have too many homeschool materials! I'm still not quite there yet with my organizing, but I want to get going on our summer session, so I'm just going to plunge ahead and keep working on it as time allows. We're doing things pretty light for the summer. Some thematic units covering basic stuff she would cover if she went to public school kindergarten, like community, transportation, citizenship, etc. We're also going to do a summer long study of the States and begin studying French, using Hooked on French.

I'm planning to blog more about homeschooling in the future. That's what this blog really started out as, anyway. Scrapbooking just kind of took it over for a while!

Be There or Be Square!

It's our National Scrapbooking Day crop this weekend at A Cherry on Top! And we are going to be Rockin' Around the Clock! Literally! From the start of the crop at 2:00 (EST) Friday afternoon until Sunday evening at 8:00, there will be nonstop games, challenges, fast scraps, classes and bingos! It's our biggest crop of the year and we want you there! The crop schedule is here, so plan to make some time this weekend to come by and see what's going on! The Creative Team is hard at work behind the scenes to make this an awesome crop, and you don't want to miss it!

Echo Park Summer Days

This month I was lucky enough to get to work with Echo Park Summer Days, one of my very favorite lines to be released at Winter CHA. Check out my reveal here!

ACOT May Challenges and PageMaps!

The Challenges for May are up at A Cherry on Top! There is totally awesome inspiration there, go and check it out! Everyone has worked really hard this month (as always!) to bring you some great challenges. It was my turn this month to do the Scraplift the GCT Challenge. This month's Guest Creative Team member is Lisa (javalove). I scraplifted her "These Ducks Can Catch" layout, using Bo Bunny's Ad Lib line.

I also contributed a layout for the Fashion Findings challenge, using Echo Park's For the Record line.
The ACOT Paper CT also had an incredible opportunity to work with PageMaps this month! We all love Becky Fleck's sketches and everyone did an awesome job with their layouts. Go and check them out here! I'm so proud of my fellow CT-ers! They totally rocked this! Here's my layout, using My Mind's Eye Quite Contrary.

Inspiration Jar

I've had this idea floating around in my head for quite a while. I'm sure that I got the idea from somewhere, but I couldn't tell you where anymore! I wanted a pretty jar to keep all my ideas that I find in magazines and online and also products that I have a hard time remembering to use. It's very rare that I make something that is ONLY for me, so I had a lot of fun with this. Cosmo Cricket Circa 1934 is a line that I just love, love, love. I combined that with a little bit of Echo Park For the Record, Kaisercraft lace and some beautiful Prima flowers and bling. It looks so cute sitting on my desk just filled with ready inspiration any time the mojo is lacking! (Which seems to be pretty much all the time lately!)

Progress...

I haven't made any. All my grand plans and where did they go? No idea. I haven't even gotten one layout done. Sigh..... Friday was awesome. I had all this motivation. It was a beautiful day and I spent time outside enjoying the sunshine with my kid. We had a cookout for supper and then afterward went to the beach. Got Starbucks on the way home. A pretty perfect day in all. I had plans to scrap after watching "Who Do You Think You Are?" But then that darn show sucked me in and got me on a genealogy research kick. I stayed up until after 1, not scrapping, oh no, but searching online trying to figure out if my dh had any relatives that fought in the Civil War. It was fun, yes, but not so productive, and then I dreamt Civil War stuff all night and didn't sleep well. I woke up late Saturday morning and all my great mojo was gone. It took me ALL DAY just to figure out what papers to use for this layout I need to do and I'm back to putting a ton of pressure on myself. Ugh. And then in the midst of it, I decided that I had way too much MME stuff, I was never going to use it all, and I needed to do a serious purge. So even after finally picking out papers, I couldn't make myself start working! I pared my MME stash down to probably about half. What I'm going to do with the stuff, I don't know yet. Most of it really won't work to give to Avery to play with. And it's so old I don't think anyone would even be interested in it if I tried to give it away. (I have/had a serious problem with hoarding MME.) So. Here's the new plan. Tomorrow (or rather, today, since it's already 1:51 in the morning) is a new day. I'm going to get up, go to church, come back home, get my homeschool planning for the week out of the way and then get serious about working. My new goal is to get ONE layout done tomorrow. The one I'm putting the most pressure on myself about. And then when that one is done, hopefully I can ease off myself a bit and have more fun. That's the plan. We'll see how it goes.