Happy Holidays

Our daughter is definitely pregnant. It shows. We are thrilled. We'll be good grandparents; we are practicing our spoiling!

Todd moved to Boston with Tracy. She's going to Boston College Law School, and he is a freelance Democratic consultant.

In the spring we saw Jen perform in two plays—one for children and one for grownups. She was great in both.

We enjoyed having good friends Gary and Carol visit us in the spring with their dog, Darwin. We also went to a resort in Lake Lure, NC, with friends Dottie and Rich, and had a nice, relaxing time.

This year we thought larger than last year's 4700 miles in the car, so in June we drove out West. In Nerinx, KY, we visited Sister Mary Alice Ely, Ken's mom's cousin who “retired” back to the Mother House. We loved visiting with her and learned a few stories about Marge we had never heard.

It rained so much we couldn't play golf in Kansas City, so we went to a casino. I won a little, Ken won more.

Jan in Colorado Springs gave us a lovely room looking at Pikes Peak. And, as you see in our photo, Todd met us for a couple of days in Estes Park. The mountains are spectacular, but the high altitude didn't agree with us. We went to Golden, where Todd was Best Man in his best friend's wedding. Tracy was there, too. We had a great time.

On to Glen Rock, WY, to see Jim and Sandy whom we hadn't seen in 20 years. They took us to Ayres Natural Bridge for a picnic. What a gem of a spot. A little park in a canyon that water had carved out of red rock. It was wonderful to see them, and we appreciated their hospitality.

After some scary weather in Nebraska we stopped in Auburn to visit family graves and met a cousin Ken didn't know—Bill. We visited with him and his wife, Barb, and Sister Mary's brother, Dick and his wife Mary Ann. Thank you, Dick, for dinner. We also saw a friend of Ken's mom's, Inez.

In Winfield, IA, we saw Plants' graves—Ken's great-great grandparents and some of their family. It's amazing what I have found on the Internet.

We bummed off all the friends we could in Michigan and had a wonderful time. Our real roots are there, and we always enjoy our time there with friends.

Both Jen and Todd came for a long weekend in the summer—different times. We are so lucky that we get to spend time with our kids and their loved ones, and they seem to think we're okay, too.

Martin and Jen will be moving next summer to Madison, NJ. Martin has accepted a professorship at Drew University where he did his undergrad work.

Our whole family is here for Christmas, including Ken's sister. Our upstairs neighbors have donated their condo again, so we have six bedrooms and four baths. Everybody has their own space. It's crazy but great fun having everybody together.

My mom is here for a couple of months to avoid the worst of northern Michigan winter. Then in March she's off to spend a few weeks with my brother Joe and his wife Carol in Omak, WA.

We're playing golf and enjoyed a warmer than usual December. I'm designing digital scrapbook materials. You can download my Freebie by following the link below:

http://www.4shared.com/dir/4269049/4a626811/Tibs_Botanicals.html

You can purchase my creations at http://www.legacyscrapbooking.com/.

My with for all is health, happiness and peace in the coming year.

Merry Christmas to All

I haven't posted anything for a while. I've been busy finishing a holiday kit for LegacyScrapbooking. If you click on the following link you should be able to find the whole kit. There are lots of stuff, including some ploppers.

http://legacyscrapbooking.com/catalog.php?category=306

Legacy is a wonderful website. They're just starting their digital presence and the folks there are big into family and heritage. My family keeps expanding with the genealogy resources available on the Internet.

Here are examples of my ploppers:
http://scrapbookflair.com/tibwriter/Christmas_Quick_Page/page1 (not available at Legacy yet)
http://scrapbookflair.com/tibwriter/Tree_Angels


FREE! FREE! FREE!

See my first kit called Botanicals on the right side? I pulled it from 4Shared and revised it a little and it's free. You can download it at this link:

http://www.4shared.com/dir/4269049/4a626811/Tibs_Botanicals.html

Please remember my Terms of Use. Like most artists, I don't want to see my hard work distributed all over the Internet. So please download it once for personal use.

The whole kit is made of bits and pieces of photos I've taken of green plants and flowers. While making it I learned how to use Photoshop Elements 5.0. Every day I learn something new.

My hubby and I had a peaceful Thanksgiving all by ourselves. It's worth being alone for once as we're hosting the entire family at Christmas. My mother, son and girlfriend, daughter and her husband, and son-in-law's mom. Even Hubby's sister might come. What chaos! What fun. My mom is coming from northern Michigan and staying for two months. Then she's going on to Spokane to spend a month with my brother. I checked with her to see if she had enough supplies for a couple of days. They're about to get a winter storm of 8-12 inches. Makes me very glad to live in South Carolina.

We played golf yesterday. It was cool in the morning and 65 in the afternoon with blue sky and only a slight breeze. It was 36 when I got up this morning, but now it's 60 and sunny. I have to put up the tree. Thought I'd start this afternoon while Hubby is engaged in football.

I have my Christmas card designed and ready to print. When I looked for the same great paper I bought last year, do you think I could find it? Nope. Had to order some. It's glossy photo paper on which you print two photo cards. It's laser scored so you just punch it out and put in the envelopes that come with the paper. Much classier than the card stock I've been using. They look just as good as the photo cards you buy and much less expensive.

I'm off to shovel out the guest room so Mom has a place to stay while she's here.

Tib

Wow, World, Look at Me!

I have officially become a designer of digital scrapbook supplies. Check me out at www.legacyscrapbooking.com.

I finished the grungy kit and called it Shabby. I also have a kit called Happy Holidays. They are both for sale at LegacyScrapbooking. They both have alphabets and lots of embellishments.

It's been cold here on the coast of South Carolina. Haven't played much golf. Hopefully soon. This will be our first Thanksgiving alone. The kids had plans and we decided to just stay home and relax. I'm not even making a turkey--we're getting the whole dinner from the Piggly Wiggly. Not much work that way. But my son still called to get my mom's mother's stuffing recipe.

My daughter's pregnancy is in the second trimester. Genetic testing was A-OK. Technician said the kid's a super star, posing for the ultrasound. Like mother--she's an actor.

A friend emailed me and said she looked at my scrap stuff but didn't really know what I was doing. So I made her a page just for fun with one of my own ploppers. Hope she likes it. I'm working on a frameable page for her and her husband for Christmas.

We're getting new carpet in the main areas of our condo tomorrow. Having laminate put in the hall. We discovered we're overloaded with stuff. Lots of tchatchkes we really don't need and gather dust. By the way I looked up the word tchatchke and discovered it comes from Yiddish, meaning trinkets or toys. I've used it forever and finally now I know it really applies. So Hubby and I are trying to figure out how to downsize some more. Maybe next year. LOL

Happy Thanksgiving to the world!

Sunday is Relax Day

Been a busy week. I've been working on designs. This is such fun. I have a sort of grungy kit ready to go and am working on a holiday kit. As you have no doubt deduced, I'm not into cutesy. I can't for the life of me design a cute butterfly, or flower. But I love nature. The darkest paper in the new kit came from a photo I took about a year ago at about midnight of a ring around the moon.

It worked great with a couple of photos of my son.

Here's the kit. Ta Da! I'm tentatively calling it Grungy Tib.

It will soon be uploaded to 4Shared.com. Check back later.

Had lots of rain her on the SC coast. Much needed. We're in the midst of a drought and because of so little rain inland, our rivers are very low. The tide comes up the rivers far enough that water intakes get salt water, so the water company is pumping from ground wells. Yuck. But, there are always a few clouds in everybody's paradise. I'm just feeling smug that it has snowed (just a bit) in northern Michigan and we're still wearing shorts. Although it is beginning to cool down. No short pants tomorrow on the golf course.

I'm teaching writing classes through the Lifelong Learning Program of Coastal Carolina University. I have many talented people in the classes. They inspire me. I've started a new novel, very different from the first one. Not a sequel. It's fantasy set in another world. World building is such fun. It's tentatively called FIRESONG. I based the main character on one I used in the very first novel I completed. The manuscript never made it out the door. So far it's coming along. I've discovered storyboarding for organizing. What a revelation. Much easier to keep timeline and characters consistent.

Happy days to all who happen on my site.

It's the Weekend!

We were out of town with a couples' golf group we run. We went to Rock Hill, SC, and had a wonderful time, even if my game was FLOG (golf backwards). I flogged myself into three awful rounds, but hubby and I had a great time. Lots of fun people.

I'm almost done knitting my first grandbaby thing. For my own grandbaby. It's exciting.

I finished my first kit. If anybody out there wants to download it it's at:

http://www.4shared.com/dir/4269049/4a626811/Tibs_Botanicals.html

I know, I didn't upload it as a zip file. I'm just learning how to do this. Enjoy and use it for whatever you want except passing it off as your own. That's not fair.

And check out Scrapbook Flair. The site is easy to use and a great community.

http://www.scrapbookflair.com/tibwriter

Big News

Our daughter called us yesterday and announced that after nine years of marriage she is going to have a baby. We are ecstatic. We've been saying for years that we thought we would be good grandparents. And my mom is thrilled about being a great-grandmother. It's so exciting. Now I'll have my own grandbaby to scrap. Meanwhile I can practice on our best friends' grandchildren: a boy who is five and twin girls born last December. My hubby thinks that if I go to a yarn shop and/or a scrapbook store and he goes to Toys R Us and Best Buy that we'll max out our credit cards. So we have to be careful and space ourselves. Now I know how all our friends feel since we're about the last in our group to have a grandbaby.

I haven't posted anything for a while because our son flew down from Boston and spent a long weekend with us. A couple of his college buddies bummed a room and breakfast on their way through. It was great fun having young people around, although the friends were only here a short time. Our son stayed until Wednesday. It's fun hanging out with your adult children when they actually seem to like us and have a good time. We are very lucky.

Hubby had cataract surgery on his left eye a couple of weeks ago and will have the other done next week. I'm jealous. It appears he won't need glasses when both are healed. I've worn glasses since I was ten and have always despised them. Finally got contact lenses about 14 years ago. No problems, except that I'm so near sighted I don't need anything for up close. Expecially digiscrapping. It's much easier with glasses as I can take them off to see the small stuff.

I have more family heritage photos to scrap, so I'd better get something done there. I did a new page about my dad. He was a bomber pilot during WWII. He died in 1999. I always thought he would like the coastal area of South Carolina where we now live. He was an avid fisherman. We recently discovered that when he was very young he flew into the Air Force Base here in Myrtle Beach and taught other young pilots how to make bombing runs. Right after we moved here an unexploded bomb was found in the Inlet. So I made the page with a quote from the poem "High Flight" that is beloved by fliers everywhere.

Paper Scrapping

Today I went to a paper scrapping workshop. We made gift bags with tags. It was lots of fun, especially being with a group of women and talking girl stuff. And I will make bags in the future for gifts. But I have to admit it was a pain in the neck (actually the back) having to bend over and pick up all the little pieces I dropped on the floor. And although the bags are really cute and people will appreciate them, I really like the results of digiscrapping better. I guess I've progressed beyond cutesy.

Don't get me wrong. All the old family photos and documents I'm digiscrapping--some from the 1870s--are going into albums and archival boxes for safekeeping. But I really like what you can do with digital images. The variations are limitless and ten people can make dozens of different effects from the same image.

Does that make me an artist? Yikes. Never thought of it that way. At least my fan base extends to my family. Maybe my friend Pat in Michigan will help out here. She's really an artist--a watercolorist. You know, some of her art work would make wonderful backgrounds. Maybe I can bribe her into letting me have a copy of something. So Pat, when you see this, be kind.

Okay, so I Lied

I didn't go public. This is a lot more work than I thought. I'm going to start sending the link to family first, then friends. And I started work on another novel. It's a fantasy set in another world about a woman who doesn't fit in because she is a Fire Mage and wants more than her isolated village can offer her. Of course, she's the only Fire Mage in town and folks resent her. So when she manages to call a dragon to her aid, she had the means to leave. Stay tuned.

I found a wonderful site. It's in the Google search at the bottom.
http://www.scrap-gratuit.fr/
She has wonderfully magical digiscrapping elements. All the things in the I Love This Doll came from this site. Magic Moments. Thank you.

And I subscribe to http://www.scrapbookflair.com/. My Home is: http://scrapbookflair.com/tibwriter.

I'm having great fun with all the old family photos and newer ones of us and friends. Hopefully no one will object since they're anonymous.

Ta ta for now.

Today I go Public!

Okay, world, I'm sending all my friends and family an email welcoming them to my Blog. I'm getting braver as I get older.

Golf is Flog Backwards

An interesting day on the golf links. Shot 42 on the front which is good for me. But on the back I fell apart and shot 52. Oh well, considering I haven't played much this summer that's still pretty good for me.

Today's digiscrap page shows part of my roots. My mother's grandparents were all from Canada. This page is her paternal grandparents. They settled in Northern Michigan near Munising. My mother is the youngest in her family and all she knew were stories told to her by her sisters: that her grandfather had run off somewhere and come back very ill. He stayed with her parents for awhile before he died, which was right around the time my mom was born. I haven't been able to discover his burial site. Someday I will. There is so much available to the genealogist on the Internet. Eventually I'll track him down.

Page credits: Very Victorian Page Kit created by Susan L. Gabriel of SueAngelDesigns. I don't know who did the background and torn top. I seem to have lost the credit. If I find it I'll add it. Fonts: 2 Peas Scrapbook from www.twopeasinabucket.com and Batik Regular.

I'm a new user of Photoshop Elements 5.0 for my digital art. Today I learned how to squeeze an object--like a ribbon so you can thread it through a hole--and how to make a curled corner. But I didn't make it from scratch. I downloaded a template that did it and followed the directions. I'm still not sure I can do it next time without going through the tutorial again. But it was fun and rewarding to learn something new. Apparently I didn't learn well on the golf course.

Another Day

It's only fair to say that I scrapped the photos for my hometown of Marenisco, MI. The town hall burned in the 50s, destrooying all the birth records. My grandmother's house was torn down in the 80s. All that remains are two of the birdbaths--just half of each--holding up a bench in a stranger's yard. Things change. But I still have cousins who live there and it's a beautiful wilderness around a tiny town.

When we retired my husband and I bought a condo for easy living. I will post some of the photos I've taken of all the water damage to our building--only nine years old--caused by poor workmanship. Fortunately it will all be covered under a settlement from the builders.

Hopefully we'll get to play golf tomorrow.

Tib's Blog

Hello, world!

My first blog. I never thought I would ever get into this. I always thought my hubby was wasting time reading all his blogs. Now I understand. I plan this to be a Digiscrapping blog. I discovered this hobby this summer when I realized with digital images not only are there no scraps filling my closet storage boxes, but you can reuse the elements. Again and again.

So anybody who arrives at my blog deliberately or accidentally, please realize this is my first post. It will take me awhile to get my act together.