The collection is growing...

I've been having so much fun making these finger puppets. My goal is to finish the jungle set this weekend, and get the patterns written up and listed on Etsy. Here's a little panda I finished up this morning.


And then a group shot of everyone. Can you tell that these are pretty big finger puppets? If I added a body, these would be full-sized animals.

And because I love scrapbooking and it gives me a break from crocheting, here's a layout I did this morning. Kit is Pixie Perfect Designs' Graceful, which you can check out here.

Happy Birthday, Trudy!

I hope you have a fantastic day! Here's a little card I made for you. (Card uses Pixie Perfect Designs' Love You More kit, available here.)



I ordered your birthday present yesterday. This is what the front cover looks like. (Cover uses Amanda Heimann's Just Beecause kit, check it out here.)



It should get here while I'm home for Spring Break.

I know yesterday I claimed that the monkey was my favorite animal ever, but this little guy passed him up as soon as he was completed. I just love him.


Anyone have any great plans for this weekend? I've got nothing planned; I think I'll just make some more cute animals!

Things I love...

I love apples. I love these apples, in particular, that I steal from Rastall (the cafeteria) almost every day. They are my new favorite fruit, and I don't even know what kind of apple they are. They've got the coloring of a Fuji, almost, but they're much larger. They're some of the biggest, juiciest, crispest, most generally delicious apples I've ever had. I love them.


I love this little monkey. He's my new favorite animal ever. Just look at his adorable little face! And those ears! And those eyes! I love him.

I love these two layouts I did yesterday. The colors on both of them are so bright and happy, and the pictures just make me smile. I love them.

(Above layout uses Pixie Perfect Designs' "Say It Vol 1" word art and "Love You More" kit. You can check them out here.)

(Above layout uses Amanda Heimann's collab with Bella Gypsy, Tomfoolery. You can see it here. Word art is from PPD's "Say It Vol 1".)

I also love comments on my blog. So thanks to y'all for commenting so much lately! I love Christin's ideas for "Barnyard Buddies" and "Garden Gang". I love that we're watching movies in class tomorrow like Armageddon and The Day After Tomorrow. I love that it's almost the weekend. And I love that I'll be home in less than two weeks!

I'm not normally a note-taker...

But in this class I've been taking notes like crazy. I took over five pages of notes today alone. It seems to be paying off, though, because I got a 97 on the test we had Monday! Woohoo!

I'm glad you all seem to like the finger puppets. Trudy, I've also been thinking of doing "sets" of animals. I want them to have cool names, too. For example, here's what I've come up with that I want to make: Household Honeys (dog, cat, mouse, goldfish, turtle), Forest Friends (owl, bear, raccoon, deer, rabbit), Jungle Jokers (monkey, lion, elephant, giraffe, panda), and Farm Somethings (sheep, cow, pig, horse, duck). I need another name for the farm animals. :) Anyone have any suggestions for that or for other/better names for the rest?

Also, does a panda count as a jungle animal? I just really think a panda would be cute. I like the idea of flowers, but I was wondering, do you think they should have faces?

Here's a funny layout I did of Egan yesterday. I love this picture, it cracks me up. Kit is Amanda Heimann's Come Out and Play, which you can check out here.

I did it!

Just playing around last night and today, I came up with two patterns. Here are the little guys I worked up...



Cute, huh? But these guys aren't just stuffed animals like I've made before, they're...

FINGER PUPPETS! I really love them (the dog more so than the cat, I think). What do you think? Will people buy a pattern for this kind of thing? I want to make at least five different puppets. I have the dog and the cat, and I know I want to make a mouse, but what other animals do you all suggest I make?

And here are a couple of layouts I did using Oscraps's February collab, XOXO. You can check it out at Oscraps, here.

The field trip today was pretty awesome. The museum was AMAZING. I wish we could have been there longer so that I could have seen more. As it was, I only saw two exhibits and an IMAX movie in addition to our behind the scenes tour. But the tour was super cool. We went back in the fossil collections rooms and saw all of the fossils that they don't have on display, which is a ton.

And we got to touch the bones. Dinosaur bones, wooly mammoth bones, saber tooth tiger bones, all of them. I touched a T-Rex's leg bone and held a triceratops horn. (Well, a good sized section of the horn, and MAN, that thing was heavy!) I learned so much and it was so interesting. I really want to go back and browse the whole museum at my own pace.

Embarking on a new adventure...

I've decided to start writing (and selling) patterns for amigurumi (the crocheted animals I make). I generally follow someone else's pattern, but I want to try writing my own. I'm working on something right now...hopefully I'll have completed pictures tomorrow.

Until then, here's a sweet layout using Sherry Ferguson's Isn't She Lovely paper pack and Words With a Twist text paths. You can check these out here.

I had my first test in this class today. I think it went well, I remembered more than I thought I would. Tomorrow we have a field trip, to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Evidently a CC alum is one of the curators there, so they're going to take us on the regular tour AND a behind the scenes tour of the museum, so we'll get to see rotating exhibits that aren't out now, too. I'm pretty excited about that.

Janie had a little lamb...

But first I had another layout. This one was for a challenge within Amanda Heimann's creative team. It uses Amanda's older kit Lazy Daisy. I just discovered this kit...and I love it. The colors are gorgeous, and the flowers are so cute, too. You can check out the kit here.

And now for the lamb. I made this little guy/girl this morning, and I just love it. I think it is super adorable. I plan to list it on Etsy soon, but I was thinking that it needs a gender and a name. Does anyone have any ideas? (Especially Ari, Ella, or Egan? Lol.)


It's been a relaxing weekend so far, but now I really need to get on my homework (just reading) and study for my test that is tomorrow. Wish me luck!

Just one little layout to share today...

It's really simple...but I like it.


Kit is Amanda Heimann's Just Beecause, which you can check out at her store.

Happy Friday!

I'm so glad it's the weekend! After an entire week of very little reading and no additional homework, I was loving this class. Then I got yesterday's homework- playing around in Google Earth? No problem. Except it took me hours. But I'm done now, and ready to relax and enjoy the weekend. Anyone have any great plans they want to tell me so I can be jealous?

And because I know you didn't get enough of Rob and I yesterday...here are two more pictures that I like. Rob looks like he thinks he's so cool in this first one...lol.

And we just look too happy in this one. (Yes, that is a good thing!)

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Janie and Robert, sitting in a tree...

Okay, we didn't actually sit in a tree. We did stand next to one though, if that counts for anything. I got a CD in the mail today from Lora, the photographer who did Rob and my pictures last week. So here are a few of my favorite pictures, most with Lora's editing, at least one with mine. Let me know what you think! (These were all taken on campus, by the way!)

Because I like to keep you on your toes...

I decided to post today, too. I know, it's totally out of character for me to actually be somewhat regular in my blog posts, but I have some cool stuff to say. (I think, at least.)

First off, to address a few things in comments Mom and Trudy left for me...

I plan to take regular scrapbooking classes at GASC in June, because I can digi-scrap anytime. I've been doing a lot of it lately because it is easier, quicker, and less messy, as well as because I do have creative team requirements! I'm glad you like them, though, Mom.

I would love to put pictures of cats and dogs on my fridge, only I don't have any. So let's combine Mom and Trudy's suggestions, and have Ella, Ari, and Egan draw me pictures of cats and dogs to hang up there! How about it, guys?

And now, a recap of my first field trip in this class. We drove around to 4 or 5 different sites, stopping on the side of the road and talking about rock formations. We were particularly interested in discovering what types of rock we were looking at, as well as imagining the paleoenvironment that may have formed them. (Paleoenvironment meaning "ancient environment", for example, we know limestone only forms in marine (oceanic) environments, so finding limestone would suggest that parts of Colorado were once covered by an inland sea.)

We looked at sedimentary and plutonic rocks, sandstone, limestone, shale, mudstone, granite, glauconite, quartz, feldspar, mica, and many other different cool sounding rocks and minerals. At our last stop, we were all feeling a little tired of rocks (it was around 1 pm, and we had been out since 9 am) when my professor announced that we were to embark on a 2 hour hike. I haven't mentioned this yet, but it was COLD out there, and WINDY! We didn't have a choice, though, and it turned out to be a nice hike.

Here are a few pictures. (The first 2 are different, I just couldn't decide which I liked better.)

This is a couple of my classmates studying the rock during our field quiz. We were supposed to identify the type of rock that the Purgatoir Formation is made of. Can you guess what it is?

If you picked sandstone, like me, you would be correct!

I got extra points for finding this gigantic piece of quartz. Our task was to find the largest clast in the Fountain Formation, and then either extract it or, if extraction is impossible, outline the size in our notebooks. (Fountain formation is a sedimentary rock that is made up of Pikes Peak granite, which is made up of quartz, feldspar, and mica, among other things. A clast would be an individual piece of the foundation stone (granite) that can be found in the sedimentary rock (Fountain formation).) I found the biggest one, and my professor told me to take it back to campus.

Now, do you see anything special in this next picture?

What about now, if I give you a little help?

The lighter bits outlined in white in the above rock are fossilized dinosaur bones from the Jurassic period! Cool, huh?

And here is my friend Alex conducting an extremely scientific test to determine if these are, in fact, dinosaur bones.

The conclusion is, yes, they are. We learned today that if you can tell if it is fossilized bone or not by licking it. There is some reaction between the bone and your saliva to cause a slight bonding or sticking sensation for a second if it is bone, and not just rock. Yep, I licked the dino bones, too! It was pretty cool.

And look at what I got in the mail today! The OWOH prize I won from Kim Mailhot. Not only did she send me the magnets I won, she also stuck in two of her "Rock my World" rocks. Thank you so much, Kim!

I've got a lot to say...

First, I'll start with some sweet new layouts, using three of Amanda Heimann's new kits, and one older kit. The first uses Truly Yours, from the Digi Files #2.



The second uses Amanda's new collab with Bella Gypsy, Tomfoolery. I really love the colors in this kit, they're so vibrant. Tomfoolery will be in Amanda's store sometime this week.

This third layout uses Firefly Lane, a new collab between Amanda and Ziggle Designs. (I love what they come up with together!) You can check it out at Scrap Orchard, here.

This last layout I thought I had posted here already, but I guess I missed it somehow! It uses Amanda's other collab with Ziggle Designs, Smooches. You can check it out here.

I've got plenty to say about what's going on right now, but let me go back to block break really quickly. Of course, it was so much fun, like I said before, but here's a picture that I think summarizes the whole break. (Robert agrees!)

Here I am, looking super cute (lol), but bored enough that I'm taking pictures of myself, while Robert is siting on the bed in a Wii coma. I swear, he (and I, to a lesser extent) played that thing for HOURS AND HOURS AND HOURS. It's a good thing that I'm pretty good at entertaining myself on the computer! (Okay, it wasn't that bad, but I just really love this photo.)

Here's the same photo, but with some things marked that I feel like explaining. (I'm bored, alright?)

#1. Well, you can see the Valentine's card Rob brought me, but really I'm trying to show you the gorgeous card Ella sent me. It's above and kind of behind Robert's card. Ella, I adore the card. It is fantastically beautiful, and I hung it up on my wall of cards using the string of beads.

#2. Robert's comatose video game face. I do have a picture where his tongue is sticking out, in deep concentration, but I'm not in it! (Which means I will not post it, lol.)

#3. One of my super cute new shirts. I bought it at Target, presumably for the photo shoot, but I ended up wearing the other shirt I bought. However, it does look amazing on me, and Megan swears that this color purple is MY COLOR. (I don't know how she knows this, but some other lady in the dressing room said it looked nice, too, so I'll believe it.)

#4. My magnet collection on the fridge, which has never been used (this year). Does anyone have any ideas for what I can do with them? I feel bad that I'm not using them, but what can I put on my fridge?

#5. The requisite Ramen Noodle Soup. I am a college student, you know.

#6. My trash can that always seems to be overflowing. You should see it right now. It's about a foot taller. I really need a bigger trash can. Do you think anyone would care if I took the gigantic one from out in the hall?

Okay, enough of that. Lora (our photographer) was supposed to mail me the CD with all of our pictures today! That means I'll probably get it on Thursday, which is super exciting. I can't wait to see all of the pictures!

So I've started a new class, which is more interesting and informative than I thought it would be. I swear, I've learned more BRAND NEW information (stuff I'd never even heard of before) in the past two days than in any other two days I've had at CC. My class is titled Geology of Antarctica: A Record of Global Climate Change. I'm learning so much about Antarctica, it's amazing.

Plus, we don't have to buy any books; we're reading really current popular literature and news sources instead. My professor is a super cool geologist lady, who has actually been to Antarctica NINE times, for a total of 18 months of her life. I'm pretty excited about the rest of the course. We have three day trips, beginning tomorrow.

Tomorrow we're just going around locally, in the Springs, in Manitou Springs, and of course to Garden of the Gods. (I think about 50% of CC classes go to Garden of the Gods.) Next week, however, we're going to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (where Obama just signed the Stimulus Bill, which I think is pretty cool). I'm not sure where we're going third week, but I'm sure it'll be cool. I'll keep you updated.

So does anyone remember that I was on an IM basketball team last semester? Well, I've been talked into it again this semester. I missed the first two games week before last (one night I was sick, the other I had my research paper to write), but I made it to the game tonight. We're a pretty bad team, truly.

We were losing 48-11 at halftime, and we tried to get out of the second half, but the other team wanted to keep playing. The bribed us into playing another half, saying that they wouldn't do any more fast breaks, we would only play ten minutes, and one of the scorekeepers could play on our team. (That's how pathetic we are, lol.) We still lost 58-16 (I was told it was actually more than 58, but they stopped adding points to the scoreboard).

We have our next game on Thursday, so wish us some luck? We could really use it.

(I told you I had a lot to say! Hope everyone's doing well!)