Organize your Stuff: Week 10(round 5): Alphas

How do you store your alphas?

We just keep ours piled on a shelf. OCD Me finds this totally unacceptable. PA Me says “look, they are on a shelf! What more do you want?!” The Inner Hoarder keeps buying more Thickers. Oooh, Thickers. And Creative Me keeps using them.

Therefore, while the POW secretly sides with OCD Me, she has also seen out scraproom as a whole. There is just not space for it at this time. So we will keep that in the back of our mind (and possibly whisper to the Inner Hoarder that she really wants one).

While all this was going on, Creative Me looked at our alphas and of course saw a crafting opportunity. This is the layout that she created from the trip that we took to Las Vegas. It may have been quick, it may have been business, but we still had fun!

Papers: CTMH solids, slide, stamps; Graphics 45 paper; Cricut Destinations die cut; Thickers, Fiskars boarder punch.

It is amazing that we were able to get any crafting done at all, with a crazy weekend of wrestling, Boy Scouts, basketball (yes, basketball season has started), and of course, making Oatmeal Butterscotch cookies to send off in a care package for Fabulous Spouse (who chipped a tooth today in the Humvee Convoy rollover simulator). 

He really needs a cookie!

Organize your Stuff: Week 10 (round 4):Alphabets part 1 & Blog Candy results

OK, for those of you who are just here for the freebies, we will not make you wait!

Shark Bait and Prize #1 (Friday, May 27th): #3 Sandi

Illusive Middle Child and Prize #2 (Saturday, May 28th): #41 SueB

Girl Friday and Prize #3 (Wedsday, June 1st): #12 Twiglet

Please contact me at scrappnbee@yahoo.com for your goodies!

This week is alphabets.

Where do your alphabets live? Are they mostly on the Cricut? In your computer? Stamps? Or are they stickers? (or our personal favorite and minor addiction…Thickers?)

Here is a layout to wrap up Memorial Weekend/ Week (using both Thickers and the Cricut).

PA Me has allowed Inner Hoarder to pile on most of our Thickers (as we work for our local Scrapbook Store and Thickers are like Scrapbooker crack… well I guess that is better than Scrapbooker heroine. Silver lining? No? Well, we take what we can get!) since last round unsorted. Well, this gives OCD Me something to do this week as we are pretty sure that this lapse in organization is due to our current Status as Lady of the Shoe …or at least that is our story and we are sticking to it!

Hopefully this week will turn out fine, as Fabulous Spouse is MIA with a Reservist Drill Weekend, Oldest Child is away at Boy Scout Camporee, Awesome Auntie has a scrapbooking class… leaving us with both Shark Bait and the WMD, and Illusive Middle Child and Girl Friday both have birthday parties…and that is just the weekend’s event at the Shoe!

Organize your Stuff: Week 10 (round 3): Alphabets Part 2

Fabulous Crisann’s Question of the Week: What is your Favorite Alpha? This is a loaded question. I LOVE my clear acrylix! Stamped alphas rock! But… in my mind, they live in stamp week. Therefore, I choose Thickers! …The stickers that do not stick! I love the fonts and the textures, but adhere today…fall off tomorrow. As long as I add glue dots, they are OK. Still my favorite non-stamp alpha.

Here is my Layout this week…

It doesn’t use Thickers, but it does use sticker Alphas...of a sort. This just goes to show, that you do not need individual letters to have an alphabet. Sometimes, you can just let the manufacturer do it for you!

As for my alpha stickers, I give this round to PA Me. With Fabulous Spouse in Montana, and packing for CKC Seattle, dealing with children’s school and ECAs, and a bout of the stomach bug going around, PA Me said that My folder of Alphas is good enough, and for a change, the POW agreed with me and told OCD Me that we might tackle this next go round, but this time, it is OK. So, no change in Alphas, but one regular layout and one cookbook layout done!

Organize your Stuff: Week 10 (round 3): Alphabets Part 1

This week in the Organize your Stuff challenge is Alphas! Generically speaking, this week is alphabet stickers, but if you are really going for broke you could include your chipboard letters and letter stamps. I am saving mine for stamp week and chipboard week as they are stored there. Here is a card that I made for Tuesday Trio using acrylic alpha stamps (btw-Tuesday Trio is temporarily on hold, as our moderator is in the hospital, so please keep her in your prayers).

Depending how in tune you are with your inner OCD Me, Alphabet week is either super easy, or super hard. Last year, I went for super easy, and just rounded them up and dumped them in a Cropper Hopper folder. It was a total fast food, drive by clean up.

This time around, I have to do something else, even if it is just to put them in two folders! LOL! For most of the last five years, the POW has really limited my use of sticker alphas. She figured that the expense was not worth it, especially when you needed to buy 2 sets just to have enough E’s to finish your layout. However, just as tastes in close change from time to time, my love / hate with stickers has waxed again… and I mainly blame the Inner Hoarder’s love of shopping and Thickers. Thickers are dimensional alpha stickers (I used them on the football layout in my last post for the varsity letters). The only downside is that Thickers are notorious for losing their stickability (so OCD Me always adds glue dots to them).

Speaking of fast food, The POW has decided that the family needs to eat better, and that I really have no excuse (even though PA Me could give you list…) why I could not cook more home cooked meals. This is my first one. It is a layout of my attempt at from scratch, 3 hour, crock pot mac & cheese from Paula Deen. This is my entry for Week 1 in the Kitchen Keepsake’s Food Network challenge.

The only changes that I would make to the recipe is that I would use white pepper instead of black pepper, and I am unsure why you shred the cheddar, melt it with the butter, then put it in the crock pot and add the cold ingredients before turning it on. This left cheddar lumps that took until hour 2 to re-melt. Also, we added frozen peas (made on the stove in the last 10 min) and bacon bits to make the meal a little more balanced.

See you at the end of the week!

Organize your Stuff Challenge: Weeks 9 & 10 Embellishments & Alphas

Whew!  What a week!  I finally caught up to the Scrapbook your Stuff Challenge, only to have my blog hit counter hijack my site and and redirect me to the yellow pages every time I clicked on it. *grrrrrrr*

However, my site is fixed (yeahhh!), and here is my layout from this week (using some of my alphas).

So, this week I started embellishments.  Wow.  If there is one thing that I seem to have a lot of... ok I have a lot of, well, a lot of stuff... and one of those things is embellishments.  The POW and OCD me worked well together, and had a plan for all of the maddness... and they took lots of pctures.

I began by emptying all of my crop bags (I have 3 of them) into a 70 gallon Sterlite bin.  I added the pile of embelishment from upstairs, and the stray embellishments that have been taking vacations in my dining room, scoping out the joint, and checking out the neighborhood.  Now, for someone whose scrapbooking storage consisted of a closet until 22 months ago, it was a pretty full bin.  Next to it is my two Close to My Heart embellishment trays (sorted by color), my brad container from the fishing department at Wal Mart, and some other bins from failed organizing.

After I did this, OCD me took charge which was OK.  Group therapy is working, and the Inner Hoarder and PA Me still have the magazines from idea week to play with and distract them.  Everything that was not CTMH was sorted ino sub categories all over my floor.  Since this is the main hallway, and I knew that Girl Friday was in hiding, waiting to pounce on any weak or straggling embellishments, this spurred me on to complete the task as quickly as possible.

Fortunately or un, OCD Me has flitted in and out of my scrapbooking life since I began, and so my brads (minus a few strays) were already sorted, envelopes were together, same with buttons, never got many flowers, but beads and eyelettes were everywhere.  That was where OCD Me and the POW spent most of their energy.  Fabulous spouse, having hit a low point in sports, found it entertaining to watch...and help...and fend off stealth attacks by Girl Friday (although some beads did give their lives so that the rest could live).  Here is the before and after.

This actually took about 3 hours, but there were SO many little beads, and tiny brads, and eyelettes!

From there it only took another hour or so to get the rest put together and into "temporary" storage (the tax return has not come in yet).  The Inner Hoarder was actually impressed...yet again... at how OCD Me can organize a big pile of stuff into a little one without purging. ...What can I say... its a gift!...

What made my day though, was that there really was nothing to do for week 10.  I am an acrylic stamp junkie and so my Alpha stickers are few.  OCD Me already had them living happily together in a Cropper Hopper Pouch, and so all I had to do was take this picture and call Week 10 done as well!