my Write. Click. Scrapbook Give Away

Today at  Write. Click. Scrapbook. is a great big give away day. Many of the WCS designers have put together different gifts, all of them scrapbook related. So! If you're of the scrapping persuasion, you should check it out. If you're not, well, maybe today is the time to start!

For my contribution, I decided to finally do something with one of my collections: word-based fabrics. It is a serious weakness of mine that when I see a fabric with words, I tend to want to buy it and make it into a scrapbooking embellishment. When you use fabric on your layouts, it does take a bit more effort than using, say, an alphabet sticker set. But the product possibilities effectively double. (I can't tell you how often I've thought "someone should make this patterned paper into fabric" or the other way around.) Plus, it's just so lovely. And as I am consistently drawn to word-based anything, well, it's a rare wordy fabric I can resist purchasing! I put some of my collection to use in a few textual fabric embellishments.

First, some tips for scrapping with fabric:

• fabric is sold by the inch in increments based on a yard. Or you can buy it in fat quarters, which are 18"x22" inches; some fabric stores will also sell fat eights (11"x18"). When I'm buying a fabric I know I'll only use for a layout, I buy 1/8 of a yard, which is 4.5" tall x 43-45" wide. If the pattern of words repeats, make sure to buy enough that you get at least one repetition. Obviously there will be some leftovers when you're finished. Perhaps one day I will make a quilt with all my scrapping-fabric leftovers!
• unless you're sewing your embellishment directly onto your layout, back it with some card stock. Then use your regular, preferred adhesive to stick it down.
• alternately, it is perfectly ok to stitch it down on your layout. In fact, it is awesome. You can even, if you're so inclined, cover an entire 12x12 sheet of card stock with fabric. Plus, there's just something about the back side of a stitched-upon layout that makes me happy. Is that weird? 
• keep a dedicated sewing-on-paper needle. Paper dulls needles faster than fabric does, so keep your nice, sharp needles for your fabric creations.
• if you have one, use your walking foot. It moves the paper/fabric combo through the machine much easier than a regular foot. Warning: A quarter-inch presser foot will leave a faint scratched line where the 1/4" guide touches your cardstock, or, at least, mine does.
• iron your fabric. I repeat: iron it! I know. I hate ironing too. But it does make a difference to the piece's outcome.
• the way you cut your fabric also influences the end result. A rotary cutter produces a cleaner edge (obviously, straighter, too!) than scissors do. I like the more ragged edge that comes from a fabric cut with scissors, but you should do what makes you happy.
• do some practice stitches before committing to whatever paper-and-fabric creation you're making. The tension will need to be adjusted a bit, depending on the texture of the fabric and the thickness of the card stock or paper you're sewing on.
• decorative stitches work almost as well on paper as they do on fabric. Keep in mind, though, that the holes punched by the needle don't "heal" on paper like they do on fabric. If your stitches are too small or close together, the needle holes can turn into perforations instead.
• sew slowly. Since paper doesn't heal, you can't fix your mistakes by ripping the stitches out. Trust me: just go slow!
• keep in mind my cardinal rule of sewing: fabric is a flexible medium. You'll rarely get exactly, completely square and straight fabric embellishments. That's OK. the texture of fabric invites imperfection if you let it. Imperfection just reinforces the fact that you made this, not a machine.

Now for the give away:

1. The All-About-Me Embellishment:

 
(about 2 1/2" tall x 5" wide)

2. the baby boy tag:

 
(about 4.5" x 7")

3. the Baby Girl Embellishment:

 
(about 6x6)

4. the Christmas Tag:

 
(5" x 2.5") (made with some left over bits from this quilt)

5. The Cute Little Chick Set

 
(9"x5") (I know...cue bird-induced squee!)

6. the Hiking Set

 
(8"x 5.5")

If you're interested in entering the give away, go to today's WCSpost and leave a comment. (You can, of course, leave a comment on my blog about the absolutely stunning quality of my work, tee hee, but that won't get you entered into the drawing.) You might just win nothing (and we all know that if *I* entered that would be the case, as I never win anything), but you could win my textual fabric embellishments. Or any of the other cool stuff that's up for grabs.

And let me know if you win!

the TNC Chronicles: a History of Mother-Daughter Strife & an Insistently Delicious Meal

On Tuesday night I made a meal for dinner I haven't cooked in ages. Eons. Nearly a lifetime. I knew without a doubt that none of my children would like it, and they did not exceed my expectations. Kaleb flat out refused to try even a bite ("but it's got greeeeeeeeen thingeeeeeeeeees!"), Jake took exactly three bites, and Nathan managed about half his serving. Haley was gleeful to be at a sleep over and avoid the whole mess. Kendell, however, was simply gleeful, because this is one of his favorite meals:

Tuna noodle casserole.

The old-fashioned kind: egg noodles, cream of mushroom soup, sour cream, frozen peas, canned mushrooms, generous amounts of pepper and a handful of dried onion. Oh, and the tuna of course. Topped with buttered breadcrumbs and served steaming hot.

I don't know—is tuna noodle casserole as disgusting as my children think it is? Because I love it, which of course begs the question of why I've made it perhaps only three times in the 18 years we've lived in our house. (It also begs the question "how in the hell am I old enough to have lived in this house longer than I lived in the house I grew up in?" but, well...I guess I AM that old!) Cooking this delicious bit of newlywed culinary nirvana reminded me of the answer to that question, which is a little story.

I call it newlywed food because tuna noodle casserole was one of my staples when I was a brand new wife.There were four dishes I nearly always had the ingredients for: chicken & brown rice, spaghetti, manicotti (thanks for the recipe Chris! I still make it exactly like you taught me!), and TNC. As the spaghetti wars actually commenced before we got married (should that have been a sign???) I really only had three dishes I felt comfortable and confident in making.

We ate TNC often.

That didn't matter much, because Kendell and I both loved it. I always made biscuits to go with (I make some mean biscuits!) and served a Diet Coke and a Pepsi, respectively. We were happy in our newlywedded, TNC bliss.

Then, after a year, we bought a building lot, found a contractor, and started building our house. (Yes, the one we still live in.) To help us survive the cost of building said house, we gave up our newlywed apartment (the one that, seriously, had a heart-shaped jacuzzi in it, which is much less romantic than it sounds as it had the unfortunate tendency to occasionally become the repository of the rest of the apartment complex's backed-up sewage I kid you not) and moved back in with my parents for the duration of the construction. Our agreement was to split the utilities and the food preparation.

Oh, the stories I could tell from that time! Not all of them involve the unfortunate placement of the bathroom much too near the stairs, but at least one of them does. Suffice it to say: Kendell has a red personality. My mother has a red personality. Know what you get when you combine two red personalities? Lots of fire.

It was a long nine months.

But I didn't realize how *I* was feeding the fire until I overheard a telephone conversation between my mom and my sister. My mom's side (the only one I could hear) went a little bit like this: "and I swear, if she makes one more tuna noodle casserole I'm going to lose my mind."

Ouch.

I kind of lost my enthusiasm for TNC after that. Now that I can look back on that time and see the humor in it, I also find myself a little bit wistful. I wish my mom and I could have had the kind of relationship wherein she recognized that I was a little bit on the pathetic side as far as my cooking skills went. I wish she had taken me under her wing and nurtured me, and remembered that I was, after all, only 21 years old. I wish we would have spent some time in the kitchen talking about cooking.

Maybe it wouldn't be so hard for me, still, to figure out the answer to the daily, exhausting, frustrating, doomed-to-always-be-asked question: What's for dinner?

But last night, for whatever reason, the answer was TNC. And it was still delicious. I still, despite my children's naysaying and my mom's annoyance, make a fine tuna noodle casserole. I might even make another one in the next half-decade or so, just to stay on top of my game.

If You are of the Scrapbooking Persuasion...

then you should come help us celebrate:

 

(My assigned letter was P. I bought a cute little tiny cake with a green frosting P on it, but when I held it up for a picture, all the frosting slid off, right into my lap, before Haley—my official photographer—could snap the picture. So I used a fridge magnet instead, but I'm still a little annoyed that my tiny cake idea didn't work out.)

This week at Write Click Scrapbook we're celebrating our third birthday. There is, of course, the new June Gallery, where we all worked within the concept of being inspired by something on the WCS site. My layout

 
was inspired by a recent week about using fabric on your layouts. I keep lots of fabric bits and pieces with the intention of using them on a layout, but then I forget, or I don't want to get my sewing machine out. Need to get over that! There's also a new design this month, and this week there are two days of product give aways, today and tomorrow.

I've been with this group for a year, so it's a sort of anniversary for me, too. I'm consistently inspired by the other team members, and not just by their WCS contributions, but by their ability to be a presence in the scrapbooking world. They manage to influence other people, which isn't something I'm good at. I love that about them!

Not only do I get to contribute, I'm also a recipient of that inspiration. My scrapbooking has become stronger and more focused, closer to what I really want to do with my hobby of choice—which is, of course, to record the stuff I don't want to forget. The stuff I am, frankly, terrified of forgetting. That's the simple purpose of WCS: Getting your memories down where they're not forgotten. It's a place that helps you remember that the memories matter most, and everything else? Well, that's just the icing on the cake.

(Of course, it's the sort of icing that doesn't slide off into your lap, possibly staining your favorite pair of jeans and forcing you to rethink your clothes for the day. Totally not that kind of icing!)

Runner's High

Everyone who runs seems to feel it on a consistent basis, the elusive runner's high. Running books describe it technically: the rush of endorphins you're supposed to get from running that carries you through miles, or leaves you breathlessly happy for hours after.

Usually after running, I'm just breathless.

Don't get me wrong. I have a firm belief in the mental benefits of running. I've been running on a fairly consistent basis for ten years now, and I know I'd be much more unhappy without it. Running gives me a place in which I can think, sort out options, figure out how I feel. I've made significant decisions simply by pondering them during a run. Running doesn't only help me control my weight a little; it also helps me chase out some of my darknesses.

But it's rare that I experience a real, true runner's high.

One of my Ragnar legs is a seven-mile downhill trail. It's described as a "severe downhill" and if you look at the map, you'll know there are no other words to describe it. In 6 miles I'll lose 2,000+ feet of elevation. That's a steep downhill. The distance won't be a big deal, but that sheer of a drop was making me anxious.

So, to get over my anxiety, on Friday I asked Kendell to drive me to the look out point of Squaw Peak Road. This is a road that winds up along the face of Cascade Mountain, eventually meandering around the back and meeting up with a different trail system. Four and a half miles up, the road splits; the left fork continues up the mountain but turns to dirt, while the right fork winds up a bit higher to a parking lot that looks out over the valley. (I would conjure that there have been more than several teenage make-out sessions here!) I started my downhill run at the make-out look out point. (We did not make out before I left.)

I have no idea how to figure out what the elevation change is on this road, because it doesn't show up on google maps. But it is fairly steep. I had worried about the traffic, since the road is narrow and doesn't have a shoulder, and all that winding makes for countless blind turns. To make myself as visible as possible to cars, I wore my bright-green running shirt and my bright-pink running skirt (the one I bought on clearance last fall which would have been worth it even at full price because get this: the undershorts don't roll up even on my fat thighs!). But I only encountered three vehicles coming up the road. One, an enormous, jacked-up truck, terrified me because it was coming fast, but he saw me at the last second and I was OK. Cue a little extra adrenaline.

Fear of being killed by an oncoming car aside, the run was glorious.  I managed to find a window of not-too-cloudy skies, and a briefly-windless atmosphere, the temperature the exact degree so that I was neither hot nor cold. Clumps of yellow wildflowers blossomed on some of the hills, and the trees were that new-green color they wear for only a few days in the spring. Birds chirped. A few bikers passed me on their way up the road, and we cheered each other on. I startled a wild turkey into sprinting across the road and into the dense brush on the other side. I admired the mountains around me.

And all the while, I pounded downhill. I love that I love running downhill now, that I have conquered my fear of it. I'm probably not the most graceful downhill runner. I hold myself back a little bit, still affected by that long-ago fall I took. But I love it. I love that I feel nearly weightless. And fast. Lithe and strong, even if only by way of a downhill illusion. Toss in the green, mountainous landscape and the just-grey sky and the wildflowers and the turkey. That, my friends, is a perfect run.

When I got to the bottom of the road, where it joins the main artery of highway through the canyon, Kendell hadn't yet come down. So I turned around and started running back up the road. Since this was a perfect run, he met me by a handy gate, blocking off someone's private access road, which I used to stretch before I got into the car. I was, of course, breathless. My quads ached and my lungs heaved. But it wasn't the usual exhaustion. It was stained with a certain shade of joy. Runner's high, right there on the side of the road.

Since I don't experience it very often, it's not the reason I run. But when it comes it is glorious. It does carry you through miles. It does make you want to run out to recreate the feeling the very next day. Of course, my thighs were shot the day after, so I could hardly walk down a flight of stairs. Still, I will keep it in my running memory, to use as a panacea during harder, less joyful ones, that run, the rare one, the one that gave me the pure happiness of a runner's high.