Piggy Bailey

I've had this picture for awhile and been wanting to scrap it. This is the picture that I saw in an add on Craig's List that the adoption center had posted along with several other animals. I immediately fell in love with this sweet little puppy. We had been searching for just the right dog for over a month at the time. We drove over an hour to pick her up from Fort Worth and were crushed when another lady was about to take her home. Fortunately for us the lady wasn't 100% sure she wanted the pup, and we got to bring her home. Bailey changed our lives as cheesy as that sounds.

For the layout I used Basic Grey's line Max and Whiskers. I just love the colors and prints the line has, and they go perfect with this picture. The line has some cute little clips and fabric brads with little animal embellishments. Basic Grey never disappoints me!

Dog Park

 Today we decided to take Rylie to our apartment dog park for the first time. We have never really taken her on a long walk yet, since she was recovering from being spayed until recently. She was so excited to be out and about. Running everywhere and sniffing everything. Once we got to the dog park and let her loose, her and Bailey ran all over. It was great to see them get to let loose and play and jump.

Bailey hasn't been running like this in a long time. When it gets so hot here she really can't stand to be outside in the heat more then a few minutes. Her hair just makes her way to hot! She ran laps around the park and Rylie couldn't keep up at all!

I took a few pictures of some sunflowers that were close by while the pups played. Once beautiful thing about Texas is that there are always flowers blooming randomly everywhere. Around Carrollton there seem to always be sunflowers.

Rylie was very interesting in the branches from a huge willow tree that hung over the fenced in area. When Chuck had a branch she kept jumping up to grab it. She eventually won the game and successfully ran off with the branch! She is quite a jumper!

Fall

For one of my AGC daily challenges we have to write about our favorite fall activities. Fall is my absolute favorite season of the year. The air cools down enough to wear cozy sweaters and jeans, but not quite cold enough for a winter coat. Football season starts and fans come out of the walls to cheer for OSU even here in Texas. There are bonfires and smores almost every weekend at someones house. Festivals of all sorts are around! In Ohio we had the Oktoberfest. Here there are festivals just about every weekend for each of the small cities surrounding Dallas. There's trick-or-treating with all the cute kids dressed in their costumes. But my absolute favorite part of fall only happens for a few days but once a year. The changing of the leaves. Unfortunately that doesn't really happen in here in Texas, and it is one of the things I miss most about Ohio. Galion has so many trees, it is just beautiful during the fall. I remember each year as a kid looking out my bedroom window everyday at the trees, waiting for them to start changing. I knew as soon as I saw the hint of yellows and oranges, I just had a week till the leaves would be gone. I love the pretty colors that seem to be everywhere in the fall, with the leaves on the ground and in the trees. I always loved how our street looks in the fall. My mom took this picture of out street last year I think. Always makes me a little homesick looking at it. :)

Balloon Festival

This weekend is the Plano Balloon Festival. They have it every September. Twice a day several balloons take off from a local park. There is a live band playing and booths of neat items and carnival food all around. We figured we would arrive an hour before the balloons were set for their evening take off so we could find a good seat to watch from. Well we got off the highway and slowly made our way to the parking area. The traffic was awful! It took us 45 minutes to make it to the first parking lot. We then had to walk 2 miles to the launching zone. We had no idea it was that far! So we missed the take off obviously, but I did get some good pictures of the pretty balloons anyways!

After walking through the booths and getting a lemonade, we noticed there was one balloon still getting ready to take off. So I got a few pics of the take off. We had a great time and got lots of exercise walking around.

Suprise Storm

Yesterday I came home from work and the sun was shining. it was beautiful out! As I took the pups out for their routine walk I do everyday when I get home, the wind started picking up. And by picking up I mean blowing like crazy! Clouds came out of no where along with lightening and thunder! I looked over and saw this sight. It looked so odd with the clouds swirly above it. I ran inside and took this pic from my balcony right before it dumped rain on us! I was a bit worried it would rain too much for the Balloon Fest, but it only rained for about two hours then it stopped and the sun came back out. Gotta love Texas weather!

Introducing Rylie!

So we have been looking for a playmate for Bailey. She's seemed really lonely since our neighbor dog Zoey moved away. So Chuck talked me into another dog. I was really hesitant at first, but I still thought it was a good idea. We decided to get a dog from the West Side Animal Leeague in Fort Worth, which is where we got Bailey. We found a cute little collie mix and drove all the way to see her at one of their adoption clinics. Its over an hour drive one way for us! Well turned out she wasn't at the clinic. Her foster mom agreed to meet us, but we couldn't take her home because she had ringworm and was being treated. Which was totally fine, but that was about 4 months ago. We had trouble contacting the lady to check on the dog, and when we did get ahold of her she gave us attitude. So we decided to just look around.

Then I saw an add on Craig's List for Denton Animal Shelter about there puppies that were in danger of euthenasiau. The pretty puppy was one of them. She can't be but 2 months old! She's super cute! They called her Cherry, but we didn't really like that. Even though she is so young she shows just some small signs of abuse. She is scared to death when you hook her to a leash or if you raise your hand just right. But I think since she is so young, we might be able to make her forget about all those bad times. Rylie is some sort of terrier mix according to the vet.

Bailey gets along with her great. Sometimes she seems a little stand offish about her, but I think that is because she is used to being the playful puppy, when now she is the one being pounced on! The play tug of war with BoBo which is awesome, except they have already destroyed it! Bailey seems a little jealous at times, but I think she'll get used to having another dog around soon. They play nonstop. I'm so glad we got Rylie. I love them both so much!

Lovin' Distressin'

I made this LO for one of my Anything Goes Challenge daily challenges. The challenge was to use the colors black, purple, orange, and green, use a picture with a small child, distress, two different fonts, and to hand cut an embellishment. That just screamed Halloween to me!

So I looked through all kinds of Halloween pics I have hoping to find some cute ones of my nephew or nieces. Well turns out I don't have any Halloween pictures of them! So I settled on this adorable photo of myself and my brother. He was the cat, and I was the mouse. It was my first Halloween! Aren't we a pair of cuties!

I settled on the papers right away. The are My Mind's Eye and I had recently purchased them from Hobby Lobby. I don't usually use too much purple which is suprising for me, since it is my favorite color! So I really didn't know where to go from there, I just kinda stared at the papers for an evening. Then last night I decided I would try burning the edges of some of the green. I really like how that turned out! Although Chuck thought I was burning the house down! I inked the entire border after I stitched the papers together, and then I glimmer misted all over, doing some masking as well. Now, up until last night I wasn't real impressed by Glimmer Mists. Everyone's always talking about how wonderful they are, and how the love them. Well I just had this one color, Lavender Fields. I had won it back on National Scrapbooking Day from scrapbook.com. Everytime I used it I didn't really see the shimmer I thought I would, and I just didn't care for it. So this time, I took a little more time with it. I made sure I shook it up real well and just took my time and went with it. I liked how it looked so much I just ordered some nuetral colors to play with!

I hand cut all the flowers and then inked them. I had mixed some stickles in the ink on my craft sheet first, to give them some sparkle. I really love how they look. Its hard to see in the picture, but in real life they really have a pretty shimmer to them. I love how this LO turned out! It's totally not my normal style and outta my scrappy box, but I love it so much! I'm super proud!

New Inks!

So recently I purchased some new Tim Holtz distress inks, and I was really excited to try them out. Among the colors I got were Broken China, Spiced Marmalade, and Shabby Shutters. I used an awesome sketch I found here http://sketchsavvy.blogspot.com.

I decided each square I used I was going to try a different inking tecnique of some sort. The first one I simple put ink on my craft sheet, and then sprayed it with water. Then I placed my square on the ink and got a neat water color effect. On two of the squares I did some embossing over the inks, as I had also just bought my first heat gun and embossing powder. The light green square I inked with the Shabby Shutters, then I used a Hero Arts stamp with embossing ink to hold water on it. I then stamped the square. My favorite of the squares is the one I used stickles with. I placed ink on my craft sheet and also some stickles. I used my heat gun to dry it and it slightly melted. And the very last one I did some masking.

This layout I made for two challenges on scrapbook.com. The Anything Goes Challenge weekly which was mega challenging for me this week, and then the Use Your Supplies challenge week #4, Something Blue. I used only blue and white to meet the twist requirements for the Use Your Supplies. For the AGC I had to have certain things on my LO, atleast 10 out of 14. I did the bare minimum of 10. I spent all night on this layout! I really love how it turned out though. I love the banner, and I usually don't ever make banners!