We Love to Laugh

This has been a hectic couple of weeks. Whenever I feel like I have my head above water, I find an enormous pile of papers I overlooked or I hit a wall of fatigue. I only have two weeks left in my pregnancy, so I know it's normal. But it's hard to have so little energy and so much to do. Thank goodness for my mom. She is a wonderful mother and an even better grandmother. She is so devoted to our son, and he adores her.

These pictures are from an afternoon out at lunch. The two of them were sucking on lemons and laughing about how tart they were. Then they would dare each other to taste some more. This is what it's like with them all the time. My mom is always up for some silly, funny mischief, and so is Ben.

As I mentioned elsewhere, I recently bought a Silhouette Cameo. When I started getting interested in scrabpbooking two years ago, I thought the Cameo was well out of my price range. I bought the Cricut, mostly because I found a very good deal on ebay and it seemed reasonable at the time. But the Cricut Personal seemed so limiting once I had it. I was only able to cut 6x12 paper which probably doesn't seem like a huge issue at first, but it became more of a problem as I found more projects I wanted to try.

When Studio Calico offered a class especially for Cameo owners, I figured this was my cue to treat myself to a new machine and try it out. So far the class is excellent. I wish they weekly tutorials and sketches instead of challenges, but I am still enjoying it. Sasha Farina has a beautiful layout included in the class PDFs, and I used her tutorial as a layout for this sketch. She cut the image, used it as a misting mask. She traced a sewing guide and stitched all the way around the inside and outside of heart, and then cut out the misted image. If it sounds incredible, that's because it is. It is a beautiful technique. I can't link to it or post it here because the PDF is for paid subscribers only, but you can see a sneak peak on her blog. I took a slight detour and traced mine instead (I'm not much of a sewer, but I'm sure I'll come around at some point). I love how the final image came out.