A Hobby Challenge

This is probably gonna be a boring post, but this is what I've been up to. Most of you know that scrap booking and making cards is one of my hobbies, and no one knows more than Chuck just how much money I have invested into all of my "toys" to support said hobby.  So last week he came home from work and said, "There's a guy from work that's gonna be retiring.........."  Say no more, I already know what you're gonna ask.  You need me to make a potluck dish, right?  Wrong.  "I need you to use all your thousands of dollars worth of scrap booking stuff to make a card."

"And it needs to be a fishing theme."

"And it needs to have extra pages inside it for all the signatures."

Okay then...........not a problem.

Spent the first few days looking for ideas on the internet.  Found lots of ideas and inspiration, but in the end I went with a design that I found in one of my card pattern books (in my scrap booking "library").  Then I had to figure out how I was gonna incorporate that design into a fishing theme.  Here was my problem:

As you can see from my fish stamp inventory sheet, I don't have a very big selection of fish to choose from.  They were all the wrong style except for that little tiny one in the upper left-hand corner.  

So I proceeded to play with that one.

This is what I came up with.

A cute idea, but it was not manly, and plus I was having problems with masking the trees behind him.  I gave up on that idea.  Chuck said he wasn't too keen on that bear anyway.  He suggested an outdoorsy theme with a cabin.

The only cabin I had showing in my inventory was this one:

With a heart on the door?  Cute.  But cute is not manly.

But wait!!  Didn't I make a Christmas card a few years ago using a different cabin stamp?

Yes I did!

Now, that's more like it!  But where, or where can I find that stamp in my stamp stash?  If I don't have it in my inventory binder, I'm at the mercy of my limited brain cells to help me remember where to find it.

It turned out to be a part of the "Backwoods" set that I had stashed with all my other wildlife stamps.

And surprise, surprise!  Lo, and behold!!  There's a fish stamp, a MANLY fish stamp that I can use!

Woo-HOO!

So, to make a long story short, I played and played and played and played, and I kept bringing the card downstairs to ask Chuck about my progress:  "Is this okay?  Is this okay?  Is this okay?"

In the end, this is what I ended up with:

I'm not 100% happy with it (could've done better on the tree background), and if I had time, I would play around with a whole different design using that fish stamp.  But Chuck said it was perfect and paid me in kisses.  So I'm done.  Whew!

In case you're wondering, the strings on the top are there because I tied the inner pages into it.  I thought the string would also serve as an embellishment for the card.  I love when things turn out to serve a dual purpose (smile).

Now that I'm looking at it, I think I could've added more trees.  The background looks too bare.  Well, I'm not touching it now!

Oh yeah, and by the way,  at first Chuck said, "what are those buttons for?"  Being a man, he wouldn't understand or appreciate embellishments (roll eyes), but I wonder, if HE doesn't appreciate them, I wonder what the recipient of this card will think of them.

 Maybe I should've left them off or put something else there.

Anyhoo, my mission is accomplished and before I put all my toys away, I made sure to update my inventory pages with those stamps.

Now next time I need a manly fish, I'll know that it even exists.

my scrap booking partner

Change Subject.

Genealogy is another past time that I like to dabble with every now and then.  It's not something I get into very often, but whenever I get the "bug" for it, I really get the bug for it.  This time it started all because me and Chuck were watching some kind of English show on BBC, and we talked about maybe going to England someday.  And that led to the conversation of his ancestors who came from there.  Before you know it, we were pulling out Civil War Pension Papers and reading all about his great-grandfather.  And of course that led into wanting to find more information and more names further back on his family tree.  So I spent days and days and days on the internet, doing some research and I learned some really exciting things.  He has ancestors from Germany too, but just in the Sutton tree, most of his English ancestors came from the Kent area.  Now it's true that you can't believe everything you read on the internet, and that is especially true with genealogy.  But from what I have found, I think that what I found is probably reliable.  And if it's true, then many of Chuck's ancestors were married in this church building:

It was built in 1062 AD.  When I saw it, I got so excited.  Just look at all those old tombstones!  They date back to the 1600s!  I wanna go there really really really bad!!

Here is another one that his ancestors were supposedly acquainted with.  A lot of babies were christianed there:

I think that one was built in the 1200s.

And then here is a church in Durham that someone may have gotten married in.  I'm not real sure if this is the right one cuz I didn't spend a whole lot of time researching this one.

Anyhoo, all of these pictures get me real excited to take a trip there to find these places.  If we could get to these places, we might find some official documents in their archives proving that these are the right places, and also proving that all the names on the family are correct, and maybe finding some of his ancestors in that graveyard.  That would be very thrilling.  I get goosebumps just thinking about it.