Elegant Mini Albums

"Artbooking Made Easy" is a wonderful series from Close To My Heart, created for your viewing pleasure in order to make using our "Artbooking" Cricut cartridge, well...easy! Kristine Widtfeldt is my favorite CTMH personality (sorry Monica!), and in this video, she shows you two of the many mini albums you can create with the "Artbooking" cartridge - and a helpful hint at the end! Sit back, watch and enjoy...then imagine the possibilities.....

Party Favor Inspiration!

This week, I have a Close To My Heart video for you. My computer is having major "issues", so I have to work on that before anything else. Hopefully, it will be resolved by next week and I'll be back with a full post. Until then, this video is one of my favorites - Kristine is awesome, and so are the adorable party favors!! These are also featured in the Spring-Summer 2014 Idea Book on pages 108 and 110. Enjoy!

An Anniversary

Today is the tenth anniversary of my grandmother’s death. She was the last of my grandparents to pass away. I mention this because I am in the business of memory-keeping. I have kept diaries and journals, and have a dozen scrapbooks filled with the memories and stories of my life. But my grandmother – she left nothing. After her passing, I asked my mother if she had found any journals or scrapbooks that my grandmother had kept, but she found nothing. Now that she is gone, I can’t ask her about her life growing up, her favorite things, her favorite memories – and she left nothing behind to clue me in. Of course, these are the things I should have asked about while she was still alive, but it never occurred to me that she wouldn’t be around someday to ask (weird, right?).

Therefore, today, I urge you to take some time out of your busy schedules to talk to your family members, your friends, and/or those closest to you. Find out their stories and write them down. You don’t have to scrapbook them, or if you do, it doesn’t have to be an artistic masterpiece. Just get the memories down on paper, because someday, perhaps sooner than you expect, the memories will no longer be there, and will be lost forever. And that would truly be a shame.

I did this layout, dedicated to my deceased grandmother, on the first anniversary of her death. On the left-hand side of the layout is a poem that my grandmother had written to her mother on her mother’s birthday. On the right, is the following journaling:

“The first time I read this poem, written by my grandmother, was on the day of her funeral. I was given the honor of reciting it during the church service in her memory. I love this poem because it gives me a brief glimpse into the life of my grandmother that I never knew. First that she was a writer of poetry, and second, that she had a deep love, admiration and respect for her mother. From the poem I can also tell that it was written after she was married, and after she had had at least one child of her own.

Now it is the first anniversary of my grandmother’s death on May 7^th, 2004, just two days after her 84^th birthday. This year, one year later, the anniversary falls on the day before Mother’s Day. This poem may have been written for her mother, but it might as well have been written for herself. All of the same things are true, and she was loved, admired and respected more than anyone else I know.

I really wish that I had taken the time to get to know her as a person, and not just my grandmother. We talked about day-to-day things, but never really talked about her life, her dreams, her past. When you’re young, you lose sight of the fact that the people in your life actually had lives of their own before you came into it. It’s still hard to believe, even after a year, that I won’t be seeing her again in this life. Most every childhood memory I have is at her house in North Adams. She was one of those people that you just assumed would always be there.

I wish that she could have met my daughter in person, but at least she got to see her in video that my parents had taken. I am also glad that I had a chance to be there with her in the hospital before she passed away, so that I could tell her how much I loved her, and for her to know that I was there. She may not have heard me talking, but I know she knew I was there, and I’m sure that meant the world to her. That much I am happy for.

My grandmother was a kind and loving woman, with a great sense of humor! She will be missed today, tomorrow and always.”      – May 7, 2005

May you continue to rest in peace, Gram. I will love and miss you always.