Remembering an Aunt and Uncle

As you’ve seen in my previous posts, I have a very large extended family.  But you’ve only seen my maternal side.  Today I am scrapping about my father’s side of the family.  My aunt died last Friday morning and her death is really what brought on this week of Heritage scrapping.  When I got home from work that afternoon, I pulled out a couple of boxes of old photos because I knew I had the photo I used for today’s blog and I wanted to look at it again.

I never knew my aunt and uncle as they are in this photo. In this photo they are newly wed, very young and you can see how happy they are.  By the time I came along they already had three boys and were knee deep in their farming and feeding their cattle. 

I can remember going out to my aunt and uncle’s farm, the smell of manure thick in my nose while I tried to keep up with my cousins who never wanted to play Barbies or house!  No, it was soldiers with their little green army men or cowboys and indians.  If we were outside, we tramped over haystacks and around the the cattle pens which always stirred the cows up and often caused my uncle to check out what we were up to. 

I remember standing on a stool while I watched her make dumplings for the chicken and dumplings we were having for supper.  I remember her telling me that “once you put those dumplings in the pot, you put the lid on and don’t ever take the lid off and NEVER,NEVER stir it.”  Her tacos were incredible!

She had an infectious belly laugh that was a delight to hear.  

My uncle lost his arm to a corn harvester about 45 years before he passed away.  He was lucky to have survived.  When I decided to get married, there was no question that my dad would perform the ceremony.  So with my dad doing the ceremony, I asked my uncle to give me away.  I proudly walked down the aisle on his hook arm.  He was pretty proud too. 

With my aunt gone, its seems to have marked the end of my Dad’s family for me even though there is a younger brother who still is still living.  Her death made me miss my Dad and grieve all the years we’ve lost. 

If you’ve read all the way to here, bless you.  Now for the LO

This is only a 1 page LO.  I don’t do 1 page LOs very often, but with old photos, sometimes you may only have one photo. 

I left the picture uncropped after I scanned it and printed it off.  The background is part of the story..  We came from southeastern Colorado and it is dry and often there’s not much green to see unless it’s yucca plants, cactus, or tumble weeds.  You can see this in the picture. 

The paper is once again from my stash and is old, old, old.  The flower border is from Gypsy Wandering and is cut at 11” long.  I cut two of them.  I cut extra flowers and I curled the petals of the extra flowers to give more dimension and attached them on top of the original flowers in the border.  I put three dashes down the middle of each petal because I thought it looked good. The jewels are from Paper Studio.  Oh, and the font is Gypsy Font. 

I love the way this turned out. 

What I am learning about scrapping old photos is that the most important part of the work that I do putting these photos in a scrapbook is the journaling.  Make plenty of room for it. 

Here are some close ups:

Thanks for stopping by!  Please leave a comment.  I love to read them. 

A Big Family

As I promised I’ll be doing some Heritage scrapping this week and sharing my process of getting these photos in a scrapbook. 

When I received the photo of my mother’s large family, I was thrilled.  I’d never seen it before and was happy that I could recognize most of the people in it.  After I got the photo, I immediately wrote my aunt and asked her if she could put together a list of the people in the photo which leads me to one of the biggest reasons to scrap those old photos.  Let your children know who those people are and why the picture was important to you. Most of my journaling for this layout is just a head by head account of the people in the photo.  Now my children will be able to look at it and figure out who is who. 

This paper is Daisy D’s and it is certainly vintage.  I think the pink is a bit different for heritage photos but the paper has an aged appearance and the design is from the 40’s or 50’s.  I think it reflects the way I feel about my mother’s family. 

I used just a touch of brown Coredinations cardstock to mat the photos and as shadows for some of the embellishments. The darker pink is Bazzill and is raspberry. The light pink is just cardstock I had and is probably from Hobby Lobby.

When it came to the title of this page I chose one word. Family—there was no other word for it.  I have this huge heritage that I want to share with my children and their children.  I used Ashleigh’s Alphabet with the cursive feature and since there is no shadow feature for the cursive option, I played around with it on my Gypsy until I got it the way I wanted.  The F is cut at 3 1/2” and the rest of the word at 1".   I liked the way it looked when I was finished.  All the swirls are cut from Ashleigh’s Alphabet too.  I used my threading water punch on the mat for the big picture and then then faux stitched it.  The word Family was pop dotted to lift it away from the flourish behind it. 

The label holder is from my stash and I’ve long ago forgotten where I got it.  I attached it with brads and placed a piece of ephemera that I also bought a very long time ago.  You can also see the stickles that I added.  I have a hard time resisting the little bit of bling.  Love those Stickles.

The flowers are a mixture of Primas and Flora doodles with brads that have been sitting in my embellishment box for a long time.  It’s making me so happy that I am using up all my supplies. 

I included the photo of my mother and her twin sister to help my children make a connection between their grandmother and this rather large family.  Since my mother was a twin and photos were an not as easily acquired in the 40’s, my mother rarely had her picture taken without her twin sister.  My mother is on the left. Isn’t she pretty!  I think this photo was taken about two years after the big family picture was taken.  They had gone away to boarding school and the picture was taken there. 

The scalloped edge on the mat of this picture was accomplished with an old Fiskars template.  I traced it and hand cut it so that it would have even corners.  It’s always good to pull out old tools and let them see the light of day again. 

The most important thing about Heritage scrapping is to leave a record behind that tells who, what when and where. I especially wanted to leave a list of whom the picture included.  Believe it or not but there are several sisters who are not in the picture and one brother who died in infancy.  There was a grand total of 18 children. My mother and her twin were born third from last.  She died at the age of 75 and her oldest sister died one month later.  Estella was 99 years old.  When my mother was born the oldest siblings were already married and had children of their own.  What a family!  I am proud to call them mine. 

I’m sharing my busyness!

I know it’s been a few days since I’ve posted anything here but it’s not because I’ve not been busy.  I’ve been very busy. 

First of all I stopped everything yesterday to make my husband a card for his birthday and I think it turned out OK despite a couple of booboos that I had to cover up.  He liked it any way.  I was inspired by the Cuttlebug Spot challenge to use the hot.  I’d been turning and turning my brain to come up with an idea for Jim’s card.  The minute I read Nilda’s post on the Cricut messageboard I knew exactly what I was going to do.  Executing it was another thing.  My inspirations don’t always turn out how I see them in my head, but I made a couple of adjustments and it was acceptable.  So with out further delay, here it is. 

   I used the Pooh font and the flames from Cars.  I turned the flames right side up varied the sizes and welded them with my Design Studio.  I used some Stickles to make them look more like fire and popped them away from the body of the card.  The OOH La La is a studio G stamp and the border around the round element is a Perfectly Clear stamp.  He loved it. 

On with Kassidy’s  album which I’ve been plodding away at.  Here’s what I’ve accomplished so far and I hope to almost finish it except for little details tonight. 

These two page are pretty simple.  Really I’ve done the whole album with little more than the DCWV Baby Girl stack, cardstock, my Cricut and the carts I have and a few very basic embellishments—Stickles, buttons, ribbon, and some jewels. 

  This layout will fall during the months of October and so despite it being a baby layout I tried to add a bit of fall so that my niece can use it to record Kassidy’s 1st Halloween and Thanksgiving.  I used my Martha Stewart Threading Water punch on this page and the rest is my Cricut. 

These layouts will fall during Kassidy’s 1st Christmas and are the only layouts I used any other embellishments that I didn’t create myself.  These are Jolee’s that I had in my stash. 

The above layouts are made so she can winter photos. The snowflakes are from Joys of the Season and I stickled them and used my white pen to give them some more definition.  

Again, I tried to make pages according to the holiday that falls in that month.  Valentines Day will give Melissa a chance to use photos that follow that theme.  

I didn’t really have a theme for this but in March everyone is looking forward to spring so I tried to make a bright, cheerful layout.