OMG, almost thee weeks since I last posted to this blog! A lot has happened since then.

For one, we've come to the decision that we're not ready to open Scrapbook Junction the online scrapbooking store. We'd have to sell about $150 a month worth of stuff just to break even, and we can't afford the possibility of that not happening. So, maybe someday. Just not yet.

That's forced me to reconsider the purpose of this blog. I have, up until now, posted my stamping projects on this blog and left off those that did not involve stamping. That's because one thing I'd planned to sell on Scrapbook Junction was acrylic stamps. I hoped to get people excited about the cool things you can do with them, and then say "here's where you can buy them." Now, I have to suggest another great website, Two Peas. And it does not have the same stamps I would have had.

I'm going to go ahead and keep doing that for now. Maybe I'll add my non-stamping projects. Maybe I'll go ahead and order from my would-be supplier the idea books I had hoped to sell and start lifting LOs from them, so I can post them.

They are "classics." I mean, some of them are ally old. I was looking forward to showing you some new ways to update the ideas presented. That is, when my budget allowed me to buy more. Even though they've been around, I only have one. Clean and Simple by Cathy Zielske. Love it, but haven't used it much lately.

Another disappointing and unexpected event of late was the death of Bob, my stepchildren's stepfather. He died on March 14 at his home in Ohio. We got along well with him and my husband's first wife, Lynn, as they divorced long ago and moved on. Both Don and I, and our children's other parents, had been married about 10 years. We had seen Bob & Lynn exactly three times prior to his death.

To help the kids (and Lynn) we decided to fly back to Ohio for the funeral. They're grown kids, but still, this death was hard on them. They needed help from Dad, who just last year felt the pain of losing his own Dad.

This trip put quite a kabash on my scrapbooking until today. Death of a close friend is a mojo killer, and Don we needed all the money we had at the time to pay for the trip.

Now mojo is back, and funds for new supplies are back in limited quantity. Here is one of the two pages I did today. It's from our daughter Holly's wedding. The couple with Don is his sister and brother-in-law. I used stash on this one. I only bought new cardstock so far, and I'll move onto some layouts with it tomorrow.

Yes, I'm sharing the one on which I stamped the title! This is in Walnut Stain, my second color of that beautiful Tim Holtz distress ink. My other one is Peeled Paint (not Shabby Shutters, despite what I said earlier. I used the Peeled Paint to "grunge up" my other layout.

Flourishes and flowers

One of my favorite embellishments, lately, has been the flower-decked flourish. Here's how I make them.

First, stamp a flourish. You might even want to do this directly onto your card or layout - if your're brave enough!

You then can cut out the flourish - or not! - and add just a few flowers.

Or you can leave the flourish as it is, and fill in the white space with a lot of flowers, so that just a little bit of flourish shows through, as at right.

Below, left is a layout where I cut the flourish from a separate sheet of cardstock, and adhered it to the layout.

And below is another layout, where I stamped the flourish very lightly onto the layout, then filled the curve in with flowers.

You can use any kinds of flowers you like (well, except maybe real!) and add more embellishments too. On my Salt Lake City layout, I've used silk flowers. These are the ones that are sold on the plastic stems. You just pull them off the stems, and they're flat enough to use on a scrapbook page, or you can layer them as I did on the flowers that aren't on the flourish. I attached these flowers with little silver brads.

On my Father of the Bride layout, I have flowers made by three different scrapbook manufacturers. The fuschia flowers I use as centers on mny of the medium-sized flowers, as well as the other small flowers, are Primas I've had for years. The larger pink flowers are the Recollections line at Michael's. The green and white flowers are by Hero Arts. The collection I bought also comes with brown and green flowers. Those, along with touches of yellow and pink, were the perfect colors for this wedding. I bought them specifically for scrapbooking this wedding, but I've already done almost 20 other wedding pages, so my package hasnearly run out. I've added "leaves" to the white flowers by using a ribbon from the wedding (actually from a present my sweet stepdaughter gave me at the rehearsal).