Merry Christmas From My Family to Yours!

Enjoy this little slide show of some of our favorite highlights of 2009. We hope you all are having a wonderful Christmas season!

Big Changes Around Here

Hi everyone, as some of you already know, I have recently started designing for Creative Memories. I have loved working with them so far and am very grateful for the opportunity to do so. The people I've been working with are just fabulous and the number of paid opportunities has been greater than I ever imagined when I signed on to them. I feel so blessed to be working with them.

However, as many of you also know, I only have so much free time to devote to my hobbies. My fantastic husband and 3 sweet kiddos are my real job and I like to devote myself to their needs as much as possible. I have been blessed with many wonderful possible job opportunities in both the scrapbooking world and in photography and I simply can't do them all if I intend to keep my family my first priority... so, this brings me to my point:

Something has to give.

I hate doing this because photography has been such a fun and delightful way for me to get to know so many wonderful families in this area. I've made a lot of friends and had the pleasure to be a part of so many good times:

The joy and wonder of lots of brand new babies.

The romance of weddings and engagements.

The celebration of many children's' milestones.

The excitement of seniors graduating or missionaries going out to serve.

And most of all--the love of so many happy families.

In giving up photo sessions, I know I am really going to miss all of that!

I won't however, miss all the mountains of editing and the carpel tunnel that goes with it. I will also feel better with the knowledge that you sweet people will get much better pictures with other photographers. It eats at me to know where I'd like my skill level to be as a photographer, and to also know I have such a long way to go before I get there. I really appreciate all of you who have let me practice on your families! My own family photos have improved so much as a result of all you patient people! Thank you!

Now before anyone goes into complete panic mode on me, let me add a couple of exceptions to my no more photo shoots rule.

First off, if you have already scheduled a session with me, we will still do it. I'm just not adding any more to my calender.

Second, each fall I will still do 1 Saturday of mini sessions. I will try to fit in about 8-10 families. I will schedule these the same way I did last year on a first come first serve basis, with the booking starting September 1st. These will cost $20 next year, and will only be open to friends and ward members.

Third, I will still do weddings, open houses, and bridals for friends, previous clients, and ward members, etc. Just please don't refer me to your cousin's sister's friend because, I'll say no. Rates will stay the same.

Forth, I will from time to time post an opening here on my blog. This will just be as time permits and when I feel the creative need to scratch the photography bug. I expect there will be about 3-4 of these per year. I will post a time, date, and location here; then give it away to the first taker.

Now I know this will not be a popular post, so let me add a few things to make it more fun. How about a look at some of the sessions I've done this year that never made it to the blog? I didn't blog many of them this year and I should have. So I'll make up for that now. Here are my favorite photos from many sessions that I didn't blog (both recent and some not so recent):

So thanks again everyone for sharing your families, memories, and moments with me! Hopefully I'll be seeing many of you again each fall for a mini session.

Did you all see April's digi kit?

If not you are missing out! It's called Lil Pumpkin and you can download it for free here: http://taffyappledesigns.blogspot.com/ This kit is way cute, and even got me to dust off my very rusty digi skills:

I'm much more of a paper and glue kind of girl, but now and then I get the urge to play with pixels. Yesterday was one of those days. I just happened to be blog surfing and came across April's kit and this free template from oscraps.com just a few days after taking these photos of Blake in the pumpkin patch at the Oil Ranch. Fate I tell ya. :)

This site also had a good tutorial on how to use these templates if you are a photoshop (or in my case Gimp) novice. Lots of other great stuff to check out there too! Anyhow, thanks for sharing your awesome design skills April! I love the kit!

We are getting excited for Halloween around here...

...and I think I'm going to have the cutest monkey on the block:

We did a test run of Spencer's costume the other day--I just needed to make sure would fit. I actually bought it online for Blake 2 years ago, but it arrived too late to use. I've been saving it for Spencer as I knew he would likely be just as much of a monkey at age 2 as Blake was. Well, the good news is that it fits perfect, and Spencer didn't hate it. He didn't love it either, but I'll take it. That's quite an improvement from his reaction to last years dragon costume. :) Ty and Blake are all set to be a Clone Trooper and Darth Vader, but they don't get to do test runs :) Anyways, I hope everyone has a great Halloween!

Just a little bit of new stuff....

I don't have a lot of time today--haha, when do I ever? :) -- but I did want to post some recent bridals. I love doing bridals! I've been lucky to have such beautiful brides and it is always exciting to talk to them about their plans for the big day. Everyone of them just glows with happiness and this sweet young lady was no different! I adored her dress! I've wanted to do a bride with a really full skirt for awhile now, and we did have some fun with it! We went out to the Mercer Botanic Gardens on a Tuesday afternoon, and it was the perfect location!

Also here are my layouts (and a card) I did for scrapbooks.com this month. Just click for a closer look:

Thanks for visiting today!

A few quick projects to share

How about something seasonal for a change? Here is a little Halloween card I made last week:

And something from completly the wrong season. lol (Hey, what can I say? Thats the way it works with the magazines). Melissa Frances Supplies on this:

And something I made for my living room. More Melissa Frances here: And the rest of these are my KMA layouts from August and September, click to read the journaling:

Thanks for stopping by today!

Turning 5

I know it has been forever since I last blogged. Sorry about that. There isn't a really good reason for it--I have no intention of just letting my blog go--but life got super busy once school started and something had to get set the back burner for awhile. This will be the first of many short catch up posts. At least that is my intent at the moment! LOL--but if life gets ultra busy again you will know it by my lack of posting :) Anyhow, I wanted to put out a few photos from Blake's 5th birthday. As I am sure you can tell it was a pirate themed party! Blake was super excited to do "good pirate stuff" for his birthday so Marc and I had a good time thinking up "good pirate stuff" to do. First off we dressed our boys and guests up in some fun pirate gear. (Thank goodness for Blake's birthday being around Halloween. The dollar store had these hat/sword, eye patch combo sets).

They read pirate stories, learned pirate songs, went on a treasure hunt, had a water balloon cannon fight, punch balloon war, played pin the treasure on the map, and fought off attacking buccaneers (Me and Marc :) ) hopefully a good time was had by all. We were sorry to miss some friends due to swine and stomach flues, however, we're glad everyone is on the mend and we haven't gotten these bugs yet! (knock on wood).

On to more photos:

Pirate stories and songs:

Water Balloons:

Tough pirates:

Pin the treasure chest on the map:

I wanted to make a pirate cake, however Blake wanted strawberry cupcakes with strawberry frosting; so we compromised, strawberry cupcakes with strawberry frosting, in gold liners. :)

Gotta love a boy who still gets excited about getting clothes as well as Legos!

and treasure hunting: Thanks for stopping by, and hopefully this is the end of my blogging break :)

Good to be back--and with photos!

Well, I'm back from vacation and finally blogging again! We had a fabulous time on our trip, and my next post (hopefully tomorrow) will go into details, but today has to be a fast post as I have to run a whole bunch of errands. So today I'm just going to post some photos from our brief photo shoot we did one night of our trip.

My entire family gets together so rarely that we always try to find the time for a photo shoot, that way we can all have updated photos of everyone, as well as a new group shot. I'm afraid that this year Spencer was less than enthusiastic about them and we pretty much had to give up on getting anything with him in it after a few minutes. Such a bummer as my brother likes taking photos just as much as I do and it was my only chance to have him take some for a year. Oh well, Spencer's behavior was mostly my fault as our crazy and busy schedule really tired him out--plus he is a two year old boy, and I've yet to met a 2 year old boy who likes his picture being taken :) Perhaps next year will go better. Ty and Blake were easy enough--they have had lots of training in the "smile please" department :) I only have to do a small amount of bribing to get them to change into their clean shirts. Here are a few my brother got while we tried to hold Spencer down for a moment.

Hopefully next year Spencer will smile too. These photos don't really capture just how much Spencer had had it--but trust me--he was beyond done at this point. I'm just glad he made it through the group shot first. That is the one photo he did well for!

And here are my dear sweet parents who made this trip possible! Thanks Mom and dad--It was such a great trip! And here are a few of the photos I took. This one is of my sister and her husband on this awesome bridge. Now why don't we have bridges like that around here? I would love to have this location nearby--it was perfect! Same bridge--this time my brother and his adorable family. I did a lot of them as, in contrast to my kids, their kiddos were in a great mood! Love my nephew's squinty smile! So cute! This one is my favorite of the bunch. I don't know what it is, but kids always seems fascinated when they see their parents kiss! I think my sister or brother-in-law took this one. I was walking back to the car with Spencer who was screaming at the top of his lungs at this point.

I love it when I can catch a family just talking and laughing together!

I Love this one too!

And I haven't scrapbooked in a while--so yesterday I threw a little something together. Another kraft background on this one. Boy do I love kraft! Thank goodness I can get it in packs of 25 because I go through it like crazy! These papers are more Cosmo Cricket Early Bird, with a bunch of Chatterbox and Queen and Company embellishments. Just click to see it bigger.

There will be more trip details and photos tomorrow or the next day, plus the winner of my giveaway, so stop by again soon! And have a great day!