Panties showing!!!

My venture into scrapbooking started about 4 years ago. Over the years most of our childhood photos have been taken out of photo albums and some have become quite damaged along the way. I thought I would scan them all in, fix them in photoshop, then print them all out again. Once I started printing, I decided that mom needed them to be "pretty"...not just stuck in an album. So I walked into a local scrapbook store to find some pretty paper....and that was the end for me! OK....the end of "that" phase of my life and the beginning of a whole new world!

I can't even begin to remember what I bought that day...but when I got home I had no where to put it! So of course, I had to run out and buy storage stuff immediately! But I did start to scrap using an 8 1/2" x 11" format. This is one of the first layouts that I did....and I still like it. Although it's quite plain....you still get the idea!

Colleen and I were sitting on the back steps of the house we started out in. You can see that it needs to be painted...I'm sure there was no money for anything like paint! You can also see that I have really BAD hair once again! Yes...that has been the one constant throughout my life.....bad hair! We wore little dresses as was the custom of the early 50s. We were playing with a ball and you can see the leaves were blowing around. Most of our photos are undated, but I would guess this was in the fall of 1954. Colleen would be almost 2 and I would be almost 3. She is so fair and blonde, I have such a summer tan with my pitch black hair....hard to imagine that we are sisters just one year apart in age!

The bottom photo was printed on vellum, then trimmed around the edges. I still like playing with vellum - it's fabulous with alcohol inks and great for openings in aperture cuts. But to print in black & white or sepia tone on vellum....just perfect for vintage photos. (Oh gag! Am I really old enough to be part of a "vintage" photo"? LOLOL!)

I still play with Colleen. Just nowadays, when we get together, we play with Art Clay Silver and dichroic glass. But we learned how to play in the early 50s, on Grandma's farm, where the wind would blow and our panties would show!

Where did all the tulips go....

Everyone has a story to tell. Sometimes we tell it by writing, sometimes we tell it in our photos. At times we tell it in our scrapbook pages, and at times, we tell it in poems.

My Grandma Hazel Moore wrote poems all of her life. I remember her trying so hard to teach me how to write a poem. She would sit an make up words that rhymed so I could write poems. I remember laughing and saying, "oh Grandma! That's NOT a word!" And she would say, "Well, Jennifer, if COULD be!" She lived 2 miles down the road from us for most of my childhood and she was a huge influence on who I am today. She taught me how to play. Oh my, she would just be so thrilled if she were still alive....I can almost hear her say, "Oh Jennifer, I wish I had spent my whole life playing with you!"

Little girls and tulips grow as fast as fast can be!!! Where did all the tulips go...did they grow old with me?

I have grown older over the years, but in my heart, I am still that little girl who played in the fields on the farm. In my heart, I am still picking tulips and checking the insides for bugs.

All about me

Well, that was a phase of scrapbooking a couple of years ago where you created a book about yourself or did a layout "all about me". I totally got tired of looking at them because it was most likely a photo of someones eyes, or one eye and half a nose....not that pleasant of a photo if you stop and really think about it! LOL!

But I did do a layout that was all about me. Literally. It was about 50 years of my bad hair...with almost 50 tiny photos of me, mostly confirming that I was born with bad hair, have had bad hair my entire life, and continue to have extremely bad hair....especially when someone has a camera near me. It's like there is some magnetic force that communicates between my hair and a camera....it just goes bad!

I thought I'd post a scan of that layout because after much giggling that turned into laughter over the badness of my hair over time...I truly think everyone should do something like this. It puts into perspective so much more than just bad hair. In one glance, I can see bad weight days, bad tan days, bad makeup days.....yep, I have had a lot of bad days in my life....most of them were days when there was a camera around!

Someone said the solution is to be the person behind the camera. But you know, I really want my kids to know what their mom looked like. And it would be nice if my great, great, great, great grandkids knew that they are not the only ones who have bad hair...that they inherited it from me! :o)

It's also a fun way to look at my life in a nutshell. 50+ years all on a 12x12 page....so even though it's about my bad hair, my bad weight, my bad makeup, my bad tan lines....it really is "all about me"!