Maya Road and Me

Two Months

It has been a little over two months since my dad passed away. The month of May was crazy and chaotic for us but we did finally add a sense of closure to my dad's passing with a Memorial Service in my mom and dad's hometown. We wanted to keep it simple as we are not ones for big elaborate services.

This is one of the last photos we have of our family together. It was hard to believe this was only a mere 3 months before cancer took our dad away.

And up until the week of the service, we weren't sure who would speak or what they would say:

But in the end even all the big kids participated. Noah, Jonathan and Ms B each recited a coupe of verses from the Bible. The two littlest ones didn't want to. Up until I got up to the podium, I didn't know what I wanted to say. But I did bring with me this notebook I found in my parents house:

This was a binder I had in high school. I cannot remember if I stored my Spanish or AP history work in there. When I had probably chucked it out after college, my dad being the spend thrift he is, recycled it. The day before we had my dad's memorial service, I started flipping through the notebook. This was one my dad kept downstairs in the house, near where my parents received company so that my dad could show his friends what was inside:

Inside, my dad had printed out all the photos we had forwarded to him from when our son was born - his first grandbaby. My dad wasn't very technology savvy - which we often found ironic as he was an engineer. He didn't know how to download photos and save them to a card to print them elsewhere. So he did what he knew how to do. Now keep in mind, my dad was a total total spend thrift. He would never never ever print more than he needed to because the cost of ink would drive him mad. But he printed pages upon pages of photos of Noah. Every photo we sent from Noah's first weeks of life were printed and put in page protectors in that notebook. 

And with the notebook in hand and then my baby girl in the other, I spoke from the heart. The words came as they needed to about my dad's love of life and how he could fill a room with laughter over his conspiracy theories. He was a jack of many trades. Even though we were poor by many standards, hand me down clothing, home hair cuts, chandeliers that only had half the lightbulbs working by choice since my dad wanted to save electricity - it didn't matter. At the end of the day,  we were immersed in love. 

Even when my dad mumbled when I asked him for some help one day in algebra and he was telling me the teacher was trying to teach me math in some space age way, I learned to navigate life from it (I didn't ask for math help again after that though). 

And though my dad is gone, he lives on in my family and our kids. Within each of them I see a spark of my dad.

As hard as the last two months have been, we know that even this life is temporary. We look forward to the next one.

And I know my dad is sitting in Heaven smiling upon us now as we enter this new chapter in our lives.

Swap Week

So the Maya Road Design Team was issued a challenge this week - create something fabulous with only 10 Maya Road items given to them. 5 of our DT members took on the challenge and 5 designers from Paper Crafter's Library did the same! I am always fascinated by what our designers come up with. When Deb and I are creating products, half the time, we would never think of our products being used in these creative ways!

They have created some amazing projects - here is a peek at two of them:

For more, check out the DT blog for the projects . We have loved working with Paper Crafter's Library. They have such an amazing resource for paper crafters including lots of videos and more and they have been such a pleasure to work with. 

And I am definitely going to have to try this technique that Andrea from PCL shared with us in a video tutorial:

 

Enjoy!

Something To Look Forward To

It is a new week for our household, we just held a memorial service for my dad last weekend in my parents' hometown. I will have to save some thoughts on that for another post later this week. But it did bring us a sense of closure for the passing of my dad. So we now exhale and being a new chapter in all of our lives. 

With that said, I am excited to be headed to Crop and Create Burnaby to teach a class called "The Mini Method". I am so excited to be heading to teach this album:

Lots of fun techniques and ideas for a beautiful mini album. My first love is actually the cover. I think I might have to reproduce it for something to hang on baby girls' wall.

One thing about putting a class together is also planning for the kits. I started a spreadsheet to figure out what I needed and I counted over 40 different items which will be going into this album. The "yikes" part comes when I need to kit it all up. Ah well, everyone will love it though and I am happy to do it!

 

Fun things

Last week I filmed a short video tutorial for our friends at Scrapbook and Cards today sharing how you can make this cute necklace:

A fun little bird you can use also on your pages.

Here are some other variations of our wood birds stamped with our houndstooth stamp:

Here is the video if you would like to make these fun and fast birds for yourself:

 

Enjoy!

Dragonflies

 

Growing up in the South, we were accustomed to seeing a lot of dragonflies. I can still remember the first time I saw one - we had just moved to South Carolina from the North and I was fascinated by them. We didn't see them when we were little growing up!

A couple of weeks ago, I was fiddling around with some of our Maya Road zipper trim leftover bits iI had around the house and using Ronda's zipper trim butterfly tutorial as inspiration, I came up with this:

Something fun you can do in under 10 mins to dress up a card, layout or even mini album.  

We filmed the full video tutorial yesterday. I actually film this at my crafting table where I make all of my projects.  I love how this is such a beautiful embellishment you can make in very little time but people will ask you over and over how you made it and where they can get one of their own. And all you have to do is tell them "here let me show you how it is done" or "give me $5 and this one can be yours" (haha). I hope you enjoy the video!