A Little MIA Thanks to Crafsty

Side note: My first Craftsy class, Creative Titles and Journaling, just launched this week. Use this link and take $15 off of the class.

Oh my goodness. I can't believe how neglectful I've been of this blog of mine. I love blogging and have really missed it, but with all of the demands on my time lately, something had to give and unfortunately one of those things was this blog. What have I been up to? One of my main time focuses has been prepping another class for Craftsy.

What is Craftsy? It's a super cool online crafting education site that creates video lessons on all sorts of topics ranging from cake decorating to quilting to gardening and woodworking. Of course, they have a paper crafting section too. I feel so blessed that they've asked me to teach about recording and telling our stories through scrapbooking.

The week after I returned home in October from filming my first two Craftsy classes, they called and asked if I'd be interested in coming back and teaching December 17 -19. Talk about a crazy time to leave, but I didn't want to pass up the opportunity. So I just wrapped up three really fantastic days in Denver filming another class.

We starting setting up the studio mid morning on Wednesday and then after lunch we started shooting the class. Side note: Craftsy truly spoils their instructors with a buffet breakfast at the hotel each morning and catered lunches at the studio each day. Oh, and they have a lot of chocolate around just in case a little treat is needed at any time throughout the day.

Before starting the first lesson of the class, I had to snap a selfie on the set.  We had a super productive afternoon and filmed 3 lessons when were were only slated to do two. Head start for the next day!

After an afternoon of shooting lessons, I meet up with three other instuctors who were also in studios filming classes this week and we took a short walk to Larimer Square and ate at a fantastic Mexican Restaurant.  It was great to get to chat with other instructors and make new friends.

Before heading out to dinner I had to bundle up and of course, I had to take a picture documenting that I had bundled up for the cold weather since it's not something that I usually get to do at home.

After fueling up at the hotel breakfast buffet with the other Craftsy instructors, we were picked up by our make up and hair stylist and we were off the the studios.

We filmed three more lessons yesterday and then wrapped early and decided to save the last lesson for this morning. We had to have some work left for today!

With my free afternoon, I spent a couple of hours at the Denver Art Museum. They have a fantastic special exhibit right now with Cartier Jewelry and that was definitely a highlight of my museum visit. The jewels were amazing, but I couldn't imagine ever really wearing most of them. I loved viewing jewelry as art!

I was dropped off at the museum right from Craftsy, so I didn't have a chance to change into my warm boots before trekking around downtown. You think these flats were warm enough? Ha! I found one small patch of snow, but luckily there wasn't snow anywhere else.

Last night I meet up with another Craftsy instructor for dinner and then headed off on a little walk (in my warm boots!) to a movie theater to see Hunger Games. A museum and a movie in one day. What a treat! Downtown at lit up beautifully.

Today it was back to the studio to finish up the last lesson for the class and we also took a bunch of photos of layouts and cleaned everything up. Just to be sure we were eating enough, they had homemade pop tarts for us for breakfast.

My team of producers, cameraman and tech guy were all so encouraging and kind. They love what they do and it really shows.

This was such a fantastic experience! It is so cool that I get to combine my love for teaching with my passion for scrapbooking. Can't wait to have my class launch in a couple of month!

Craftsy Class Giveaway!

A few weeks ago I flew to Denver to work with Craftsy videoing an online crafting education class. The class is all about creative titles and journaling techniques that can make story telling on your layouts more meaningful.

It was a seriously exciting week and I'm excited that the class will be ready to roll later this month.

To celebrate the upcoming class launch, I'm giving away a class to one lucky winner. Just go here to enter.

I spent weeks prepping for the class creating may new layouts that featured techniques and ideas that I was excited to share and teach in the class. Once I was there, it was so much fun having hair and makeup done, getting to have my own dressing room (there was even a star on the door!) The best part was finally getting to share my ideas and layouts on screen.

Of course, I'll share here once the class goes live, but for now please be sure to enter the giveaway for free enrollment in the class. 

What We Ate - November 7

Hello! It's been several months since I've shared a "What We Ate" post and I decided that it was time to try and get back into the swing of it again. Hopefully it will motivate me to continue planning meals. I love gathering meal ideas and hope you get some inspiration on new meal ideas here.

Sunday - Grilled Pizza

Grilling pizza is probably my favorite meal to make at home right now. We've been perfecting our homemade dough recipe and I used this recipe as a starting point, but added 1/4 cup of olive oil instead of the suggested amount. The increase olive oil was inspired by this pizza dough recipe.

I quadrupled the recipe and we had enough pizza to feed 14 hungry people plus a small amount of leftovers.

Our favorite topping combo this week was a honey BBQ sauce from Trader Joe's, mozzarella, blue cheese crumbles, thinly sliced green apples and peppered bacon crumbles.

Monday - Sweet Potato and Black Bean Tacos

We love tacos around here and this week I decided to mix things up and make a veggie mix instead of meat to fill our tacos. 4/5 of us loved it, so I'm thinking it was a success.

One of my favorite things about this meal is that I heated the leftovers from breakfast and topped it with an egg. Two meals in one!

Tuesday - Oatmeal Waffles

These tend to get added into the dinner mix every couple of month and everyone loves them. Some topped them with strawberries and cream. I choose to top mine with a little almond butter and pure maple syrup. Bonus: these are gluten free if you use gluten free flour.

Wednesday - Hawaiian-Style Turkey Sloppy Joes

This recipe was recommended to me by my sister and I thought we'd give it a try. I haven't made sloppy joe's in years and it was good to have them again. This recipe had a nice sweetness added by the pineapple juice. Instead of the apple cider vinegar, I added some Trader Joe's BBQ sauce. Everyone loved it, so this is a keeper.  I cooked up a few zucchinis and a red bell pepper as a side dish.

Thursday - Trader Joe's Orange Chicken + Pei Wei

Thursday nights are always crazy around here with choir and soccer practices and I didn't have time to prep dinner. Luckily Audrey was home at dinner time and cooked up some Trader Joe's Orange Chicken plus some fried rice. I picked up a salad and lettuce wraps at Pei Wei to round out the meal.  I had 5 minutes and home, so I threw food into a plastic container and then Max and I were off to soccer. Sorry for the terrible picture - I snapped it in a dark parking lot with my phone while at at soccer practice.

There's a look at what we ate this week. Now it's time to plan out dinner for next week!

Sit Back and Relax

It seems that time and activities are coming at us at a record pace lately, so it was amazing last month to get away on a cruise and take some time to sit back and relax. One of the best things about a cruise is that you can really unplug and just enjoy time alone and with family and friends. No texting, very limited internet and a lounge chair by the pool forced me to slow down and I loved it.

One of my favorite pictures that I took was while I was in a hammock on the Disney private island, Castaway Cay, on the quiet adult only beach. My friend, Jennie, and I had gone to the beach to take a yoga class, but when we arrived, the class wasn't happening. We decided to each sit back in a hammock to wait and see if the yoga class was going to ever start. The class never started, but it turned out just fine. It was a perfect opportunity to just sit back and relax.

This layout was really fun to put together. I started out knowing that I wanted to use the picture plus the "grateful for" card on this page. Then I started trying out different 6 X6 papers to see what looked best. I just stacked them on each other to try out the patterns and then bumped the paper and the papers all fanned out a bit and had lots of pieces of patterns showing. I loved the look of all of the different patterns on the page, so I stuck them all down and had a finished page.

Layout Supplies /// November Scrapbook Circle Little Moments Kit /// Sweetness Add-on /// Home Sweet Home Add-on

Around Here >>> October 2014

Unpacking from my week away with Craftsy.

Trying to get back into the exercise habit (ran 1.5 miles + a one hour yoga class today.)

Thinking up ideas for my kids' Halloween costumes.

Wishing for some cooler fall weather.

Craving these pumpkin cookies.

Committing myself to healthy meal planning for November.

Organizing scrapbook layouts from the past four years and putting them into albums.

Reading a Nancy Drew book with Hannah for an upcoming book report.

Enjoying a quiet house while I regroup from my last big project (Craftsy) and focus on things that were pushed aside.

Planning new products for kits for Scrapbook Circle.

Celebrating my brother's birthday here on Saturday.

Hoping to have a night night with Ward soon.

Loving night walks around our neighborhood.

Attempting to take my to do list one task at a time.

Finally! Free TIme to Read

A couple of weeks ago our family was lucky enough to get to take a Disney Cruise over fall break. It was an absolutely fabulous week that will be hard to top. One of my favorite things about getting away is having time to read. It really is such a treat.  When I’m at home, it seems the only free time for reading comes right before I go to bed and it’s almost impossible these days for my eyes to stay open for more than a page or two.

I’ve had a hard time finishing books lately because the stories having been grabbing me and pulling me in. I think I’ve been starting the wrong books. So I was very happy that the two books I choose for this trip were both fantastic.

 The first book I read was The Rent Collector by Camron Wright. This book pulled me in from the start. It is about a family in modern days living in a dump in Cambodian. This story was filled with hope and inspiration. It not only really put all of the blessings in my life into perspective, it also reminded me to always look for the best in others and to never give up hope. This was a quick read and an easy to follow story that wasn’t too complicated. Perfect for a vacation book.

The second book I read was The Lavender Garden byLucinda Riley.  This was recommended to me somewhere online (likely on Amazon or Goodreads) as a book similar to Kate Morton’s books (which I love.) This is a story that takes place in the current day and during World War II. The stories are intertwined and it was engaging and kept me quickly reading to find out how things turned out in the end.  It’s a bit of a mystery and has well-rounded believable characters that you are cheering for throughout the story.

Let me know if you end up reading one of these books. I’d love to hear what you think!

Craftsy > Here I Come!

This blog space has been quite neglected for a few weeks. It certainly wasn’t intentional, but my time has been pulled to other places lately. My biggest project has been doing class prep for two Crafty classes that I will be filming for four days this week. Now that the work is finished and I’m on a plane to Denver, there is finally time to blog.

Have you heard of Craftsy? I’d heard of it, but hadn’t spent much time of the site until recently. It’s an online crafting education website filled with inspiring classes on all sorts of crafts such as quilting, sewing, photography, jewelry, woodworking, gardening, cake decorating and more. They have done a few paper crafting classes and plan on adding more. I'm excited to be part of their paper crafting class expansion.

I was contacted a couple of months ago by Cratfy to see if I would be interested in working on two upcoming classes for them. It was a great opportunity that I couldn’t pass up! I’ve worked on class outlines, materials and lots of demos and it’s all finally prepped and ready. I’ll be in the filming room at the Craftsy Studios in Denver for the rest of this week. Wish me luck!

Here’s a little peek at some of the pages I’ve been creating for the class.

Want to follow along with me on this adventure this week? I’ll be posting updates to my Instagram account (lisaandrewsaz) and I can’t wait to report back on how the week goes.

Flying Through September

What has the time gone? Seriously feeling like we are in t crazy fast time warp.

Here's a peek at some of the things I've been up to so far this month.

Girls trip to Park City. We drove 12 hours from Arizona to spend three full days enjoying beautiful Park City. We spent an entire day a Swiss Days which is the ultimate craft fair and then next day we rented bikes, took them up the Park City ski lifts and rode the bike down switchback trails. Slightly terrifying, entirely beautiful. We spent our third day relaxing at the place where we were staying. The views from the house were amazing!

Celebrated a friend's birthday at Kneaders. We've been friends since we were six years old and it's always fun to be together. For some reason, I only took a picture of the food. Yes, we had the bottomless French toast. Delicious.

Took this awesome group of teenagers to the Gilbert Temple at 5:15 in the morning last week. Perfect way to start the day.

We had a crazy amount of rain here last week. Water was pouring into our garage and game room off of our garage. Many of our neighbors came to our rescue and helped us pump and sweep water for several hours. It was a crazy day.

After the rain, we had to go and check out the retention area near our house. It's normally a soccer field, but after the rain it was filled with 17 feet of water. It was like a private neighborhood lake.

Taught a class creating this Christmas burlap banner at a Super Saturday craft day we had at church last Saturday. It was fun spending the day crafting with friends.

We said goodbye to my sister Michelle who is heading off to London to go to pastry school. We wish she lived closer so we could be her taste testers.

We went to Joe's Farm Grill on Monday with family to celebrate my birthday a few days early. Great company and food!

There's a look at the happy highlights of the month so far. Hope your month is going well!

Hello Oceanside

When our family went to Oceanside a couple of months ago, I took a lot of pictures. I've already created a layout with a few favorites, but I wanted to use more photos from our trip on another page.

My favorite thing on the page? It's got to be those cork "who" and "when" fill in the blank pieces. I sketched out the idea for those a few months ago and now it's excited to have then through the design and manufacturing process and actually on a scrapbook layout.

I love that I fit six photos on this page. Photos really helped tell the story. Isn't that what scrapbooking is all about - telling our stories?

Layout Supplies /// Island Adventure Kit /// Bungalow Add-on /// Tiki Torch Add-on

Cake for Breakfast? Yes, Please!

This morning I got together with some friends from church for a meeting. It was one of the friend's birthdays tomorrow and I decided that it would be fun to take along a little breakfast birthday treat to share. I hadn't gone to the store or specifically planned to use a recipe, but noticed that we had some strawberries in the fridge that were begging to be eaten. So I did a web search for "strawberry breakfast cake" and found a great recipe.

It's always a bit of a risk to just use a recipe from a random blog, but today it was a success! Here's the recipe for the Fresh Strawberry Breakfast Cake that I used. The only thing I changed was that I used almond milk for the 1/2 cup milk.

It was perfectly sweet and moist. Just note that if you make it, it does take an hour to bake. So plan accordingly. I do *try* to avoid sweet things in the morning and generally try to stick to eggs or smoothies, but this morning this sweet treat was just the perfect way to start the day.

K + D >>> Scrapbook Circle Blog Hop

Welcome to our Scrapbook Circle Blog Hop! Scrapbook Circle has a new creative team, as well as a fabulous August kit, and we'd like to introduce you to both today. We are giving away five August Kits and the winners will be selected from the comments posted along the hop. 

If you just left the talented Tessa Buys blog, you are in the right place. If not, I hope you'll join us for the entire hop by starting at the Scrapbook Circle blog.

We are all so excited to feature the new August Island Paradise kit today. I hope you are filled with inspiration!

One fun thing to note: Scrapbook Circle is running a promotion this month that all new subscribers can choose a past kit to ship for free with their August kit. Just add the Island Paradise kit to your cart, then add a favorite past kit to your cart and use the code "FREEKIT" in the promo box at checkout.

As I mentioned in the post about my sister's bridal shower, we've had a whirlwind couple of months around here prepping for Kristen's wedding. The day came and went earlier last month and I'm now enjoying time looking through some of the pictures I took on the wedding day.

I printed off a couple of my favorites and used them on a layout celebrating Kristen and Doug's wedding day. Their story is quite amazing and I hope she gets it all written down somewhere. Not only does she now have a wonderful husband, but four really great kids too. Instant family. I couldn't be happier for her.

I loved using the August Island Paradise Kit on this page. The black and white background paper was a perfect backdrop to the wedding photos mixed with pops of color from the embellishments.

Layout Supplies /// Scrapbook Circle August Island Paradise Kit /// Bungalow Add-on /// Tiki Torch Add-on

I hope you've had a fantastic time hopping around to the Scrapbook Circle team blogs today! Remember to comment along the way while you hop and we will choose five lucky commenters to win an Island Paradise kit. Winners will be posted on the Scrapbook Circle blog next week.