Author: fkbowman

Altered Canvas craft

Altered canvases–I love giving these as gifts!

I love to take photos of my kids and their friends. Even though the boys are now teenagers or are nearly there and the photo ops are fewer, they know it’s just easier to smile, smirk, or grimace and bear it. They know I’ll be sharing the photos with their parents and posting them on Facebok so they can tag themselves. But I wanted to do more with those memories.

Photo cards are born

Several years ago, I got tired of spending $3 or $4 for every birthday card that we gave so I decided to make cards instead. As a scrapbooker, I had the supplies for cards but just making a simple card still didn’t satisfy me. That’s when I started making photo cards or, in some cases, mini scrapbooks.

I was so thrilled by the reactions I got from the moms, I started making them for more of the boys’ friends. I started to look at the cards as gifts for moms. After a few years of this, though, I decided to try something different. Enter the canvas.

Scrapbooking as art

Last March at a scrapbook vacation, I took a class about creating decorative canvases. I loved the altered canvas project and bought some canvases on my drive home but was intimidated to make one on my own. But come fall, I got the nerve.

One friend was the quarterback for his rec football team and his team was doing well; so well, in fact, that they were playing for the championship. His mom takes even more photos than I do and posts them to Facebook so it was easy for me to create the collage (well, it was easy after the Kodak Photo Kiosk groaned under the load of her photos).

And then I jumped at altering that canvas to mount the photos on. It was so much fun that for a fleeting moment I thought I should pay the recipient for the pleasure of creating this project!

Ta-da!

I actually made two copies of this canvas because the birthday boy was having a joint party with another member of the football team and I couldn’t show up with just one of these. I wasn’t sure if the moms would “get” the project especially the mom I hardly knew. Would they think it was one step above a kindergarten finger painting?

I shouldn’t have worried. In fact, one canvas still resides in their foyer six months later.

So now I wonder…how am I going to top this?

He’s so not impressed

Picked C up from basketball practice tonight and we were talking about his homework on the drive home. He mentioned that he needed to do a little research about Ernest Rutherford for chemistry. I asked if Rutherford studied the atomic structure. I was so pleased with myself when C said that Rutherford did, in fact, study the atom (among other things).

Fast forward a few hours…
He is sitting down across the kitchen table from me to do his homework. I ask to see his notes about on the Rutherford research. On his meager list of references were the words “backscattering spectrometry.”

Geeky mom, I ask “Is that using light to measure particles in solution?”

C replies, “Yeah, I guess so.”

“We use that at work to measure emulsions. Let me show you some graphs.” I open a scientific poster showing graphs comparing particle sizes and tell him that a co-worker who’s known him since he was an infant works with that equipment.

He glances at it…and goes to watch “Pawn Stars.”

At least he stifled his yawn.

Career aspirations

J visited Cecil County School of Technology as part of a middle school field trip. He started griping about it yesterday because “no friends will be on the trip.” According to him, no friends are ever on field trips with him.

In spite of his supposed lack of buds, he seemed to get something out of the visit.

Me: “So you were most interested in the webmaster job. What did you like about it?”
J: “Well, you get to sit on the computer all day.”
Me: “That’s it?!?”
J: “I don’t want to work in a box (cubicle); I want to have an office like Daddy. (Pause) I don’t want a box because if you fall asleep while you’re working, it might not be good if people can see you.”
Us: (laughter)
J: “And it’s better than building things.” (The school has a construction program.) “I don’t want to work outside.”

With career aspirations like that, he better marry well.

Multi-tasking while watching movies

I watch movies differently than other people. In fact, I don’t often watch movies because most just don’t hold my attention. On the rare occasion that I sit down with my DH to watch a movie I end up either: 1. Falling asleep or 2. Doing something else while I’m watching and usually that something else involves a computer.

Tonight he brought home the Brad Pitt movie Moneyball. A recovered baseball fan, I had actually wanted to see it.

And almost from the beginning I was researching facts from the movie on my new kindle fire. I tried not to pick it up off the table because I knew once I started surfing, it would be tough to stop. I have some kind of compulsion to gather trivia.
By the time the A’s start to turn their season around I was in a surfing frenzy. The movie talks about real players and events so I was curious what the characters were doing now. What ever became of Mike Magnante?  (He was cut just before he qualified for retirement and is now a high school math teacher.) Did Jeremy Giambi ever turn it around?  (No) What kind of career did Scott Hatteberg  have after that season changing home run? (A pretty long one–he played until 2008 and, according to the A’s website, he’s now working in the front office. Through the power of wikipedia, I was able to answer these questions.
My research about Hatteberg led me to a story about one of my favorite Baltimore Orioles. In a kind of six degrees of separation, the draft pick for Hatteberg was compensation for free agent Mike Boddicker  in 1990. An interesting coincidence. When I mentioned this to my DH, his response was “So?” and I knew he was not amused that I wasn’t devoting my full attention to the movie. Grrr.
I looked to see what Boddicker was doing in retirement. (I’m nothing if not loyal.) His wikipedia page was a little outdated and said that he was currently a broadcaster for the Orioles and my first thought was “Hmmm, I might have to actually watch some games this season.” Turns out that happened during the 2010 season. Instead I found a blog post from this past November that mentioned that Mike Boddicker had been treated for tonsil cancer but that he was expecting a full recovery and, in fact, was planning a hunting trip. A bad news, good news story. I’m hoping he makes that full recovery and gets to enjoy many more hunting trips. 
So movie watching…it isn’t really my thing.
P. S. More trivia–Mike Boddicker and Rick Springfield were born on the same date (August 23) eight years apart. I’m still a dedicated Rick fan too.
P.P.S. Looking at Boddicker’s stats, he had 10 complete games in that 1983 season. Ah complete games by pitchers…a time when men were men.

Thank you for saving Halloween, Steve Lange!

At 12 & 14, I thought the boys were over Halloween. Well, the 14 year old is pretty much over it and was satisfied with wearing my goodwill-sourced zombie hockey player costume. The 12 year old led me to believe that he was cool with the zombie football player costume; until October 28, I thought we had it under control. Silly me.

The 12 year old is a gamer and his game of choice then, prior to the release of the latest version of Call of Duty, was Minecraft. On that Friday night he announced that he wanted to be Steve from minecraft for Halloween and started to tell me about his elaborate plan for the costume which basically consisted of encasing him from head to toe in cardboard boxes!
We spent Saturday with me trying to convince him that he needed a plan that was more easily executed and safe. His initial design would have left him walking like Frankenstein and unable to put his hands out to catch himself if he fell…nevermind carrying his own treat bag.
By Sunday morning we still didn’t have a plan we both found agreeable. He was determined to paint the character mask by hand and I was making a shopping list of the all the paint colors I’d need to buy later in the day.

I desperately searched the Internet for other options. And there i found the blog post that saved Halloween.
A dad posted a pdf of the graphics for the Steve mask and instructions on what size box to buy at the copy center. I showed my son a photo of kids wearing the completed Steve mask and we finally had an agreement. 
 
Our Walmart shopping list was reduced to finding purple sweatpants which we located on sale for $5 in the girls department. He still insisted on making the ax but I simplified the process by using a square punch from my scrapbooking supplies. For a weapon made of a pizza box and some cardstock, it turned out to look quite impressive; and it looked great as I carried it all evening while trick or treating because he lost interest in carrying it as soon as he showed his costume to his Minecraft-playing friends.
I know I’m late writing this as it’s now just two weeks before Christmas but I had to let Steve Lange know that his Halloween costume rocked!

 

Reliving my youth

There was a point in my misspent youth–middle school and high school–when I was a sports fanatic in every sense of the word. This was unusual because I was an uncoordinated bookworm with asthma who never played a sport.

The mid 1980’s was a bittersweet time to be a Baltimore sports fan. 1983 brought the last Orioles World Championship but it also brought the loss of the Colts franchise. I followed the Orioles closely, listening to games on the radio when they weren’t televised and keeping score the old fashioned way. Any day that Storm Davis or Mike Boddicker pitched was a great day for me. However, never being a football fan, the Colts’ departure was a curiosity rather than a mortal wound.

In my world, 1983 meant the start of my obsession with Baltimore’s indoor soccer team, the Blast. And what an obsession it was! I’m still not sure how my parents put up with my constant yammering about soccer. Now, as a mother to an NFL crazy 14-year-old, I’m getting a little taste of my own medicine. The other day as we were driving to some friends’ house for the first Ravens game of the season, he wanted to talk about punt returns! I nearly set him on the side of road.

At the time, Baltimore had the luxury of three daily newspapers and a separate sports tabloid. Because my grandparents owned a news stand, I read all four sports pages every day. With the Blast though, I felt the need to clip and save every article printed about the team. I carefully organized and pasted them into scrapbooks that I still have today.

I dreamed of being involved in the business of professional sports, be it as a sports writer or public relations shirt in the front office. Over time, I realized that those jobs were few and far between so I needed more mainstream career aspirations. And I’ve spent nearly all my years since the 80’s working with the same company in various capacities. My love of sports waned and those days of true fanaticism were a distant memory.

But then we had two sons…and I nudged them to play soccer. They played in the fall in our local rec leagues, played indoors during the winter, and played some spring soccer. A few years ago, Connor moved up to travel soccer and it was a whole different game. This year, he went out for soccer as a freshman and made the varsity team at our small high school; at the same time, Jarrett, his younger brother, made his first travel soccer team. Right now, it’s all soccer, all the time, and we’re all into it.

And I’m reliving a bit of my childhood. I take photos of the boys and their friends playing sports and, now, I’m back to clipping newspaper articles and saving them in scrapbooks. For some strange reason, the whole thing leaves me on edge of tears and some times the tears win out. When Jarrett played his first travel game on Saturday, when Connor scored his first goal for his school yesterday, and, as I write this, the tears have won again.

I tell people…”I always wanted to be a sports photographer, I just didn’t know it would happen with my own kids as the athletes.”

Tears and all, it’s pretty cool to be me right now.

An almost finished Jacob’s Ladder scrapbook–better late than never

I’ve attended more than a few Scrapper’s Dream Vacations (SDV) over the years and I often take classes there to learn new techniques. Unfortunately, I don’t always finish the projects I start in class or use the technique again.

Several years ago, I’m guessing at least 3, I took a class about Jacob’s ladder scrapbooks. I loved the idea, stopped at Staples on the way home to buy a paper cutter that would better handle cardboard, and started another Jacob’s ladder as soon as I got home. I thought it would be a great way to display the school photos of the boys throughout the years. And then it sat…and sat…and sat.

In the last week or so, I’ve been cleaning up my scrapbook room and I started a list of projects to be completed. My Jacob’s ladder was top of the list.

Today, that project’s lucky number came up. Of course, I couldn’t remember how to assemble the album but I knew someone would have the directions online. Found the instructions, adhered school photos, and assembled. I only need three more school photos before I can scratch this project off my list.

Mission…almost accomplished.
From Drop Box

 

Disney World at Halloween

I’ve always wanted to go to Disney World at Halloween to see the Not So Scary Halloween Party but it never worked for our schedule. Last year, a time share company was trying to woo us so we decided to make a long weekend of it.

This photobook will hold me over until I can scrapbook our trip. I love to scrapbook but I’m at least two Disney trips behind (I’ve lovingly dubbed it “Disney Hell.”) We take so many photos that each album seems to take a year to complete.

Click here to view this photo book larger

One SMALL Step for David Olivacz – Fallston, Maryland | OneSmallStep for Prader-Willi Research

One SMALL Step for David Olivacz – Fallston, Maryland | OneSmallStep for Prader-Willi Research

David was diagnosed with Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS) shortly after his birth in August 2007. PWS is an illness that touches nearly every aspect of his life. Doing things that many of us take for granted can be extremely difficult for David to master yet you can see from the attached video that he’s a happy little boy.

His family has put together this short video to shows David’s progress and has shared it on the web to raise awareness of PWS. They are active supporters of the Foundation for Prater-Willi Research One Small Step initiative to raise money for research into PWS treatment and are organizers of a 2k walkathon on August 20, 2011, at Annie’s Playground in Fallston, MD.