Tuesday, November 09, 2010

The Story of Two Loves

Big bad blogger signing in.

March 2010 seems to be the month when my blog officially died. Cause of death? Facebook. (Everyone else blames Facebook anyway for their own lack of blog updates, so it's as good an excuse as any.) But in a word - LACK. Lack of time, lack of inspiration. But I believe in reincarnation, so here's my initial attempt at resuscitating the blog. I am hopeful that I will be able to breathe some life into it because also after so many months, seven, to be exact, I have started scrapbooking again! Scrapbooking, after all, is the raison d'etre of The Armchair Scrapper.

I have been a frequent visitors to my fellow scrappers and manufacturers' blogs though. I continued to be abreast of scrapbooking news, styles, products, and trends. In fact, it is in one of these frequent forays in inspirational galleries that I came upon American Crafts' Recipes Week Challenge. I was so inspired by the theme and Jennifer Gallacher's sample layout that I decided to venture into my scrap room and play.

Baked Goodies


Journaling:
Recipe for Chocolate Revel Bars hand-written on a page of CH's recipe notebook.

Materials Used:
All three patterned paper (a la Carte) and Thickers by American Crafts; Cosmo Cricket tag; Tulip dimensional fabric paint; Saunders liquid glue; Sakura pen; Tsukineko ink pad; button by Autumn Leaves.

On a side note - revel bars are the very first goodies I baked. It was Christmas 2002. I've never baked before and I wasn't sure what the final outcome was supposed to look like. I thought at first it looked underdone (the chocolate looked too soft and gooey to my untrained eye) so I returned it to the oven for an extra 10 minutes. Thank goodness, bar cookies are easy and forgiving, so it still turned out well, just slightly burnt on the edges. Thankfully, too, I had forgiving friends and family who pretended not to notice those burnt edges. :-)

I'd like to believe I've become a better baker since then. After all, I took a class after that first near-disastrous experience. And now I am INSPIRED. Inspired to continue scrapbooking and to start baking again. Just in time for Christmas! I am very happy that in this particular layout I got to combine my two loves.