Jessica Sprague is offereing a free class. Everyone who wants to learn from an amazing teacher should check it out. I have taken every single one of her classes and my skill level has grown and grown. Just go to JessicaSprague.com and look for the ad with the hands. Hugs,Ami

I have been, as you might know by reading my layouts, quite political in my life.  I spent many years as an activist and a community organizer. Then in my early forties I was fortunate to meet and marry my wonderful husband Jon. I don't know what happened; I think perhaps he was waiting to become an activist. Anyway two years after we were married he read a book by John Robbins of the ice-cream family and he became a vegetarian. Boom…just like that. He hasn’t touched a piece of meat, fish or fowl since. And the main reason was the harm to the environment. The result of which has been a concerted effort over the years to decrease our footprint on this earth.

We bought a condo less than five miles from where Jon works and the bus line runs right in front of the condo entry. I could go to work and come back with less than a block of walking and Jon can do the same. We can walk to our local mall only about two blocks away and find there a Michael’s, Jo-Ann’s, Barnes & Noble, theaters, library, ethnic restaurants (about twenty), NY Cupcake Co., French bakery, etc. Also within six miles of us we have Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and Puget Consumers Coop. We are happy in being able to travel less and vote with our dollars as well as our ballot.

So what does a respectable ex-sixties activist and her younger husband and friend do on a gorgeous Saturday morning in late September? We go to a Green Jobs action!! We find that in downtown Bellevue, our hometown, they are building two huge condo towers and to our delight and surprise, they are going to be LEED Gold certified. Now what the heck is that you might ask? Well, Jon and I are early risers and on early morning HGTV is a program called HGTV-Pro. It is all about remodeling and building and lately green building. LEED certification means that you are building to the latest environmental standards. So gold certification is the second best there is and the highest one, platinum, is seldom accomplished in residential building.

So here I am along with Jon having great fun on a Saturday afternoon. Each time we here of the great things that are being done and could be done to save our planet, we are inspired. Please vote-both with your ballot and your dollars. We are recording history with our pages. We do it for our families, ourselves and for future generations to know who we are. I hope that they will know that we did our small part to make things better when we realized that we were causing harm to our home, the planet earth.             

We each got to keep our green hard hats. This is me and my camera. Jon is on the far right of the picture of the group and my friend Sue is holding up the bright green sign.

Here it is in all of it's glory....My Studio.  This is the place where I spend most of my time during the week. I have an alarm that reminds me when it is time to break for lunch and it rings again about an hour before Jon comes home from work. This is the first time in the 22 years that we have been married and all of our moves that I have had a whole room to create in. It is a delight. It may appear to be crowded but what can I say....all of you probably have the same problem. I love paper and embellishments and etc., etc.  Even though I do most of my scrapping on the computer now, I still take time to make the occasional hybrid project and almost all of the cards that we send out.

I promised Cassie that I would leave a rave review on my site and then got busy with company and class and fell behind. Cassie made me the most wonderful hat. I sent her a description of the one I have that was worn out and she asked for measurements and made me this new lovely one. I walk everyday at least a mile or more and with my short hair keeping the ears warm is a must. This hat does the trick and even looks good. Cheers to Cassie and all of the great crafters on this site.

Just realized today that I have been so busy with catching up that I haven't spent much time just relaxing and enjoying my blog site all week long. I am still terribly behind when it comes to all of the work I would like to accomplish but will at the very least get these three layouts posted....The first one was done for a journaling challengeat Designer Digitals. The frame and flourish are by Kellie Mize and the paper is from K. Pertiet aged perfection 1. The Snapshot layout is from the Type+Writer class at Jessica Sprague.com This journaling class has been a great learning experience for me, as I tend to talk a lot but not neccessarily put my voice onto my work. Both it and the layout Hey Young Lady are more journaling than usual for me especially the story of my younger self. The papers are all from J.Sprague TW-1 and the fonts are too numerous. If you should want to know about one I will happily try to remember it but for now suffice to say that they are all from free download font sites. The words as background in Snapshot were designed by using a web site called wordle.net. It was really exciting to see what happened with a paragraph of my writing.Try it once, and you will have lots of fun....