Family History Sale

For the month of March 2013, I will have all my kits with a family history theme on sale for 15-50% Off!  Check them out in my store!

I'm sorry I've been away for such a long time. It has been a long winter.  I hope to be designing again soon and posting more often.  Thank you for stopping by.

Annies Digital Things

This is one of those posts that I hoped I would never have to write again. It seems like yesterday when we said good bye to our dear Jean Daugherty after her battle with breast cancer and now we have lost another designing friend, Anne of Annie's Digital Things.

When I worked as CT leader at Heritage Scrap, I first became acquainted with Anne.  She was enthusiastic and creative in every way.  I was a new scrapper and I had fun working with her kits.  This is a layout I created with her Parlor Music kit.

 

 

When I began designing, she encouraged me more and I can still hear her laugh when we did designer conference calls and chats.  I loved her Vintage Flying kit.  It was perfect for this and other flying photos I have.  She said her hubby was an aviation nut and there was a lot of plan "stuff" at her place, so she just had to make this kit.

 

 

My first collaboration kit as a designer at Heritage Scrap, was Autumn in Paris (no longer available).  I struggled a little, but she had no problem at all - this was an amazing vintage kit she put together.  I found it perfect for this poem written by my great grandmother.

 

 

 

Anne had worked many years designing and creating dolls/clothes and miniatures.  Thank Heaven For Little Girls came out of that love and the love she had for her granddaughter.

 

 

 

 

One of Anne's skills as a digital designer, was looking for the niche where a type of kit was needed.  Most of her kits have a particular topic or design theme.  This is something I have tried to emulate in my own designing.  This layout was created with her contribution to the Heritage Builder's Collab for the anniversary of the store. This is a beautiful vintage heritage kit that I think everyone should have in their heritage kit collection.

 

 





 

 

This is another layout done withe the Autumn In Paris collab which is no longer available.

 

 

 

For this layout I used the background paper and ruffle from the Thank Heaven For Girls kit mentioned above.  The rest of the items come from Grandmother's Sewing Basket.  Anne was particularly talented at extracting.

 

 



 

Another designer collab portion no longer available.  I believe this one was called Irish Linen.

 

 



This is another pedigree chart from the Heritage Builders Collab  mentioned above.  Anne and I shared a common surname in our family tree - Tisdale, but sadly we never found a connection.  It would be fun to be related to such a wonderful lady!

 

 

Tattered and Torn was a really fun kit to work with.

 

 



When I showed Anne this layout, she was delighted.  She said it was exactly what she had envisioned when she created On The Road Again.  It was perfect for my Grandparents' 1950s road trip.

This is also from Tattered and Torn, mentioned above.  It's an exquisite kit!

Another layout with Thank Heaven For Little Girls.

 

 

Lastly, I want to share Never Give Up.  This is Annie's Breast Cancer Kit.  She beat it and had an extra almost ten years.  The second time around,it got the upper hand.  Too many lovely people are lost to this horrible disease.  Somehow I think she'd still want us to join her in saying "Never Give Up!"  Even when she was battling it herself, she was often giving encouragement to others starting out on their breast cancer journey.  I've sure missed her this last year as she has battled the disease. And I miss her even more.  She only lived 4 hours away - I wish I had made that drive to see her.  My prayers are with her family at this time.

 

Please take a look around Annie's Digital Things shop before her beautiful work is gone.

 

So long Anne, it's been good to know you.  You may be gone, but you're not forgotten.

December Sales

 

My Store

Snow in the Air? New Kit

 

 

Snowflakes have always been one of my favorite design elements.  They are so amazing and remind me of what an awesome and infinite Creator we have.  I have a lot of snow pictures from the 1920s and 30s and none of the snow kits I've seen really fit, so I decided to create my own. This is Flurries Digital Scrapbook Kit.

 

 



Here is a view of the Flurries elements.  I used several crochet pieces and a paper snowflake too.  There are a few flowers to mix in as well as the winter corsage.

Frames and Journal elements, including a book with snowflakes lightly over the page.

Here you can see the papers.  There is a variety of patterned paper as well as solids and a snowflake edged overlay.

Right away I had to play with the kit.  This is a photo of me and my little brother and my Dad making a snowman.  It was just a few years ago!

This is one of my grandparents' pictures from a hunting trip, long ago, somewhere in Washington State or British Columbia.

I hope Flurries will be a fun addition to your winter kits.  It will work well with some modern photos as well as heritage and vintage.  You can find it HERE.  Thank you for looking!

SALE Time!

I started mine a little earlier HERE.  Make sure to check out the whole store this weekend for great deals from all the designers including $1 kits!!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Digital Scrapbook Day Sales

I have a fondness for Digital Scrapbook Day.  DSD weekend in 2008 was when I discovered Heritage Scrap!  My entire store is 50% Off November 1 through 7 and you can find it HERE.

Spitting In A Tube

Earlier in the summer we had the opportunity to do the beta DNA testing through AncestryDNA. Since we only have part of the story on my Husband's side, we decided this would be one way that we might possibly connect with some cousins or other relatives.  Unfortunately that has not happened yet.  But it is still pretty interesting.

One of the things the testing determines is a percentage of ethnicity.  This is where the big surprise came from on Hubby's test!  We suspected his would be close to half British Isles with names in his tree like Hardcastle, Peyton, Cannon, Sullivan and Collier.  But guess what?  Not a speck!  His ethnicity shows:  50% Central European, 45% Scandinavian and 5% Uncertain.  We laughed - I'm the one who is 3rd generation born in America from Swedish immigrants on my Dad's side.  I'm the one with the Johnson surname and here my Hubby is 45% Scandinavian! 

Two explanations for this could be that we have no idea what is on the hidden side of the tree and many from the British Isles came from Viking stock.  Another factor is that DNA is a complicated thing!  It's hard to say how it all gets mixed up and what goes into making us who we are.  Having identical twin daughters, we see this every day.  They have the same DNA and yet are unique individuals in every sense of the word.

Well, this fall, Ancestry offered another opportunity for the DNA testing which is $99. Thanks to a great sales month (Thank you customers!), I was able to slip this into the budget and it was soon my turn to "spit in a tube."  The testing is done through saliva and is able to test both sides of the family.  Next came my turn for surprise!

My ethnicity was as follows:

75% British Isles
16% Central European
  8% Eastern European
  1% Uncertain

British Isles did not surprise me as my Mom's paternal side were Puritans, my Mom's maternal side came primarily from Scotland and Ireland and my Dad's maternal side has a lot of Irish.  Central European explains the Germans and Dutch on both sides of the family and I knew my great great Grandparents came from Poland and Slovakia, not to mention that some of the Germans came from the part of Germany that is now Poland.  1% Uncertain.  I can buy that. 

But where is the Scandinavian?  This is where the SHOCK came in!  I can trace my ancestry in Sweden back to about 1600.  Are you telling me that none of these people were Swedish?  There is a possibility that my family came from elsewhere to Sweden as at one point Sweden controlled a lot of countries, even though today we don't think of them as a "super power" country.  But all the way back 400 years, none of them were Scandinavian?  The only other thing I can think of is that since I am female and I only get an X from my father and that the Swedish would come down through the Y chromosome, that is why.  I don't understand the complexities of DNA well enough to understand this.  Do any of you?

It is fun and I already connected with someone in my Wolcott family tree and hopefully I can connect with more.  My hopes was to find other people I am genetically related to, which might solve some of my brick walls.  It just depends on who does DNA testing and the more people who do, the more possibilities will come up.

This whole experience has made us curious.  The Ancestry DNA testing is fun and is helpful for connecting through their site.  In the realm of DNA testing, it's fairly inexpensive.  So I do recommend it.  However, now we would like to know more than that DNA test is designed to share.  So I will start saving up pennies to try testing at Family Tree DNA.  They have a variety of levels of different testing and claim to have the largest available databases to compare testing with.  So, hopefully our DNA family adventure has only just begun.