Hello Beautiful

Back in October Molly cut off all her long hair into a punk pixie.  I don't know about the rest of the world, but this is not a common thing for 8th graders here in lovely Cleveland-ish Ohio.

I took the before and after shots the day of the haircut, and printed them out that same day, and started a layout the next day.  It's been 2½ months, so the details are fuzzy, but it was pretty atrocious, so I ditched the start of that layout and "started" fresh.  Startin fresh consisted of taking out a new sheet of white cardstock, putting the photos and the words "short" and "long" cut from the Silhouette on the cardstock and walking away.

I only meant to walk away until I had some more free time, but it ended up being longer than that.  I just didn't feel like scrapbooking.  I didn't have time, but more than that I didn't have any mojo.  And I sort of wanted to have mojo, but at the same time I was sort of okay with just focusing on other things for a while.  Well, the craziness of Christmas in retail seems to be over, and I have two weeks off from tutoring.  Yes, there was Christmas, and company, and other craziness, but finally, finally I had time and mojo.  Yay!

I decided to dump the original "the long and short of it" title and go with "hello Beautiful" instead.  I used a heart background from the Silhouette store, 2Peas flair and Bella Blvd paper.

LOL.  I just noticed that the glare on the flair makes it look like it says "hell Beautiful."  Oops.

Some details:

I sort of wish everyone flipping through my album saw this layout in harsh sunlight, just so those shadows would be there. :P

I was an assistant manager at Archiver's for about 16 months and (at least when I was there) rhinestones were pretty much mandatory on every layout.  Here, I'm just trying to correct a mistake, but every mistake is fixed even better with bling. Right?

The Theresa Collins letters end up looking okay, but I'm still not pleased with them. (Insert grumpy noise here)  And the messiness here is more due to the fact that I had to pry them up and shift them to right to make room for the picture.  If I weren't so lazy I'd run it through my sewing machine, because it doesn't exactly look permanent...but...yeah...that's so much work.  :P

So, I mentioned in the process video that I had a "thing" I need to work on that might keep me from scrapbooking for a while and hinted that I'd talk about here, so I feel obligated to address that.  If you visit my blog, you might have seen the last post about my interviewing for a teaching position recently.  I didn't get it, but the whole process reminded me that I do want to be a teacher.  I'm not certain what snapped in me when I finished my student teaching experience, but I basically dug in my heals and said (in so many words) "I'm not going to teach."  Which is pretty silly, since it's something that I've wanted and worked towards for a long time.  But no is the time for me to get serious.  That interview fell into my lap, and as a private school they were willing and able to take me without my having passed The Exam.  But that was a one time occurrence: schools will not contact me, and they won't even look twice at me without being fully certified.  So I really have to buckle down and take my exams.

There are two: one in my subject (7-12th grade math) and the other in pedagogy (the theories and methods of teaching).  I have every confidence that I will ace the math exam on my first try.  However, the pedagogy test is scary - I took those classes first and have had plenty of time to forget which theorists thought what.  I sort of half-heartedly started studying in October, Now I really need to hunker down and make a steady go it.

I hope to take the tests in late February or early March.  So in the meantime I'll be spending my spare time taking notes, making flash cards and quizzing myself.  Doesn't that sound like fun??

Today is New Years Day.  The first day of 2015!  I hope that we all (me included!) have a healthy, prosperous and creative year!  Thank you for visiting!