Month: May 2015

Memorial Day is a federal holiday in the United States for remembering the people who died while serving in the country’s armed forces. The holiday, which is observed every year on the last Monday of May.

This is an important fact to remember as Memorial Day is also the traditional “beginning of summer” holiday.  Personally, I like to remember all those who have gone before me, not just the soldiers.  This is why I choose to scrapbook today and remember those fond stories of people that have passed.

Since it is Motivational Monday, I am still posting a sketch that I,too will try to complete this week. Submit your finished layout to be posted here and entered into the contest for this month. Just take a picture with your phone and send it to 801-597-4896 to enter.

I look forward to seeing your pages.

If you are like most scrapbookers and cardmakers I know, you HATE to waste, and you REALLY Hate to throw things away.  I was finishing up the layout for the sketch challenge yesterday and was staring at the sheet of unused letters on the page thinking “now will these be usable anymore?” after all, you only get so many letters, and it always seems to me that after you have make your first title with them, there is always a letter missing from what you want to do next.

Fast forward to just before bed, I pick up my tablet and take my turn at a couple of games of “Words with Friends” I have going with some very old friends.It is really good to feel a connection again after so many years. We were in Girl Scouts together, and good friends, even if we didn’t hang out all that much in high school, but the connection is kind of a warm fuzzy feeling… but then I am getting off the subject.  Sometimes I play with people that come up with words that I have never heard of and wonder if they are cheating and using a gaming program to unscramble letters (no, not you Kam). But it made me start thinking…. I have a sheet of half used letters on my table, and a program to make words from letters. Hmmm, Light bulb moment!!!

I put all the letters on my particular letter sheet into the program and now I have a list of words I can use on cards and scrapbook pages. Now granted, some would be a challenge to use, but others just might work!

I looked at three programs this morning as I googled for programs to make words from random letters.

The first one was called Word List Maker which is clearly for gamers since you can put in only 8 letters and you have the option for the “hook” or connecting letter for a game of scrabble or words.  Since I abhor cheating, I am not sharing the site with you, besides it limits the results for this purpose.

The 2nd one is called Word-grabber. and it will accommodate up to 15 letters and is not tied to any specific game model. Since the particular sheet of letters had only been used twice, I still had plenty of letters left so I just entered 15 of the letters, not using any duplicates. Out of these letters abdefhgijkltux came 40 pages of words!!  Who would have guessed that you could get  jubilated, fatigued, fixable or even fixated from this random set of letters!  If it could do this with just single letters, imagine what would happen if I threw in some more vowels!

The last one I tried was Wordsmith.org/anagrams/advanced.html.  This program would accept 25 letters.  So this time I entered all the vowels I had left, and some random letters to see what would happen. This one didn’t work so well, as it put all the letters in a very strange sentence. I think for now, I will have to stick to the Word Grabber.  Just think of the possibilities.

If you have any questions about this post or anything else, please leave a question for me below and I will get back to you asap!

Good Morning,

It is 5am and I am thinking it is time to start sharing sketches with you again. My hope is that I, too will complete a layout using the sketch and post it for all to see. I chose this sketch  because in my unsorted mess of pictures, a subject for another day, I believe I can find three related pictures to use. I also chose this sketch by L Eubank for it’s circles. In this month’s Stamp of the Month, Just Sayin‘ there are circles that will look great on this page and you could even use the stripe stamp or sayings in place of the strips in the sketch.   The more I look at it, the more I like the two together..

Take the challenge, and make the layout. Then take a picture with your phone and send it to 801-597-4896 so I can post it here. You will then be entered into a contest for a free stamp set.