My Mom

Today I am so grateful to the woman who gave me life, my Mother!!

As a little side note, today was a perfect day to honor my mother as it is her birthday.  

Happy Birthday Mom!! I love you gobs and gobs!!

For those of you who are just joining me on my blog I am doing 365 days of things I am grateful for.  We are now on day five and these are in no particular order.  

So this is my mother Kathleen, she does not like to be called Kathleen, she prefers Kathy.  My mom is a wonderful woman and I love her so much. She gave birth to six children and cared for each one of us everyday, she was lucky enough to be a stay at home mom.  We loved having mom there when we returned home from school, church activities, work, a date, and being with friends.  She was always there to listen and help with any problems we had.  She loved our friends and many called her mom as well.  She is loved by so many. She has been able to be there for the births of all of my babies and I have been especially grateful to have her there in the room with me with the last three, and all the help she was with them after they were born.  She is in Utah and I am in Colorado now so it isn't as easy to just get together any more and I do miss that, but we still talk often.

 It was so nice to go through some older pictures and gather a collection to do a layout on my mom.  I am very happy with the way these pages turned out.

I added this beautiful quote that comes from George Washington, "My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw."  I loved this and felt the same way about my mother.  I made these awesome flowers out of four scalloped circles attached to one another by a brad in the middle, I went with yellows because it is her favorite color.  They really made a great look on these pages. Thanks Jeri for teaching me how to make these lovely things!

I love this picture of my cute parents!  I added the word mom with some brown mailbox letters, they fit perfect in the space I had available.  I also added little metal tag words in various places, like the one in the right top corner that says "joy".

Again I am truly grateful for my mother and wish I could be with her to celebrate today, hopefully this post helps fill my absence.  I love you mom!!!

Happy Crafting, 

Tara

Buchholzer Sisters

Today I am grateful for some of my best friends, my sisters by blood and maiden name!!

I come from a family of six kids I am second youngest.  There are five girls and one boy.  Grateful to say that my brother married a wonderful woman who added another sister to our bunch. 

I am so pleased with this layout in every aspect, it was fun finally putting these pictures together. They are like seven years old, even though we have all had more kids since these were taken, we all look pretty much the same...only thing I see different is my hair is long now.... ;)

The picture on the right has our precious handicap sister Shauna in the center, she was the only one out of the six kids that got brown hair.  We are all redheads.  There are not a lot of pictures we have of all of the girls together, but I loved that she was in this with us. 

With these pages I had a lot of fun adding various details.  I loved the puzzle pieces for my words as they were just letters until put together they created sisters, and friends.  So perfect!

Here are the girls up close, from left to right let me introduce you to my sisters, Tammy, Shersten, Jamie, Tara (me), and littlest sister Rachelle.  

I loved the butterflies and what they added to these pages.  I was able to use my cricut for the letters, butterflies and the white scalloped circle I wrote our names on.  I used some brads in the butterflies and added some orange buttons as a final pop of orange.

"We are sisters by fate , best friends by choice."

Until next time time, Happy Crafting!

Tara

O'Crowley Sisters

Today I am grateful for the amazing sisters I received when I married my husband.

This was such a fun page to create and I just LOVE how it turned out!!

Here are the O'Crowley women, a force to be reckoned with for sure!  What a great group of girls and I am so happy to be one of them.  From left  to right we have Rachel, Jessiciah, (Robin - mom) Robyn, Tara and Brittany.  We took these photos on Thanksgiving day and unfortunately Brittany was unable to make it, fortunately enough we saw her and her family a few days earlier and had this picture of her to combine with the other sisters.  I love the accent flower in the upper left corner made from tear drops and a small dew drop in the middle.

Here I added a beautiful silver embossed emblem saying "friends", the picture doesn't fully do it justice,  it is bright and shinny and really adds to the page. I placed a pink flower cut out with a punch I had and added another tear drop flower to coordinate with the one up on the top portion of the page.

Using the same punch, I made this cute trio of  flowers next to the picture of us girls.  I feel like it really gave the page the final balance it needed.  

Here is the complete page again.

 These are great women and I truly consider them all to be not only sisters but friends!

Happy Crafting, 

Tara

Home cooked foods...

Today I am grateful for home cooked food. 

 This is something that I have always enjoyed.  I grew up in a home where there was always a home cooked meal on our table every night and a wonderful one at that.  These four meals were actually made while my mother was here staying with me after I had our last son Kade, this past April.  Jeremiah was deployed and my mom and I enjoyed a couple weeks together and we ate some really yummy food.

Here we have Garlic Spaghetti, Crepes and Omelette.  I used The Robin's Nest - Veranda Explore/Stripe card-stock.  I also accented with some dew drops, round and diamonds. I wanted to keep things simple and used just a few little frames I had in my craft room to highlight the name of each food.

On the second page we have BBQ Chicken Pizza and Honeymoon Delight.  I used a fun journal card-stock, again from The Robin's Nest.  I went with a black border and sponged the edges in a brown. I really like adding some personal handwritten message to my pages when I can.  

 I am really happy with how these pages turned out, especially since I do not think I have ever crafted pages just around food. :)   Thanks for checking in today.  Until tomorrow...

Happy Crafting, 

Tara

My husband, Jeremiah

Hello, hello.  Welcome to Hidden Scrapper!  My name is Tara O'Crowley, I am married to a wonderful man named Jeremiah and we have five handsome little boys. I have the privilege of being a stay at home mommy to three of our five little guys.  Our older two boys live in Utah with their dad and step mom.    I am very excited and a bit nervous to be honest, about FINALLY starting my actual blog.  

  I will be posting at least once a day for 365 days!!  That's right, everyday for at least one year is what I have committed to.  To give a little detail about the blog.....Jeremiah challenged me a few weeks ago to start my blog, but there was more to it than that.  He challenged me to blog and scrap about something that I am grateful for and each day has to be something different with no repeats.  I took a minute to think about it and decided this would be a wonderful thing for me to do.

 So without further ado lets get things started!

Today I am grateful for this man...

This is my husband Jeremiah.  He is truly my best friend.  He is a wonderful father.  A dedicated and honorable Army Officer.  He is a loving son, brother, and uncle. Those of us who know him, would consider him to be very sarcastic, and playful.  He is one who would truly do anything for anyone, at anytime. He is far to often misunderstood and read wrong.  He has a love for gardening, our 210 gallon salt water fish tank,  working on the home improvements and our soon to be newest adventure, sailing. He is so talented and can honestly do just about everything, and do it well!  

Fist page and a close up view of the dew drop swirl.

  These 12 x 12 pages were done on The Robin's Nest Olive/Stripe card-stock. 

The dew drops (cute little embellishments all over the page) are also a Robin's Nest product.

I created a nice accent swirl around the top corner picture with the dew drops.  I also added a Time Flies rub-on from The Robin's Nest.

You can check out their store at  http://www.robinsnest-scrap.com/  I will be using a lot of their products on my blog so keep their website handy in case there are things you would like to order for your own crafting needs.

Second page and a close up of the words, ribbon and dew drops.

I used some brown stickers for his name. I found an Army rub-on and added it to the corner of his military picture in his dress blues. With my cricut I cut out in brown the words, Soldier, Husband, Father and Friend.  I placed a small piece of Stampin' Up! ribbon behind each of these words & added a few dew drops.  Then I drew stitches on each letter to complete my look.  Scattered a few dew drops in various places on my two pages for a final touch.  Here is my two page layout once again.

Thanks so much for joining me today.  Until tomorrow.

Happy Crafting, 

Tara