Wet Nose, Warm Heart .... and a sad good-bye

I am sharing some sad news today, last Saturday I had to say good-bye to my Bosley.  He would have been 13 in December.  He had not been well for some time due to liver problems, he was blind and not hearing well, confused at times and I just couldn't stand to see him go through the winter like that.  I'm sure he wouldn't have made it through and I didn't want him to suffer.  I had been mentally preparing for a little while now.  Even though I know it was the right decision, it is hard to be the one to have to decide.  He was not alone, he deserved to be held and comforted and not be more frightened than I'm sure he was, I was there for him.  I'll never forget that day.

Needless to say, I was not up for making cards on National Scrapbooking Day.  This weekend it's quiet in my house, daughter working and visiting friends, hubby and son away hunting, so the house is littered with my crafty supplies.  And I created this:

It is cased from a layout I found on Pinterest from Pamela O'Conner, a CTMH consultant.  I fell in love with the layout the minute I saw it and I knew I had the perfect picture.  It was taken in January 2012, before we had Sampson and before Bosley turned ill.  Some time ago, I had bought the Echo Park For the Record 2 paper pack specifically to make layouts of my babies...so I used those papers on my layout.  I embellished with coordinating stickers.  Don't you just love the title??!!  I couldn't change it, it's perfect.  The heart was cut using my Cricut and the CTMH Art Philosophy cartridge.  The enamel dots are from MME.

These next few photos show some of my thought processes in planning my pages - papers, layouts etc.  For my Cricut Expression cutter I always use Cricut Craft Room.  LOVE this program.  I'm not even sure what most of the buttons are for on the Cricut 'sigh' so I'd be lost without it, but it works well for me using the free software.  So in the first picture, I plan the layout so I can determine what size I want to cut the heart.  To do this I go to the Machine and Mat tab and change the machine to Cricut Imagine, this lets me use the colours and patterns that are offered and I can make it similar to the patterned paper I'm using.  The black square represents my photo.

And these are my cutting guides for my photos.  I like to place these over photos so I can see how they will look at different sizes and where I need to cut to best use the picture in the layout.  I used the 8 x 8 guide to trim my 8 x 10 photo of Bosley.  I also cut out a sample heart so I could place it over different patters of paper to see which one I preferred.  I couldn't decide between two papers, so this definitely helped me decide on the flowered pattern, rather than the more abstract pattern I was considering.

I'm sure you'll be seeing more layouts of my babies soon.