Legacy of Scrapbooking

Hello. My name is Pat and I'm a Scrapbooker.


When I started on this wonderful hobby about six years ago, I thought that noone else in my family scrapped...I'm the first. I immediately loved everything about it - the beautiful papers, embellishments, ribbons, brads, buttons, stamps, stickers, glue in all its many forms, rainbows of flowers, photographs, and the list goes on and on.

Then, when I was two or three years into it, it occurred to me that I am not the first in my family to embark on this memory-saving, family-chronicling journey. It had been going on for years...in fact well before I was born. All I had to do was think and remember.

One of my earliest memories of Mum and home, was in 1952/53 when I was four or five. The King of England had died and his daughter, Elizabeth, was to be crowned Queen Elizabeth II of England. The newspapers and magazines were full of pictures of the royal family at this time and being loyal members of the British Commonwealth, we would cut out all the royal pictures we could find and Mum put them in at least one scrapbook. I can easily remember Wendy and I helping to mix the water and flour paste that we used as glue in this book. I don't remember whatever happened to that scrapbook. I suppose in our many moves as a military family, it got misplaced or left behind someplace. I would love to have it now.

After the experience of making the Royal scrapbook, Wendy and I for awhile cut out movie star pictures and put them in another scrapbook. Again, this one has disappeared. I didn't think about them for years.

Mum also made a scrapbook for each of her three children. We loved to get those books out and look through them. The first page of each one contained congratulation/baby cards received when we were born. The books had birthday cards, Easter cards, Christmas cards, Valentine's cards and anything else Mum thought should go in. It was such fun to look at who sent what way back then. My favorite page contained a full-page birthday card in the shape of a gingerbread man, trimmed with glow-in-the dark paint. I would take it into a closet and close the door so I could see the gingerbread man glow. That book is still among my treasures, although it is starting to come apart.

The next scrapbooks I made (very plain and simple, unlike those I do today) were of the wedding cards Lloyd and I received, and then one I made of all the wedding invitations we received and baby announcements from friends. I stopped working on those about 38 years ago, but they're still part of my 'stuff' that has followed me across the country several times as we've moved around. As each child was added to our family, I made scrapbooks for them containing congratulation and greeting cards. I stopped after each album was full - about 4 years per book. The baby books I kept for each of the kids are also a form of scrapbook. Great treasures.


But my favorite treasured scrapbook is one my Aunt Evelyn gave me. It was made by her mother - my dad's mother - my namesake, Millicent McCarthy. She made several scrapbooks in the early years of the 1900s. This one is very fragile but I managed to photograph the pages so it would never be lost. It is beautiful - full of colorful pictures cut from magazines, cards, advertisements, prayer cards, post cards, ladies' calling cards and anything else Nanny found beautiful. Looking at it is like glimpsing a piece of the past. Nanny died when I was 10 so I never had a chance to talk to her about her scrapbooks, although I do have vivid memories of her and always felt a bond with her because of our names. Scrapbooking is another bond I have with this lovely woman.

the cover

And to continue the tradition, a couple of my daughters and nieces have begun scrapbooking. It really is a family legacy.

Emily at a crop

I started scrapbooking because I had albums full of pictures but they were just pictures - no stories attached, no sentiments written, no names attached. By putting the pictures in scrapbooks with stories and journalling, a more complete picture of the people and activities emerges. I'm hoping my children and grandchildren will treasure the scrapbooks I make of them and their lives as much as I treasure the scrapbooks made by my mother and grandmother.

I no longer use flower and water paste, newsprint scrapbooks, or magazine pictures and have a roomful of scrapbook supplies, but the basic premise of scrapbooking prevails - I record what is beautiful in my life so those who come after me will know who I am, what was important to me, what I loved, and how much they were loved by me.

Scrapbooking is also a great way to make friends.

And that is why I scrap.

Cool Cats

Sara has two beautiful cats both about 8 months old. They're good friends with each other, at least Mickey tolerates Percy in her ladylike way. But they're as different as night and day.




They were intended to be indoor cats but right from the start Mickey, the dainty female, demonstrated...vocally...her need to be out in the fresh air and sunshine...no matter what the weather was like. Even in the sub-zero temperatures we've "enjoyed" this winter, Mickey would run from door to door crying to be let out. And she'd stay out for long stretches of time. One day she appeared on the frozen snow-covered deck with a frozen snow-covered mouse in her mouth. She never stops hunting.


Percy, on the other hand, likes nothing better than to lay in the sun as it reflects through the large living-room window, catching z-z-zs and perfecting his tan. He can be made to go out to keep Mickey company occasionally - very occasionally - and at such times he'll stay on the shovelled walk and not venture more than 2 feet from the shelter of the house. Although he's bigger than Mickey, he has yet to bring home a grasshopper, much less a mouse. Maybe it's his pure-bred Balinese blue point temperament, but he seems to live to be waited on and petted and made a fuss over.



See how angry he looks at having his precious little feet in the snow! What a wuss! But we don't mind. He loves to be pet and purrs his little heart out whenever he gets any attention. A purring cat can be forgiven anything.

They are our very sweet cool cats.

Aidan Woolf - our 2-year old grandson - lives in the house above our basement suite with his mother (our daughter Amy), father, two sisters, and St. Bernard (Bernie) who outweighs him by 100 lbs. He seems to listen at the door for the sound of Lloyd and/or I arriving home and, if we're not quick or quiet enough, he follows us down to our space. He particularly loves coming down when Papa is here. Maybe it's his need to escape his mostly female existence upstairs, or maybe he's just a man's man. Whatever it is, lately we've realized that he needs more male companionship.

He came downstairs the other night wearing Kenzie's wedge-heel sandals, carrying over his arm three frilly fancy easter bags.

In his defense, his two older sisters are girly-girls - very feminine little drama queens. He's surrounded by their girly paraphernalia and loves exploring their stuff, causing chaos as he goes.

Also please notice the dirty legs, in true boy style, and the impish grin on his face. He's a real sweetie.

Things will even up at his house this summer when his baby brother is born. Then there'll be three girls, three boys and one male dog. He'll come into his own in no time and will be instrumental in teaching his little brother how best to bug the girls, climb on unclimbable surfaces, shove furniture around the house, drive his mother crazy and win the hearts of his grandparents.

Way to go Aidan!

My Mother-In-Law

Today would have been my mother-in-law’s 95th birthday. Sadly, she passed away a few days before her 89th birthday. Today when I opened my Facebook site, there were five or six status threads about this feisty, much loved woman, some posted by her children and others by some of her grandchildren. Each status thread had many comments, anecdotes, and memories of her over the years. It was great to read them and participate on the threads, honouring her in such an unplanned, spontaneous way.

Thelma Mae Bruce was born on January 27, 1915 in Taxis River, New Brunswick.

She was the eldest of 10 children and because of her mother’s failing health, she was instrumental in raising her siblings, quitting school at an early age to do so. She married Ralph MacKenzie just before World War 2 and raised their son, Bert, alone for the 5 years Ralph served in the Canadian army overseas. After the war they added three more children to the family, Cheryl, Joyce and my Lloyd.

Joyce, Bert, Lloyd, Cheryl, Thelma

I’m not going to go into the details of her long life here – I’d probably get some of the details wrong anyway. I just want to show some photos that indicate who she was and why she was loved so much.

4 generations - Grandson Rob, Son Lloyd, Father Berton, Thelma

She was a country girl with simple tastes and expectations. Her greatest joy was found in her children and grandchildren. She loved to feed people – she and Ralph owned and operated a very successful restaurant for a number of years and she was famous for her meat and potatoes meals and pies. She seldom sat down with the family to eat. To this day among family members the term “doing a Thelma” refers to any woman who hovers around the dinner table, making sure everyone has lots to eat and dishing out seconds whether they’re wanted or not, usually eating standing up behind the seated group so she could keep an eye of everything.

Cheryl, me, Ralph, Joyce and Thelma



Her family was her life. She raised and nurtured her siblings, children and grandchildren.

Sharing her birthday with grandchildren Jake and Rachel in 1983

Ralph and Thelma with our first 4 kids

Rob, Jenny, Amy and Sara

Family Reunion in 1978

Lloyd and me, Alan and Cheryl, Ralph and Thelma, Joyce and Larry

This embarassing picture shows Thelma beating me in the annual

family reunion foot race. She had more energy than anyone else I knew.

Thelma with her four children,

She and Ralph enjoyed a peaceful life after their children had grown and left home, until he died of a stroke in 1981. She continued to live on her own but moved closer to her daughter Joyce and spent her remaining years being a super grandmother to Joyce's three kids.

Thelma and Ralph.

She had to endure the worst pain a parent can experience when her oldest son Bert died of cancer in 1999. She never quite recovered from that pain. Her health began to deteriorate quickly after that, her diabetes worsened, her eyesight and hearing dimmed, until she passed peacefully surrounded by family. She'll never been forgotten.

This picture was taken just a few months before she passed away.

As mothers-in-law go, she was the best. I’m pretty sure she liked me, as long as I kept her baby boy happy. She never interfered or tried to offer advice. I don’t think she ever called me a “horse’s ass” which was her term of choice for anyone who she felt was doing anything stupid. She just loved us all, and smiled and fed us instead of telling us so. I am eternally indebtedly to her for the wonderful grandmother she was to our kids and to providing me with the love of my life.

Back At It

Finally this weekend I've been able to get back to scrapbooking. Since attending the Scrapbook convention in AZ in October I haven't had a chance to get my stuff out and settle into some good sessions with paper, glue, embellishments, ribbon, buttons, bling....all those things that give me a creative lift.

A couple weeks ago I bought a scrapbooking program for my Mac laptop, just so I could do some sort of scrapbooking. It was fun and easy to use and in the space of three days while relaxing in Arizona, I had completed a digital scrapbook of 20 pages for Jenn, Jonah and Sam. Sometimes it can take me three days to complete one traditional scrapbook page! It was fun and exciting to use the drag and drop templates in the program, but I think I prefer traditional best. There's just something intrinsically satisfying about playing with all the different papers and embellishments that makes me happy.

Here are three 2-page layouts I started at the Oct. convention and finished this week. Each individual page is 12" x 12".

Autumn Leaves, starring grandchildren Layla and Baron Bourne

Our Tropical Paradise - our Arizona back yard

Japanese Gardens in Lethbridge, with Kenny and Alex MacKenzie, and Emily, Lloyd and Pat

These next layouts are some of the 8.5 x 11 digital ones I made for Jenny

These are some cards I made today.

This is the inside of the card. The front has a cut out window that allows the greeting to show through.


This is the front.

The picture of the 'queen' in this card is actually on the inside of the card, with a cut out window covered with a transparency on the front - made from a kit.

This is the inside.

So that's what I've been doing this weekend. Feels good to be back at it again.

January Blues

So...2010 is off to a bad start...blogwise. Here it is January 22 and I've only done 5 blog entries this year. Not that I have a host of fans waiting with bated breath for my next entry, but I'm starting to feel guilty about disappointing my most faithful reader. I know he's tired of opening this blog up and seeing some odd looking cacti instead of some funny story of his kids and/or grandkids.

Truth is, I just don't feel that I have anything interesting to say these days. I've returned from the land of eternal sunshine

to the land of cold and snow. The contrast is...what....invigorating???

January in the north is a sick month. I heard on the tv last week that January 16 is officially the most depressing day of the year in the northern hemisphere. Whatever the reason, Lloyd and I had briefly (I hope) succummed to the season's hype. He's going into his second week of intense vertigo, managing only about 4 hrs of sleep a night, broken every 45 minutes or so by attacks of mind-numbing vertigo...and sciatica. I have had a recurrence of iritis which sent me to my opthmalogist for the first time since 2004, and she put me on steroids to reduce the inflamation, eye drops to reduce the pressure caused by the steroids, and is booking me into laser eye surgery for an iridotomy to keep my narrow-angle glaucoma from developing into close-angle glaucoma. The iridotomy consists of drilling laser holes into my iris. What fun. This should be happening in the next week or two. I'll be glad when January's over. And I'm going to be missing a trip to Winnipeg to attend my niece's wedding reception. Sorry Meredith and Angelo.



It hasn't been all bad though. The Arizona trip was lovely, even if it was in the presence of kids and grandkids instead of soulmate/husband. Lloyd and I did manage to have a lovely, peaceful three day weekend together when I got home. And today I finally get to go out on what used to be an every Friday lunch fun time with Mickey.

So...that's my update for today. It's my whine of the month. After all, life isn't always sunshine and light. I'll keep the next entries more upbeat. Don't give up on me yet.

If winter is here, can spring be far behind???

One In Every Crowd

I love saguaro cactus, the State Tree of Arizona....tall stately sentinels of the desert.


I've taken pictures of lots of them, but today I found one that was tall but different - not so stately - the bad boy of the family.



What's with this guy anyway. Did his arms get tired of standing up for so long - after all, the poor old guy was 100 years old before he grew one of those arms. Maybe he was standing on his head when his arms sprouted and they think they're in the right position. Who knows.

Sooner or later he'll end up the way all his upright brothers and sisters - a dry skeleton in the desert, after a long life as the symbol of the southwest desert.