We come like trees ... we all have roots! Family Tradition! ~SOUS 1-07-11

Hey, it's Friday and time for a new weekend ... and a new Stuck on U Sketches  reveal!  If you are new to our challenge blog, we welcome you. If you are a veteran, we are so grateful for you!

Boy, did I have fun with this one! At first, it was hard to get back into the rythmn of scrapping.  I wanted to badly enough ... but I felt a bit like I was starting all over again.  As much as I loved those Christmas holidays, they threw me off kilter a bit.  LOL

Anyway, since the sketch called for one photo, I chose one from last Thanksgiving of my little granddaughter Marianne putting her handprint  on our Family Tree canvas. This was an old piece of artwork with large sunflowers on it, remember those days?  When I started having grandkids, I decided to paint the canvas white and put the family's handprints on there, starting with my hubby and I, then our kids and grandkids ... even a few foreign exchange students. At the time I only had 2 grandchildren but that has grown over the years to 14 and counting.

It has become an awesome family experience to watch as new handprints go up on the canvas.  Last Thanksgiving, my heart just burst with joy (and the tears flowed) as I looked up one side of the hallway and down the other side ... and saw every single member of the family craning their necks to watch!  Isn't that the great thing about family? Everyone wanting to cheer for one another.

So, there is lots of Cricut action on this page. I made a pact with one of my teamies to start using our Cricut cartridges more. For this page, I ended up using 8 without really trying. Okay, here our a few close-ups.

I used my new MS punch all around the page. My papers are a mix of MME Fall in Love Glitter stack, Bo Bunny Noel and and Creative Memories cardstock.  Love that I took time to emboss my cloud which was cut from Everyday Paper Dolls. The tree is from Stretch Your Imagination and the birds are from Straight from the Nest. That cute little sun is from Just Because Cards.  My title was cut from Heritage (Family) and Reminisce Accents (Tradition.)  There is lots of inking all around and use of adhesive foam squares to lift things off the page.  In place of dots for my "i"s," I used flat backed pearls.

Love the grass on that Zooballoo cart, don't you? It was cut multiple times and layered.

The last thing I did on my page was to wrap my tree with some ribbon from my stash and thought it was the perfect finishing touch!

My pearl backed butterfly is, of course, from Indie Art.  I always keep going back to that one.  Here you can see one of my K and Company frames with the saying which I computer-generated. " We come like trees .. we all have roots."  I have that motto on my albums about my own grandparents.

I can't close without throwing in a few photos of 3 other kiddos that got to put their hand on the tree this year ... Peyton  (who is the subject of many of my pages) and the 2 new boys from Ethiopia, Isaac and Jeremiah.  That part was kind of impromptu, so everyone used the pinkish paint I had hurriedly grabbed for Peyton.

Peyton, assisted by her mommy, Brendi

Isaac with the help of his sister MacKenzie

Jeremiah and me

Sorry for the long post today!  Sure hope you find time to play along with the sketch this time! Remember you have 2 weeks to upload you project! If you haven't already seen what the other designers have done, I hope you will pay them a visit.

Thanks for coming. I always love reading your sweet comments!