Janice Daquila-Pardo

Believe

December 17, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 2 Comments

Isn’t this a sweet photo of my husband’s sisters on Christmas morning? I date this photo at circa 1980 because Thyia, the baby of the family, was born in 1976, and she looks to be about 3 or 4 years old in this shot, don’t you think?

I really love Thyia’s little Dorothy Hamill haircut and Tyna’s filmy pink nightie, which is why I opted to use papers from the Echo Park “Holly Jolly” collection. It’s colors and images go perfectly with the bright, happy, girly look I was going for on this page.

I’m entering this layout into color story challenge #161 at the Play Date Cafe:

Just because card

November 22, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 1 Comment

First things first, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone in the US!

I decided to participate in the challenge at A Blog Named Hero to use one of your old cards to inspire you to make a new one, with a different style.

I wanted to create a card with a detailed fall scene in the foreground and a swirl of fall colors in the background. So I clear embossed the background stamp on white cardstock and then swirled distress inks in fall colors over it. I colored and cut out the little scene with the kitty beside the house to imitate my brother’s home and furkid, and I will send this little “just because” card to them!

I wanted to create a fall scene with an abstract background, so I clear embossed the background stamp and then swirled distress inks in fall colors over it.

Here is the card I made back in April that I used for inspiration on my new one. As you can see, I used the same background stamp for a similar embossed resist look on my new card, but the two results are quite different!

I wanted to let the background on this card get most of the focus, so I kept the other elements understated.

Product/technique notes:
All the stamps are by Hero Arts; I colored the detail images with Copic markers; and I did the embossed resist technique in the background with Tim Holtz distress inks.

Counting blessings & candles

November 17, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 1 Comment

I was born on Thanksgiving Day. If I was given my choice of another birth date, out of all 365 days of the year, I couldn’t come up with a better one.

One of the biggest reasons for my love of my turkey birthday is that it always meant getting together with family. Now, because Thanksgiving is a little bit of a moving target on the calendar, my birthday only actually falls on T-day every several years. My 17th birthday in 1983 was one of those years.

I have just a few photos from that Thanksgiving celebration at my Aunt Doo Doo and Uncle Ron’s house, but they’re enough to show that it was my birthday as well. In these shots with me are my cousins Rob, Colleen and Mike as well as my bro, Phil.

After everyone was stuffed with Thanksgiving fare and could barely sit comfortably or stay awake, Mom would pull out a carefully hidden cake so everyone could sing to me. But I noticed that people usually went for the pumpkin pies over my cake, and let’s face it, who wouldn’t?

Product/technique notes:
All the patterned papers came from My Mind’s Eye’s Indie Chic collection (the Saffron color scheme), which I thought worked so well for these photos and the theme of my page. I’m entering this into the MME November challenge, which is to demonstrate gratitude on your project.

So grateful for you

November 16, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo Leave a Comment

Unfortunately, this is the only photo I have from Thanksgiving 1990.

Sometimes you have only one photo from a whole day of celebration. And sometimes that’s actually all you need to be able to tell the most important story of the day.

When Phil and I were growing up, our family always made the two-hour drive to Pennsylvania to spend Thanksgiving with the extended family from my Dad’s half of the union. Those were good times: at least four generations of family all piled into Aunt Doo Doo and Uncle Ron’s house to catch up with one another and eat obscene amounts of delicious food. But then cousins started getting married and having their own children, and the families that made up that big group started breaking off to celebrate Thanksgiving in smaller units.

So in 1990 our family stayed home and had a cozy turkey day on our own. We no doubt started the day by going to Mass and then came home to spend hours cooking “the fixins.” Here, everything is ready to go—Dad even carved the turkey before this photo was snapped—and we’re about to dig into the feast. Seeing as the importance of this day is to recognize what’s most dear to you and count them as blessings, I think this one photo summed up the day perfectly!

Happy hour

November 10, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 3 Comments

Mom, me and Phil enjoying happy hour in Saxapahaw, NC (August 2012)

I went to North Carolina this summer to visit my mother and brother, and we made a list of things we wanted to do while I was there. Phil brought up the idea of going to a town called Saxapahaw because he had read that it was a great day-trip option for foodies. It’s a small, sleepy town west of Chapel Hill, where my family lives, that has begun to gain renown because of the renovations and eateries that are being added:

We made the half-hour drive in high spirits and with high hopes. Yes, it was a hot and steamy day in August, but how bad could that be once we were lounging comfortably on the back deck of a Saxapahaw café, overlooking the beautiful Haw River and enjoying local gourmet food and beer?

Now, I don’t want to complain too much, but it was actually a little weird. Perhaps we went on a bad day—it was in the middle of the week in the afternoon—but there was nothing at all that we could find to “take in” about the place. And we only saw a handful of people during the few hours we spent there! I’m thinking maybe Saxapahaw has a really good PR person. 😉

Luckily, we ran into a man on the street who had bought and nicely renovated a portion of the old mill and turned it into The Eddy Pub. We took our rest there over an appetizer plate and some nice local beers. In the end we had a good time because, let’s face it, the company is always more important than the locale. And best of all our waitress graciously took this lovely photo of the three of us.

Product/technique notes:
I followed the November Club CK sketch, below, and am entering it in the challenge. The background paper (which put me in mind of designs you’d find in an old pub) is from Fancy Pants’ The Good Life collection, the butterfly stamps are by Martha Stewart Crafts, the flair is from BasicGrey’s Fact and Fiction collection.

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