Janice Daquila-Pardo

Glory days

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

My brother, Phil, is on the far left in this photo.

1988 was our star-spangled summer. Phil and I had each earned an editorial internship in New York City through the American Society of Magazine Editors. A whole summer spent living and working in New York! What an amazing time we had.

On July 4th a small group of our friends from the internship program went down to the East River to see the fireworks; they were the best I had ever seen! There was rousing music blaring—I particularly remember New York, New York and Glory Days. During the last song of the night—New York, New York—we formed our own little chorus line and performed a Rockettes-inspired high leg kick in perfect unison to the music.

What I recall most from that night, though, is feeling so free and happy to be right where I was.

Knave training

July 22, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo Leave a Comment

I am a total newbie to Renaissance festivals. It was such an interesting culture!

We spent a beautiful spring Sunday afternoon immersing ourselves in the sights and sounds of Sherwood Forest Faire, a Renaissance festival in McDade, Texas. We watched a jousting match and a magic show, threw axes and shot with a bow and arrows (my favorite!). Matt grew up attending Ren fests, but I didn’t, so this was all new to me. It was such an interesting culture! Everyone who worked the event was decked out in period wear, which I expected. But many of the attendees had even better costumes! It was a fun day.

Product/technique notes:
I used this fun sketch from Crafty Sketches:

The papers I used for the flags are from BasicGrey’s Oxford collection.

Oasis

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

I swear I heard a rattlesnake while we were on this walk into hell.

To be fair, it was my idea for us to go for a hike on July 4th. There’s a trail running along Brushy Creek Road that I see lots of walkers, runners and cyclists using, but we had not tried it yet. So we agreed to go first thing in the morning to check it out. Then, first thing in the morning turned into noon, and I suggested we wait for another morning. But Matt insisted we’d be fine. So we slathered ourselves with sunscreen, filled our water bottles and headed out.

That path. Went on. Forever. And I swear that ninety percent of it was in full sun. Did I mention that it got to nearly 100 degrees? And there were vultures circling overhead? Yeah.

My repeated requests to turn back fell on deaf ears; Matt really wanted to see where that path led.

Just as I started feeling sick from all that heat, and we were about to run out of the water we had been rationing, it appeared. I actually asked Matt if it was a mirage or an oasis!

He said, “It must be an OASIS because I can see it, too!”

It was a lovely little community water park…with families picnicking, kids playing and squealing and wonderful, cold, restorative water spraying everywhere. We looked at each other in amazement. And then ran in.

What could have been better than to find this?

I think it's awesome that this free splash area is offered by the park system.

Product/technique notes: I saw this distress ink watercolor technique over at Kristina Werner’s card blog and decided I wanted to use it on this layout because of my water theme. I pulled out this piece of patterned paper from Little Yellow Bicycle (I’m using both sides of just one piece of paper on this page) and thought it would be a great way to represent both the searing sun and then the bright colors and fresh feeling of the splash park. So I chose colors of distress ink to match the stripes in the paper (wow, did they match well!) and created swatches of splotchy watercolored paper. Then I cut out each letter of my title from a different swatch.

Just look at how my swatches match the paper!

Fun and games

July 10, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 6 Comments

My first sketch for Creative Scrappers went live on their site on Sunday, and I was so excited to see how the design team used it. All their pages are just beautiful!

Here is a peak at the sketch, and I hope you’ll go grab the full-sized version at Creative Scrappers and use it to play along:

I decided to play along with my own sketch, so I created this page about a recent night out with some friends for BINGO! We were having a little going-away party for our friend, Sri (in the turquoise top), who was about to leave to spend the summer in the English countryside with her grandparents and then come back to the States to attend graduate school. Quite a nice new beginning, right?

The journaling reads, “If BINGO sounds like a game for geriatrics, try playing it at The Park Hotel with Sri, Deborah and Heather! They serve shots when certain numbers are called, hold dance-offs to break ties and give garden gnomes as prizes. What a good time.”

I’ll add this comment: This is not like the BINGO they played in the church I grew up in; in fact, it’s pretty irreverent. 😉

I was sorry to see my friend, Sri, leave, but I know she's starting a great new life.

Just me and the open road

July 2, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 2 Comments

When a kid has a bike, everything changes.

This is the first week Creative Scrappers is revealing the work of their new sketch artists and design teams. Sketch #215 is a great one created by Jenny Evans, and I decided to play along with it to celebrate with my new team members.

My journaling on this layout reads:
“What a 6-year-old girl knows about her world changes once she a gets a bike. Pre-bike all I knew of my hometown I saw from a moving car or on walks with my parents. But once Santa left me a beautiful blue vehicle of discovery under the Christmas tree my world expanded. Willoughby was mine!”

Product/technique notes: I pulled together this sweet little summer page using patterned papers from Simple Stories’ Summer Fresh collection and that cool building paper from Studio Calico’s Abroad collection.

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