8 photos

First Communion 1975

May 3, 2015 By Janice Daquila-Pardo Leave a Comment

Phil and I made our First Holy Communion on Saturday, May 3, 1975—40 years ago today!

I remember so much about that special day. My mom made my beautiful dress. Fr. Francis Curran, our pastor at Immaculate Conception Church in Willoughby, celebrated the Mass. And I was so happy that all our relatives came for our big day.

Product/technique notes

I used patterned papers from the My Mind’s Eye “stella & rose » gertie” collection and cut a title with my Silhouette. With all the patterns plus eight photos, I decided to keep this design simple.

CowParade

November 15, 2011 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 12 Comments

Sketchabilities has revealed its latest sketch, #59, and it’s a great one! Be sure to head over to the site to grab the sketch, then create something and link it up! 🙂

Here’s my Design Team layout inspired by the sketch.

Artist-decorated cows were displayed all around the streets of Austin.

CowParade is the largest and most recognized public art event in the world. These exhibits, held in 75 cities in 30 countries to date, have produced more than 5,000 cow canvases by local artists. The exhibits have been viewed by upwards of a half billion people.

And from July through October CowParade came to Austin!

CowParade Austin included 74 sculptures. Matt and I wanted to be sure to partake of this public art display, so we took a few hours one Saturday in October to see as many of them as we could. We walked up and down Congress Avenue and photographed these big bovine beauties. There were many that we didn’t get to see in person, but the ones we did see were beautiful and clever!

Just this weekend the sculptures were auctioned, raising $1.49 million for The Superhero Kids Endowment at the Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas!

You cannot win if you do not play

November 23, 2010 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 1 Comment

For a long time I’ve been a lurker online. I read blogs and shook my head, laughing at the funny things other crafters said. But I didn’t comment. I read product reviews and agreed or disagreed with the analysis. But I didn’t drop the reviewer a line about my opinion. I learned about scrapbook and card challenges and toyed with the idea of participating. But I didn’t send in my layouts for consideration.

However, with the start of this blog I decided that had to change. I had to stop lurking and start speaking up. And I admit that’s challenging for me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve turned to my husband, Matt, at his computer and told him what I thought of things I had read online. And after patiently (usually) listening to my diatribe, he would often say, “You should be blogging this stuff. Or at the very least you should comment on that person’s post.” At the mention of sharing my thoughts publicly I usually just turned back to my computer to read more of what others had written.

When it comes to the challenges and contests I really just haven’t thought I could compete with all the talent out there in the world. There are so many amazing layouts being posted every single day! But that was just a lame excuse for not having to expose myself to critique—or worse, to ridicule.

So I’ve ended that by starting to throw my hat into the ring every so often. It has been so motivating and much more fun than I expected it to be! I’ve even won a few times. Yay! But even more than the winning, I’m enjoying knowing that others are looking at my art. I just hadn’t realized how much that was missing from my process. I’m accustomed to finishing a layout, showing Matt for his approval, and then putting it in the appropriate album. Sort of a letdown, you know?

Well, last night I took the next step in this journey of making my crafting process more public and social. I submitted my work for consideration for a design team. Gulp.

The assignment was fun because it involved working with sketches, which I really love anyway. I liked the sketches, and I’m proud of my resulting layouts. So I feel like I won even if I’m not chosen for the team. Here are my submissions:

Baptized

Sunset cruise