Spenser was the only dog I've ever had, and we loved each other dearly.
This is my second week as guest designer for Artful Delight, and this time I used their April kit to create a layout with a photo from 1991. Because both of my parents worked, we didn’t have pets while we were growing up because Mom and Dad didn’t think it was fair to have a pet and then leave it home alone every day. So my parents didn’t decide to get a dog until my brother and I were done with college and young adults.
At the time of this photo I was 24 and back at home living with my parents while working a full-time job. Enter Spenser. What an amazing little life. From the moment we picked him up at the breeder and brought him home, I was his. And even though Mom and Dad adopted him, he was mine. We fell in love immediately.
In this photo, I had just come home from a day at work, changed out of my work clothes and thrown myself onto the family room floor to cuddle with Spensie. He was only 4 months old here. In fact, you can just barely see his crate in the upper left corner of the photo. Dad was still training him, so he slept in the crate at night. He was little and feisty and his paws smelled like Fritos (have you ever noticed that about dogs?). Spense eventually grew to be a medium-husky miniature Schnauzer (a little bigger than they normally get), so pictures like this of him when he was a little baby are extra precious.
Ours was not that intense-but-shallow puppy love that we all associate with the adolescent years; no, it was deep and real and lasting. I love and miss you, sweet boy, every day.
Product/technique notes:
The patterned papers I used on this layout are all from the Dear Lizzy “Lucky Charm” collection, except for the wood grain, which came from Glitz’s “Color Me Happy” collection. I created the sunburst effect with my Cameo. I cut it out of the top half of the yellow cardstock and then backed that with half a sheet of the patterned paper to peek through. That way I could just build the rest of the page on top of the yellow sheet. It was so much easier than cutting each sun ray and gluing it down individually. [Thanks to Susan, who left a comment asking how I did the sunburst, for inspiring me to come back and add this to my post!]
