Poppylium: Mani, Gypsy and a freebie

Three things on the agenda for this post, and they rhyme :D

I'm actually going to talk about them in a different order than the title suggest, though. Let me start with a bit of fun news: Theresa of Simple Girl Scraps misses designing...! She stopped a little while ago but felt that she missed it, so she made everyone a freebie!

It doesn't have a fancy name, but the colours are gorgeous. Take a look at June Mini 2015:

I used it to scrap our new future dog Mani:

Here's a little more about Mani. Our next service dog was supposed to be a lab mix, whom we had called Captain Picard. The trainer was starting to feel that he might not be a good match and a great pyrennees mix that she was training for another child became available. She thought of us right away for him and after hearing about him and about Captain's shortcomings, we decided we would indeed switch. His name was Marty but as we know a few human Martys, it would have felt strange. The trainer offered for us to keep the name Captain Picard as we had never met the lab mix. But in our minds, we had associated the photos and personality traits she had described to the name and it would have felt wrong to use it again.

So I starting going through the old list of names, and the Internet. Now, I have to say, I might be hard to please. I love words and names. And I put a lot of thought behind choosing one. I don't think I was being unreasonable in wanting a name that was: unique, two syllables, easy to say in both French and English and sounding similar in the two languages, and with a nice meaning. But I also had to make sure that hubby would also like the name, which had been a struggle the past coupe of times we had to come up with one.

I searched for Basque names because of the connection to the breed, I searched for cool words that meant "white", or "snow", or "pearl", or anything related to his colour. We considered Alonso, a Doctor Who reference which would have allowed us to say "Allons-y Alonso" in our best David Tennant voice. But we weren't convinced. Then it occurred to me that if our previous service dog was Helio, partly based on the god of the sun which worked well with his colour, maybe this guy should have a name based on the god of the moon. So I looked up a list of moon gods and discovered Mani, the norse god of the moon, a beautiful giant who guides the moon. It worked for all my demands and even sounded quite a bit like Marty which would make it easier for the puppy to get used to it. Dave wasn't 100% convinced but didn't mind it and it slowly grew on him and got picked.

Moving on to the Bella Gypsy new releases of the week.

The first kit is inspired by Inside Out, the new Pixar movie which I really want to see. The more I hear about it, the more I want to go! The kits has gorgeous, vibrant colours, and is great for a layout about feelings, good or bad.

I tend to scrap happy moments, good memories, big smiles. I don't even usually take photos of the harder times. But for some reason I had taken photos of my little guy on a day after a short night (he has sleep issues). I think I had one of him where he looked soooo sad I couldn't stand to look at it and deleted it, but the two I kept give a good idea of how tired and upset he was.

They also released Wildflower, a beautiful collection which I thought was perfect for the Epcot Flower and Garden Festival photos, for my March 2014 album.