Month: January 2015

Continuing with my theme of using up older collection, I pulled out my October Afternoon Midway stuff.  I have to say, having had both Two Peas and Archivers close has really cut down on my shopping.  I wish we had a store where I could go look at stuff!  Luckily, I have enough patterned paper stockpiled to scrap for the next 10 years without buying anything more than cardstock and tape runners.  lol.

 

I decided to make a frame out of some Prima flowers.  I think I like it?   I finally used up all of my tiny brads so I used stickles to dot the centers.

Initially I wasn’t going to do this layout, but then I realized the arcade stuff would look pretty awesome with the Midway papers.

I’m done with August 2013!  I’ve been using up some of my older supplies too.  🙂  Today I’m using one of my all-time favorite collections, Crate Paper’s The Pier. I threw in some bling too.  Incidentally, if you have a preschooler, give them a can of shaving cream.  It’s awesome.  Today’s decisions include deciding on the next month to tackle.  I’m torn between March 2014 and just keeping with the chronological theme I have going and tackling September 2013.  I’m pretty pumped at the thought of finishing 2013 all together, but March 2014 doesn’t have all that many layouts to do…  Decisions, decisions.  Either way, I hope my productive streak continues!

 

3 weeks in and I’m still loving this project!

We won’t be sharing the babies’ names before their arrival so I’ve blurred out the options on this card.  🙂  Most of the cards this week are still coming from the Kraft Edition, with one coming from the Baby Boy Edition.  I also added some wood veneers and label stickers this week.

 

And how did I do on my mini-goals?

1. Baby Boy’s Blanket- I made some progress, but didn’t finish.  Hopefully this week!
2. Storage system for the nursery (hello Ikea!) – Once again, made some progress, but need to roll this one over.
3. 2015 Week 3 PL – Done!
4. 2014 Week 3 PL – Um…  I started it?
5. Start Finish book club book by Thursday – Done!
6. Figure out carseats – nope.
7. Design layout tracker – nope
8. Pick another month to scrap and finish it – I have all of the pics printed for August and I’m about 1/2 done.
9. Work on wipes – I got them all serged!  Now I just need to find the fraycheck and finish them off.
10. Make spreadsheet for borrowed baby stuff – nope.

Raptor developed a nasty ear infection this weekend so some of the crafty projects got put on hold.  Hoping for a productive week this time.

This was one of the few pages I had already done for July 2013 before starting my binge scrapping.

Still actually quite simple, but I did dress up the frame with a bit of twine.  Loving these papers from Shimelle’s line.

I also thought these pictures were pretty awesome.  These pictures of the layout are a bit blurry, but I promise they’re clear in real life.  🙂  My mom and I took Raptor down to San Marcos to check out Aquarena Springs.  They don’t have a mermaid show like they did when I was little, but they do still have glass bottom boats.  Super cool.  🙂  I managed to get a pic of Kate and myself in the reflection which was pretty neat.

I’m starting to think that I may have been waaaay over zealous with those goals for the week.  lol.  We’ll see how much I can manage to get done this weekend.

 

 

Yay for holiday weekends! I got a whopping 17 layouts done this weekend, bringing my grand total for the month to 37!  I’ve now finished through the end of July 2013 and I am relishing this short period of being only 17 months behind. 🙂  Now I’m deciding if I should just scrapbook random layouts for a bit or if I should push on and tackle August 2013.  Decisions, decisions.  Now obviously these are super simple layouts, but I’m ok with that.  I have plenty of more artistic layouts sprinkled throughout.  Not to mention that Kate wanted to look at one of the finished scrapbooks this weekend and I had an epiphany.  As we looked through the book, I wasn’t critiquing my layouts.  I was marveling over how tiny she was!  So I’ll continue to push through and just try to get some stories down.  Here’s an example of one of the super simple layouts from this weekend.

I don’t even think that I cut most of these papers.  I just moved the scraps around until they looked like what I wanted.  🙂

Honestly the most time consuming aspect of this was adding these strips of Amy Tangerine tape and gluing down the wood veneer hearts.  Which took almost no time.  🙂  And to be honest, this layout is more complicated than most of the ones I made this weekend.  I go through phases of wanting to be artistic and creative and phases of just wanting to get it done and checked off.  Both are fine!

 

I’d say that I didn’t really spend more than 30 minutes on anyone layout.  That’s still quite a bit of time spent scrapping, but I’ve recently managed to get Raptor addicted to scrapping too, so I just give her some older papers (she doesn’t care that they’re not trendy), prints that I’ve ended up not using, and old journaling cards from my used up Project Life core kits.  I’m having her journal on her layouts now.  It’s super cute.  (And good for her writing skills.)  It was really satisfying (and motivating!) to get a whole month knocked out.  I batch printed the photos and then forced myself to just focus on them.

Other things I’m hoping to get done this week:

1. Baby Boy’s Blanket
2. Storage system for the nursery (hello Ikea!)
3. 2015 Week 3 PL
4. 2014 Week 3 PL
5. Start Finish book club book by Thursday
6. Figure out carseats
7. Design layout tracker
8. Pick another month to scrap and finish it
9. Work on wipes
10. Make spreadsheet for borrowed baby stuff

I had a very productive weekend.  🙂  (I wrote this a few weeks ago.)  I got all of the wipes cut out, and I even managed to rethread my serger!  I’m switching the thread to teal and let me tell you, it looks awesome.  The biggest thing, though, was finishing this scarf!

Here is my Frozen obsessed Raptor modeling it for me.

And here’s a close up detail shot.  I used a variegated nubby yarn which knitted up lovely in a seed stitch.

 

 

It’s a New Year’s miracle!  I’ve managed to keep up with Project Life for 2 weeks.  🙂  I think it might be a new record.

I’m still using mostly the Kraft Edition, but this week we had some baby news so I threw in a card from the Baby Girl Edition.  The Kraft is more cream based and the Baby Girl is more white based, but honestly, things like that don’t bother me in Project Life.  You’ll notice that most of these pics are phone photos so they’re not fantastic.  Once again, not bothered by that for Project Life.  lol.  When I’ve looked back at past Project Life albums, I love that they include all of the random one-off phone photos that don’t make it anywhere else.  Like the gas pic.  Hello!  Gas was under $2 a gallon!  Definitely something to remember.  🙂  The only things I added were a few thickers for the “Week Two” on the title card, and I added the text for the belly pic before I printed it.  Keeping it super simple this week.

I did a bit more blurring this week because it included my baby sister’s bachelorette weekend.  I will say, it was by far the classiest bachelorette party I’ve been to, but it did still include a rather naughty cake.  🙂  I also blurred out something from work and a bit of the identifying info from Raptor’s report card.  I’m always nosy and want to know what other people have blurred so there you go.  I’m still so loving this project!  🙂

 

 

 

I’m in major catch up mode!  I’ve done 16 layouts since January 1st.  I’d be feeling super awesome about that, but it looks like I have over 250 layouts left to be caught up.  Ack!  Currently, my plan is to do simple layouts as quickly as possible.  Also, I’m trying to pick a month at a time to focus on.  (I’m starting with the months that have the fewest layouts instead of going in chronological order like I usually do when I’m in catch up mode.)  I’m forcing myself to do whatever layouts are going to happen for that month and then crossing the others off my list.  I’m doing November 2014 right now and I hope to be done with it in the next day or two.  The reality of my “to scrap” list is that some months have 7 or 8 layouts worth of cute pics of Raptor at the pool.  Do I really need to scrap all of those?  No.  Time to narrow down the list.  Other items on this week’s to do list include washing/ sorting baby clothes my friend lent me.  Cleaning out the nursery so my other friend can stay there this weekend.  Knitting like a crazy person. (I’m 1/3 of the way through the first blanket!)  2015 Week 2 Project life.  2014 Week 3 Project Life.  Must catch up on all the projects!

 

I got another week done!  It’s a miracle!

This week I used the Becky Higgins Girl cards.  I’m still working on the calendar cards.  It will go in that blank orange space.

I didn’t have a ton of pics this week so I resized a few of the filler cards.  🙂

 

 

I love doing this project with traditional materials!  I have had so much fun this week putting it together.  Having a dedicated space on my desk has made all the difference on being able to keep up with this project.

Here’s the left side.  All of these cards are from the Kraft Edition.  I kept it pretty simple.

And here’s the right side.  After doing it digitally for 2 years (lol, 1 year being done and one year being in the planner) I’m not used to having 7 journaling cards a week, but I’m really liking writing more.  Especially since this year is going to see such big changes for us!  I’m not a huge fan of having all of the journaling cards down the middle with all of the photos on the top and bottom so I mixed it up.  I like the way it turned out.

Pretty much the only embellishing I did was to add a few wood veneers and write on one of the photos.  I’m not in love with how the writing turned out, so I think next time I’ll add the writing before I print.  (I’m wanting to add a belly pic every week with the number of weeks I am on it.)  I printed all of these pics at home on my Selphy (I <3 that printer) and to get 2 to a page I use a program called TurboCollage.  It could not be easier to use.

And that’s week 1!  Fingers crossed I can keep up this year.  🙂