Where I’ve Been.

Sorry gang. I’m sure you’ve all been checking here to see if I’ve updated lately, right? Uh huh. That’s what I thought. Well, I’ve been busy. And, as per usual, not busy with the things I should be doing, but instead the things I want to be doing.

I signed up for a free online class that Jessica Sprague is offering. The class is called “Stories in Hand”. It started yesterday and registration for it was closed last night. But those of us that did sign up are having a blast! No one was even really sure what the class was about. Jessica simply said she was going to teach us the system she developed for telling her stories, organizing her thoughts, etc. It sounded intriguing and it was free, so I figured what the hell.

I’m SO glad I signed up! It’s fantastic! We had been given a list of a few supplies before the class started, so I had picked those up last week. Yesterday, for the first day, we were given files to print out for the cover and the tabbed pages for the binders we had bought. Here’s the cover:

And here are the tabbed pages we printed out and put into the binder. There’s one for “Roots”, one for “Self” and one for “Family”.

This is what they look like:

Within the Family tab, she told us to create sub-tabs for each member of our family. So I have one for Steve and one for each girl:

So that was it for day 1 of the class. Today, I got very excited when I saw what the next part was. We were given more files to print out for in the binder. And on these files are hundreds and hundreds of questions to ask yourself and then write/scrap/video/etc. about. Whatever way we decide to document it is up to us. The class is more about teaching us how to keep track of what we want to document, prompts for possible things that will be forgotten if someone doesn’t write them down, etc.

These are the contents and questions we were given for each of the tabbed sections:

There are at least 20 pages of those questions for EACH tab. My god, I’ll be writing and scrapbooking forever. LOL! I’m sooo excited though! I really DO think it’s important to document the things in your life. The things that will be long forgotten after your gone unless someone takes the time to record it forever. Think of how cool it will be for my kids to have the stories behind these types of questions. I wish I had one of these from my mom!

Jessica also gave us these pages to print out for the binder:

We were told to put at least one of those in each tabbed and sub-tabbed section, to write down the stories you want to eventually document. So cool!

I’m not sure what we’re doing tomorrow, but I believe Jessica mentioned making a small notebook or something. After that, we’re going to begin actually using the system, doing exercises, etc. I’m pretty pumped! I wish I would’ve posted about the class here before registration was over so some more of you could have signed up. It’s NOT for scrapbookers. There’s certainly a lot of us there, but many haven’t scrapped a day in their lives. The pages and files are as easy as clicking Print, cutting them down, and punching holes in them. So no comments here about me being creative. This is ALL Jessica this time. LOL!

If she ever offers this class again in the future, I’ll make sure to post about it here and I URGE all of you to sign up for it. Even if you don’t want to actually scrap/write/etc., it’s cool just having the hundreds of questions at your fingertips. I can see it being fun for your kids to pick one of the questions and let you tell them the story. Just awesome stuff.

Anyway, that’s where I’ve been the past few days. Printing, cutting, and punching holes. I’ll be back later though. I NEED to post the photos of my evil sister-in-law and my mother-in-law sliding down the ginormous slide at Bounce U over the weekend. Their facial expressions are simply priceless. LOL!

Later gang! :)

Year at a Glance Album

As mentioned yesterday, my custom deck of cards from Artscow arrived last week. There’s an option to turn off the numbers from printing on the cards. Since there are 52 cards in a deck, I thought it would be fun to upload a picture from each week for the past year and have them put on the cards. Then I had Steve drill a hole through the whole deck and I held them together with a standard office binder ring. (Note: I’ll be buying a smaller ring. This was just the only size I had in my stash right now. I’ll also tie some ribbons and stuff on the ring to “pretty it up”.

I had uploaded a design to put on the backs of all of the cards, so I just took a Sharpie marker and wrote a little bit about each photo on the back of them.

In Photoshop, I put a little “strip” on each photo and typed “Week of _______”.

 It’s been fun so far. Just looking at it this week, we discovered that during this week last year, there was some snow on the ground. Far cry from the almost 70-degree day we’re experiencing today. LOL! The girls get a kick out of it and we end up talking about the picture and some stories from whatever event the picture is from. Good stuff. :)

And once again, I disappeared.

Wow. I’m really slacking on this blog thing. I think it’s partly because I’ve spent most of my time over on Facebook again [waving to Facebook friends], partly because work has been busy (when I decide to actually work, that is), and I’m working on a bunch of projects for Christmas and stuff. I seem to have missed Halloween AND the big election here. Wow.

OK. So let’s start with a few photos of the kids on Halloween. I don’t have many of Grace because she decided she didn’t want to go Trick-or-Treating, so I only have the one of her on the day we tried out her costume idea (for now… I have some others of her I haven’t edited yet). She went to a bunch of other Halloween-related parties, events, etc., so when she didn’t want to trick-or-treat, I didn’t push her.

So here’s Grace. She’s a punk rocker.

Don’t you just love the attitude? LOL! (And obviously, when we went out in public, she wore a different shirt that didn’t bare her midriff.

And now, onto my little Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. She had a BLAST trick-or-treating!

This was the day we bought the costume. She had red sparkly shoes for the Halloween events. See? She had to wear many, many layers because it was freezing, but you could still tell who she was supposed to be, so she didn’t care.

In other news, I got my Deck of Cards mini photo album thingamajig the other day and will come back later to show you pictures of that. It turned out pretty cool if I do say so myself!

And now, I need to enjoy the last 15 minutes before the girls come bounding through the door from school. So I’ll be back later!

OH! And I have to show you why my children have reaffirmed that they are indeed mentally disturbed freaks. LOL!

Um, hello?

Hey gang! I can’t believe it’s been 9 days since I last blogged. How very rude of me. In my defense, things have been pretty busy here with work, Halloween events, switching our house’s heating system from oil to coal (for purely financial reasons), school stuff, and extracurricular activities. But I’m here now, which is all that matters, right?

In glancing at my last post, I see I never posted my Sunday layouts for my Week in the Life project. So here they are for your viewing pleasure, as well as the 2 inside pages that sort of act like a pictorial “summary” of the week.

I just have to do the cover page and maybe one or two “outtake” pages, and then I’ll get it printed.

What else? Oh! I’m a redhead now! I went last Friday and got my hair done. It less “orange” (actually, it’s not orange at all IRL) and more “auburn” in real life, but you get the idea. I LOVE it and may never go back to another color. :)

And yes, in the photo, I’m holding my shirt shut to avoid boobie flash. I had to use my self-timer and because it was sitting on our low windowsills, I had to sit on the floor and bend over. LOL!

Anyway, I need to go do some work now, but I’ll be back later. Tonight is trick-or-treat night in town (and no, I do NOT know why my town does it on the Wednesday before Halloween, but they do). So I’ll post some pictures of my little Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz and my punk rocker/goth girl. Later gang!

Weekend Report

So the weekend’s been busy, but fun, I suppose. Friday night was “Movie Night” here, so we made ice cream sundaes and watched “Finding Rin Tin Tin” (cute movie, by the way). Yesterday, I cleaned during the day and then we headed to the town’s Halloween parade. Grace walked with her Brownie troop again, and I walked with Hannah and her Daisy troop. They made me wear a stupid headband and a tail, but I shoved the tail into my back pocket about 2 blocks into the parade. I have some pride. And since the entire damn town watches the parade and I know over half of them, I had to draw the line somewhere. LOL!

I’m waiting for Steve to get home from walking around on a mountain somewhere so we can order wings and watch the Steelers game I’m taping right now. I’m soooo tempted to turn it on and at least see who’s winning, but I’m fighting the urge. Sigh.

Anyway, I have some more cleaning up to do, so here are my pages from the last few days for my Week in My Life project. I’ll be back later. :)

 

I doubt you want to see ALL of these pages close up, but I will post the last two larger so you can see little Hannah has a cat. Unfortunately, since I was with Hannah for the parade, I didn’t get any photos (except that one) of Grace.

Halloween has officially begun.

Last night, Grace was in a Halloween parade in a neighboring town. She walked with her Brownie troop. The girls were jellyfish and their leader was Spongebob. I must say, their costumes were really creative and they looked really cute! They had umbrella hats and they attached strips of bubble wrap, colored cellophane, and some iridescent charms. They each wore a blinking, color-changing light around their neck and had different colored glow sticks in the umbrella hats. They looked really neat walking in the dark.

Grace had a blast! It was her first parade she was ever in. Hannah sat with me and Steve to watch it and loved getting all the candy that the parade marchers threw to the kids along the street. (Are we the only people that do that? It’s a big thing around here for all parades, and the kids LOVE it.

This Saturday is our town’s Halloween parade. Grace is in it again and Hannah is also in it with her Daisy troop. I’m walking in the parade with Hannah, although I don’t really want to. LOL!

I’m working on another little album project too. At Artscow, you can order a deck of photo cards, with a different photo on each card. I recently discovered that you can set it so that the actual card numbers and suits aren’t printed on the cards. Since there are 52 cards in a deck and 52 weeks in a year, I uploaded one photo from each week for the past year and put one on each card. Then I turned off the card numbers for printing. When I get them, I’ll somehow bind them (probably with a ring) and have a little album of a picture a week for a year. I’m excited to get them! I just need to create the “cover” card and then I can order them. Once I get them and see if the whole concept actually works, I may order another set or two for Christmas gifts for the grandparents.

And now, I must go do something productive. Here are my pages from yesterday for my Week in My Life project. Grace is on the right-hand side of the photo, holding the banner. :)

Life Happens. And I Want to Remember It.

I started a new “project” yesterday. For what it’s worth, this project wasn’t my idea. I first read about it on Ali Edward’s blog. She’s an amazing person (from what I gather) and an amazing scrapbooker (from what I’ve seen). A few week’s ago, she posted about a Week in the Life project, where you document a week in your life. No pressure of Project 365 where you’re committed for a year. No reason to try to be overly creative or impressive. Just recording what a week in your life is like. Take photos for a week, write a bit about them and be done. Seven short days to do it, but something you (and others) can look back on for the rest of your lives and smile, cry, reflect, etc.

So I decided yesterday to give it a whirl, and I have to say, I’m having a blast with it. I took photos yesterday and today and spent the majority of today deciding what I wanted my finished book to look like, what I wanted to do (and not do) with the whole thing, etc. I decided from the get go that this wasn’t going to be crazy ADHD about the photos (like I normally am). Sure, they’re an important part of the whole thing. But I wasn’t going to spend hours (like I usually do) touching up photos, trying to make them perfect, etc. For me, this is just about getting the details down. I’ve made myself shoot in Auto mode on my camera, just because I don’t want to get all “artistic” with these photos. I’m adjusting exposure, contrast, and white balance in the photos, but that’s where it ends. No fancy post-processing… no touch ups… no  cool effects… no mind-blowing conversions. Just the photos and the story behind them.

I think it will be so cool to look back later on and browse through the book I intend to get printed out. In fact, I’m loving it so much, that I think I’m going to do it once a month. One week out of each month, I’ll do this, so that at the end of a year, I’ll have 12 photo books with each one documenting one week during each month of the year. I just think it will be cool to read back through them later.

So I decided to make these fairly simple. No fancy scrapbook elements and drop-shadows, no spending hours making sure all of my colors match, etc. Just a basic template, my photos, and my thoughts.

Here’s what the first page will look like.

Obviously, there’s a second page with the remaining days of the week. I’m just pulling in 4 photos from each day, as a brief “summary” at the beginning of the book.

Then, I’ll have 2 pages for each day of the week. The left side will have one (or two) photos with half a page of journaling just talking about what we did that day, what happened, what kind of day it was, my thoughts, etc. The right side will concentrate on just the photos.

Here are some close ups of the pages.

 

If you think this might be something you’d like to do, you can go to Ali’s blog and see a whole list of the posts relating to the project. There are so many approaches you can take with this. You can do it digitally like I am. Or you could just print out the photos, crop them, and handwrite the story behind them. In my opinion, the appearance of the end result isn’t nearly as important as the process and the idea behind the end result. I just think it’s a cool concept, and one that I think the kids (and Steve and I) will really enjoy as they get older and can look back on our lives.

So who’s joining me? Anyone? If you decide to give it whirl, drop me a line and let me see your project. I LOVE look at everyone else’s. :)