Layout Share – 2012

Hello again!

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m slowly picking away at my updates and ideas for my blog here.  I wanted to share some layouts from 2012 HERE I’m organizing my layouts under the “Memory Keeping” tab rather than under a separate “Layouts” tab, thought I could keep all things about documenting memories under one tab…What do you think?  Come take a look!

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Have a great day everyone!

Big Big news here!!

My big big news for the day (actually week and month!)… I will be contributing to the latest class from Stacy Julian and Jennifer Wilson at Big Picture Classes!  I can’t begin to tell you how excited and thrilled I am to be working with these amazing ladies…. and when you get a personal email from Stacy Julian saying she likes your work and wants you to help teach a class…you say yes ma’am!!  (for my non-scrappy savvy friends, Stacy Julian is one of the driving forces in the modern scrapbook world!)

AAS2014classroomdescription

 

Check out the class description here: the art + science of scrapbooking

So all my scrappy friends, come check out the Art + Science of Scrapbooking. Registration is on now through May 21. Class is four weeks, 2 challenges per teacher per week. I will be the “right brained” scrapper (no surprise there) doing the “left brained” challenges. Come on over and sign up!!

Can ya tell I’m just a little excited?!

layout share the last of 2013

I did manage to fit in a little digi-scrapping at the end of last year in between family and traveling and snow and ahem, not finishing my december daily or my Project Life  (both in process)  sometimes it’s just great to do something start to finish in one sitting…done

Digital Layout using Little Feet Digital Designs 30 days of Thankful kit

Digital Layout using Little Feet Digital Designs 30 days of Thankful kit

Thankful List using LIttle Feet Digital Designs 30 Days of Thanks / Cornucopia kit

Thankful List using LIttle Feet Digital Designs 30 Days of Thanks / Cornucopia kit

Both of these layouts (which I am presenting as a 2 page layout) are from a beautiful digital kit designed by my dear friend Janet Carr of Little Feet Digital Designs.  the kit is available HERE and it is gor-ge-ous as you can see.  Since the page with photos was so colorful, I opted to change all of my photos to black and white so they would stand out.  I used PSE8 (i know, i know time to upgrade) and the “convert to b/w” settings to change the photos.

Hope you enjoy!  Have more to post but signing off for now to survey the snow on the roof…

Have a great day everyone

back on the digi-bandwagon

Now that my computer has recovered it’s 120Gb of “other”  (crash plan backing up huge log files to my hard drive in addition to backing up on-line…needless to say, deleted crash plan and the files and hellooooo hard drive space!)  I’m finally getting back to some digital scrapbooking!

01-Intro-Page-webMy dear friend Janet is running a free class at Your Stories Go Digital called “This is me Exposed”  It’s a super class with FREE digi-templates and kits to use in the project.  I thought it would be a fun class and Janet’s designs are GORGEOUS!!  See her shop HERE .  The class runs for four weeks (and it’s kind of self-paced so although it’s on week 3, you can jump in now!)  and I’ve finally gotten to making up the title page for my collection.  I’m not sure what form it’s ultimately going to take but it will be fun going through the pages and answering all the questions….just might be getting my family in on the act as well!

What projects are you working on this month? I’m working out the best way to organize all the files and information for classes like this and will be sharing my methodology soon!

Happy Monday everyone!

2013 memory keeping retrospective

I love memory keeping and telling our family stories.  I am happy to be the gatekeeper for the family photos and memorabilia and the designatee to get it all organized in a format that we can share with our little family, our larger extended family, friends and with the world at large.

Plus, it’s fun

Toward the end of this year, I felt that I hadn’t really accomplished much as far as my memory keeping / scrapbooking projects were concerned.  I know I have a big bunch of on-line classes that I am going to finish up next year, as well as other ongoing memory keeping projects (that is another post for another day) but I thought I’d tally up my efforts this year and see where I really stand (I am planning in my “to do blog list” to share about some of these projects)…

Project Life

PL-for-Blog-PostYes, as of the close of 2013, I am still working on 2013 while looking forward to starting 2014.  Am I OK with it?  Yes.   Does it work for me? Yes…  Am I going to continue with this way of documenting our lives weekly?  Absolutely.    I’ve found during this my 3rd year of this kind of documentation, that sometimes this works best for me if I can “batch” it and do several weeks at once.  Earlier this year, I put together 8 weeks of layouts (8 double or 16 single) in less than 2 hours (!)   For 2014, I would really like to keep more current on this project but we’ll see how it goes.  The most important part is that the photos and the stories are getting documented.

Tally:  52 weeks of 2 – page spreads  (or 104 single spreads) (plus some extra stuff thrown in for good measure)… am going to down grade the number of weeks completed because I realized after I published this post that I’m still working on the last 4 months of 2013….that would be the not-caught-up-but-its-ok part of the project !

Revised Tally:  36 weeks of 2 page spreads (or 72 single page spreads)…still a good number!

Albums

Florida Keys vacation 2012:  

FLA-album-for-blogI was really happy to find a way to liberate the photos and stuff from this trip and get it into an album we can all enjoy.  I still need to corral everyone to write a few things down on some of the journaling cards but it’s basically done.   Love how it all came together, since I had everything all categorized and organized ahead of time, it took about 3 hours to pull the actual album together.

Tally:  20 double spreads/ 40 single pages

50/50 for Charlie’s 50th birthday:  

50/50 Timeline-album cover pageWhen I thought about my memory keeping efforts, for some reason I did not count this album or Project Life (???)  I know, silly.  This project was a true labor of love and I’m so so happy that I made this gift for my wonderful husband.  In short, the album was a 50 year retrospective of my hubby’s life to date, including photos from 1988 forward that I had, and photos from 1963 to 1988 from his mom.  Everything until about 2007 had to be scanned, cropped and edited (!)

Seriously love this book!

Tally:  202 photo album pages or  large images scanned

484 images edited/manipulated/printed

48 double page spreads / 96 single pages

50th Surprise Birthday Party Album

party-album-for-blogThe album about the party (yes we were just a little party-centric earlier this year!) I almost forgot about this album…I used the same type of album as the Florida Keys vacation, slipped in photos taken at the surprise party and notes from the guests.  Easy peasy done.

Week in the Life Album

WITL-13-Cover-Page I almost didn’t do it this year but at the last minute decided to jump in and keep it SIMPLE which I think I succeeded in doing…. layouts are printed and note sheets are all tucked away just waiting to but put into the album.  This project was all digital which was the only way I could keep it super duper simple and it worked.  I shared about this project on the blog (yay!)

Tally:  24 single page layouts

December Daily Album

December Daily 2013-startWork in process…I don’t think I’ve ever actually finished one of these in December (!) and thats ok.

Girls School Days Albums

Had them each pick out an album color, ordered the albums and started sorting current year and last year items loosely into each album….ongoing project I hope to work on more in 2014, but hey, at least they’re started.

Layouts 

Layout 2013-Julia's kitchenAh the backbone of scrapbooking and part of my memory keeping toolkit.   I love making layouts and have to admit, that I’ve been doing a lot more digital scrapbooking than paper but I’m making a concerted effort to do more paper scrapping to:  a) step away from the screen b) use up the large amount of scrapbooking supplies I own.  I am working on a better system to keep track of the layouts that are in process, completed, printed out (for digital layouts) and photographed (for traditional layouts) so I kind of feel I have work all over the place but here is a rough estimate of layouts completed….

Tally:  103 single page layouts   …   61 digital  … 42 paper

More than I would have guessed, I think my tally was helped by a weekend crop in January, and Layout-a-Day challenges in February and May.

GRAND TOTAL 

124 Double Page Spreads  (or 248 single page spreads)

127 Single Pages

375 Single pages (counting double spreads as 2 pages..which they are)

Wow

More than a page a day

No way would I have dreamed it was that many!!  Awesome.  So glad I tallied it up.  So happy that all of these memories are written down and in albums for everyone to enjoy and for those who are wondering…yes, I printed out all of my digital pages.

How did you fare this year on your projects/hobbies/memorykeeping exploits?  I’d love to hear!!

Bring on 2014!