Tag Archives: make stuff

exhibit a:

Posted in Craft, Fiber fun, Handmade, Make, Make Stuff, Sew this by

…or how do I get myself into these predicaments ?

 

exhibit a 8x5

 

See these?? These are the piles that have taken up residence on my work table…no, now these piles have nothing to do with my 4 boxes and 2 bins of fabric that are already in residence in the studio (that were supposed to be cleverly sewn/stashed/gifted down to two bins by *sigh* the end of last year) no, these piles are the result of my children conning me into pj pants, my girlfriend finding a steal on fabric pieces and a “can’t resist” sale at the fabric store…

exhibit A:  a stack of too fabulous and super duper cheap to resist fabric pieces from our last foray into Zimman’s Fabrics… next to last on the pile is 3/4 yard of beautiful blue print cotton which is slated to be a cushion for the comb-back windsor chair in the front hall…

evidence:  super-cute snowman fabric for red-bench pillow, orange cotton fleece on clearance for pants for gwen, two pieces of cotton knit on sale to experiment and make tops for myself

exhibit B:  Lily’s stack of fabrics from last week’s raid on Jo-Ann fabrics.  Her pj pants are halfway up her legs so it’s definitely time for new cozy ones…but somehow “pick 2 pieces of flannel” turned into 3 pieces of flannel and one piece of fleece.

look here:  Gwen’s stack of fabrics, same particulars as exhibit B above.

Obviously, this week…it’s a sewing week… otherwise I won’t see the top of my table until spring.  (arrow stamps are from Splendid Fiins Evidence Arrow Stamp and Brush set #2)

Go!

What projects are stacked up on your table this week?

back on the digi-bandwagon

Posted in Creative Practice, Digital Scrapbooking, Documenting Life, Life in 2014, Make, Make Stuff, Memory Keeping, Project Gal- Memorykeeping by

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!

and so we start

Posted in Craft, Crochet, Fiber fun, Make Stuff by

Lily received a crochet kit for Christmas from her Grandpa to make these super cute stuffed animals….except neither one of us knows how to crochet (!)  I knit but never crocheted.

photo 1and so we start….the two of us together on the sofa, my 1970’s era Reader’s Digest “Complete Guide to Needlework” and You Tube videos by our sides…I grabbed some scrap yarn and crochet hooks and we dig in.

photo 2We worked for an hour and honestly, I think we did pretty well considering neither of us had ever done this!  Next it is off to the craft store tomorrow for some yarn and hooks that go together,  my hooks are a little small for the yarns that I had making it difficult to pull the yarn through.  Lily liked it and was working away !  I found it much harder to control the yarn and hold everything than knitting but I’m sure that will come with practice.

crochet-1To make a start…that is sometimes the most important part of the entire project.

Here’s to making more starts this year.

2013 memory keeping retrospective

Posted in Creative Practice, December Daily, Digital Scrapbooking, Layout A Day challenges, Make Stuff, Memory Keeping, Project Gal- Memorykeeping, Project life, Project Life 2013, Week in the Life, Week in the Life 2013 by

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!