The beginning of a New Year

I've never been one to make a big deal about New Year's. I'm not a big partier, and I don't drink, so most big New Year's Eve parties just don't suit me. Typically, we do something quiet like a nice dinner at home, and a movie night or have friends over for a fun night with the kids and a nice dinner for the parents.

I'm also not a huge fan of making sweeping changes at the start of a New Year. For the most part, I think that changes need to come about when you are ready for them, and not when there's the pressure of a date on a calendar. Having said that, I have sometimes made some resolutions and stuck to them (and other times, I've made resolutions and they barely survived the first few days).

This year, I'm trying something a bit new.

2011 has been a rough one for us in many different ways - health concerns, work stress, money pressures, etc. It's also been a great year as I've made some wonderful new friends and we feel more settled into the neighbourhood and Ottawa in general.

One thing that has been on the back burner a lot is my scrapbooking. I just haven't had the energy or focus to work on a lot of things, other than a few layouts I've done from time to time. I wanted to change that this year (along with some other things), so I made the decision to start the New Year working on two different projects - both scrapbook related, but also related to health and the changes I want to make in my life.

The first one is pretty straightforward. I signed up for a year-long course through Big Picture Classes. It is a class called Move More, Eat Well.

Here's some info on the course:

In Move More, Eat Well you’ll spend the year with Cathy, checking in once monthly where you’ll get a message from her. It could be a message of inspiration; it could be a message full of laments over muffin tops; it could be a simple reflection on how one month can make all the difference in the world. Whatever the case, she’ll share her personal ebb and flow with you each month, as you go through the process with Cathy, who hopes to give you a little burst of inspiration for your journey.

THE PROJECT

You will be creating an 8 1/2" x 11” album using divided page protectors to document the journey. Fully layered digital templates provided for digital scrapbookers. Cathy has found incredible power in writing about this process of trying to make changes in her own life. She will be giving you questions to consider, assignments for photos to take, and providing you with printable (and customizable) elements which you will use to build the album.

Cathy will encourage you to write every month and will be sharing her own album pages with you. We will also build a community of women (and possibly a few men) supporting one another, sharing the highs, lows and in-betweens of making real and lasting changes.

I liked that this was a long-term course that would allow me to combine my love of writing with making some changes in my health, nutrition and fitness. It's not an overnight change - but one that I hope to build on throughout the year.

The other project I'm starting on January 1 is to work on something called Project Life that was created by Becky Higgins. Here is some info on this system:

Project Life is a back-to-basics approach to memory-keeping. This simple format requires no skill - only your pictures and a pen. No one's life is perfect but everyone has a story and every family has a collection of memories. Putting pictures + stories together in Project Life makes us more aware of our blessings and encourages us to cultivate a good life.

The Project Life kit is a system that you can work with in your own way. There are hard-copy versions (which is what I will be working with) that involves a binder, divided page protectors, coordinated inserts and journalling cards, etc. It's all designed so that you can easily create a way to capture memories that are important to you. While you can work with the kit any way that suits your own style and needs, the way that I want to work with it is what it was originally designed for - capturing one photo a day for an entire day.

It's a big commitment. It doesn't sound like much, but I've never been one to take photos on a regular basis. I want to change that - and that's part of what draws me to Project Life. The goal is not to just record the big events like trips and vacations, holidays, birthdays, etc. but to actually capture the minutia of your life - the ups and downs, the boring stuff as well as the exciting stuff.

My hope is that it will motivate me to take more pictures, and scrapbook more, and also get out more and do more things to create lasting memories for me, Alex and Chris.

I also hope to blog more about how things are going on both projects and be more active on both this blog and our family blog.

So... the New Year is almost here - and I'm ready for it and excited about these new projects!

Weekend Scrapping Fun

Wow - I can't believe how long it's been since I posted anything on this blog. I've really not been doing much scrapbooking at all over the summer, but I'm starting to get into things again.

I was lucky enough to get invited for a weekend of scrapping by Tania. We have a group of women who get together once a month to scrapbook in Ottawa's east end, and once a year, they go to Cornwall to scrapbook for the entire weekend. I was so happy to be included in this weekend, and it was a great experience. The women were all fantastic, everyone was so much fun and I just loved seeing what everyone was working on - they did some incredible layouts and cards and other crafty items.

Here's the layouts I got done over the weekend - you can click on the photo for a bigger version if you want.

Finding a Scrapping Space

Wow... I haven't posted here in so long. I really haven't done much scrapping lately but I find I'm really missing it. Part of the reason I haven't scrapped as much as I'd like is I don't have a dedicated space for it. Our house has a bit of a strange layout and there's a room at the back of the house with a fireplace and nice big windows, but it's a bit hard to use it as any type of useful space as it's narrow and long. Right now, we have a love seat in there, but I find it's really only used once in a while and Alex sometimes plays in there.

Right now my scrapping stuff is up in the loft area but without a table set up to work on, I find I'm not ever getting any projects done. We decided to repurpose the back room so I can have a table there as well as my scrapping stuff - we'll see if it works out.

Ideally, we'll finish our basement at some point in the next year, and that might give me a scrapping space as well as a big play area for Alex. For now, we'll see how the new plans work out and if Alex is happy having the upstairs loft for his big play area.

Wow - I Won a Free Class!

A couple of weeks ago, Jessica (http://www.jessicasprague.com/) had a little contest for a free class. She'd written a post about Birthday Photo Books - all you had to do was post a comment and they picked a random name (or names?) from the list of people who commented to win a free class.

Well I won one of the prizes (I can't remember how many people they were picking). It is a free class called "Up and Running" and  I'm looking forward to completing this class - it's self-paced, so I can do it at my leisure. A lot of what's in the class is stuff I'm already capable of doing, but there's still lots for me to learn so it'll be exciting to work through the projects in the class. I won't start it until I finish Part 2 of the Type+Writer class I've been doing for the past two weeks, but once I do some things, I'll be sure to post them here.

Hey Little Girl

Here's the latest layout I completed for the Type+Writer class I'm taking at the Jessica Sprague website.

Normally I don't find journalling difficult at all - I might not always love what I write, but it usually comes pretty easily to me. This layout was much harder. Not only did I find it hard to write about myself, but I found that the whole idea of writing to your younger self wasn't comfortable to me. I'm not sure if I found it a bit cliché or if it was just hard to write things knowing what it was like growing up. If I was doing the same type of thing to my own son, or another child, the journalling would have been very easy - but I found it awkward to write something really sweet and fun and positive when I know that growing up can suck at times... hopefully the journalling doesn't come across as totally negative though. I took a few liberties here and there, and overall I'm okay with what I wrote.

Aside from the actual writing, the actual layout techniques were neat to learn. I wish we learned a bit more of the 'meat' of what we were doing somethings, but I'm sure I can flesh out the techniques a bit to be able to apply them to other layouts.

Maybe I'm not typical in that regard. If the lesson calls for me to change a layer style, I love learning how to do that - but I also want to know exactly what that does and what other ways we could use that same technique in other layouts or with other photos.

Now to try to get some of the other layouts completed as Part 2 of this class began yesterday - YIKES!

Moments

The latest assignment in my online Type + Writer class was supposed to be focused on capturing the little moments in a typical day. Unfortunately I wasn't able to do that, but I still wanted to learn the techniques used in the layout, so I modified the assignment a bit.

One cool thing that we did for this layout was to incorporate a "word cloud" using either the content from our free writing assignment (a snapshot of that day) or by using your own blog (assuming you have one). The site that we used to create this "word cloud" is called "WORDLE" and it's a very cool site. I just typed in the link to my family blog (not this scrapping one) and it captures the most common words and creates a 'word cloud' from them. You can modify the colours used, and the layout. I then did a screen capture and brought it into the layout and put it on its own layer so it was above the background paper. By playing around with some of the settings, I learned to create a muted background image that incorporates the actual words from my blog.

When I noticed that words like "Chris", "Alex", "Snowman", "Maple Syrup", etc. were prominent in the word cloud, I decided to use photos to link to that text and journalled something to tie it together.

It wasn't exactly what the homework called for, but I'm happy with the results.

20 Little Things

Okay - this next project for the online class was a little bit more difficult to complete. The writing we did yesterday was a bit more difficult as we were supposed to write about ourselves. It would be interesting to do that same exercise again in a few weeks when I'm hopefully feeling better. I've been struggling a lot with some pretty intense pain for the last two weeks (I had a few days of feeling good - but the rest of the time it has sucked). One thing we do is a 15-20 minute free write - just pick a topic and write about it without worrying about organizing our thoughts or grammar, etc. Normally this wouldn't be hard - but to have to write about myself when I know and admit that I'm in a pretty dark, hopeless mood surely had an impact on what I wrote.

The other assignment was easier to write down as you just had to complete each of the following sentences:
•I am proud of my ability to…
•I am amazed by…
•I am blessed with…
•I am a sucker for…
•I am freaked out by…
•I am calmed by…
•I am always up for…
•I am ready to…
•I am excited by…
•I am baffled by…
•I am fascinated by…
•I am listening to…
•I am intrigued by…
•I am challenged by…
•I am extremely fond of…
•I am challenged by…
•I am wild about…
•I am tickled by…
•I am humbled by…
•I am honored by…
•I am amused by…

I then took four subjects from the above list and expanded on them so I had a list of five things for each = 20 small things.

The techniques used were cool to learn. Things like creating and saving a brush (.abr) file for use on other projects, creating circular text, creating art word layouts for things like titles and quotes.

Here's my take on the page. Once again, I used some papers from another kit I had (Echoes of Asia) from the Jessica Sprague website.