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.

The Final Tally

Well I've started the class. It's been a bit rough keeping up as I haven't been feeling well the past little while, but so far, I'm working pretty steadily on the different projects.

It's neat format. Each day, participants get an e-mail with basic info on what needs to be done/learned/practiced that day and that links to the class page, where more information is posted.

The classes run in two-day cycles. The first day relates to writing - with simple exercises to get us writing about different things, or using different approaches as a starting point. The content we work on this day will relate to the layout we complete on Day 2.

On Day 2, we get a template to work with, and quite a few video instructions showing some very cool techniques or tricks for Photoshop Elements or the full-size versions of those programs. We can pick our own photos, and use the papers provided in the class kit, or we can use our own papers from our own digital stashes.

It's been fun chatting online with some of the other people taking the class (people from all over the world), and seeing the work that people have been doing.

Here's my own take on the first page's layouts. You can click the image to see a larger version.

Typography + Writing Class

Today is the start of a two-week class I'm taking on Jessica Sprague's website (www.jessicasprague.com) that relates to typography and writing. While I'm relatively comfortable with writing, I do feel that I need to step out of my comfort zone as I feel that a lot of my journalling just captures the basic info and not how I felt about things, or what things meant to me.

I'm also just going a wee but nuts lately as work is slow and I haven't scrapbooked in many months, so doing this class as a way to get me focused on something and hopefully scrapbooking more.

In honour of the first day of the class, I decided to post one of my favourite videos that I stumbled across online. It uses a poem by Taylor Mali and was created by Ronnie Bruce as part of a course.

I hope you like it!

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

Where has the time gone?

Wow - it has been far too long since I've posted here. I've been so busy with life and moving and holidays and work that I haven't done any scrapbooking at all since before our cruise at the end of October.

I still haven't even been able to get my stuff unpacked yet but I'm slowly working through the boxes to get the scrapping stuff organized.

I've found a local store and the owner and staff seem very nice, and I signed up for a crop there in April but it's a very small store so I'll be doing some online shopping through some of my favourite online stores, I'm sure.

I also signed up for a course run by Jessica Sprague. I had started on of her online digi-scrapping classes last Fall but never got to finish it, although I've been working on it more lately. It was a self-paced class so I can finish it whenever I like. This new class starts in a week and is designed to help people with journalling and typography for layouts. I already journal a fair bit and I'm pretty comfortable with that aspect of scrapping, but there's always room for improvement plus it will be fun to learn more about typography and try something new.

It's a two-week class and I'm taking both level 1 and level 2, so that's a month for this class - should be fun and hopefully I'll get motivated to do some more scrapping.

I'll try to post pictures of the layouts I do in the online course over the next month.