January 31, 2012

Little Hands...

My scrap project this month was not something I had planned, it just sorta happened but I am so happy with the finished item.  For Christmas I was given a very special present, handprints of little Miss Ivy on a tea towel- age 13mths.  It was a teary moment when I opened that present, I can tell you...lol.  So what to do with the tea towel... I would never use it as a tea towel, I'd be too afraid of washing away Miss Ivy's hand prints and the tea towel was too big to hang as is.   I definately wanted it on a wall in my craftroom so this is what I came up with...


I cut the tea towel up, stuck the fabric bits to a piece of Christmas themed scrap paper and framed the whole thing.  The picture is now hanging in my craftroom and makes me smile everytime I glance at it.  I sure am one lucky Grandma :)

Have a great day!

January 21, 2012

Week 2 - Project Life & FREEBIE!

You can tell I'm back at work by the lack of blogging right...hehehe. I tell ya during the week I am soooooo tired at night, but hey then there is the 4 day weekend to look forward too =).

I was a little tardy in getting my Project Life -Week 2 together but that was in part due to reading several blogs of how others are organizing photos, notes, etc. I decided to follow suit and get myself organized as well, I am determined to stay on track with project life so anything that will make this easier is a winner in my book.

Whenever I take a photo or two and load them onto my computer, they usually go in a folder called unsorted. I then tag the photos before moving them to their proper folder. Inside this unsorted folder I now have folders for each week i.e. week 1, week 2 etc., this will definitely speed up the process of finding photos for layouts. Loving this idea so far!

I bought -a week to a page diary -to make notes in, plenty of room to jot down important thoughts or just what I am feeling at that time. I am not so worried about forgetting things when I sit down to create a page now. Good idea number 2!

I have also decided to pop the extra bits and pieces like ticket stubs, receipts etc. into plastic bags labeled with the week dates ready for scanning. I am not sure if I will scan everything or create a pocket to attach to the corresponding pages, I may even do both. As I am in two minds I can see this will be a process that will evolve over time but I'm not going to limit myself by making any hard and fast rules. Project Life is meant to be simple, easy and fun to do...right!!!

Now for my week two pages...



and the FREEBIE I mentioned? I love quotes so I can see each week there will be a quote or phrase somewhere on a page and figured I would share my little creations.


DOWNLOAD HERE! Just a couple of little journal cards, one 6x4 and one 3x4, as always
(Downloads available for a short time only)
enjoy :)


Have a great day!

January 17, 2012

Don't forget the GIVEAWAY!

GIVEAWAY | Three people will receive a copy of the Cute As Notepad Hybrid kit.
My Cute As Notepad is the sweetest little notepad you ever could make for yourself or someone special, super quick to put together too. Included in the kit are PDF files containing everything you need to put these Cute As Notepads together. They come in two sizes, a large and a small version to cater for all printers.

TO BE ENTERED into this giveaway please leave a comment below. Comments will be closed on Tuesday 17th midnight AEST. Winner’s will be posted shortly after. Want to double your chances, come visit me on facebook and leave comment on the facebook giveaway post too. Please be sure to check back to see if you are a winner.
Plus here are pages 11 & 12 of December Daily 2011



Have a great day!

January 16, 2012

Sweet Baby Boy!

Today is a Miss Ivy day, which of course means I am going to have a most wonderful day >.<  and it is also bloke's birthday.  Twenty-Five years ago today he was born 20mins before midnight, funny how you remember somethings as though they were yesterday.  Love you my boy, you don't even know =)  Happy Birthday!

Nawww wasn't he adorable...

Now for present day layouts, pages 9 & 10 from my December Daily 2011!


Hope you are enjoying the pages :)

Have a great day!

January 15, 2012

Sunday Giveaway

I've had a sunny Sunday today and so far a fun and productive weekend =).  First up I'm going to bore you with a couple more pages from my December Daily 2011. Then I'm going to tell you some fabulous news, well fabulous to me and anyone else living in OZ that would like to print their digital pages into a book and not lose any of the layout. Then I'm going to tell you about a Giveaway!!!

First: pages 7 & 8 of my December Daily 2011



Second: fabulous news if you live in Australia and would like to have your digital layouts printed and bound into a book at a Harvey Norman Photocentre. You will need to purchase 1 tool to help you achieve this goal but it's really cheap and well worth the money, ready... it is Wendy Zine's Scrapping Simply Templates ONLY or  Scrapping Simply Toolkit.

I purchased the Toolkit yesterday and had a play with my December Daily layouts as these are the ones I really, really want to get printed and bound. I only corrected one layout and uploaded to my account at Harvey Norman Online as a test run. Book options I chose were one layout to a page and the full page option for each image to see the difference between a layout designed as is and one corrected using the Toolkit. YAHOOOOO... is all I can say, the layout corrected using the Toolkit was just perfect. I am now in the process of editing all my layouts for a book version, when done I'm going to take it to my local HN Store as the instore software is the same as online =).

GIVEAWAY | Three people will receive a copy of the Cute As Notepad Hybrid kit.
My Cute As Notepad is the sweetest little notepad you ever could make for yourself or someone special, super quick to put together too. Included in the kit are PDF files containing everything you need to put these Cute As Notepads together. They come in two sizes, a large and a small version to cater for all printers.

TO BE ENTERED into this giveaway please leave a comment below. Comments will be closed on Tuesday 17th midnight AEST. Winner’s will be posted shortly after. Want to double your chances, come visit me on facebook and leave comment on the facebook giveaway post too. Please be sure to check back to see if you are a winner.

Have a great day!

January 14, 2012

Cards and Lists

Hi folks, just dropping in to post a couple more page from my December Daily 2011.  Hubby and I are going to watch a movie tonight so this is a quickie post =)


Kit: Jolly Christmas (available soon) by SammyD Kreations (me)

Tomorrow I hope to show you the super cute project I've been working on, and there maybe a bit of a giveaway too...
Have a great day!

January 10, 2012

Project Life - Week 1

Just so you all know, not sure I mentioned it but I am doing Project Life in a Digital Format.  I am so a digital girl as I find it suits my lifestyle and if I really want there is nothing to stop me printing my pages out at home to add physical bits and pieces, but only if I want a paper version...lol!

I bought the Turquoise Edition Full Collection and Template Design A, I figured one template was enough as you can move the pieces around to create the other templates. I will probably only use a couple of fonts throughout. VT Portable Remington & DJB LAURENT script are two I really like so I'll go with these. If your interested in doing digital you can find ALL of the Project Life kits HERE from JessicaSprague.com and I see there is a Shutterfly version as well.

And here they are... my first pages for Project Life. Seeing as the New Year started on a Sunday, I figured it was a perfect day for me to start too, so my pages will cover Sunday-Saturday. This gives me all day on the following Sunday to get my pages together, now that's a plan I like =)



As you can see week one features a lot of Miss Ivy. I think this will be a trend...hahahaha, but a very delightful one.

Things learnt so far - saving full size layouts in a tiff format gives me the freedom to go back and correct my typos...

Have a great day!

January 09, 2012

Monthly Roundup 2011 - Complete!

Yahooskies... My Month in Review/Monthly Roundup/Project 12 whatever it is you like call it, is DONE!  I can't believe that 1. I stuck with it and 2. I have completed the very last page.  Now to get those layouts off my computer into some form of album...YES!

and here's a preview of my Project Life Cover page...


Stay tuned I'll be posting Week 1's pages tomorrow =)

Have a great day!

January 07, 2012

Advent-urous...

I just have to tell ya, I love google reader... WHY? Because I can subscribe to as many RSS feeds as I like and each day google reader gives me this wonderful little list of the latest posts to read.  OK so the list is not so little some days but it helps me keep up with projects like December Daily and Tim Holtz's 12 Tags, Project Life that others are doing, the latest and greatest designs in digi land, etc... you get the picture! 

As part of my scrapping goals for the year I will journal more, so what did I find today... this great new site that should help me with that goal ~ Tell Your Story Everyday!   I just love the line  - this a learned skill. That means that you can learn how to do it! - from the post Journaling Your Life Story.  I didn't/don't journal because I don't think I'm good at it but I can learn... so hooray for Tell Your Story Everyday!

As we are on the subject of journaling, you will notice for my December Daily Album not every page has journaling and then others have heaps (far more than I usually do).  I think the reason I am so happy with my album is because of the journaling, I had stories to tell and I did!

So with out further ado here are pages 3 & 4...

Scraplift of Cari Locken page using got sketch? - Sketch 69

Kit: Jolly Christmas (available soon) by SammyD Kreations (me)

Have a great day!

January 06, 2012

December Daily 2011

Hooray for Ali Edwards... Hooray for December Daily...

I was so excited to start this project again and so very excited to say I have almost finished. OK so there is one page to go but I can't finish that page until I have finished my 12 Tags of Christmas (my goal for the rest of this week).
For my first December Daily project in 2010, I had all these great ambitions of creating a digital version and a paper version. Well lets just say I wasn't quite as successful as I had hoped but I did learn a lot.

I attribute my 2011 December Daily success to...
  • Having a diary of sorts to jot down ideas of what I could do each day or actually journal what happened. 
  • Think about what photos to take to match the ideas I had jotted down.
  • Pick one format to create the album, so I stuck with a digital format.
  • Actually putting the pages together after Christmas when I had more time.
  • Not stopping until the album was complete.
I am so happy with the result and can't wait to get these pages into a photobook. Here are pages 1 and 2...


Kit: Jolly Christmas (available soon) by SammyD Kreations (me)

I thought I'd share two pages a day for the rest of January, they might give you a few ideas for your next DD or maybe just a layout or two :)

Have a great day!

January 05, 2012

Hello 2012!

Welcome to a New Year, how exciting is that!  As each new year begins, I'm always excited about the possibilities!  This year Hubby and I have started off with Goals and Plans for the next 10 years.   WHAT? 10 YEARS!  Yep Hubby is always the one to look at the BIG PICTURE, me not so much as each day is the BIG PICTURE for me, lol... but really it wasn't so scary making plans for the next 10 years, and it was kind of fun.  See... so many possibilities =)

All this future planning got me to thinking what craft goals I would like to accomplish for 2012. Keeping in mind my time restraints, my ability to leave everything to the last minute, my effectiveness at doing nothing and wanting to do every new project that flashes before me eyes...phew!  So much to do and so little time so... I made a list!

Project Life: last year I did a project 12 and managed to keep up... YAY!!! go me. Each month's page was very basic, a photo and one line text of the event, this year I would like to expand on my basic idea and include more journaling and maybe, just maybe turn it into a project 52... hello Project Life!

Card Making: I will make a card for every family member's birthday and post it on time (repeating this mantra each week).

Scrap Challenges: I need to participate more in challenges as they help push me out of my comfort zone.  One a fortnight should be do able, I love sketches so this will be my thing and besides they are fun!

Handmade Gifts: These are to go with those handmade cards and with a view to Christmas... yes I said Christmas...hahahaha.

Scrap Projects: (this almost needs a list of their own) Calendars, Christmas Cards, December Daily, 12 Tags of Christmas, Albums of various sizes: mini, CD, 6x4, photobooks - I'm going to attempt one project a month.

Now to get myself organized I am making good use of Outlook's Calendar, I just love the reminders it sends me and the fact I can see at a glance what is happening in any one month.  Plus as I am going to put more focus on finishing projects started, I will have lots to show throughout the year!

Setting goals is kinda liberating =)  Have you made a plan for the year?