Spring has finally decided to make an appearance here in Huntsville! This week I've been able to experience the joys of running outdoors without freezing my tail off, driving without the need for heated seats (though I'm still eternally grateful to Darren for that particular Christmas gift last year), and gardening. The Botanical Garden is having their annual Spring plant sale this weekend, and we went today and came home with a few choice bits of greenery to add to the gardens here at the house.

There's lots of green in the Project Life layout I'm posting today, too, including photos from a trip to the Gardens and flowers blooming in my front yard nearly two years ago. Some things will never change, thank goodness!

Supplies:

InLinkz.com

This layout was actually up on the Simple Stories blog a couple of weeks ago, and I turned the camera on and filmed while I was scrapping so I could put together a video of the process.


I simply adore Simple Stories' "A Charmed Life" collection, and as a St. Patrick's Day birthday girl it felt a little wrong to use it for something besides birthday photos the first time I cut into it. The greens, blues, and yellows were just perfect for these photos, though, and I'm sure I'll be using it again on St. Patrick's Day pictures before too long.

In a small and not-entirely-unrelated-to-my-recent-blog-silence bit of news, Darren (otherwise known as my husband and also as "he who installed the awesome heated seats that I mentioned above") has officially been accepted to medical school starting this fall! I'm thrilled for him since he's wanted this for a long, long time, but it's also brought on more than a few "so much to do and so little time" thoughts since the acceptance letter arrived. We have so many things we want to finish around the house, and basically only one summer left to do them all before he starts four years of school followed by four years of residency. The next three months are now or never time for getting those things done ourselves, and we'll definitely be staying busy!

March Kit Layouts for Citrus Twist

I'm settling into a new blogging non-routine over here nicely, and while I don't intend to make it the norm to go for long stretches between posts, I've been putting the extra time to good use in my craft room! I've got paint drying on a layout as I type, and I'm about to go all kung-fu with a craft knife once this is posted and start in on an altered book for the April Citrus Twist gallery.

Speaking of Citrus Twist, I still have my March kit layouts to share! The new kits went live in the shop last week, and in the spirit of being a kinder, gentler blogging task-master to myself, I'm going back to sharing all of the layouts in one post again. :)

I didn't realize until after I'd finished my first layout (using just the main kit) just how many photos I have of my niece, Sophie, reading with someone in our family! There's this page I scrapped of her and Darren, one from January of her getting in a little story time with her Poppy, and in today's layout she's reading gardening magazine with my Mom- her Noni. I'm pretty sure that there's a photo of me reading a My Little Pony book to her floating around my Lightroom library, too, so I may have to scrap that one soon to add to the collection. And, total aside, but My Little Pony has changed a lot since I played with them as a kid!

My next layout was for one of the sketch challenges over at Citrus Twist, and I got all inky and glitter splatter-y with this one! Glitter splatters are really easy to make- just water down some plain white glue, load it up on a paintbrush, and splatter it across the page just like mist, except you cover it in glitter afterward.

I filmed a music-only (no voiceover) video of this layout since it's actually pretty easy for me to flip on the video camera that always stands over my work table. It still takes a bit of time to edit, but it really is so much faster than doing voiceovers, so hopefully you enjoy it! For those who subscribe to my blog via email, you can watch the video here on YouTube.


I must have been wishing for spring while working with these kits. Actually, I still am- it's cold here today! This layout mixes together pretty much all of the kits, and I started with a loose grid-style arrangement for my photos and then did my usual thing filling in the gals between them with papers, stickers, and other embellishments. It's pretty much my favorite way to make a page!

My last layout with the April kits is a Project Life page from my 2011 album, which is I think only 6-7 weeks away from being completed now! Since I've stepped back from blogging a bitI now have more time for photo editing, and I'm working on getting the rest of my photos caught up and printed. It helps that I've finally made friends with VSCO keys for Lightroom. There's definitely a learning curve, but I can edit so much more quickly now!

And today? It's my birthday! We've done the usual stuff- getting the birthday Starbucks treat and sushi for lunch- along with a few new things like picking up more oxalis (shamrocks) for the gardens and a new batch of succulents for my desk. I'll write up the full account of our adventures over on my personal blog once the day is over and I've processed the photos. I've already printed a few to scrap as I lift one of Wilna Furstenburg's layouts, including the one of some of my new plants below!

The Breakup + The 6x8 Project Life Plan

Last week I decided to break up...with my daily blog schedule.

Oh, it was nice and structured and ensured that new content appeared here every day, but lately I'd started to realize that it no longer inspired me. I'm a one-chick show here, and, since I have a full-time job, blogging is simply a hobby. It's a hobby that grew out of my love for photography and scrapbooking (and of course, Star Wars!), but lately it's been threatening to take over all of the above. I have a tiny window of time each day for my hobbies, and over the last few months I've noticed that I would want to scrapbook a layout or play with paints or any number of crafty things...and then I'd stop and remember that I needed to write a new blog post for the day. By the time that post was finished, guess what? My crafty time would either be very short or gone altogether- not good!

So on Thursday I made a decision to simply not post Friday Favorites the next day or Geek Girl on Sunday (and really, to just not worry about posting on my blog at all), just to see how things went for me with that little bit of reclaimed hobby time. Almost immediately, I knew I'd made the right call. And I mean the right call! I was on fire getting things done this weekend, both in the house (dude, my attic is looking awesome!) and in the scrap room. And, instead of scrapbooking just so I'd have something to blog, I found myself scrapbooking just for fun (which is the point of it, afterall!) without worrying about how I would frame it in a post.

I also found myself snapping photos for Instagram more than usual, pinning on Pinterest a little more, and, wouldn't you know it, I even felt like recording a video last night. One of the projects that I started this weekend was to finally nail down a process for my 6x8 Project Life album for 2014 (it's only March, right?), and, when I started to put it together, I had no intention of blogging or sharing it. When I was finished, though, I started to think that it would make a fun, short video, and that simply flipping on the camera to share my new process would be a lot easier than taking gobs of photos, editing them, uploading, and then trying to format them into a post.

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Supplies:

InLinkz.com

And thus the new "online me." is born. I'm abandoning my daily blog schedule from now on for the sake of my sanity creativity. I'll still be posting here, but less frequently and only as I'm inspired to do so (or need to for a design team). Instead of letting a blog schedule drive my content, I'm reversing things and going back to a time when I was posting projects I made instead of making projects to post. I'll probably be using some other social media sites a little more, and if you like you can follow me on my Instagram account and over on Pinterest, which will hopefully help take the place of Friday Favorites (I've even got a Geeky board for those who loved the Geek Girl posts).

I'm not sure what form this blog will take in the future- I'm thinking maybe some of the usual scrapbooking content sprinkled with the occasional roundup post of my favorite recent pins on Pinterest, photos from Instagram, etc., but I don't want to commit to anything remotely resembling a schedule. My only plan right now is to not have a plan because, to be honest, my last plan had me considering simply shutting my blog down altogether last week- I was that stressed about it. For me, right now, freedom is key, and that's what I'm getting back to!

Project Life 2011 - June 28 - July 2

Checkered tablecloths at our favorite BBQ restaurant. My old and faithful car turning 300,000 miles (and I'm still driving it, almost two years later!). Spending a weekend with my family, running a 5K with my cousins, and photographing fireworks with Dad. So much happened during the week of June 28 - July 2, 2011- including all of the things I mentioned and more- making me so happy to now have this week tucked safely into my Project Life album!

Supplies:

InLinkz.com

The bold reds and blues in Simple Stories' Homespun collection worked well with the colors in my photos from this week, and I've actually noticed that several of the newly released collections have healthy amounts of primary colors in them. Yes, Pantone's Radiant Orchid has definitely put purple more front and center this year, but it seems that bolder colors are also becoming the norm, especially when mixed with more complex shades such as the aquas in Homespun (which also match my photos- yay!). You can see this trend in several other collections, too, including Studio Calico's Lemon Lush, where bright yellows and blues mix with a light purple, and also in Dear Lizzy's Daydreamer, with its pinks and aquas paired with navy blue and red. If you find yourself with a handful of photos to scrap that have a bold color scheme, but you would really like to use some other tones, these new collections might be the perfect way to help bridge the gap between the two color families!

I know that discussing color theory is a bit of a departure from my usual Project Life posts, but, to be honest, some weeks all I really have to say is, "yay, I finished another week, and here it is!" I was feeling much the same way toward the end of my term at Two Peas last year- like I had used up all of the new things I had to talk about in videos where Project Life was concerned, and it was just naturally time for me to be done with that. I have thought off and on for the last few weeks, though, about filming Project Life videos again without voiceover and just using music, like the ones I used to make and like Leena Loh's, which I've fallen madly in love with because a) they are nice and short and b) with music is actually my own preferred way of watching scrapping videos. I'll also admit that doing the voice part takes quite a bit of time that I simply don't have, but filming and then dropping the footage into iMovie to edit and add music is something I think I could handle...so, if I were to start filming "process" videos with music again, would you guys be interested in seeing them? I know it's not everyone's cup of tea, but I wanted to ask just in case. :)

Project Life 2011 - August 14-20

Last week and for the next several weeks I'll be sharing the remaining Project Life pages from my 2011 album. I've mentioned a few times before that I'm a bit behind on getting my photos from the end of 2013 and the beginning of 2014 edited and printed, but I'm making good progress on catching those up and will be sharing a couple of tips about how I'm making that happen soon.

Until then, I do have all of my 2011 photos printed and ready to go, and for this week's layout (covering August 14-20), I decided to use the new Styleboard collection by Maggie Holmes for Crate Paper.

Supplies:

InLinkz.com

One thing you'll probably notice right away when looking at this layout is that it's a lot more embellished than what I normally make! That's by design, since as I was working on this page I was feeling like doing lots of layering and clustering. I actually really enjoyed that process, though at the end my pages did feel really busy. I think that's partially due to the 12x24 format, though, and the fact that it just has so much space to fill- just one of the reasons I'm excited to try the smaller 6x8 canvas for 2014!

One of my favorite parts of this page is the large camera that I cut using the Styleboard dies and my Sizzix Big Kick. The dies work perfectly with thin cork sheets, and though I've read about a few people having trouble with these, my cuts came out very nicely whether I used cork or paper. The cut on this page does have a slight tear on it, but that happened after it was cut and stuck down. I had originally placed that flair badge a bit higher, and when I removed it, a small section of the cork came off with it- ooops! Since much of Styleboard has a shabby feel to it, though, I decided to leave it as-is.

This layout is an example of how I fill weeks where I don't have many photos- just play with the empty pockets! If you want more ideas for layouts covering timespans where you and your camera just weren't in BFF mode, I also put together a video lesson covering this topic during my time at Two Peas last year. You'll find that project here.

Thank you so much for stopping by today- have a happy Monday!