Project Life Tuesday

I thought I'd try to link up with Jessica Turner over at the Mom Creative today for her Project Life Tuesday.  I think it is a good way to be accountable with my project life stuff.

So far, I have not accomplished a whole lot with my Project Life.  I am arriving a bit late to the party.  I saw a lot about PL from different sources, but I thought that it was completely outside the range of something I'd want to try.  That was before I started seeing all of the Project Life supplies out there, I saw a bunch of terrific/inspiring layouts, and my daughter bought the PL Clementine kit and binder from Becky Higgins.  Once I saw her opening the package, I was sold.  I've gone back and forth about whether I wanted to do all digital, to do it traditionally or to do some sort of hybrid.  Of course, being sort of a supply hoarder at heart, I can't pick just one.  I am sure, in the long run, I'll stick with the digital version and be more likely to complete it that way, but there is something tactile and wonderful about slipping those perfect little cards into the page protectors that just screams out to me, so I have both as an option.  I know that I'm not likely to print pictures out at home, or to send them to be printed weekly, but I figure that I can do it digitally, and then decide what pictures I do want to send to print and can do that on a monthly basis, getting the traditional pages ready without the photos at the time.  Just typing that makes me laugh.  I am so horrible with follow-through, I don't know how I'll even complete one version, much less two, but I am going to give it a shot.

Today I scanned in some items for digi pages to be completed in the next few days, and then I tucked them into my traditional pages.  So far, I've just completed my digital "cover page" and I had fun putting it together.  I know that I'm going to have to be better about reviewing my digital products to see what I have as far as embellishment, but I think once I get going, it will all be good.  My digital cover...

The Tattered Pear - Sullen Seamstress1, Valorie Wibbens - Today paper, Today Journal Cards, Pocket Stuffers & Pockets No. 3, Lauren Reid - Hometown elements, TDC Shutterbug Collab - The Story of Us button, Ali Edwards - Hello Life stamps, Becky Higgins - Project Life Clementine digital kit

I'm looking forward to doing this, and I'm also excited that Jessica is going to do it as well.  It will be interesting to see what she comes up with, and it will also be good to keep me on track.

Are you participating in Project Life?  Are you doing digi or traditional??

Oh How Pinteresting Wednesday

Here are some of my most recent faves on Pinterest.

Haha

Source: http://shop.krisatomic.com/product/chronic-bitchface-print via  http://lovetorielizabeth.typepad.com

Love that wallpaper, the couch and the number 56.  

Source: mochatini.org (no original source) via  Paula Kesserling on Pinterest

There are no words to describe how I love this...

Source Saniapell.com via Brynn Zirkle Dukes on Pinterest

This I'm using for my One Little Word...

Source prettystuff.tumblr.com via Kristin Merritt on Pinterest

And of course there has to be something yummy

Source tastykitchen.com via Royanna Hohl Fritschmann on Pinterest

And a yummy of another kind.  Funny and yummy...

Source: Handmaderyangosling.tumbler.com

Reminds me of something my mom said the other day.

Source: marathonsweetheart.com, via Kelly Agodon on Pinterest.

What have you pinned for me lately?

10 Things

10 Things

Shimelle hosts 10 Things on the 10th.  Check her out.  :)  

Over at The Lily Pad, there is a discussion going on about stats and faves of 2011.  You can check it out here.  I normally wouldn't have thought about how many scrapbook layouts I did in any given year, but that thread got me thinking, and I had to go back and count them up.  I accomplished more than I believed, largely because I was on a CT for a bit and got a bunch done for her massive product releases.  It was a fun time.  Anyway, I ended up completing 86 layouts.  I was happy with that number because it was averaging more than 1 a week even though there were bursts of activity and big giant lulls when I did no scrapping whatsoever.

I thought I'd go back and post a ten of my favorite layouts from 2011.  

1.  This was one of my favorites because I seriously worked so very hard on this.  It was for a challenge at Sweet Shoppe, and you had to include 25 words about yourself.  It took me quite awhile to go through my digi stash and find enough words (that fit) and elements that were the right color (or could be re-colored).  

2.   I loved this because I created the stamp with the art quote.  It is also a picture of a painting I did for my friend, Jerisha, for Christmas.  

3. A fun picture of my daughter and her friend Amy.  I love the colors and the viewmaster reel.   

4. A funky layout (I believe it was a scraplift challenge) of our dog, Bobby.  I loved the unserious nature of it.   

5. I loved the kit I used in this layout.  I also loved the picture, and I liked how it all came together.  I ended up posting this for a challenge at TLP, only to have it deleted because the kit was from Oscraps.  Oops.  I re-did it using TLP products for the challenge, but still like how this one turned out.   

6.  I loved this picture of little mister wiping ice cream off his mom's face.  I also loved loved loved this kit from Dani Mogstad.   

7.  The pictures of Tim and I are few and far between.  It isn't the best picture, but I liked it anyway, and I love having a layout of the two of us. 

8. This is a layout I did during a speed scrap at Sweet Shoppe on National Scrapbooking day in May.  This is my nephew, Lucian, and it is rare to catch him smiling, so I loved this layout.   

9. I love Sara Gleason's templates (Zinnia and Swallowtails), and this is one of those weird layouts that just sort of happened without planning, and I really loved the funkiness of it all.   

 10. I am not a big fan of having my picture taken. I rarely create any layouts featuring myself, but this was for a speed scrap, and I like how it turned out.  I love the painty stuff, the sequins and the stitching.  

Have you picked out your favorite layouts/projects of the year?  If not, why haven't you?  It is kind of fun to go back over and see what you did, if your style changed over the course of 12 months and/or what you documented.


  

Meal Planning Monday

Toward the end of last September, I put together a menu plan for the entire remaining days of the year.  For the most part, we stuck to it.  There were a couple of glitches and a couple of times we went off the rails, but kind of amazingly, we made it through with fairly little effort.  So far this year, I have been out of the menu-planning frame of mind, but now I realize I need to get back into the swing of things.  I am going to start small, with just this week and a theme of comfort food, and then after the big birthday shindig on Sunday, I will have greater mental capacity for planning further out.

Cottage Pie: pic from MarthaStewart.com

Monday:  Cottage Pie

Tuesday:  Pork Carnitas

Wednesday:  Chicken Caesar Salad

Thursday:  Homemade mac & cheese

Friday: Out

Saturday:  Spaghetti

Sunday:  party food

What do you have on the menu this month?

Crafty McCrafterson

I love getting crafty, but I don't seem to do it very often.  Yesterday, I had the prime opportunity to get my craft on because my DD was going to go to Oregon to visit her 4-year old half brother Bo (and new baby brother Robbie), and she needed help with Bo's present.

It seems the sweet little angel boy told his parents that he wanted a "wish box" for Christmas.  He wanted a wish box so he could put all of his "secret wishes inside and pretend they came true"... after hearing that, Jessica was bound and determined to get him a wish box.  Of course her working full time and having a wee small child doesn't lend itself to a lot of time to spend crafting.  So I got involved, and a wish box was created.

I was excited to get a chance to use my new Silhouette Cameo that Tim got me for Christmas.  :D  I cut out the "wish" wordart on the Cameo, and just used a couple of pieces of old Cosmo Cricket paper I had in the craft room.  I cut it to fit the plain recipe card box, gave it a little brown paint around the edges, and then put some Martha Stewart glitter on the inside of the lid.  Bo is probably not allowed to have glitter in his daily life.  His dad is a total conservative man's man and won't put up with anything remotely girly, but how can you have a wish box without glitter?  

This morning, I found a template and put together a little book for him to tuck inside the wish box.  It was just a piece of cardboard, scored and folded.  I put the Cosmo Cricket scraps of paper on the outside and then took a stack of paper lunch bags, cut the pages to fit, sewed a seam down the middle of the stack and then glued the front and back page into the book.  A "manly" wish box if I've ever seen one.

I'm wishing I would have painted the inside of the box brown, but I was running out of time and paint and just opted to leave it alone.  A four year old can't be that picky, can they?

So that was sort of a fun little craft project for the day, and I used up a few old supplies.  I loved that paper so I never used it before, but I only had two sheets, and I don't know what I would have ended up using it with, so I thought it would work well.  I hope he likes it.

Simple Scraps Saturday

Back when I first started scrapping, I thought that templates were lame.  Now, I have come to embrace them and use them when I'm feeling a little mojo-less.  I like the fact that you can totally make them your own if you are feeling up to it.

The Lily Pad has a bunch of great template designers who stock the shop with lots of fun stuff.  One TLP designer I really like right now is Amy Martin.  She leaves a lot of white space and freedom to do a lot with her templates.  She just recently put out a call for people to use her template and possibly get their layout published.  I was not selected, but it was lots of fun to play around with the template anyway.  Here are two different layouts I did with the same template.

I used the same template and even some of the same elements, but ended up with two totally different feelings on the layouts.  I love that you can turn them, flip them, even shrink them down or expand them if you want.  So many different things you can do to give yourself a new perspective.

What about you?  Do you use templates?  If so, do you change them much or stick with what was pretty close to the original?  

Friday Favorites: Movies/TV

Yesterday I commented on how we don't get out of the house much.  Even if we do go out and do something, you can pretty much bet on the fact that it isn't going to see a movie.  I don't know what it is, but Tim just really doesn't like movies much.  I secretly think it is because it is dark and cozy and he's afraid of falling asleep (which he has done before) and never living to hear the end of it.  :)

Every once in a while, I threaten him with seeing a movie.  I'll see a preview on tv and really want to go, so I tell him I'm going to make him take me.  It usually never happens.  Prior to the past couple of months, Jessica worked in the evenings, so we had Kennedy and could never go to a movie.  But now she's working decent hours and we *could go* but don't.  :p

Thank goodness for Netflix and Redbox.  Tim doesn't really like to watch movies at home either, but at least I can sneak in a few now and then if he out and out refuses.  Two that I recently watched and really loved, I had also wanted to see in the theater but never did.  They were both kind of sweet, feel-good movies that are maybe a tiny bit improbable as far as plot, but the characters are nice and it is a fun little story that leaves you with a smile and maybe even a little tug at the heartstrings.  So if you haven't checked them out yet, you might want to think about these...

 
 

They are my current favorites.  :)

We also started to watch a tv series on the indie channel called Portlandia.  The second season starts tonight.  It is an half-hour comedy series that is a bunch of little sketches about life in Portland.  There are two main actors who appear in every sketch, and then they've had some great cameo appearances last season by Heather Graham, Kyle MacLachlan, Edie McClurg and Steve Buscemi.  It is a little Friday night guilty pleasure.

It is a weird/quirky comedy that totally fits life in Portland, Oregon.  It cracks us up because it is so true to characters you can run into in P-town.  And Tim will actually watch it.  *Gasp*

What have you seen that you can recommend?

Social Skills

So today, I realized that I have no social life.  Well, not much of one anyway.  I have been planning on starting my first attempt at Project Life, but it dawned on me that I don't have much to document on a weekly basis.  Pretty much all of my weeks are looking the same these days.  The high point of my week is generally Thursday.  I take little mister to the Little Gym and have some minor social interaction with the parents, kids and group leader.  It is sad.  I also have a weekly phone call with my Masters program mentor on Thursday afternoons.  Another pathetic point to chalk up to a lame social life.  Tim is pretty much a homebody, so we don't even do social things as a couple or with other couples/friends.

Then tonight, the *real* high point of my day/week was that I was able to participate in an online "speed scrap" with several other women.  So now my social life consists of online activities, school and child-related functions.  *sigh*  But I did have to giggle because for the speed scrap, we had to pick bold patterned papers and have three different pictures.  I ended up choosing pictures from the night that Shannon, Jessica, Amy and I had dinner together at Jimmy Mac's (back in August).  I felt it was ironic to be participating in an online group and scrapping about one of the few social activities I've had in the past few months.  :)  I guess, looking back at the calendar, I have had other social activities, but times like tonight, they feel unfortunately few and far between.

Note to self for 2012:  plan more social outings!

What about you?  Do you get out a lot?  Do you have a lot of friends or your significant other that you can go and do things with? 

How Pinteresting

So I ran across a blog The Vintage Apple that hosts an "Oh, How Pinteresting!" linkup, so I thought that I'd play along... since after the Christmas rush of crafting and cooking, I am doing nothing else with my 1700+ pins but collecting them.

Here are a few of my faves...

Have made these and can attest to the yumminess!

Reading List

So one of the goals I have for 2012 is to read a book a week.  I have done this in the past, and it never ceases to amaze me how many books there are out there to read and enjoy.  Right now, I have a ton of books in my personal library, taking up a lot of psychic energy because they are yet to be read.  So I hope to alleviate some of the mental anguish I get every time I pass by the shelves of unread books and/or see lists of upcoming “must-read” books. 

A few on my list for the year are:

• Threats by Amelia Gray
• The Instructions by Adam Levin
• Hot Pink by Adam Levin
• The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
• Every Last One
• 1Q84
• The Imperfectionists (I’ve tried to buy this three separate times on my Kindle so I really must *want* to read it)
• The Night Circus
• 2666
• and multiple others I can’t think of off of the top of my head (but I do have a list somewhere)

What about you?  Is there anything you are dying to read this year?  I’d love to know if there is something I’m missing that is too good to pass up.