I have been doing crafts, I promise

My crafting has been lacking.  Thought I would do the usual and shame myself into keeping it moving by posting here.  I am so determined to finish projects, well, I just can't even say.  It is so much fun in the beginning.  And then it gets boring fast.  I have to be mindful of that while I'm conceiving of projects.  I am terrible at editing and always want to do more.  But I'm tired of leaving half completed projects. 

My California scrapbook project is painfully slow going.  Its fun to work on it when I have nothing else to do and need something mindless and crafty, but I am determined to get the darn thing done this month.  We're going on another trip and I am already hatching something scrapalicious to do for it.  As always I have no clue what I'm doing.  Its so big that I've added a hundred pages and posts, and still have like three sections to go.  I still question what the purpose of this is, but love it and ultimately don't care.  Posts below show a finished page, a page in progress, and a page with random stuff ready to be used.  I think my next challenge is coming up with a better way to document our next trip.  All I have right now is a moleskin notebook and a big fat book on England.  Hmm.

The Winter 25 Scrapbook has also been hard to complete.  I really enjoyed the Fall 25 Scrapbook, but not so much with the Winter one.  The Fall one was novel, whereas the Winter was not.  While the Fall one did the trick to ward off the Winter blues, they still showed up in small little ways.  With the Winter one, I wasn't into the to-do items in the same way, and didn't do them with the same creativity.  And so, it lacks the pizazz of the Fall one.  I completely replaced multiple items, and half did others.  But some things were lovely:  finishing my quilt, capturing Spring and taking a very cold walk along a frozen Charles River all rocked (photos below).  I'm also determined to finish this one by the end of the month because I REALLY want to get started on my Spring/Summer one!

This is all I have for the Spring/Summer album so far.  Its a different size (5.8 X 8) and has a binder inside.  I have a list of to-dos (mostly things to explore in New England - a total road trip all summer!) but don't want to follow them in the same way, if at all.  For the Fall and Winter, I documented according to the items, but for the Spring/Summer, I want to make dividers for each month and document chronologically.  For example, for the month of April, I have a date night, the Boston Marathon, and pictures of the spring.  I want to put together a narrative and somehow document it all together.  And for May, I already have our water adventure that I'd like to put together with a story.  I've been gathering and taking photos, so we'll see.  I have no idea how this is going to work out, just that it needs to be different from the Fall and Winter ones.  Hopefully it will keep me invested and exploring and doing things.

So I promise, I am doing things.  Just very very slowly.

CA: Scrapbook Update

My California scrapbook has been another ongoing project that has been really enjoyable to stick with. One weekend, I got inspired and stamped and painted the front page for the scrapbook plus the daily front pages (not pictured). I used a gold paint tinted black and then wrote the location in script, using a sharpie marker. Just having fun laying out pages, trying to tell a story, and pointedly ignoring the critical voice that says "why are you doing this? why are there so many pages? what if you aren't scrapbooking like you're supposed to?" Who cares? It feels good to do after a long day at work, and that's all that matters. Images below.

CA: Scrapbook Update

Thought I'd share some pictures of the scrapbook so far. The picts aren't the greatest, and I'm trying to cut out pictures of people, but I'm proud of how its going! And I have a new addiction to scrapbook papers...I thought I loved fat quarters but I really love collections of paper. And corner rounders. And tags. And date stamps. Yay!

CA: The Beginnings of a Scrapbook

My husband and I recently took a trip to California to visit my brother and drive up the coast, ending up in San Fransisco (a place I've always wanted to visit) for my 32nd birthday. I've tried blogging the trip and making online photo albums, but didn't have a place for the great ephemera that we collected, like this awesome pamphlet on the left called "Don't Die in the Desert," complete with two exclamation points and a skull to let you know that they mean business. I decided to forgo digital in favor of a scrapbook.

I started by separating my photos and stuff into days, effectively breaking the journey into manageable segments to better tell the story. I then brainstormed (see right) and came up with the idea to create a front page for each day that would have a similar look. Each day page would have a map of the day's travels, a title, something showing mileage, and something showcasing these awesome date stamps I got from Staples. Since all the colors of California are in the greens, blues, creams, yellows and browns family, I decided on a deep, dark brown paper to build the day pages on (see below). I printed out maps from google, pulled out my huge letter stamps, found some packing tags (also from Staples) and practiced stamping some layouts.



In addition, I decided on this gorgeous green scrapbook (I love green) that has a chocolate brown tab, and the inside is the same rich brown that I wanted for the day pages.






Each day ended up with a map, labels and small pictures representative of some of the pictures to come. Plus a fun label with the location, mileage, and date, plus a (I think) clever title.



Some of the tentative layout for the airplane travel days...


Some shots of where the layout is now....



Next step: stamping the title and starting layout.