Writing Myself Out

This past weekend was the big crop weekend at Cocoa Daisy, which is held twice a year (April and November) — and man, was it ever intense, and FUN. So much fun, in fact, that I didn’t end up taking a break from the festivities (and crafting!) on Friday, which was my original plan since I didn’t have anything really “fresh” to share earlier in the day. So, although I did post on Monday about Nat Kalbach’s ornament swap, I will consider this post to be two weeks worth of sharing. I’m hoping I will still be able to finish up one or two more projects based on the crop challenges, so you might even see a bonus post from me.

Maybe I’ll start, though, by sharing what’s freshest on my mind, and that’s that I’ve decided to try out Project Life for 2012. In 2009, I bought one of the original Project 365 (an earlier “incarnation” of the same product line by Becky Higgins) kits to do for 2010 — thinking that I would do it as a “photo a day” to have a record of my last months of pregnancy and most of Sara’s first year. I bought it “second hand” but unused, so it was already pre-assembled, and I actually did quite well with the “photo a day” part. I also journaled in bits and pieces, mostly in the “what does your day look like” thread on Willow Traders, but I never did get ANY of the journaling cards written because I let myself think I had to record every key detail on those cards or nothing at all. I also tried to “batch process” weeks worth of photos at one time, and it just didn’t work. There’s a part of me that still hopes I’ll be able to finish that album (it has photos printed for January through May, and all the memorabilia, notes, etc. are in a box in my closet), but sadly, I doubt it.

So, I know going into 2012 that I have to adopt a different strategy or it won’t work. There have been refinements to the product line — starting with the name change — to shift away from the calendar year specific/daily entries approach, and this coming year there are more page protector styles to allow for vertical photos, bigger memorabilia, etc., as well as new colour schemes. So, I liked that idea — and I also really liked what I’ve started seeing on various people’s blogs, which includes being more flexible/”forgiving” of yourself if you miss a day here and there, and including more of the “stuff” of life, little snippets of conversation, kids’ art, etc. — and even getting your family involved.

What sealed the deal for me, I think, was seeing how you can approach a week of your life (or even a month, if you prefer) as a single spread, in this very simple, slide-it-into-the-pockets-and-you’re-done album, and if you miss a day — so what, you’ve got a concise, beautifully presented portrait of this period of time. And then, if some weeks you want to take a more artsy approach to the spread, adding your own embellishments/doodads or patterned paper or inking or whatever techniques appeal to you, that’s great too — and you can add in extra pocket pages, or long journaling blocks, or an envelope of memorabilia.

I’ve enjoyed seeing Ali Edwards’ Project Life pages all year, and over the last couple of weeks I’ve been reading a number of other blogs and especially appreciated the detailed, “this is how I make it work” posts from people like Lisa Truesdell and Marcy Penner (fellow Canadian, and I’m guessing fellow Mennonite too). I’m totally cribbing Marcy’s “Project Life station”, using the baker’s rack I bought and put in our kitchen/dining area a few months ago. It’s become an overflow area for household papers, but I’m going to reclaim it for this project.

I justified the purchase of the materials as most of my Christmas gift from Bryan’s parents (who have us buy our own gifts with money they give us in advance), so I’m a bit disappointed that because of a “hiccup” (what does that mean, exactly?!), the Canadian distributor isn’t able to send out orders with the newest Project Life designs (Clementine and Cobalt) until mid-December — which means it won’t be here in time for the Orthners’ get-together on Dec. 10, and (with the Christmas shipping craziness) likely not even before we leave Dec. 22 for our time with my parents in Regina. But I’m still excited, and once I get a few (!) other things cleared off my house/craft project list, I will start setting up my Project Life station. Wheeeee!! I’m also planning another year-long project (One Little Word) for 2012, but I’ll talk about that some other time.

So… back to the Cocoa Daisy crop, and some project sharing! Perhaps I should adopt a philosophy of “what happens at the crop, stays at the crop” but it’s all out there on a message board anyhow — so I will say that there was a lot of silliness and sharing of “cringe-worthy” experiences (mine involved a spruce beetle and a roomful of high-ranking politicians) and hot celebrity photos, a madcap (or so I’m told!) game of bingo, frenzied one-hour challenges (I tried the first one — almost got done in time, but not quite), goofy crop nametags (I even posed wearing mine), and some EXCELLENT dialogues with some of the scrapbooking/mixed media industry’s top names — the one with Julie Fei-Fan Balzer was my favourite. (And I even found out the back story on why she uses “milkcan” as her username — and it’s not just because that’s the name of the theatre company she founded.) There some great classes too, such as on stitching techniques and graffiti art, which I want to go back and read through, and try out the techniques.

The theme of the whole weekend was “Craft Fair”, and there were 20 different challenges from the Cocoa Daisy design team and guests (including Julie Balzer, Amy Tan (aka “Amy Tangerine”), Vicki Boutin and Ali Edwards), all using that theme as their jumping off point — like for example with “Jams and Jellies”, the challenge was to use one of the “fruit/veggie inspired” colour schemes for your layout. The challenges are still open, actually, until this Sunday night — so if you want to enter one or more of them, head over to Cocoa Daisy.

I completed five of the numbered challenges, which for me is amazing — Bryan was so sweet, and gave me Friday and Saturday (and part of Sunday, although we also attended church and had a great lunch, I made cupcakes since it’s was Bryan’s 41st birthday, and then had his brother and sister-in-law over for supper, cupcakes and a game of “Bonkers”) to just focus on my crafting. On Wednesday night, I stayed up WAY too late working on another of the challenges, and maybe I’ll get that done and shared later this weekend.

The first of the challenges I finished was a layout based on a sketch by Vicki Boutin, and I documented Sara’s 2nd Halloween. I even recycled the wrappers from my crop snacks — leftover Halloween candy. The journaling reads: “For several days around Halloween 2011, it was a constant refrain around our house: ‘Connie. Connie. Connie.’ And truth be told, I was getting irritated, even a little jealous. I mean, I KNEW Sara liked her once-a-week babysitter, Connie Venn, but come on – surely being with Mama was okay, too?! I don’t know how it finally clicked. Maybe it was at the Parents and Tots get-together, when Lori Howe brought out orange-and-black treat bags for all the little kids (and, um, their moms…) to dig into and Sara started sampling the box of Smarties, or maybe when she was eagerly running to the door (even the next day) whenever the doorbell rang, so that she could give each person something out of the bowl…. Whenever it was, I finally clued in – yes, sometimes she wanted Connie, but most of the time, she just wanted CANDY. And (within reason!) I’m totally okay with that!”

I also tried out Ali Edwards’ challenge to “go big with your text”, for which I decided to haul out my acrylic paint, my ancient (and mostly unused) foam letter stamps and some smaller acrylic stamps, and try making some word art out of a quote from John Milton: “Grace was in all her steps, and heaven in her eye” (got an extra “was” in there by accident). I had been wanting to do a layout about Sara’s fascination with her shoes — especially these red ones that squeak when she walks — and this seemed like a good opportunity.

I tackled the “clothing” challenge next, which involved taking inspiration from one of the posted items of clothing, and using it to create a Christmas card. I used a picture of a long grey coat with wooden buttons and strips of coloured fabric to create this card. The candle in the “Merry and Bright” title was an attempt to cover up some problematic stamping (the “i” bent and smeared ink on my project), but I thought it worked out reasonably well. Here is the inspiration piece:

And my card:

As you can perhaps see in the background of that shot of my Christmas card, it has been snowing here, which made photographing these two remaining projects a challenge. The text on the black-and-white layout got smeared a bit by falling snow when I tried to photograph it on our deck, and the other layout was photographed on my crafting desk, and the lighting in my office is not the best for photographing. But that’s what I’ve got right now….

Anyhow, the black-and-white layout — which combines some of my reflections on what the word “church” means to me, and photos taken (for the most part) at our friends John and Timea Patterson’s induction as our pastor couple — was done in response to a challenge to use a photo of a black-and-white ceramic piece as our inspiration, using no other colours. Here is the piece that I used:

I took my title from a song by Carolyn Arends (here are the lyrics).

Journaling: “Church, to me, is a gathering together as believers (and those seeking, and those struggling, and those just wondering) to worship, work, learn and celebrate the fact that God is in His heaven and yet here among us as well. I’ve had the privilege to “do church” in many different settings – cathedral and lakeshore, in a salt mine once visited by Nicolaus Copernicus, in a school gym – and it all comes back to the same thing: we worship together.

The local church serves many roles. It is a place for teaching – a role played out in Sunday School classes, small group settings and the sanctuary. The church is a place to learn the foundations of faith, both theology and Bible stories, to gain an appreciation for the history of the Christian faith and to discover ways in which we can be stretched and deepen our faith.

The church is a place to work out the meaning of community, in relationships with people of every generation and background, some we like and some we don’t. The church is a starting point for discovering the meaning of a “social gospel”, in which good news means more than just the news of salvation, but a practical working out of that salvation here on earth – tending to the needs of the hurting of heart, mind and body.

The church is a place for honouring ritual and tradition – prayers of intercession, laying on of hands, baptisms, weddings, communion, the celebrations of the church year. The church is potluck suppers and libraries, games nights and prayer nights, potato sack races and Dixie Cups of ice cream served with little wooden spoons at summer picnics, Christmas pageants where a small, uncoordinated angel might accidentally knock over one of the pillars of heaven, farewell barbecues and graduation parties with streamers and balloons in the lobby in front of the sanctuary: in other words, the church shows us how to see God in all the activities of our daily lives, as well as in the most profound and extraordinary moments. The church is where we learn how to carry out the message of the cross: the vertical line to God, the horizontal line to one another.

And finally, the church is a place of “sending out” to the world – to proclaim the good news to our neighbours, whether they live next door or on the other side of the globe. And the role of the Christian is to drink deeply of it all, to learn and then become a teacher, to send and, as God wills, be sent. We are to participate in the life of our church, not just sit in a pew on Sunday morning and then slip out the door before anyone notices us. We are to serve according to our gifts, and be willing to test ourselves, to go beyond our “comfort zone” and see what God has for us to do.”

And then finally, I did a layout about me. This started out as my incomplete one-hour challenge layout, but it fit so neatly into the “home baked” challenge that all I had to add was some sparkly items (the white and red pearls), write the journaling and call it done. (The other requirements were something white, something red, something with dimension/texture, and answers to some questions about ourselves.)

Okay, that’s it for now. I may try to get some better photos of those last two layouts if the weather is decent. If you’ve gotten this far, I thank you — I think this is the longest blog post I’ve ever written, so I hope it makes up for my absence last week. This coming week I plan to get back to my December Daily preparations, and get to work on my ornament for the swap — I can’t believe December is nearly here already!! Thank goodness my Christmas shopping is 90 per cent done…. I’m hoping to find one or two more gifts at the local craft fair this weekend.

Cheers! (Oh, and happy Thanksgiving this coming week to my American friends.)

So sorry about not being timely with my weekly post — instead of writing for my blog yesterday during Sara’s nap, I was in the midst of glue and paper scraps and buttons and glitter. As a result, though, this week’s content is about as fresh as it gets!

I’m starting work on my December Daily (an album project started by Ali Edwards a few years ago, and since adopted by legions of her fans ), as this year I’m determined to make an actual, physical album instead of simply recording the season here on my blog. So, I’m following Ali’s lead in creating my “foundation pages” for the album, well in advance. It’s been a treat getting into the “Christmas spirit” so early — hopefully I’ll still be excited by the time December actually arrives.

I haven’t actually constructed the album pages yet, as I decided to start with the numbering for my pages. These are a combination of “cake mix” and “from scratch” — I picked up a hybrid (printable digital images) kit from Elle’s Studio, which was intended for making an advent calendar, and adapted it to work for December Daily. I think the only ones that I made exactly “by the recipe” were the silhouetted “12″ and the very glittery “9″ — I used almost an entire bottle of glitter, and pressed it down with a brayer, so that sparkly stuff isn’t coming off the snowflake. (It’s not coming off the brayer, either! — though I’ve mostly removed it from my desk, the sink, etc.). The others that are from the kit I added bits to, such as word stickers, inking, buttons and “bling”, or took elements away/added replacements.

I made a couple of the numbers out of “scraps” from other pieces, including the “14″ (a bit of the pink music paper from the kit’s “16″, the “celebrate” from another piece, and some green Thickers numbers), “16″ (foam number stickers, black pen and a piece of the patterned paper from “13″), and the “21″ (a tag from the kit’s “1″, and elements from my stash).

I am rather pleased with my “from scratch” numbers, and the ones that I changed the most. “1″ was made with a piece of translucent ribbon and a piece of cardstock to which I added black number stickers as a mask, then sprayed with several colours of ink, and peeled off the stickers, then edged with black ink. I kind of like the spots where the ink “bled” under the stickers, giving the letters a funky edge. The gingerbread man (“23″) was originally #14, and I kept his recipe and basic shape, but gave him a new number with some fuzzy Doodlebug numbers, some black mini-brad eyes and some extra “browning” with ink. I also added a punched out piece of a Saskatchewan map showing the city where my parents live, as we will be arriving there that day.

For “22″, I found a 7Gypsies vintage ephemera card, with a poster for the movie “Gypsy Girl”, as that’s the day we’ll be on the road to my parents’ home. “10″ uses the basic structure of the kit sample, but I made the little vertical pocket out of a piece of pinked fabric (from K and Company, I believe) and a ribbon that was on a gift I received a while back, so it was already nicely tied. I think Dec. 10 is the day we are having a gift exchange with Bryan’s siblings, so that should work nicely in the album. And then for “24″ — we have a stack of funny “parenting flashcards”, and I found the word “swaddle” in the box. I had the Scripture about the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger in mind, and Dec. 24 in Regina always includes a beautiful evening worship service at my parents’ church, so I decided to go with that.

So that’s what I’ve been working on. This post is rather long already, so since Corrie has posted my last two layouts on her blog and done a nice job with it, I will just link you up to it. You might like to see my guest designer feature on the Burlap & Buttercups blog as well.

Thanks for stopping by.

Edited to add: You may have noticed that there is no “19″ in the photos above. I have finally finished that one, as of nearly midnight — as you will see, it involves an accordion flower, and between my troubles with that and my difficulties with the tissue paper flower I tried to make during the Crop and Create event I went to in September, I’m starting to think I have as much of a black thumb with paper flora as I do with the real kind! Bryan and I finally got it figured out, although we got the accordion too tight and I had to make a few modifications to the piece as a result. Here it is.

In the “spirit” of Halloween (insert groans here — preferrably with ghostly chains rattling!), I thought I’d share some of my oddly large collection of Halloween layouts. I say “oddly large” because Halloween isn’t really one of my favorite holidays — especially all the death imagery — but I’ve actually found it easier to scrapbook than Christmas, which is much more dear to me. With most of my Halloween layouts, I’ve found it easier to follow the story where it leads me, rather than using the usual colours (orange/black/purple/green) or imagery (spiderwebs/monsters/pumpkins…). In that way, Halloween becomes a backdrop rather than the focus of the layout.

This first one is actually not a Halloween layout per se — but it seemed to fit, and in a way it’s more traditionally “Halloween-ish” than most of my “real” Halloween layouts. This was what happened here on Oct. 4 — Sara’s (and her sweater’s, and the carpeted stairs’, and the linoleum’s) close encounter with a bottle of red dye intended for making homemade soap.

I think this layout marks the fastest turnaround from “event” to “layout” in my 14 years of scrapbooking — I had it done just hours after of the event depicted. I felt an urge to create something to immortalize this, and for once, my scrapping area was clean enough and my supplies organized enough to do it. Years before I became a mama, I’d read an article in a scrapbooking magazine that exhorted, “Don’t get mad, take pictures” — so as I was taking my daughter off to clean her up, I grabbed my camera and snapped a very quick photo for posterity. It wasn’t well-framed or well-lit, so I played with it in Photoshop Elements, added a couple of filters (Dark Strokes and Poster Edges), cropped it tight and printed it big. The background is an old patterned paper from Paper Loft, which I had in the “urban/grunge” section of my patterned paper collection and thought went well, with its splashes of red against the neutrals and the “eye” in the background (or is it just me who sees that??). I found the “Frightfully Delightful” border strip in my tiny collection of Halloween papers, and the old movie poster on-line, and the cartoon werewolf was from a .99 digital kit from Two Peas. This was just a lot of fun to create.

And then this one was created a few weeks ago, as a way to remember Sara’s first Halloween.

There was really no “story” to her first trick-or-treating experience — we put her in her costume, stopped by the homes of a few friends and family members, and came home. We didn’t collect any candy for her, but we did have a couple of chocolates ourselves. But I had seen a layout in Scrapbooks Etc., created by Amanda Probst, in which she took visual inspiration from the book Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus for a layout about her son, and she was kind enough to send me a copy of the layout for a closer look. Since I first saw her layout, we’ve since become big fans of Mo Willems — particularly Edwina: The Dinosaur Who Didn’t Know She Was Extinct, but also the “Pigeon” books. (picture from Wikipedia)

So — I decided to take Amanda’s idea one step further, and I took the story (most of which is Pigeon’s attempts to convince the reader, by various means, to let him drive the bus — until the bus driver shows up and drives off in the bus, and then Pigeon sees a semi and decides he’d like to drive that instead!) and re-wrote it as though Sara was trying to convince us to give her Halloween candy. I used a photo collage template from Scrapbooks Etc. to make things easier, and then added my journaling strips. The book’s backgrounds are different colours on each page, and I’ve repeated that here too, although it wasn’t really planned that way initially — I just couldn’t decide what colour to use! (Here is what they look like.) Our friend Lisa Friesen, who took the pictures featured in my “Babe of the Woods” layout in my last Friday post, took the silhouetted one here as well.

Okay — it’s getting late, and this post is getting long, so I’ll try to get a few more Halloween layouts posted this weekend. I’ll also try to get a better photo of that “Duckling” layout — I thought I had another one, but couldn’t find it tonight. Thanks for visiting.

Hey there. I’m sorry that my blog has been so neglected these last few months — even though I enjoy so many blogs, I am sometimes at a loss to know what to write about on my own. I decided, today, though, to give regular blogging another go. Willow Traders — my on-line “home” — has a weekly blog hop, and I thought maybe I could commit to posting something crafty/creative once a week and linking up for the blog hop. If I can into a rhythm with that, maybe I’ll try posting more often.

So — consider this my inaugural weekly post. I hope I can do this!! Since the Willow Traders blog hops start on Fridays, that seems like a good day of the week to post. Since I like catchy titles (my journalistic background coming out there — headline writing was one of my jobs at the newspaper), I will call these posts “Fresh on Fridays”.

Okay — now where to start?! I have actually been doing a fair bit of scrapbooking/card-making/playing with my crafty supplies over the last couple of months. I was offered guest design spots with two kit clubs — Burlap and Buttercups for their September kit, and Sweet Peach Crop Shop for October — so that gave me the excuse to dedicate some serious time to scrapping when each kit arrived. I’ve also been participating in an on-line Get Organized Challenge educational series, hosted by Tiffany Spaulding from ScrapRack, and have actually developed some systems for HOW to organize my supplies. I’m not finished by any means, but maybe that process could be the subject of a future post. And at the end of September, my friend Megan and I went to Saskatoon for the inaugural Crop & Create event organized by Scrapbook and Cards Today magazine. I will share some photos (I didn’t take many — I know, I know — but there are a few, and I’m waiting for a few more from a new friend who took them because my camera batteries died) and stories of the event, my time with Megan and the projects I made, as a future post. There — now I have topics lined up, so no more “what do I write about?!” excuses for a while.

Since this is the FIRST “Fresh on Fridays” post, though, I will share my freshest stuff first. And that would be my projects for Sweet Peach! Corrie, the owner, actually had me lined up to work with the September kit, but something went wrong — we’re not sure where — and the kit never arrived. (I hope it’s not sitting in some UPS warehouse, and if it is, I hope someone finds it and sends it my way!!) So, no playing with the Amy Tangerine line from American Crafts or Jillibean Soup for me. BUT, Corrie decided give shipping a kit to La Ronge another shot, so I got the October “Sweet” kit to work with (there are two kits, “Sweet” and “Juicy”, every month), along with an embellishments add-on. I had to rush a bit because the kit arrived just before I had company coming (my parents came up for the Canadian Thanksgiving long weekend) and then we were going to be out of town for several days (the reasons may be another post altogether… though not one of these crafty Friday ones), so I had just Tuesday night and Wednesday to scrap! Thank goodness I have an understanding/flexible husband and a wonderful babysitter who took Sara a day earlier than usual! I got two of my four required projects finished before we left, and had made good headway on the other two, which I finished up on Tuesday.

So, so far Corrie has just posted my first two projects on her blog, so I’ll share those here as well, and put up some “sneaks” of the other two. First — a birthday card (you can click any of the pictures to see them bigger).

I used the blues, burlap and woodgrain letters to create a masculine, outdoorsy feeling card for my brother Curtis, who turned 33 (!!) on Oct. 18. I thought the “coffee filter” embellishment with the math questions worked well for a birthday card, with the “addition” of years. I stamped the Emerson quote on a piece of the packaging for the brads that came in the embellishment kit; might as well recycle, eh?

The second project was created partly as a way to showcase the photo shoot that our friend Lisa Friesen did for us on the Thanksgiving weekend — these were taken in a spot less than a five-minute walk behind her house, which is right on La Ronge Avenue, our main downtown street, so yes, we do live IN the woods! But I didn’t want the layout to be about the shoot itself, so instead I focused on a message I wanted to give Sara (who is napping right now…. I love that she is still pretty regular about her afternoon naps).

The journaling reads:
Sara, right now I have no idea where you will grow up – but wherever you go, I pray that you will remember that this was your first home – a small (under 8,000 in the area) town in northern Saskatchewan. It was built on moss-covered bedrock and swampy muskeg, with a single downtown street wandering along the shores of a vast, clear lake. You devoured wild blueberries, received tiny white leather moccasins as a baby gift from the chief of the Lac La Ronge Indian Band, played with beaver fur at the local trading post and moss in the forest, and traveled for hours to get to a Walmart. And sweet girl, I hope that you will also remember that these six adults were among those who loved you best, and who could think of no happier way to spend their Thanksgiving Day than with you. Photos taken Oct. 10, 2011.

To give the background cardstock more texture, I put it on some cracked pavement (ie. my driveway!) and used a sanding block to “emboss” it. I also embossed a border onto the focal photo with a Scor-Pal, which is a tool for scoring lines (usually for the fold on greeting cards), and then sanded the raised parts to let the white core show through. The top patterned paper reminded me of sky, and the leaves are on the ‘ground’ beneath us. With the kraft doilies, I used a mix of Glimmer Mist, Maya Mist and walnut ink to create some variegated colours that reminded me of autumn leaves.

And finally, here are the “sneak peeks” of my other two layouts, “My Cupcake Project” and “Re-upholster”.

Thanks for visiting.