A Week in the Life - Thursday

Well hello again!
I am so sorry if I left you hanging last week on my Week in the Life project, that was not my intention at all! In fact, I made (almost) every effort to keep posting. See, what happened was this, I had been posting the day after each day so that it would be an all around view of my day and on Friday I was fully planning on posting about Thursday's day, but, my sister and I went on a little road trip Friday morning. No matter, I thought, I'll just bring my computer and camera etc and post later from the hotel. Well, I packed the camera, I packed the laptop, but what I forgot to pack was the cable to connect the two to upload my photos onto the laptop.....wop wop.fail. Oh well, better late than never I always say :)
                 

A Week in the Life - Wednesday

Wednesday

Total pictures taken 38

Welcome back, I think this is a new record for me, posting three days in a row! So far it has been good, there have definitely been challenges, both in picture taking and in journaling and recording our week. Today I'm not going to do a lot of writing 

A Week in the Life - Tuesday

Welcome back!

So yesterday (Monday)I started this week in the life project and though it kind of had a bumpy start, today I started hitting my stride. Things of note, a lot more pictures were taken, not only that but I had some fun playing around with angles, the timer on my camera (which I have never used before!) and different lighting. For my words today I included some observations of our life right now, to distinguish this week from any "normal" week 

All pictures were taken with my Canon Rebel T3i with my 18-55mm lens (I hope to get a wider angle lens eventually) And here we go...

Do you scrapbook? Do you need some new ideas?

Hi!
I love scrapbooking but lately I've felt a serious lack of creativity, so I've been searching for ways to get new ideas. Well today I signed up for the this...



It's free, looks fun and it will hopeful help me jump start my creativity :) Join me if you want, should be a blast...

Creative Crop 2013

Did you know last Saturday was (Inter)National Scrapbook day? No? Well me neither ;) until I got a nice email from the people at Big Picture Classes informing me of this special day and inviting me to participate in their annual Creative Crop.


                                                                       {source}

Basically we were given 10 different "challenges" of different techniques to scrapbook and with each layout you submit a picture of, completing this challenge, you had a chance to win some pretty awesome prizes (well, pretty awesome if you are a scrapbooker ;) So, since my scrapbooking has been pretty non-existent lately, I decided to attempt a couple of the challenges, and you know what? It was great! I ended up finishing three pages, two are a double layout and one by itself. The double layout is a bunch of pictures I've been wanting to scrapbook for awhile, they are about Gabe's first solo ski attempts.  (the challenge with this one was, we were given a sketch of the layout we were supposed to use and then use our own pictures and stories within that layout)

My Scraproom/Playroom

Thank you so much those of you who have stayed around while my blogging has been so sporadic! I think I've got the kinks worked out and the computer problems fixed too! 

So, a couple of weeks ago I posted this picture and said that I would show you the updated version soon. Apparently 3 weeks is soon! ;) You can check out my scraproom inspiration post here.

And now on to the fun "after" pics! Yay! This first picture is almost the same angle as the one above. 

 In it you can see my desk and a little reading corner, playmobil land and some storage stuff. Turning to the right we have this view...

A Project Life Update

I've been really bad at keeping up with updating things I say I'm going to update (sorry about that!), so in the spirit of updating, here is my Project Life album from January to the end of February ( if I update it till now it will take all day to get through all the pictures so look for a March-April update soon! Promise!). If you are interested in what the first page looks like, I shared my title page HERE. 

Actually, I shared this first page too, but not with journalling cards :)  

This is the week of Jan 1st to 7th.

Jan 8th to 14th

Jan 15th to 21st 

                                                                           Jan 22nd to 28th

Jan 29th to Feb 4th 

Feb 5th to 11th (don't worry, no one was hurt it was just a training exercise :) 

Feb 12th to 18th 

Feb 19th to 25th (oops still need to print some pics!) 

And last but not least, Feb 26th to Mar 3rd 

Hope you enjoy and have a good weekend!

An Inside Day

Since today it was looking like this.....

outside, I decided to stay in and work on something I've been wanting to work on for awhile now. By the way, the picture above does not do justice to the sheer volume of snow coming down, it is almost a white out. We had hardly any snow left before this morning, I took this picture at around noon and now there is about six inches of new snow!

Anyways, awhile ago I mentioned I had a plan for the Big Envelopes I ordered with my project life stuff (you can check out that post here) well today I decided to work on my kids' "School of Life" albums (well mostly just Nyla's as Cady is only in grade 1 and Gabe isn't in school yet :)

I believe it was in spring 2010 when I took the Library of Memories online course with Stacy Julian (check out more about that here) among many of her many ideas was one that really resonated with me about organizing and keeping track of all things school related which she called School of Life. So since doing that course I have been pretty good at organizing the kids school stuff in a little file holder on my desk. Each child has a file for each grade (since my kids are young I just started with what I had which was this little cheapo file folder from Wallyworld, not pretty but it works)

This is my desk while I was hard at work. Notice I've got my important stuff always out, my school of life folder on the right (to easily drop school stuff right in) and my project life stuff in the middle :) Necessities people, necessities :)

Here is a picture of the title page of Nyla's book, I kinda scraplifted the idea from SJ :)

And here is one of the Big envelopes ( I bet you wondered when I was going to get to that) LOVE THEM! They have that great pocket on the front with a card to label and personalize, which I did with some stamps I had on hand and a little flower. Inside are things like report cards, special art projects, certificates from school and sports etc etc. Like I say love them. So nice to have it all organized and pretty and easy to access (now if only my basement was that easy to organise and make pretty, which is my next project)

What did I do with school pictures you ask? Well, you are just going to have to tune in next week and find out :)

It's here! It's here!

I am so excited! Can you tell? Why am I so excited you ask? Well, I'll tell you :) Remember when I wrote this post a few weeks ago when I was impatiently waiting a certain something? Well, it's here finally, my project life stuff has arrived!

I had ordered the cobalt core kit, then I changed my mind and decided I liked the Clementine version better. I also ordered a black signature binder,  a package of the big variety pack of photo pocket pages, and a pack of Big envelope pages. I was so excited I nearly ripped the box out of the purolator man's hands :)

I guess there had been a mix up with the company who distributes the Becky Higgins product in Canada and I was supposed to get my order around Christmas, but that didn't happen so I had emailed the company to see when my things were going to be shipped. The woman emailed me back right away and we got it sorted out and she felt so terrible about the mix up that she overnighted it straight away so I could get started :) Long story, sorry! 

My plan was to highlight a week per layout in 2012, so I had been taking pictures and making notes and had my idea for my title page all planned out. When I got everything out of the box, I got started right away! Here is my title page:

The core kit comes with everything you need for a title page and last page all planned out, but I knew I wanted to add pictures to the title page at least. I still want to add our last name and the year somewhere, but haven't decided where and how yet.

I also threw in all the pictures I wanted to use from the last 5 or so weeks, so I continued on with that. Now I just have to finish the journalling and add those card to the pages and I will be all caught up! Here's the first week of January:

 I'm hoping to get most of the journalling finished today. Oh and those big envelope pages I ordered? Those are going to be a part of some scrapbooks I'm planning to document the kids school years, an idea I got from Stacy Julian called "school of life".

In other news, our week has been kinda quiet around here, my mom watched the kids for us for a few hours the other night ( I had to work, Pat had a meeting, so nothing fun) and she and Gabe made this,

 Cady made the other tower :) Gabe played with it a ton yesterday while I did my thang (see up top :)

And poor Nyla has been sick with a sore throat so she's been watching a lot of Garfield (their latest favorite movie) and reading.

How is your week going? Any fun and exciting things arrive for you to play with? :)

P.S If any of the links for the project life stuff above don't work for you, you can check out Becky Higgins site HERE. Also, if you don't live in the United States and want to order stuff, there are links on her site for how to do that, they ship all around the world!

P.P.S. I am not affiliated with Becky Higgins at all so I don't get any perks or anything for sharing all this (I doubt she even knows I exist :), I just really like her stuff and her outlook on what scrapbooking is and the fact that she is a mom herself and understands all the challenges we all face :) Just so you know :)

Impatiently waiting.....

The other day I mentioned Project Life, and some of you may know what I'm talking about and some of you are making the "huh?" face. So today I'm going to share a little bit about it because it is on my mind constantly as I am waiting for it to arrive in my mailbox!

Project Life is a scrapbooking product line developed by Becky Higgins ( you can check out her blog on my blog list). But it is not "just" a scrapbooking line, it is a way of thinking about life. I absolutely love the video Becky did explaining project life and it explains the whole idea way better than I ever could. You can check that video out HERE or like I said you can check out her blog over to the right. I love watching it and getting inspired, not just about PL, but seeing the quick glimpses of her home and all the beautiful colourful paints and fabrics she has going on (and her cute kidlets too) :)

I am so excited to start this process and I can't wait to see the product I ordered in person cause it looks so gorgeous on her site!

So, have you heard of Project Life before? Are you as excited as I am to start a new year with a new project?

Christmas Card 2011

Well here it is, we had such a fun time with our friend and photographer Cindy on our photo shoot and I honestly had the hardest time deciding which photo to use on the cards because there were so many great shots to choose from.

Front

and inside.

Some of you received yours already and some of you are getting them a bit late (oops sorry about that, lost a bit of card making time to study for exams time) and this whole month has flown by so fast I cannot believe in one hour it will be Christmas eve!

I know I said I would share Christmas decor with you today and that just didn't happen as we had a house showing (to sell it) and right now we're actually at my husband's mom's place for a pre-Christmas celebration. I did get a bunch of good pics of the house today though so be sure to check back next week for those to appear :)Thank you so much to all of you who do take the time to check out my little blog, I so enjoy blogging and sharing some tidbits of our lives and it's nice to see other people enjoying it as well. 

 I wish you all a safe and happy holidays and a very Merry Christmas!

Updated Scraproom pictures

Last night I did my triathlon training course and Thursdays we do a run practice (Tuesdays we swim and Saturdays we bike) we did the whole running course which is 5 km and because I have such bad feet (bad pronation) I am always sore the next day. Well today I can barely walk so I figured I may as well sit and update my blog a little bit :) Thank goodness the run portion is the last thing we do during the tri :)

So, anyways I found my camera finally (it was squeezed in between the cushions on the couch ?? hmmm) and took some pics of my new scrapping area. It is in a small room in the basement where the playroom is as well so it's a bit squishy, but so far it works. My idea is that for the summer, we will do our outings in the mornings (beach, spray park, library, etc) and then during the heat of the day we can hide out in the nice cool basement and the kids can play/ do artwork and I can scrap. Yay! I've been reading

 and getting really inspired! I love books about decorating/organizing and scrapbooking so what could be better than all three together? So here it is, not completely organized and pretty yet, but hopefully you will enjoy.....

My stuff takes up one wall, and the kids get the rest of the room :)

I like to organize my supplies by colour so each square bin represents the colour of stuff within. Although I want to change this a bit for a few reasons 1) the store doesn't have all the colours I need like yellow, purple and black and white 2) it looks too mish mash and I'd like it to look all uniform. Oh what I wouldn't give for an Expedit!! The boxes on the shelf above? The colourful one and the black one are my category drawer and my cold storage. Yes I only have one category drawer, but it is almost full so almost time to shop for another :) and on the left you can see a few of my storage albums. ( all the terms; category drawers, cold storage and storage albums are from LOM or Photo Freedom)

View from the other side.

My desk aka where the magic happens :)

                                                     My two youngest playing in the playroom half (please don't mind the mess picture was taken on a real day :)

Playing playmobil, I love when my kids play playmobil (and Lego!)

Gabe on his last day of soccer this week

I love this boy :)

Finding Photo Freedom

I am so excited for June 2nd! Why, You ask? Because that is the first day of the online class I just signed up for called Finding Photo Freedom. It was written and made by a woman named Stacy Julian and I just love her! I actually took her class last year when it was called Library of Memories and I was so happy I did because it totally changed the way I scrapbook and also how often. This past year I've done the most scrapbooking I've ever done and I credit it to taking Stacy's class. I love how organized my pictures have been since then and I can't wait to see how Stacy changed things up a bit for this years class. If you are curious about Stacy or her class, you can check her out by clicking on her blog link on the right under"My Blog List" or, for her class, click on the button on the right "Finding Photo Freedom".
Now I'm off to check out what I have to do for pre-class work, should be fun!
Sam

Happy Birthday Pat!

Last week we celebrated Pats 30th birthday. Happy Birthday honey!  I keep teasing him that he's my old man but I'll catch up in a couple months :) That cake looks pretty pathetic but rest assured we loaded it up with whipped cream on top. It was a chocolate oatmeal cake and it was yummy!

Here's our sick Nyla, she was sick all last week and now Gabe and Cady are feeling it too.

Last week the younger two were feeling fine and they enjoyed all the fresh new snow we got :)

And they were so cute snuggled up reading "Brown Bear" together.

While I got some more organizing and scrapbooking done. Here is one of the four pages I did, it's about making cookies with Nyla in 2005!! Now, some might say that is pretty far behind, but last year I took an online course called Library of Memories with Stacy Julian and it was fantastic! I will have to do a post about that soon, but the basic idea is, you are not behind and you don't have to "catch up" with scrapbooking if you are organized properly.

How is your winter going? Are you enjoying some new snow? Or are you (like me) enjoying the excuse to be indoors and get some crafty things done? Do tell!

Scrapbooking score and Christmas update part 2

Yesterday, I went to pick up the albums I ordered from my local store (American Crafts Modern Albums) and scored some lovely deals while there. Last year I took the online course called "Library of Memories"by Stacy Julian and she turned me onto these wonderful albums. I just love them! I also love the fact that all my printed pictures are totally organized in chronological order, but more on that another day! I also scored a bunch of chipboard accents, some ribbon, flowers, printed paper and I just love the chipboard and stickers at the bottom.They are kind of retro-y with the cute little toasters and beaters and I think they will go perfect with pictures of my newest toy....

Hello Beautiful! my new Kitchen aid stand mixer!! Soooo excited about this, can you tell? Well I used it once right away to whip up some mashed potatoes on Christmas day and had planned to do some baking right after Christmas, but on Boxing day the bottom element in our oven gave up the ghost, so I had no oven to bake in. (insert frowny face here)  So finally after a couple attempts to get the right element (I say it was Pat's listening skills, he says its was my measuring skills :) the right one was installed by my wonderful hubby and on Tuesday I was mixing up a storm. So here she is, sorry for the glare!

Here are the yummy chocolate chip cookies I made....

  and the yummy calzones we had for supper. I made plain pepperoni, pepperoni and mushroom, meat lovers and a Greek veggie one for me (spinach, red pepper, kalamata olives, feta and mozza). The whole wheat crust recipe I got from the cookbook called "The Earthbound Cook, 250 recipes for delicious food and a healthy planet" by Myra Goodman