I haven’t updated in a while, so this post is going to be fairly long. And two thirds of the way down there’s going to be a bit of a New Girl spoiler, so beware if you care.
I rearranged my craft ottoman the other day. I’ve been acquiring supplies, little by little. This is what it looks like inside… I’m using 2 loaf pans, a Japanese wooden box and an old cardboard box that held card blanks to contain everything, with a wide mouth jar for my pens and a plastic letter sorter inside one of the boxes to divide some of the labels and stickers. Mimi thinks it looks alright. All I can see when I look at this picture is the tangle of laptop cords… oh, how I hate cords! 
I have been staying up to date with my Project Life pages, usually working on them on my Monday off. What I get behind on is taking pictures of them and sharing. I’m usually excited to show off when I’m done, but it’s usually early evening by then and the light is gone. After this weekend that won’t be a problem any more – daylight savings time is upon us! yippee! I love long summer evenings.
week 8… a busy week at work and a tricky week for me to craft into a small spread.
On the left side I was a bit distracted by the back sides of the patterned paper I used for the previous week. I liked the yellow grid and the colorful herringbone designs, so I decided to use them. But I didn’t want to adhere this week’s material to the back of the cards, and they were a bit too strongly colored, so I put my photos on tracing paper to create a translucent background. I thought that was pretty clever! I thought to use vellum, but what I had was tracing paper, so that’s what I used.
I had a lot to say about this week, but I decided to add it over this picture of my pile of crap (representing how messy this week was) and I used a handwritten (CK Becky) font over a ghosted white background. You can read it easier in person, but it takes a little effort. That was my intent. There’s some stuff there that’s boring, some that’s a little more private. The big pictures are from work – we got a new break room floor over the long weekend and I liked the picture I took of it (sunshine!) but the long weekend also made for a horrible day at work catching up on all the books returned while we were closed (don’t return books to a library on a long weekend if you don’t have to… please!)
I used writing directly on photos on the right side, used my first fake hashtag caption (#ontheblog) to be a little trendy, taped a happy instagram to one of my favorite photos, and listed all the delicious fishy things I ate on Saturday on a Liz Tamanaha designed card. I don’t really think the card goes very well with everything else on the page, but what the heck. And I didn’t have photos of the first seafood meal, only the second one, so it made more sense just to list everything. Hubby took the picture of me wearing my new t-shirt because I couldn’t get a decent mirror shot.
and then week 9:
(spoiler alert: I included an image from New Girl season 2 episode 15)
I mixed things up again this week – some writing on photos, simple photos with a digital text caption, some layered labels and washi tape and patterned paper.
I like to take a photo of my whiteboard calendar at the end of the month, so I added that in as a week (and month) in review card. The food is very typical of what I eat and I left lots of white space to add notes about where the food came from – I was quite pleased to be able to say who made the bread and some of the toppings. I got a shot of hubby while we were waiting for our food at one of our favorite weekend lunch places. I liked the picture of him better than the picture of the food. And I love taking book pile pictures – showing what I’m interested in right now, and reminding everyone how awesome the library is. I love that arrow paper. All the papers are from the Studio Calico scrapbooking kit for February.
And this is where I get a bit embarrassed by how much I love New Girl… I watched so many episodes this week that I had to include the photo I took of the season one DVD. I found the other image online – someone included one of my favorite quotes from the show with a screenshot of “the kiss” – I couldn’t resist putting it in.
“Yeah, I mean, I saw through space and time for a minute, but that’s not the point!”
btw I had no idea how many people made fan art and fan videos and fan fiction for their favorite tv couples… and I learned some new slang this week – to “ship” means to desire a romantic relationship between a fictional couple. A lot of people ship Nick and Jess.
Anyway, I liked using one paper to unite the two related cards and all the arrows reminded me of cupid and of chaos (the kiss was a wonderfully disruptive element that has provided a lot of conflict and humor to subsequent episodes). I was able to use my film strip washi too, although I had to add some white card scraps to stop it being see-through.
I used the awesome wood print paper for my spring collage, and the extra wide ombre washi tape from the Studio Calico kit worked quite well on kraft card to back the strange sunset light photos in the top right corner. I guess I didn’t have much to say on the right side of the spread. The pictures speak for themselves.
Well, that was the end of February. It’s just a snapshot of what’s going on, but it’s fun to create. I am amazed at how many other things I could be putting in if I had the space – more photos, ephemera, more stories. I keep a planner/diary (which I just realized I haven’t been updating this week because I closed it and moved it out of sight) with lots more details about my days, so this album is a place to be visually creative and combine the events with images that I love.
Jo:)
adventures in the here now 