So, I have this other blog...

I started another blog for my crafty pursuits, in support of a new business I'll (eventually) launch.  For now, I'd love it if you'd clickety-clack on over there, and maybe add it to your reader if you like the crafty stuff.

I'll still blog here about our regular life, but if you're wondering why I've become scarce and less crafty, it's because I'm posting those things over at

The Papercraft Lab Notebook

If you'd like to subscribe to it, I'd appreciate it greatly!

Here's the feed link to copy-paste into your reader of choice:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/papercraftlab   

(Apparently Feedly thinks it's hiding.)

Hope to see you there, my Internet friends and "friends".

Project Life 2013: Not Quite Chalkboard But Still

On Saturday I got to craft *all day*, thanks to a fundraiser crop for the Komen 3 Day Walk.  I went with my friend J and we shared a table for 9 hours. She made 35+ layouts, while I did 2.75.  I am really, really slow. But since I love the process, that's fine.

The first thing I tackled was this Project Life layout. I had visions of doing a "chalkboard" theme, with the chalkboard finish paper from an old DCWV paper stack.  I bought some awesome liquid chalk markers and was excited to use them for this layout, after drawing all over the mirrors and glass in our house.  However, I'm not much of a doodler and the markers were broader than I prefer for Project Life so I didn't quite get the chalkboard effect I wanted.  I still like the simple color palette, though.  Click for larger images.

July 15-28: pseudo chalkboard

July 15-28: Thatha time, crawling!, Date Night and water play

July 15-28: Making lemonade, Spanish story time, #nsale, food

Details, details

Aside from the black chalkboard paper, the printed 3x4 cards I used were from the Scraptastic Project Life kits. I picked the ones that fit the chalkboard or black, white and aqua theme.  The grey and white tiny letter stickers are from the Target $1 section. And they're even repositionable!!  I know, right?!  I bought two packs.

I also made liberal use of a Heidi Swapp embellishment pack I've had for ages - polaroid frames, rub-ons and little "liked" stickers. I also used a ton of adorable doily rub-ons from Christy Tomlinson, which I received in my Pink Paislee warehouse box. For some reason, I adore doilies, though I really am not into frilly, girly embellishments. I (mostly) hate flowers, lace, and anything vintage.  But doilies?  Sign me up! 

The "moments" puffy sticker, adorable chevron cloud and what I think is a lemon (?) are also Pink Paislee, from my box.  You can't see the washi tape too well on the black background, but it's a graph paper pattern, with the word love and little pink hearts in lowercase. It's from Freckled Fawn, and super-cute.  I also went to town with some Freckled Fawn grey, black and white enamel dots.  I love having those in neutral colors!

As you can tell, I love mixing and matching products, and that's probably what takes me so long to complete these layouts. This one took me 4 hours, but I was also chatting and snacking while working on it.  But it's almost a perfect representation of my style - consistent color scheme, lots of journaling, lots of photos and fun supplies to play with.

Here's a slide show of all my 2013 pages, including close-ups.  If you can't see it, click here to view my entire 2013 Project Life gallery.

Project Life 2013: Simple as Cherry Pie

I got sidetracked by making "real" scrapbook layouts and put off this Project Life spread for a while.  I had a little crafty time to myself this weekend, thanks to hubby and I trading off. He got a motorcycle ride and car show with some of his buddies and I got a couple of uninterrupted hours in the craft room all by my not-so-lonesome. Bliss.

A few months ago, I came across a Craigslist ad for a Project Life Cherry Kit, including binder, page protectors, dividers and most of the cards for a screamin' deal. M and I went to pick it up while Big Sister T was at preschool. I think it was one of the older style Project 365 kits, as the cards are smaller than in the newer kits. 

This week I wanted to use my *actual* Project Life cards instead of matching and cutting down patterned paper, so I decided to stick with that Cherry kit, and mixed in a few coordinating cards from a Clementine set I bought from someone who was splitting her kit. So the color palette ended up yellow, red and orange, which is great for mid-summer.  Click for larger photos.

July 1 - 14: Phone photos, holiday, baby photo shoot

July 1-14: Card made just for me by T & assorted Instagram goodness 

I also went through my stash and reorganized everything, and found a couple of sheets of rub-ons from my friend J, with whom I exchange cast-offs and extras. Something I've realized from making non-PL layouts is that I like a lot of repetition to bring disparate elements together. So I tried to use a LOT of the rub-ons, not just one or two like I'd normally do.  

Rub-ons are also *fantastic* embellishments to put directly on photos. I don't like manipulating them in Photoshop to add funky text or digi stamps, so I can get a similar effect this way.

July 1-14: Magformers (best toy ever!), phone photos, tons o' journaling

I am all about the stories, and am often too long-winded even for all the slots in Project Life.  This week, using the Design F page protector with all those 3x4 slots was super fun - enough for lots of little photos AND lots of journaling.  I also embraced the photo collage this week, and just used Lightroom to create my own templates.

You saw it here first: Pom pom bullet points

I did my usual "bullet point" summary for the week.  (You can take the girl out of Microsoft, but...) This time I used tiny 1/4 inch craft pom poms to add a little dimension. So if this becomes a huge trend in scrapbooking, remember you saw it here first. Hah.  The words on the flower are from those rub-ons I mentioned earlier. It was a Thanksgiving set, but there were plenty of non-holiday words to use.

And I didn't have to mess around with wet glue, I just used my favorite Micro Glue Dots. They are awesome for every tiny embellishment, including sequins, beads and now tiny pom poms!

I've got lots of interesting photos this month since I'm taking the BPC Phone Photography class. It's been great inspiration to really *see* what's around me as I go about daily life and not wait for some dedicated photo time that may never happen. I'm looking forward to starting the layout for the second half of the month with all these fun mobile phone photos!

Here's a slide show of all my 2013 pages, including close-ups.  If you can't see it, click here to view my entire 2013 Project Life gallery.

Project Life 2013: Someday We'll Find It

Since starting the Phone Photography class last week and exploring different apps for photo taking and editing, I realized my workflow to process photos went all crazypants. Now the photos are in multiple directories *and* there are different-sized duplicates, thanks to Instagram resizing photos when uploading.

I sat down to sort it out this weekend and realized I need to pick a path and stick to it.  So for now, I'm taking photos with Vignette and editing them in Pixlr Express, which allows me to save large files.  I may or may not share them on Instagram, but I'm no longer using it for images I want to print, since I haven't yet figured out how to save those photos at a good resolution for printing larger than 4x4.

After I got all the photos on my computer, I used my usual workflow within Adobe Lightroom to select and print images for this Project Life layout.  And as usual, I had more photos than would reasonably fit, but I got creative and combined some in a single pocket.  I got all but one to fit on the spread, but that meant I didn't have as much room for journaling as I would like.  (As you know, I'm long-winded.)

Click on a photo to enlarge it.

June 17-30: T's dance recital, zoo trip, park GPS roulette

Jun 17-30: Preschool picnic, swimming lesson, outings with sisters

Old & new together

Studio Calico PL kit card + Elle's Studio frame, artistically askew

I didn't use a specific kit this week.  I had one precious sheet of gorgeous rainbow polka-dot paper I was hoarding from the We R Memory Keepers 2010 line called "72 and Sunny". I used every one of those 144 square inches on this layout. Ever since I rediscovered it while moving everything out of my leaky craftroom, I've wanted to use it for Project Life, and it's perfect for summer.

The spread came together fairly quickly. After selecting and printing photos like I always do, I grabbed the special paper and pulled out a small set of coordinating stickers, cards, letters and embellishments from what I had nearby on my desk. I only chose things that were cream-based because I have a real issue mixing white and cream, which someday I'll overcome. Maybe.

The paper coordinated nicely with the cream-background hexagon journaling stickers from Jillibean Soup that I've also been hoarding since last year.  I found a couple of chevron cards in my recent Studio Calico kits and threw those into the mix.  The random die-cuts came from the mystery bowl on my desk. I love flipping through it to find perfect little surprises.  For a bit of shine, I grabbed two packs of the tiny round Heidi Grace adhesive metal accents which I keep buying at Jo-Ann when they go on sale.  I love those little things and they fit nicely with the polka dot paper.

And now the year is half-over and I'm still on track, so yay for that. I'm trying to figure out how to incorporate all the photos I'm taking for my photography class.  Maybe just a couple of extra pages for those, or I'll make a 12x12 grid and get it printed professionally for the album. I can't tell you how happy I am my photos are actually printed and physically available to look through, rather than trapped on our server, languishing in the digital abyss.

Here's a slide show of all my 2013 pages, including close-ups.  If you can't see it, click here to view my entire 2013 Project Life gallery.

Project Life 2013: Happy Birthday To Me!

My birthday last week was low-key, but one of the best I've ever had.  TJ took the morning off to watch the girls so I could get my craftiness on.  For six whole uninterrupted hours. Granted I used some of it to shower in peace and get an eyebrow wax, but the rest was spent editing photos and making a Project Life layout.

Here it is:

June 3 - 16: Father's Day, lima bean plant, double cart @ Whole Foods

June 3-16: my favorite paper EVER, popsicles, Crazy House Project

Filler - I have a thing for clouds, lately.

Calendar card with pretties

I used the Citrus Twist June Project Life Kit, mostly.  I put the last several kits in the same Cropper Hopper Paper File (love these things for storing kits!), so I'm not sure which pieces belong with each month's kit.  But I do like mixing and matching things, so I'm not too worried about it.  I especially love the Amy Tangerine Yes Please tiny puffy stickers and their fun summery colors.

And you know what else matched, and was perfect for our popsicle-making process photos?  My MOST FAVORITE PAPER EVER.  

It's the Dreamy Days Polaroid-esque paper from American Crafts' Dear Lizzy Neapolitan line.  I got a sheet at my local scrapbook store (shout out to Ben Franklin Redmond!), and when I realized how much I loved it, I went back for more only to find they were completely out.  I was heartbroken, so I ordered a few sheets online from another scrap store.  Then I realized I *still* wanted more, so I ordered a 25-pack on Amazon. At the time, it was much more expensive than it is now, but I still consider it money well spent, to secure (aka hoard) that paper. I know, it's a sickness.

But now that I have so much, I'm not afraid to use it. It works so well to frame lots of little photos. And the pastel colors coordinated really well with the Citrus Twist kit colors.

You'll also notice that I embraced two colors I don't much care for - Pepto-Bismol pink and yellow.  I'm just not a fan but they worked well here, especially with that yummy pink and yellow ombre wide washi tape from a recent Studio Calico add-on kit. Standing in for bullet points this week on my summary are the hard-to-find Studio Calico tiny star wood veneers.

I've also found the perfect solution to adhering tiny wood veneer pieces and sequins, without having to deal with messy wet glue anymore.  Hooray!  I had no idea that Glue Dots came in a Micro size of 1/8 inch. I'll be buying more of these, for sure.  They are perfect for the tiniest wood veneer stars, little sequins and even small beads.

As you can tell, this was A Good Crafty Session. I had fun, and things came together as I thought they should.  I've been in a bit of a picture taking lull, so I'm hoping the Phone Photography class I signed up for in July will help me get my mojo back.

Here's a slide show of all my 2013 pages, including close-ups.  If you can't see it, click here to view my entire 2013 Project Life gallery.

Project Life 2013: Luxe Love

Yep, it's time for another Project Life layout already.  I was anxious to use my brand new Luxe items from my Pink Paislee warehouse box that arrived last week.  So shiny and pretty!

The gold papers were speaking to me this week so I figured I'd do a color scheme of gold and white. I wanted another pop of color, though, and remembered reading someone's message board post about neon pink with gold.  That is a color combo I had never, ever considered.  But it's genius. So I grabbed my Heidi Swapp neon pink gel pen and went to town with a lot of journaling.  (Click for larger photos.)

May 20 - June 2: Zoo, Folklife, Daddy Time

May 20 - June 2: Brunch with friends, Good Baby, YUM

Week title and summary card

I kept the rest of the spread very simple.  I wanted to retain the simple look of the 12x12 star and circle papers, so I cut the papers to match the slots in my page protectors and laid out the pieces the same way.  Since there were several slots with no pattern I had plenty of space to work with my photos, many of which I printed smaller than usual this week to let the background paper shine (pun fully intended!).

The embellishments were minimal as well - Luxe gold rub-ons, and these amazing, fantastic Dear Lizzy 5th and Frolic tiny white and gold letter stickers I had been hoarding from my Studio Calico December Daily kit. And just so you know, I 1-clicked myself another pack of them on Amazon, because they are so lovely.

For emphasis I also used the larger gorgeous shiny gold Hardcover Thickers, which I think I also got in an SC kit. I was thrilled to find them recently in silver, too.  I love the simple font, and they are so shiny.  I'm a sucker for shiny things.

Because I didn't use many different products, it was really easy for me to load up what I needed on a shallow tray and work at the kitchen table while watching the girls play in the living room. Usually my crafty time only happens after they're in bed, so it was really nice to be able to work on this during the day.

Here's a slide show of all my 2013 pages, including close-ups.  If you can't see it, click here to view my entire 2013 Project Life gallery.

Project Life 2013: Orange You Happy, Mama?

I got my groove back for this Project Life spread, which included our low-key Mother's Day celebrations. We went out for an early breakfast at my favorite Portage Bay Cafe, and then my parents came over the following day for an official Mother's Day brunch. Bacon was enjoyed by all. Well, not T, because she doesn't like bacon. I think I'll keep her despite that.


(Click to see larger photos).

May 6-19: Mother's Day, solid food for BabyM, haircut & Redmond Saturday Market

May 6-19: Brunch, UW research study, manual labor, cuteness

Calendar bling marking our anniversary and Mother's Day

Small detail - almost what I wanted

The last photo is a closeup of one of the Studio Calico Project Life Kit cards.  I wanted to add a cute embellishment to the inside of the camera so I put in a tiny star sequin and used Glossy Accents to create a little dome over it.  Except that I didn't use enough, so it's not quite round. Oh well, better luck next time.

I tried hard this week to use only my growing collection of pre-cut Project Life cards. Most are from recent Studio Calico kits or my brand-new Project Life Midnight Core Kit.  I used a few scraps and embellishments salvaged from my December Daily album (which I reworked and finished-finally!  More on that later.)  

The black letter stickers spelling "SUPER CUTE" and "MARKET" are cast-offs from a friend and are over a decade old.  It was a fun game to figure out what I could spell with the remaining letters.  Once I completely run out of As and Es, the rest get turned over to T for use in her "crafting".

Something I've found helpful to making a cohesive layout is to use most embellishments, stamps and letter stickers twice on the spread. I was doing this subconsciously and just realized it while making this spread.  It's not a hard and fast rule, but it definitely helps me limit the number of "things" I'm bringing in, as well as making the different pockets "relate" to each other.  I'm sure this is some fancy graphic design principle that I missed out on during the art classes I never took.

So here we are at the beginning of June, almost halfway through the year, and I'm still living in the mythical land of "caught up".  Yay!

Here's a slide show of my 2013 pages, including close-ups.  If you can't see it, click here to view my entire 2013 Project Life gallery.

Project Life 2013: Space Needle Wedding Letterpress Style

I finished this layout last night and it was hard. Nothing was coming together the way I wanted, my handwriting was terrible, and I messed up some journaling cards that I loved. Sigh. That's the way of creativity, right?

I've learned that if something is bothering me on a layout (or any creative project) that time won't fix it. That thing will *always* bother me, every time I see it. So now I know to listen to my intuition and fix it. Maybe that means I have to completely re-do something, but it also means the end result will be pleasing to me.

So last night when I was working on it, I struggled. I was anxious to get it done before bed so I could blog about it today. But I wasn't in a state of "flow". Every pocket was hard-won. But I'm fairly happy with the results.

I used the lovely letterpress invitation from Allison's baby shower as inspiration for the color scheme, then gathered up matching journaling cards from Studio Calico, the new Me and My Big Ideas line from Michael's (love those things!), and the new striped vellum paper I got at Daiso, the awesome Japanese dollar store we have downtown.  I've also been making a more conscious effort to use my stamps rather than just collecting them.

These pages cover our Big Outing to ride the Seattle Monorail and go up to the observation deck on the Space Needle, our friends M & T's wedding, and multiple trips to local parks thanks to our stunning weather.

I made some progress in figuring out my printing issues from Adobe Lightroom - I set Lightroom to manage the color instead of the printer, and now the photos are brighter and more true to what I see on-screen.  I still need to tweak the settings, but am much happier with the results now. (Click for larger images.)

Apr 22 - May 5: Wedding, Space Needle, Parks

Apr 22 - May 5: Babies & Penguins

Here's a slide show of my 2013 pages, including close-ups.  If you can't see it, click here to view my entire 2013 Project Life gallery.

Project Life 2013: Big Outings and Pink Kits

I got my mojo back and finally felt like working on Project Life.  The nice thing about doing a layout every 2 weeks is that it allows me a little time and space to NOT work on it, without that nagging feeling of "getting behind". I'm not sure there's anything I hate more than guilt induced by crafty stuff that's supposed to be FUN.

I didn't have a strong color scheme or materials in mind for this layout, so I thought I'd let my April Citrus Twist kit guide me.  There was a lot of bright pink in it, and even though it didn't exactly match the colors in the photos I took, I charged ahead anyway.

Am I the only scrapbooker who doesn't care about matching photo colors to paper? I just think it makes it less fun that way.  Given how often T's jackets appear in photos, I'd always be using the same colors, and I'd get ridiculously bored.

We had some Big, scrapbook-worthy stuff in these couple of weeks.  I gathered up the kids and we went to the Tulip Festival, BabyM had her first solid food (avocado!), and we went to the Olympic Sculpture Park in downtown Seattle.  (Click for larger images.)

April 8-21: Tulip Festival, first solid food for BabyM

April 8-21: Sculpture Park, Starbucks demographics, Uwajimaya

April Project Life Studio Calico Calendar close-up

I keep my PL pages pretty flat and free of bulky embellishments so I can fit all the year's pages in one 3 ring binder. But when I finished this spread, I thought it looked *too* flat. Fortunately, there were some cute embellishments in the Citrus Twist kit to fix this problem - four little circle "gems" with patterns and bright pink floss. I like how they added just a bit of dimension and shine to the page.

My handy-dandy Tiny Attacher stapler is awesome for keeping the floss in place.  I still love those tiny staples.  I'm also in love with the crazy triangle stamp from a recent Studio Calico kit. I'm looking for excuses to use it everywhere.  It's especially cool stamped in metallic ink.

I'm still having challenges printing my photos from Lightroom so they're nice and bright.  I found a video from Scott Kelby that may help, so I'll hopefully get that sorted out before the next spread.

Here's a slide show of my 2013 pages, including close-ups.  If you can't see it, click here to view my entire 2013 Project Life gallery.

Project Life 2013: A Riot of Color

I don't usually comment on current events, but if you and/or yours were in Boston today, hope everyone is safe.

This Project Life layout was a bit uninspired. I was excited to have time and space to work on it, but couldn't settle on a color scheme. I was underwhelmed by the Kelly Purkey kit I bought for Project Life, and also not that thrilled with the April Studio Calico kit. Not a good month for new supplies, I guess. 

I knew I wanted to use the yellow "Springtime" card since we've finally had some decent weather! So I built the color scheme around it, which is not my favorite, but at least it's bright and fun. I used cards from the April SC kit, my new Jade Project Life kit, and the new Me and My Big Ideas line at Michael's, along with some of that fabulous American Crafts glitter tape.

I also used a lot of sequins, and after some experimentation, found that Scotch 2-way scrapbooking glue is the best for adhering individual ones, because it has a nice small tip on the bottle.

This isn't one of my favorite layouts - it just ended up being a bit too eclectic and not cohesive enough.  But with 52+ pages in the year, I can't expect to love all of them. Imperfection is acceptable, and what's important to me is that I have photos I love and wrote down the highlights of our weeks.

(Click each photo to see a bigger version.)

Mar 25 - Apr 7: Favorite restaurant, friends, activities ;)

Mar 25 - Apr 7: Food & sleep!

Glitter tape, sequins and SC kit cards, oh my!

One really cool thing I learned this week was how to use Lightroom to simplify my photo selection and printing process.  I used their 'Smart Collections' feature to filter on the date range for this spread, which quickly gave me the set of photos from which to choose.  I then used a color label to mark the ones I wanted to print, which made it easy to review my selections and swap things in/out.

I then used Lightroom itself to print (instead of the Canon EZ Print app), and taught myself how to save templates to get multiple photos on a page. Now I've got a few standard templates for my PL photos, which will really streamline the process for me. The only thing I haven't figured out is how to fix the fact that my photos print much darker from Lightroom than from the Canon app.  I'm sure it's some horribly complex issue about screen brightness and ICC color profiles, neither of which I care to understand in great depth.  I'll be searching online for a quick and easy solution.

And in good news, I've commandeered BabyM's bedroom to be my temporary craft room until we figure out a solution for the leak. Since she sleeps in our room and will until she's no longer eating at night, we've been using her room for miscellaneous storage and the occasional guest. I'm so excited to have a dedicated space again.

Here's a slide show of my 2013 pages, including close-ups.  If you can't see it, click here to view my entire 2013 Project Life gallery.

Tuesday Lovin': Adobe Lightroom

Starting Project Life in 2012 changed my photography process significantly:

• I took many more photos, deliberately, because I knew I needed stuff for the album
• I went through those photos EVERY WEEK, because I need to print them
• I used my phone camera a lot more, because it's handy. So I needed to coordinate two sources of photos - phone and the "big" camera.

Prior to Sept 2009, I only took photos at special occasions and on trips when I remembered to bring the camera. When T was born, I was excited to capture her rapid changes, so I ramped up, even remembering to get a photo of her on most days of her first year. 

In 2010 and 2011, I just dumped all those photos onto our hard drive. I went through some of them to make photo books for the grandparents, but still have loads of unprocessed photos from those years.

2012 and Project Life made me realize that my current process or "workflow" as fancy photographers call it, was really cumbersome. It worked, but it was a PAIN:

1. Dump photos from phone and camera into a folder called "import"

2. Sort those photos manually into folders based on subject matter - crafts, family/date, house, etc

3. Using the painfully slow Windows Photo Viewer, go through and delete unusable shots

4. Open the remaining photos in a photo editor like Photoscape or Adobe Photoshop Elements and go through each one to make edits: crop, adjust exposure/white balance, apply filters and actions as desired.

5. Save copies of the photos to their "final homes" on our server.

6. Upload those photos to our Smugmug site.

After several months of this, I was ready for a change.  Someone suggested that Adobe Lightroom might help. I was skeptical that another expensive software package was going to HELP matters, but bit the bullet during the Black Friday sale on Amazon.

I'm not a "click it and see what happens" kind of person, so I did a lot of reading online and watched some videos on the Adobe site to learn the software before using it.  (More on those resources in another post.)

At first it seemed overly complicated. But then I realized I don't need to use *all* the features of the software and I can grow into it over time. 

A few editing sessions later I fell in love, because it made my biweekly photo sorting process *much* easier and faster:

1. Dump photos from phone and DSLR memory card into monthly folder via Lightroom .(Settings saved so all I need to do is choose a different folder each month)

2. Quickly review imported photos and mark the rejects. One click deletes the rejects forever.

3. Crop and edit photos, still in Lightroom. Easily do more extensive editing in external programs, without leaving Lightroom.

4. With just a few clicks, save the final JPGs to our monthly/category folders *and* send to Smugmug *and* Facebook as desired, all at once.

Lightroom is really fast at displaying photos and moving to the next one. There are lots of options for flagging and marking images as you go through them, but I just mark the ones I'm not keeping because there's a beautiful menu option called "Delete Rejected Photos". 

It also can process multiple jobs at once, as in my Step 4 above - I can start all of those items and still work in Lightroom while those are being completed. Much faster than uploading at each site, or manually copying files to the hard drive.

The one thing I needed to get used to is that Lightroom doesn't actually edit the original files. It's a nondestructive editor, so it just saves those edits separately from the photos. If you want an edited version, you have to "export" a JPG file with those edits. But this way I don't shoot myself in the foot by irreversibly editing a file beyond repair. 

Lightroom is also superfantastic at cataloging large numbers of photos.  We have 16000+ and growing, and I haven't yet tackled the aspect of sorting through and categorizing all of them, but I know that Lightroom will be able to handle it, as many professional photographers use it for their hundreds of thousands of photos.

I'm making my way through Scott Kelby's excellent Lightroom 4 book (slowly).  I love that I can pick and choose what features I need, and slowly get better at processing photos and storing them in a way that makes sense for us.

So if you're serious about taking pictures and keeping them organized, even if you never intend to do it professionally, I highly recommend using Adobe Lightroom. You can get by without it, but it makes life so much easier.

I love, love, love it. (And no one is paying me to write this. Though if you buy something on Amazon after clicking through my links, I may get a few cents to spend on chai.)

Project Life 2013: It Ain't Easy Being Green

I am inspired by color. On the too-rare occasions when I get a pedicure, I always have a strong feeling for what color I want, and it's all over the board. It depends on my mood and the season.

This also happens when I'm making beaded jewelry - I nearly always have an idea for color combinations first, and then I search through my bead stash to make it happen. This is why I sort my beads by color. I also sort all my paper scraps and embellishments by color for the same reason.

For my last Project Life layout, I took inspiration from a few bright green and white cards I got in the Studio Calico Project Life grab bags I bought a few weeks ago. It was perfect for the 2 week period encompassing St. Patrick's Day, even though we didn't really celebrate it. TJ and I tried to remember what we did that day, and all we came up with was "we wore green" and "we ate out somewhere". Sometimes I'm not so good at documenting these things.

What I also love about this layout is that I mixed super-old and new products. The "THIS WEEK", "LUCKY", "this is my beautiful life", speech bubbles, and "FAVORITE" cards and the white letter stickers are from recent Studio Calico Project Life kits. But the photorealistic grass paper, which matches the color scheme perfectly, is ancient in scrapbook years - mid 2000s? So are the kelly green number stickers on the calendar and hello card, and the vinyl bracket border on the week card.

Mar 11-24: Mostly @ home, daily routine stuff

Mar 11-24: Daddy Day at preschool, dinner with friends, deep thoughts

The calendar thingy.

I'm still working at our kitchen table, since the hole in my craft room ceiling is still open, which means I've got limited embellishments to use - some sequins, wood veneers, Thickers, miscellaneous stickers and die cuts. The upside is that my layouts are coming together faster without the decision paralysis of having a whole roomful of stuff from which to choose.

Here's a slide show of my 2013 pages, including close-ups.  If you can't see it, click here to view my entire 2013 Project Life gallery.

Project Life 2013: There's a Hole in My Craft Room

My craft room has a giant hole in the ceiling.  There's a leak and we need to figure out how/if we can fix it. Fortunately the water never came into the room itself, but it was collecting over the ceiling, making a lovely bulge that looked like impending disaster.  So we moved *all* of my stuff out of the room, and are working on figuring out where the water is coming from.

So for the next couple of weeks my craftiness will invade our kitchen. I put together this biweekly Project Life layout with very limited supplies. Since my printer is now in the garage, I had the photos printed at Bartells Drugs, a local chain. They offer a matte finish, which is very cool, but the photo has a tendency to "rub off" when it gets scraped by something. I learned that the hard way when using one of my old crappy paper trimmers.

As usual I had more photos than I could use, so the crafty bits are limited. I used one of the Seafoam Project Life kit cards for the week summary, and then noticed that the Echo Park Photo Freedom ampersand and 'you are my sunshine' cards matched really nicely, too, and that got me set on an aqua and yellow theme. And that gave me a fantastic excuse to go crazy with the super cute KI Memories 'smile' washi tape I got in one of my Studio Calico kits.

Feb 25 - Mar 10: Redmond outing and dance class

Feb 25 - Mar 10: New glasses, coloring eggs, sisters

Calendar closeup - tiny bling

I filled my supercute IKEA Raskog 3-shelf cart with my essential Project Life supplies so I can continue to work on my pages while my craft room is being fixed.

I've found a formula that works for me to keep the layouts looking cohesive:

• One type of alphabet stickers
• 1 or 2 washi tapes, glitter tape or ribbon (coordinating)
• Use same journaling pen for entire layout
• Adhesive gems, enamel dots, brads, *or* wood veneer (choose one)
• 1-2 patterned papers only (coordinating)
• Month card with days marked off
• Week card with dates and bullet point summary
• Stick to color scheme for *all* embellishments

This 2 week period also contained TJ's birthday but I didn't get any good photos of our birthday dinner at Zeek's Pizza, or him opening his presents.  (Sad!). 

Here's a slide show of my 2013 pages, including close-ups.  If you can't see it, click here to view my entire 2013 Project Life gallery.