Guest CT with Just Jaimee!

I am beyond thrilled to be guesting with Just Jaimee this month! I’ve been a huge fan of hers for a long time, and working with her products over the last year has really taken my style into a more artsy direction. Some of my very favorite pages have been made with er products.

Here are a few of my pages from her newest Storyteller collection, Quinn.

I thought I’d try 8.5×11 on for size with this one. I like playing around with different sizes in my albums. It’s for the “scrap a bad photo” challenge at the Lilypad. I probably won’t come anywhere near close to finishing MOC this year, but it’s been fun getting inspired by some of them.

Another MOC page. This one was inspired by a mood board, specifically the phrase I used as my title. It looks pretty chaotic, but I just love it.

Journaling reads- I fell in love with New Orleans long before I ever went there. It started in high school when I read The Witching Hour by Anne Rice. I was mesmerized by her descriptions of the city, especially the Garden District.

Fast forward nearly twenty years, and I was making my second trip to New Orleans with my husband. I wish I could go back in time and tell my seventeen year old self that one day she’d go to that city, and it would be just as magical as in the books. That she’d be with someone she loves who she hadn’t met yet. and that would be magical too. November 2014

Switching gears a bit-

I’ve been thinking long and hard about how I want to document 2015. Listening to the advice Megan gives in her Pocket Your Year class, I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting. I’ve tried 6×8, the PL app, planner pages, pre-designed Quick Pages, and pocket page templates I designed myself.

While I’ve enjoyed the process of exploring new ideas, I keep coming back to this- right now, I enjoy making traditional LO’s more than pocket page style. I do absolutely love scrapping with pocket page templates, but only for certain kinds of LO’s. I don’t want to do the same old 2 page pocket style page per week system. I love the results, but I hate the process of putting them together. (I think I mostly just hate making two page LO’s in general)

So last week I came across this post by Yin and I absolutely fell in love seeing her year all laid out like that. But what I found even more interesting was how she used different kinds of pages to document her year. I wondered if something similar would work for me. So I nabbed her freebie template and got to work.

I really like the result, and I’ll definitely be using her newest set of templates in my album this year. (At least until June. We all know that I go completely off the rails in the summertime!)

It has been amazing working with Jaimee and her team the past two weeks. They are so supportive of each other and so incredibly talented!

*I am a Creative Team Member. This means that I receive free products in exchange for making and advertising layouts for designers. However, the opinions expressed here are my own. The enthusiasm expressed here is definitely my own. See more of my CT layouts here.

Big Honkin’ Layout Share, featuring 2005, wedding, Christmas, travel, and an old school Project Life page

I have been scrapping my booty off lately! Here are a few of my latest pages.

First up are the new releases from the GingerScraps designers.

I think this might be one of my favorites, ever. As I mentioned last week, I’m working on scrapping some of my 2005 memories. One of the biggest themes of that year was all the traveling back and forth that Jason and I did to see each other. The honeymoon collection could not have been more perfect to scrap that! The map paper, oh I love it so much. I’ve been trying to come up with fresh ideas for photo-less pages, and the Word Paths were a great jumping off point in my design. I’m really proud of this page.

Journaling reads- Being in a long distance relationship involved a lot of travel for both of us. After that first visit, we tried to get together once every month or so. He would fly to Nashville or I would fly to West Palm. Those visits were one of the lifelines of our relationship. We measured time by how long it was until we would see each other next. So many of our conversations centered around planning the logistics of our visits, where we would stay, what we would do together. Thinking back, I remember it was hard, but it was all so worth it to see each other.

Credits:
Honeymoon Collection Bundle by JB Studio and Meagan’s Creations 
Word Paths {You & Me} by Little Rad Trio

I’m working my way through wedding photos this year too. I’m so glad that I didn’t scrap all of them when I first started. I like that my wedding pages reflect the evolution of my style, and aren’t stuck back in my 2010 style. I have hundreds of photos, so I figure I’ll scrap a few each year, and I’ll be finished sometime around 2075-sh.

Credits:
Skip A Beat by Luv Ewe Designs

Tracie, from Clever Monkey Graphics released a couple of Christmas kits this week, so y’all know I snatched those up! You can’t have too many Christmas kits, right?

The first one documents our doughnut obsession.

Journaling reads- Let’s not talk about the amount of Christmas doughnuts we ingested this year…. Dec. 2014

Credits:
Holiday Cookie Exchange by Clever Monkey Graphics

And the next one shows off some more photos from Four Freedoms Park, where we stopped on our way to Louisiana. I’ve already done a few pages about it, but I wanted to do one that showed how they had it decorated.

Credits:
Merry and Bright by Clever Monkey Graphics
Day By Day by Dagi’s Temp-tations

Last year, I took the Catch Up with Project Life class at BPC, where I made several pages for my 2011 Project Life album. (Which I just realize I never shared here) I’m coming close to finishing, and I’m pretty excited!

That year I made a single page spread for each week. So I knew Dagi’s new templates would be great to use for my next unfinished week. In a stroke of scrapping serendipity, the colors in Blue Heart Scrap’s newest kit worked out just perfect for that week too.

It was neat looking back at our “old old” apartment. You can just barely see the little Kitty head peeking out from around the stairs.

But I have to say, thank goodness for Rad Lab, because a lot of those pictures were kind of rough. I’m resisting the urge to try and fix the photos in my PL pages from that year before I get them printed. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Credits:
Make Memories by Blue Heart Scraps
Day by Day template by Dagi’s Temp-Tations

I have lots more pages to share this weekend. It has been an amazingly busy scrappy month around here!

*I am a Creative Team Member. This means that I receive free products in exchange for making and advertising layouts for designers. However, the opinions expressed here are my own. The enthusiasm expressed here is definitely my own. See more of my CT layouts here.

Catching Up with Project Life- Challenge One

Earlier this year, I decided to take a hard look at some of my projects and to see what it would take to actually finish some of them. I made a document in Evernote, which I would revisit from time to time. I made Next Action lists, and slowly worked through them. My plan was to finish some of these projects sometime before 2025 or so.

Enter Catch Up with Project Life, a class at BPC.

The first lesson mirrored what I’d already been doing, and gave me added incentive to make more progress. Assessing my gaps took a lot of work. My first couple of years’ worth of PL files were a Hot Mess. That was before I’d settled on a naming structure for my files, plus some of them were in a program that I no longer use (Pixelmator) and my computer couldn’t figure out what to do with them. It took HOURS to straighten out 2011 and 2012, but I did it!

2013 was easier to sort out, but I got pretty discouraged looking at all that I needed to do to make it come together in a cohesive way. (That was the year I did PL three different ways, remember?)

2014 isn’t too bad. I’ve finished the first volume, and I’ve made decent progress on July-September. The summer months are going to be a challenge, but I’ll talk about that in a later post.

The hardest (but most fun) part for me is always the question of what form is my finished project going to take? I have a different plan now that I’ve really assessed the cost of my different options.

2011 will definitely be a blurb or artscow book. I had that intention from the start of 2011, and I think it will work best.

I had originally wanted to print out 2012 as individual LO’s with inserts, like I’ve shown here. The problem with that is, it will be crazy expensive, even though I’ve printed out several weeks already. So that probably will be another blurb book. I’m a little disappointed, but I can’t justify spending nearly $100 to get all those pages printed out when I can get a cheap book for $30.

2013… I just don’t know yet. It makes my stress levels skyrocket, so I’m putting it aside for now.

So that’s where I am right now. My goals for the class are to finish 2011, and continue on with 2014 as usual. I’ll get to everything else eventually. I’m feeling pretty confident. I love that the class is set up as a series of challenges, and the lessons have been fun and informative so far.

Project Life 2014- Weeks 31 through 34

Now we are entering the era of my Project Life pages where I was not taking many photos. I was sad and uninspired. Then I got The Plague. It was all downhill from there. That’s why I wasn’t too worried about falling farther and farther behind. I knew the catching up process would be much faster with less photos, and less to say in general. I combined weeks 33 and 34 into two pages because week 33 wouldn’t have made a whole page.

While I’m much happier now, I still don’t feel like I have my photo mojo back yet. I’m looking forward to Week in the Life next week to give me a little spark. I’m sure I’ll get it back eventually 🙂

*Project Life was invented by Becky Higgins. You can learn more about it here. My Project Life pages can be found here.

Project Life 2014 Summer Stories- May 30 Part Two

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted about our summer in PL. Here is the second part of May 30th.

Some of the pages from North Dakota will have privacy blurs for C’s home, school, etc.

Around Fargo, and our first 3×100 photo of the year.

Check-in at the hotel and yummy dinner.

That first day was a beast to scrap. It was a long day and we took over 200 pictures. It has taken me over two months to finish up the pages for one day, which is a little discouraging. Hopefully the rest of the summer won’t be as challenging! Still very glad that I have Momento to refer back to though. It’s been a huge help.

*Project Life was invented by Becky Higgins. You can learn more about it here. My Project Life pages can be found here.

Project Life 2014- Week 30

*Project Life was invented by Becky Higgins. You can learn more about it here. My Project Life pages can be found here.

Project Life 2014- Week 29

*Project Life was invented by Becky Higgins. You can learn more about it here. My Project Life pages can be found here.

Playing with the Project Life app

I was skeptically optimistic when I heard Becky Higgins was doing an iPhone app. Though I’m a huge fan of Becky and the whole PL system, I think her digital products are overpriced for the digital market. Most of her core kits are $20, and I will never pay that much for a kit, unless it’s for charity.

I was pleasantly surprised at the pricing for the app. You get a few card sets free with the $2.99 app, and you can purchase additional ones for $0.99-1.99. The app comes with several template styles and photo collage templates. You can also purchase more if you’d like. I found the whole pricing structure much more reasonable than her other digital products (although I’m not sure if you’re getting the entire kit when you purchase through the app. I will confirm this when she adds more kits that I own)

I love that you can choose between squared and rounded corners. The cards fit well into the slots for either choice. I love the ease of it all. I did three pages in an afternoon. It was so fast! I love that I can easily scrapbook on the couch while Jason watches football. I like that I’m getting to use kits that I wouldn’t be able to buy at the regular digital price. I super love that when you type onto a journaling card, the text wraps around perfectly so you’re not typing over the embellishments on the card. I can’t even do that in PSE!

A few things that I’d like to see in future updates- An option for drop shadows, either within the app, or an option to export the templates on a transparent background so we can add our own. This might not be a big deal for paper scrappers using the app, but I’ve heard several digiscrappers complain about this. We don’t like flat looking pages. I’d also like to be able to write text on the photo spaces. There are workarounds to this by using other apps to add writing, then importing those into the PL app, but it would be nice to be able to skip this step. The photo editing in the PL app is extremely basic. You definitely want to do that in a different app as well.

How I plan to use the app. I probably won’t use this app for everyday scrapbooking. I love the clean look of my PL pages this year, but I will definitely consider using the app to catch up on previous years. I have a feeling that I’ll use the app a lot on multi photo collage type pages. Pages where I have a ton of photos, but I’m not really inspired to make pages with them so they’ve been sitting on my HD for years types of pages. Travel, scenery, holidays, etc.

Here are the pages I’ve made so far with the app-

This was the first one I made, using the Midnight kit. I just used pictures I had in my camera roll and made a quick little page about what MK has been up to lately. I think I used the photo editing within the app, but I might have used Pic Tap Go.

The other photos on my camera roll were from our recent day in Boca. I used the Kraft kit and one of the Squared Away templates (in-app purchase). The Kraft kit doesn’t have square cards, so they’re a bit wonky looking. But I like it, it looks different.

This is where I started getting really excited about the app. I’ve been wanting to scrap our 2009 trip to California lately. The photos needed a lot of help, so I edited them in RadLab on my computer. I created a “To scrap” folder in Aperture and shared it with my iPad. I was then able to use the edited photos in the PL app. I did all of that, including buying the Travel kit and putting the page together, all in less than 15 minutes. That’s when I figured out exactly how I wanted to use the app and how it would impact my scrapbooking. I was so excited!

I’m also really excited to try scrapbooking on the go. We’ll be going up to New Orleans this fall, so that will be the perfect opportunity to test it out! I can see myself scrapbooking in all sorts of exotic locations. The memory keeping possibilities for our summers alone are endless.

Has anyone else out there tried the app? I’d love to hear about your experiences and see your pages 🙂

These are numbers 6-8 of 25 pages I want to make in September.

Project Life 2014 Summer Stories- May 30

Welcome to the first part of my Project Life Summer Stories! Now that summer is over and life is a bit less hectic, I’m excited to share some of our adventures. It is always incredibly overwhelming to try and document this jam-packed season each year. I’m hoping that by keeping things super simple, I’ll be able to at least hit the highlights.

These three pages are from our trip to go pick up Little Man in May.
The journaling from the first page was taken from notes in my Momento app. I’m glad that I was able to get the details down because even a couple months later, they’re already fuzzy.
I also used captions from Instagram to trigger my memory. 

I’ll be using lots of photo collage templates for these pages. We take thousands of photos during the summer and there’s no way I’ll ever be able to scrap them all. But I do like to cram as many as I can without it looking too cluttered, and collages are great for that.

*Project Life was invented by Becky Higgins. You can learn more about it here. My Project Life pages can be found here.

Project Life 2014- Week 28

I’m skipping ahead to work on more current weeks of my Project Life. I’ll still be working on my summer pages at the same time, hopefully to be shared on Thursdays. I want to stay relatively on top of PL, while taking the time to savor my summer photos at the same time. I won’t be posting them on the blog chronologically, but you can always see what I’ve finished so far on my Project Life 2014 page.

I’ve taken a lot of time the past few weeks thinking about where I want to go with PL for the rest of the year. I have a love/ hate relationship with this planning stage. (Jason would probably tell you it’s all hate because he has to listen to me complain about it all the time) There are things I absolutely loved about the way I did the first volume of 2014- clean, simple, white space, and better photo editing.The photos stood out and I just really really love those pages. I loved that I could spend as much or as little time on a week as I wanted on each week. Some had one page, a couple had six or seven. It felt very freeing to not have to constrain myself to two pages per week.

But I felt like one important thing was missing- words. I mostly stuck to a week in review card, with a few photo captions thrown in. When I compared my older pages with 2014’s, I missed the stories. Little stories like what we were watching on TV or reading. Longer stories from blog posts. I was missing out on words. Then I read this post by Aaron Morris on the Pocket Source blog. The last paragraph really grabbed me. In his PL, he’s attempting to give equal room to photos AND words. Hey, I want to do that too!

I’m going to be adding more words in a few different ways- more captions, more quotes, and more small everyday stories. I want to start adding more current events and blog posts every once in awhile. I’m taking the Hello Story class by Ali Edwards, and I’ll be adding things from that. I love Kristin’s “Currently” cards, so I’ll be adding those sometimes too.

I’ll need extra room for all those extra words. I’m using the PSE actions by Mommyish to make my own templates. They’ll be very similar to Becky’s PL designs, but with squared corners.

I’m in love with Tracey Larsen’s photo templates and will be using those a lot. That will give me more space to write, and give more white space to rest the eyes.  I love how my pages look with her templates.

Now, on to week 28…

This week was four pages. I took a lot of pictures and had lots to say, so I’m ok with that. I was doing a lot of experimenting and trying to get things “just right”. Also, lots of words= lots of opportunities for typos. I’ve already had to fix and re-upload a couple of these pages.

I was loving Fat Mum Slim’s new photo-a-day app this week so a few of the photos used those filters. The rest were edited in RadLab.

More photos, goals for the month, and a quote I found on Pinterest.

Fun stuff going on here- a quote made with the Word Swag app, a Currently card, and one of the downloads from Hello Story.

For the last page, I just copied and pasted text from this post. It was technically written the week before, but I thought it would be more appropriate in this week.

*Project Life was invented by Becky Higgins. You can learn more about it here. My Project Life pages can be found here.