First Haircut and First Double Pager

I have been saving some of the last papers from the Field Guide kit to create my first double page layout. I saved some Basic Grey paper for the background and hoped that I would come across something worthy of two pages.

As part of the Cover to Cover class Shimelle Laine offers, I made a short list of layouts that I felt were missing from this year's album. One of the important events was Scarlett getting her first haircut. She was just a month shy of turning two when she had her first haircut and I was definitely more nervous about it than she was!

I spent a lot of time positioning the green strip of paper just so on the second page so everything lined up only to completely cover it with photos and other paper!

All the papers are from the SC kit. The embellishments on this page include a Sasha Farina flair, Amy Tangerine sticker and a MME border sticker. The Thickers are an SC exclusive from the So Cal kit.

 The same lines are represented on this second page. The right hand photo was taken on the runway they have in the salon for the children to show off their new looks. 

I am glad I had a go at a double pager and especially glad that I have recorded this event in my album as well as in Project Life. I think I may challenge myself again to this format if I have an event with more than a couple of photos. It has also officially meant the end of the Field Guide kit! I am so excited to get stuck into So Cal for the rest of the week.

Right, the kitchen calls. I have a pile of veges that need turning into ratatouille and sadly they won't chop themselves up! Enjoy your Wednesday!

Style Analysis

I have just completed an exercise as part of my Cover to Cover class trying to determine what I mostly do with my layouts. The challenge was to look at the last five layouts I completed and analyse the style, products used and determine what the components are of the pages I love.

These are four of the five layouts I analysed. The fifth one I have not actually photographed yet I just realised!

• My love of patterned paper is pretty evident. With the exception of the Me @ 38 layout all contain a mixture of patterns and the pattern on the Me layout drove the whole design.
• I use a single photo almost exclusively. All five layouts I analysed were single photo efforts and increasingly I am using Instagram shots. I went through my entire 2012 album and found only two layouts containing more than one photo.
• I love bright colours and generally warmer colours too. I lack confidence in combining colours so the Studio Calico kits have been an absolute godsend in that someone else with a far better eye puts the colours together.
• I used Thickers for every title of the five analysed pages with the addition of other letter stickers for the majority.
• All my journalling is hand written and I am increasingly using printed journalling cards. There is one layout with no journalling and one with hidden journalling among the five.
• I always leave either the top left or top right corner of the layout empty.
• My layouts are very flat.

I am surprised at how little cardstock I have used lately and how much more confident I am becoming at mixing various patterns. Overall I was pretty pleased with all these layouts. Often it is the photos I love rather than the layouts themselves though ... perhaps I should just be sticking them in a photo album!

I found this exercise really beneficial and will try it on a second album soon to see if my style has evolved at all.

Have you ever analysed your pages in this fashion? Did you discover something unexpected about your style?

Cover to Cover - the Album Conundrum

Have I mentioned how much I am enjoying the Cover to Cover class I am taking at the moment? It is really making me think about the hows and whys of my scrapbooking and the best way to share our family stories. I have been reading and watching all the prompts but struggled to act on more than a couple last week. I set aside some time today (thank you Pre School and Slow Cooker for making that possible) and am up to Prompt Five which is looking at how to divide my albums.

I am not a chronological scrapbooker in terms of the order in which I work on projects but I certainly am leaning towards two chronological albums to cover our family year. The first will be my Project Life album and the second will be a 12 x 12 layout album exploring some of those events in more depth. I love Project Life and I intend to keep it going as long as possible but I do find that I tend to gloss over some of the stories from a busy week as a result of space constraints. The additional 12 x 12 layout album will allow me to address that challenge and keeping things in chronological order really does make sense with these two albums. 

In addition I am looking at two or possibly three travel albums. The first will be a Japan album. We go to Japan every year and I think it makes sense to keep all those photos together. Obviously there will be aspects recorded in Project Life of these trips but the major recording will take place in a separate album from now on. A second travel album will be a New Zealand album. We get home leave every other year and we tend to have extended visits of up to a month when we are there so again it makes sense to keep our New Zealand experiences separate. The third album will be of our other travel. Short hops to Indonesia and Malaysia and week long trips to Phuket do not require their own album but I do like keeping our travel adventures somewhat separate from our real everyday life.

I am in two minds about a separate Scarlett album beyond a first year album. We do everything together as a family with the exception of what she gets up to at Montessori so I think a separate album might be a little redundant. I might revisit this if we have another child but at this stage I think I am happy to have her life included as part of our family life - she will be the one inheriting the albums after all! I also need to do a wedding album as that is long overdue and my beautiful photos deserve more of a home than my hard drive.

I have been pulling things out of albums and reorganising the contents of my albums a little (so glad I only have two and not thirty to think about!). I like the new feeling of possibility this exercise has given me. It has also given me more focus on what  storiesI want to tell with my layouts. 

How do you organise your albums? Has Project Life changed anything for you? Would this process be overwhelming to you or a welcome fresh start?

I cannot recommend this class enough and no one is asking me to say that. Please check out Shimelle's website here if you think this class might be your thing as I am sure you will really start to examine the way you organise your albums.

I really don't want to have a picture free post so I will add in a layout I whipped up last night. It is a pretty minimalist piece but I am very happy about how it turned out. The model loves it too.

Mish Mash

Welcome to a new week. I hope all the Mum's out there had a lovely Mother's Day. I find it hard now that Mum is no longer around even though she really did not like the whole idea of Mother's Day and we never really celebrated it. It is probably just all those photos on Facebook of family togetherness. We spent a really nice weekend together even though we ended up staying home instead of heading to Malaysia.

The highlight of the four days we spent together for Miss Scarlett was the purchasing of a new scooter. She is in love with the freedom and the speed. I am not so in love with the speed in combination with her total lack of steering ability but we are both working through it. In New Zealand children always wear helmets when on bikes of any kind but it is a pretty rare sight here in Singapore. Fortunately, Scarlett loves her Ladybird helmet and will not get on her scooter without it! Long may that attitude prevail.

Although I think physically Scarlett and I have almost nothing in common, temperament wise we are pretty similar. This is not a good thing as I am stubborn and occasionally a bit moody. I love the next photo of Scarlett telling Daddy off for taking her picture without asking her first. He won't be doing that again in a hurry. It gives a very good indication of Miss Bossy Boots in action!

I have started making the small steps back to being a short haired woman. I always had short hair until I grew it out to get married and Tet liked it long and so it stayed that way. I have been finding my long hair a real pain as I have been walking more and constantly washing hair down to the middle of my back was getting really tedious. I have cut a good few inches off the last three hair cuts and this time it is really noticeably shorter. I can no longer tie it back! One more cut and it will be officially short. I really like it though!

I am loving the Cover to Cover class with Shimelle Laine but am getting a bit overwhelmed with how to sort my albums. I am printing out all six lessons so far as I type and I am going to approach the whole exercise in a much more systematic way. I hope to share a little more of my process with you as the week progresses.

Sorry this is a bit of a mish mash post but it suits my Monday brain - it tends to get a little all over the place! I have not done a single piece of scrapbooking this past week so I am yearning to get back into it. Fingers crossed Monkey is going to have a decent nap this afternoon. I have a load of photos from this past weekend so I want to get some printed and some memories recorded.

Have a great week!

Cover to Cover Has Started

I am super excited that Shimelle Laine's new course Cover to Cover started yesterday. I have been looking forward to it for the last couple of weeks.

I opened my first email this morning and we have homework! The course is designed to help find a way to make your scrapbooks really tell your story. This means looking at the way they are organised, how the flow works within each volume and ways to make them really reflect the author. Exciting stuff!

Our first task is to describe our system. Mine is pretty basic. My day to day scrapping is covered by Project Life. I am about two thirds of the way through my first album. Obviously it is chronological and contains both the boring day to day minutiae and the big events such as trips and birthdays. It is the album I feel is most complete and I am happiest with. I also have one full album of all my 12 x 12 layouts ( I have only been scrapping for about 18 months so I don't have a huge quantity of layouts - maybe 40). The layouts are placed in here in order of completion so they are all over the show in terms of subject, time of event etc. I also have another empty album waiting for me to start transferring some layouts into as I decide how I am going to sort my Layouts in future. At this point I am leaning towards annual chronological albums of layouts I have completed along with a wedding album, baby's first year album for my daughter and a holiday album to keep all our vacation pictures in one place. I have three Amy Tangerine camera albums on order at the moment too to help sort things further. I just use AC 3 ring albums. There is currently no flow or story within my non PL album and this is certainly something I need to work on.

Shimelle's idea of a chronological album for each year with additional major events albums makes a lot of sense to me. I have added the trips album in, as living in Singapore there are very few months that we don't go somewhere in the region and I think it is nice to keep those photos together. I love Shimelle's idea of including one layout from these events in the bigger album and then referencing the larger collection.

The final thing we need to do is include a photo of our current system. I think I will have a serious case of inferiority complex seeing all the large collections of albums but I know that will be me one day and I know that after this class I will be getting there in a much more organised fashion!

Please excuse the less than fantastic photo - with toes intruding at the bottom and odd lighting. Monkey is napping and I am a bit restricted where I can be while she sleeps! I just found two finished layouts sitting loose in the front of my album too tut tut! I have also included a couple of completed mini albums  - my December Daily and my Learn Something Every Day from last year.

Anyhoo, I am thrilled to be making a start and I have some ideas just percolating away at the back of my mind which I am hoping will become more focused as the class moves on.

If you are interested in signing up head to Shimelles's site. I think the class should be a cracker!