and i'm done with week two...

i'm pretty sure i'm just destined to be about 2 weeks behind on this thing, but i'm okay with it, because at least i'm getting my notes and journaling down on paper each day, and that's what i wanted this album to be about. i'm also kind of loving the process of getting a whole bunch of miniature (well, 8x8) layouts done every few days.

cover re-do: my album was already getting a little too thick for binder rings even after having only done 15 layouts so far, so i made the switch over to an american crafts 8x8 modern album. with this album i also don't have to worry about punching holes in my pages. yay for that!

december 8th: the sights of christmas

for this one i had some fun with paper piecing, stamps & embellishments that i don't always reach for.

december 9th: ornaments

i used this prompt to document the first time we're combining christmas ornaments, i never knew there were so many fire truck and hockey ornaments in existence.

december 10th: wrapping paper

i was inspired by those awesome "what's in your bag" blog entires and diptychs for this one.

december 11th: rfd holiday party

apparently it is impossible to get a good picture at the roseland fire department holiday party, not last year and def not this year, so i documented that with this layout.

december 12th: the christmas tree(s)

i liked the idea of scrapping about our big tree, and including our little charlie brown tree so i landed on big tree & little tree, but then when it came down to putting it down in thickers i liked how it kind of sounded like a kids story or comic book, so i decided to go with "the adventures of big tree & little tree"

december 13th: christmas music

@heyjenrenee sent me a couple of mixes a while ago that she added the track listings to by printing screen captures of the playlists in itunes and i loved the idea. for this one i just printed a couple of my winter/christmas playlists from last year to do the layout about.

december 14th: opening gifts

this one was a struggle, but i like how it turned out. the journaling is about how some sort of gift giving shift has happened and i find myself enjoying the giving of gifts way more than the receiving.

hey! i'm doing this thing!

i decided, with some sweet encouragement from sara berry & heidi, to finally jump on the december daily/journal your christmas bandwagon! my original thought was to use two pages from an 8x8 maya road chipboard binder book as my front and back cover, but with just 9 pages done so far i can already tell that it's going to get a little too thick, so i've ordered an 8x8 american crafts modern album. i'm hoping that i'll be able to carefully peel, trim down and transfer this cover onto the new album when it arrives.

day one: manifesto.

my reasons for needing/wanting to finally dive into this album this year.

day two: snow

i took a super cheese ball approach to this one. i made little evidence markers to photograph my mug & hot chocolate with and wrote a formal apology letter for causing our first early snow. thank goodness for that label tulip coffee (turned hot chocolate) ring stamp from forever a go!

day three: roseland's tree lighting

i forwent the prompt on this one and scrapped what we'd done this day. it was special for me because the boy and i went to the event together, instead of my usual meeting him there because he's on duty for the fire department. it was pretty chilly, but fun to see all the kids freak out when santa came!

day four: advent

(i flipped the prompts for days four & five)

i do love my "olive the other reindeer" pop-up advent calendar, but i decided to adapt this day's prompt to get a little crafty therapy down on paper. getting excited about the christmas countdown has been hard this year with the store closing exactly one week before christmas, but this page gave me a chance to get some of those feelings out of my system on paper and think about all the good things that have come from my time at scraptasia.

day five: the perfect christmas

i decided to make this one a real quickie by fine tuning it down to dream holiday decor with some images i had seen fly past in my google reader over the past couple of weeks.

day six: to do list

(i shuffled days six, seven, eight & nine around also)

it was my original intention to list the gifts i still needed to buy up there in that shopping panel at the top left, but the boy is a peeker, so i stuck to generalities. each panel is it's own little section of to do's (shopping, activities & decor) i feel a little on top of this holiday, but there are still a bunch of things to do, even now, on day 15!

day seven: traditions

this is really my first year combining christmases with the boy (last year we had only been dating for a couple of months) and since it's also our first christmas living together it's been really interesting combining our traditions. for this layout i focused on three of my family's traditions that i want to make sure are included in our new, combined version of christmas.

so, that's my first week of december dai;y/journal your christmas, i'm hoping to be totally caught up over the next couple of days, and then i'll be able to post days eight thru fourteen and then make it a weekly thing! i really am enjoying it so far, promise!

i've missed you mod podge!

like the true blue, newly discovered romance nerd i've become i save all my favorite texts, fives lists, and random messages from the boy, and since he's already withstood the crafting curse i decided to make an album dedicated to them. i used an 8.5x11 d-ring from american crafts and mod podged the heck out of it front, back & insides. it's going to be filled with atc's of favorite one liners, 8.5x11's of things we've done & little everyday things with the texts to go along with them, and cool divided protectors i found that i'll use to hold printed screen captures of favorite fives. it's going to be kind of a history/manual of our us-ness, hence the "textsbook" title (y'know, like a textbook!) now that the album is done, i'm excited to work on the guts when i get some more time.

what i've been up to...

* say what? - i've taught this game a couple of times over the past couple of weeks and now that i'm done using it as a class sample i'm pretty stoked to fill it with favorite quotes, tweets, status messages & things overheard. it's 25 plus pages of atc sized pages. favorite patterned papers on the front with stamped kraft paper on the back, so it would be easy-peasy to add even more pages at any time.

* st. pat's game - the st. pat's game was last night and it was everything i hoped it would be, haha. jessica & roger and doug & i decked ourselves out in red, green & white and headed to the prudential center to watch the devils rock their old school jerseys to play the penguins. the devils got the win for a complete series shut out of the penguins and we got to watch crosby eat it. loved the devils get the shut out against last year's stanley cup winners, loved the chants of "crosby sucks" and then "you can't beat us" for the final 3+ minutes of the game, and really loved being there with the boy and j & r on their anniversary!

* designing - i've been working on some more cards just for fun, a layout & a card for something fun that's about to start at the store and some other random layouts for me. but, what i've mostly been doing is a ton of class designing & prep. so many classes coming up at the store and since the product for them all has been rolling in like crazy i've got a whole bunch of plates spinning at once. i'm vending for the store at a crop all day saturday, so i'm hoping i can work on some of all of the above inbetween the obviously forthcoming barrage of customers!

so, not really seeing a friday five happening this week, but i promise i'll get back into my positive 3 a week habits starting next week!

friday five #20

01. "1 week" class - i taught a couple of sessions of my "1 week" clear acrylic mini album this week and am in love with how it turned out. i can't wait to fill it with a weeks worth of photos, lists, receipts, tags, tickets & whatnot asap! now to figure out which week to do. is it cheating if i pick a week i know at least a couple of things are going on? maybe.

02. spoonflower.com - i think i've blogged before about an etsy shop i love, craftyfolk who also is making her designs available as fabric on spoonflower.com. i really could have gone without knowing about this website. the fabric is pretty expensive, but i can see sooooo many awesome home decor items and a really rad quilt or two made with all the amazing fabrics available from various designers on the site. right this second i'm kind of dying over this cassette explosion pattern!

03. alice envy - i am so completely jeallie of all you lucky peeps who have gone to see alice already! i keep hearing it's totally amazing, although i've also heard that the ending is a little abrupt. i've heard it's beyond beautiful though, and i can't wait to see it! sadly, it's a matter of coordinating 4 schedules for the full on imax 3d alice experience.

04. new she & him single - i'm already working on my 2010 spring mix, look for it sometime next week, and part of what set it in motion was the new she & him single, "in the sun" the b side "i can hear music" is also pretty sweet. the new she & him album, volume 2, comes out march 23rd and if this is any indication of what's to come i'm more stoked on it than the first album.

05. a vera bradley bag? - really? do i really like a vera bradley bag? wha? i guess it's true. a customer came in the store last week with the stephanie bag in the "sittin' in a tree" pattern and i haven't been able to stop it from randomly popping into my head since. i think it's the birds & the amy butler feel to it. plus this bag style is not so grandma and i think it might be kind of perfect as an easy-peasy, lightweight spring bag. perhaps?

using the heck out of your 6x6's!

i think i've mentioned before that i teach a series of classes called "maximizing your 6x6 paper pads" using basic grey paper pads, showcasing how to use cute card designs that allow you to easily get multiples of 6-8 card designs from just one paper pad (sometimes the tally of how many you could make is up around 40!). now companies like cosmo cricket & sassafras lass have caught on to the paper pad trend and are making 6x6 pads of minimized versions of their larger papers, cosmo cricket even includes complimentary patterns that aren't available in 12x12.

anyway, while we were in the process of moving the store, i played a bunch with cosmo cricket's "nutmeg" paper pad and made an altered fall tree for the mantle, a coaster mini album, about 6 cards and i still have a bunch of paper left to make even more!

the key is to minimize the card area you need to cover by creating flaps with edge punches, utilizing large stamp images & about a billion other tricks i'm not giving away outside of class. : p

anyway, consider this encouragement to cut into those paper pads, even your favorites! have fun!

friday five #07

01. monsters of folk - i don't know if i can really even explain my monsters of folk experience in terms that will be able to do it any sort of justice, but i'll try. i had heard rumblings of this "super group", but had just put them in my mental to-check-out-list until my friend john off handedly mentioned that he had a spare ticket for their philadelphia show at the academy of music, which i jumped on. these 4 guys, m. ward (solo work, she & him), conor oberst (commander venus, desparacidos, bright eyes and solo work), jim james (my morning jacket and solo work as yim yames) and mike mogis (bright eyes + 5 million other things) have written, performed, produced or appeared on like 70% of the albums i love most in the world and their degree of musicianship is INSANE (and you know i don't use caps!) anyway, the show was definitely one of my favorite performances of all time, if not the favorite. it was obvious that these dudes all really dig each other and thoroughly enjoy writing & playing music together. they performed some of their songs from their album as well as a ton of each others' songs for 2ish+ hours and it was amazing! beyond words.

02. screen printed tour posters - i have written before about my love for a good gig poster, but i just have to revisit it since the past week and a half has yielded two! kristina & i scored the amazing screen printed typewriter tour poster (pictured up there) at the get up kids show last thursday, and then i also scored an amazing one with metallic-y bits at the monsters of folk show monday. i die. now they just need a good framing so they can join the art wall.

03. new york magazine - just go ahead and subscribe now. new york magazine is the perfect length for a weekly reading, an awesome mix of news & entertainment, and it always supplies me with at least one or two interesting stories i want to share. i love it so much that i will even forgive it for this weeks cover story about how there are bands back in brooklyn. duh, nym!

04. chapstick "classic" - any of you who know me in person know that if i can't get my hands on my lip stuff it's all over. in fact john and i had to dash to the locust deli pre-show because i almost started hyperventilating sans-lip moisturizer. anyway, chapstick medicated used to be my go to love, but then they switched it all around when they changed their packaging and so i had to start using burts bees instead. it's good, but it's no chapstick medicated. anyway, on said pre-show dash for lippy stuff i made a wonderful discovery, chapstick "classic" is in fact chapstick medicated!!! rejoice with me.

05. penguin classic hardcovers - i think i have blogged in the past about my desire to read the classics that i somehow skipped in my earlier days. i started with pride & prejudice and am enjoying it so much that i'm slowing my reading down so that it doesn't end. and it's making me wonder what other classics are out there that i would love as much as this one. and now the design/literary world has given me yet another reason to keep reading; penguin hardback classics designed by coralie bickford-smith. gorgeous repeated images, printed and debossed on cloth hardcovers. so yum. my favorites are the picture of dorian gray, madame bovary, great expectations and oliver twist i am putting them on my christmas list, and have already visited them in the book store. you can drool over them all here. how beautiful will they be on their very own set of shelves?!?

in the works...

lately i've been way more inspired to work on mini albums and layouts, rather than just cards, and i think it has everything to do with my recent ruthless clean out of my scrapping area. i think since i've gone through my entire stash somewhat recently i actually have an idea of what i own and finding myself excited about embellishments and papers i forgot i even owned, like those crazy old school junkitz letter stickers! 

since my return from austin i've been wanting to make my album about the trip, but i sometimes have trouble working on a project that i have such high expectations for.  i already knew i wanted to use the chatterbox wood veneer albums as soon as i saw it, and i have all my photos printed with the "color craft bonus picture" frame from big huge labs, but i've been having trouble deciding on just the right collection of papers. 

i always associate color combinations with certain people or different events and with this trip it was all about the modern/salmon-y red, avocado & teal inspired by a row of shops right off south congress street that i fell in love with on my very first day in austin. so, i have finally picked my final collection of papers (from 7 different manufacturers, yay!) and decorated the front cover of my album, now to work on the inside pages, decide between typing or printing my journaling and go on the hunt for some very large d-rings! wish me luck!