It's been a while

Well, a while at least since the last post. In the meantime we celebrated Christmas and the arrival of a brand new year, so I wish all of you a very happy 2014.

Hm, I should have folded one the corners on the sixth. Never mind now - it is the only one of the six I did not send to anyone. Actually I did not send any Christmas cards, although I made around 50. Most of these were commissioned by colleagues or for a charity Christmas market and some went into my card box for next year. Instead of Christmas cards I sent some New Year's cards to a few friends.

For the third time in my life I have taken New Year's resolutions, this time some crafty ones.

1. Use up scraps

When browsing YouTube for ideas on resolution 2 (see below) I came across some great ideas for do-it-yourself embellishments. I raided my envelopes of small and box of even smaller pieces of paper and can announce that the lid fits the box again. Instead there are lots of punched pieces of paper stacked away in various other areas of my craft room waiting to be turned into something like this:

I did not count them, but I have probably punched hundreds of circles and butterflies and quite a few border strips.

If you are insterested in what inspired me I recommend this video - the embellishment creation starts at 2:00:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dD2JQohcvM


2. Start a Project Life album

The divided page protectors have been sitting in my drawer for a long time now. Actually I just wanted to do divided layouts, but since I have not done much traditional scrapbooking in the last four years or so for various reasons they never got used. Well, now they hopefully will.

To kill two birds with one stone or work towards two resolutions with one cut I prepared 4 x 6 and 3 x 4 journaling cards. My page protectors have various designes - the Becky Higgins design A and another set for six horizontal 4 x 6 photos. So all scraps that were large enough were cut into 4 x 6 or 3 x 4 cards to prepare for Project Life. Some are plain cardstock, others are patterned paper, a few more embellished cardstock.

I store these in a cardboard box from Aldi (1.99 EUR/around 2.70 USD), which I embellished slightly. Then I added some dividers to the two drawers in the middle. The labels are attached with non permanent glue dots so that I could easily change them.

The little book on the top holds ideas and notes for Project Life.

The weekly approach will not work for me most months, as either I do not take enough photos or too many at a time. Each month will therefore have as many spreads as required and possible.

Watch this space as of February :-)