A few cards

Not in chronological order of production, but here are a few cards:

(For a colleague who has just had a baby girl)

(For a colleague who is getting married)

(For two girls who suggested wording for a t-shirt print some friends and I wanted to do - we promised a little RAK package for the person whose suggestion was chosen and did a raffle among the other participants)

(For a friend, just because she sent me a nice card instead of simply writing an e-mail - the card base is 6 x 12 inches and folds in three so that there was a lot of room to write)

Reflections

When I am sick I tend to reflect on things, most recently on kindness. I do believe in kindness and two people I had considered friends for many years made me doubt a lot of things last year, including kindness. To this date I have no idea what I could have done wrong and why they have treated my the way they did.

It hurt to bump into one of them the other day when I left a shop. She looked at me like a rabbit in the headlights when I came out, smiled at her and said hello. She nodded a little bit and rushed into the shop.

I still believe in kindness. But I have come to the conclusion that I sometimes need to be kind to myself.first.

Thank you, S. and especially F., for comforting me the other day.

Treasure hunt

At CAR I admired Barbara Haane's albums and saw how great old typewriter font can look on layouts and Project Life cards. Knowing that my parents have three old typewriters I went treasure hunting in their basement. 

Typewriters 1 and 2 look nice and vintage but were heavy monsters, one without ribbon and the other with a non-functional one. Plus I had no clue who to change ribbons in these, nor any idea where I could get new ones from.

Typewriter number 3 not only came with its sturdy original case but also with a functional ribbon. It is admittedly very old and you can barely read what is written, but I might even like the look. So here's my new old friend Monica:

This typewriter is also a part of our family history. My dad learned to type on this machine and my mum wrote countless test papers for her students on it - sometimes as blueprints when photocopying was not common yet. I remember being fascinated by this typewriter and happily typed random letters on it, using up the "good" paper against my mum's request to use scrap paper.

Then I found an office supply store which still sells brand new ribbons for this typewriter. The ribbon arrived today and I was concerned that I might have damaged the mechanism that lifts the ribbon when you type. The first lines on the paper are actually only coloured by the leftover ink on the types. Luckily I then discovered that the colour setting (see the small lever on the right of the machine above the shift key) was on white (= correction), which means that the ribbon would not lift. Moving the lever up then produced acceptable results.

I should probably clean the types, but I actually like the smudged look.

OCPD - or how Monkish am I?

My colleague claimed this morning that I have OCPD tendencies. At work I would rather say that I keep my desk tidy, but I quite agree in some other ways:

- I always keep my Project Life cards in their original order and use the top one first if I have the same card multiple times. Even when I store the cards cut from 12x12 sheets they remain in the same order as on the full sheet - "A" side up of course. Cards with horizontal alignment must have the bottom facing to the right of vertical cards.
- My kits are always stored in date order.
- Distress Ink pads are always put back in their proper place in the stack.

Outside the scrapbooking world:

- A roll of toilet paper must have the loose end coming down at the front. If someone visiting me starts a new roll and lets the loose end fall down at the back I change it the other way round.
- My towels are always stacked in the same order - neutrals from dark to light on the right sight of the shelf and colourful ones stacked from blue to yellow to red.
- Clothes - all tops on clothes hangers are sorted by sleeve length from left to right (tank top to full sleeve) and within these sections by colour (light to dark).

So yes, B, you totally have a point and in fact this will probably result in a scrapbook layout. As so far I have not freaked people around me out completely I am quite ok with my quirks.

CAR 2014 - Crop am Rhein - Part 1

From 4 to 6 April I attended a scrapbooking event called "Crop am Rhein", organised by Barbara Haane and her team. If you do not know what the Rhein is, voilà:

Workshops started on Friday afternoon with a mini album presented by Conny. Mine is not completed yet, so there is nothing to show yet.

By the way, this was my crop companion:

I love this cart, and it fit all tools and things I had taken for the weekend.

On Saturday there were two workshops hosted by Olga Heldwein (mixed media project) and Paige Taylor-Evans (two layouts). Here's what I made in Olga's workshop:

One of the layouts I made in Paige's workshop is too personal to share, but here's the second one:

Some shops were there and offered Make & Takes. I made this tag at Stamping Fairies:

Some cards later at the crop evening:

As sleep is totally overrated we stayed up until almost three in the morning. (Luckily I had the following Monday off to recover from the weekend.)

On Sunday there were two further workshops, a mini album presented by Dani Peuss and four layouts in pocket page protectors by Barbara. I haven't finished these projects yet, so more to come later.

The weekend can be summed in one word: FANTASTIC - great fun, a nice bunch of people and lots of creativity.

A little break from art journaling

It has been quiet here for a few weeks again, so before I get caught up on current stuff here's a little recap of the last few weeks. Currently I am taking a little break from art journaling and scrapbook more.

While working on Project Life I have come to the conclusion that most of my layouts and especially the Project Life pages are too personal to share, or there are too many parts I'd have to hide, so most of them will remain in their albums and won't appear here. The good news is that with the not strictly weekly approach it has been easy to stay caught up. In fact I am a bit disappointed when I have completed a page and need to wait for some days to have passed and new photo prints to arrive.

The Project Life box is well filled now. In fact I probably have enough cards for at least a year. The ever increasing amount of nice kits does not help and I have cut back on shoe shopping already.

The other resolution is also progressing well - I have created and used some more clustered embellishments and donated most of my punched butterflies along with other scrapbooking supplies at a recent scrapbooking event - more on that later. Here are new embellishments:

Some cards:

A mini album made at a workshop:

There is an accordion album inside, again with pictures too personal to share.

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 :-)

Winter decoration

I went to a tools/gardening/animal supplies/flowers/decorations shop with my parents last Saturday. My firm intention NOT to buy any Christmas stuff vanished when I  saw a Christmas tree with donkeys instead of ornaments. Too cute to be left there. Then I got the star light string and the bird (which will nest in my door wreath soon) and voilà:

A friend of mine insists that this is not a donkey but rather a crossbreed between a donkey and a rabbit, thus a "ronkey", or "Hesel" in German. I think I will call it "Peng". We saw an extremely furry guinea pig in the shop which looked like it had just exploded with a loud "peng". My cats would not approve of a guinea pig, so the ronkey it is, and yes, he will be called "Peng". Probably not funny for non-German speakers, but does he look like he cares?

Christmas is coming

Here are some of the Christmas cards I have made so far this year. They were mostly commissioned by friends or are to be sold on a charity Christmas market:

Supplies:

Cardstock, various patterned papers, dies and punches, stamps, watercolour pencils, Ranger Distress Stickles, Distress Ink and Archival Ink, Prima flowers, baker's twine, stickers

Story

Supplies:
Dylusions spray inks, Ranger Distress Ink, acrylic ink, stencil, stamps, Molotow marker