Notes on the Journey: December 2011

Monday, December 19, 2011

Monday Love

I have to tell you that I love Mondays. It's a great way to start the "work" week, because what I work on is scrapbooking! It's the day that Trish and I get together to work on various projects. We've gotten much more organized through working together, we've discussed many subjects both deep and trivial, and we've bounced a lot of ideas off one another.

Thanks to this scrap time together, we are more focused on writing our stories, we've clarified what are goals are in scrapping, we've worked on class projects together, we've shared genealogical work we've done.

Today we spent a lot of time going over an upcoming project we are doing together in 2012 - My Lifetime Story, a project that has run on Faith Sisters for the last couple of years. The time wasn't right for us to do it then, but it is in 2012. We've now got a good overview of the project, lists of photos to keep an eye out for and potential stories to write, and a plan for when/how we will do the project.

We've using templates by Ali Edwards from Designer Digitals so our album has a consistent look. We're also planning on using some of Ali's word art brushes to enhance our layouts. We've picked Erica Coombs' Autumnal Collection from Design House Digital for our kit for this year's pages.

How many pages we do for each category is totally flexible since we are planning on putting this into a D-ring album rather than printing a photo book, so we can add pages as we want, even in future years.

We also spent some time figuring out which parts of Ali's One Little Word class at Big Picture Classes we haven't finished yet. We discovered that it really won't take that much work to finish it up, even though I've felt like I've been really slack the last half of this year in doing the projects. I really love this album so far, and we are going to be taking the class again this year and adding to our albums.

Tonight I'm printing some of the missing photos and journaling pages. I plan on having the journaling pages on my clip board, so I can grab it and get the journaling done on the spur of the moment.

Another project we are preparing for is Stacy Julian's Twelve, again at Big Picture. This is another year-long project. We're not even quite sure exactly what this is going to entail, but we've learned through experience that Stacy's classes are always worth getting involved in.

I have lots of catching up planned for my days off this holiday season. I'm getting two books ready to print - This is My Life, from Log Your Memory. I'm printing mine as an 8x8 photo book, so I've got to proofread and turn my PSD files into JPGs for sending to the printer. I also need to finish up my The Monthly (Cathy Zielske), templates available at Designer Digitals. I'm doing this in 8.5 x 11 format and printing it as a photo book, so again, I need to proofread and create JPGs.

Lots to do, but I'm looking forward to filling my vacation with productive scrapbooking!

Yes, I'm ready for the holidays. We are extremely low key when it comes to holidays, so it isn't a stress for me. I have one more gift to buy because we restrict our gift-giving to just the grandkids. The rest of us figure is we need/want something, we buy it for ourselves. It's not about the stuff, it's about love. That we are blessed with in abundance.