November's 30 Days of Thankful

I have decided to participate in a project that Cathy Zielske is doing on her blog, 30 Days of Thankful. Since my One Little Word this year is Grateful, this is a good way to keep that topic in the forefront as I go through November.

I'm creating the pages digitally, printing them on matte photo paper and then handwriting the journaling.

I'm not using Cathy's predesigned pages, but I'm copying them as closely as I can, with different papers. The kit I'm using is from The Digi Files, Warmth of a Family kit by Amber Shaw, part of the November supplies if you are a Digi Files member. This is the first time I've used any of Amber's designs, and these papers were just what I was looking for.

Cathy was the first scrapbook designer whose style I absolutely loved, and it remains a favorite still. I'm not a fussy details person in general, so clean and graphic works great for me. Except when I'm the artsy, messy person! Clean and Simple is still my scrapbooking default, and it makes putting an album like this together a piece of cake.

I didn't get prepared for this project until today other than buying an American Crafts 6x6 Modern Album, but it was a pretty simple matter to create my templates for each page, pick a couple of topics and photos, and get caught up. The work on this will likely be done in batches when I have the time, but Cathy provides a free PDF for the project to make notes of the topic you want to journal each day and what photo you want for that page.

I love the 6x6 size - I need to do more projects this size. The only downside is the ink I'm going to have to buy to keep my printer humming along!

Here's day 1 & 2:

The cover of my album is a work in progress right now. Since it's an American Crafts Modern album, I'm playing with inking, painting and who-knows-what-else on the cover. A photo may show up here when I'm done.

Patti

Music underlies language acquisition, theorists propose

Interesting article on music and language:

Music underlies language acquisition, theorists propose

Pumpkin Patch

I'm enjoying having an assistant photographer. My daughter has a nice camera, and she shares plenty of photos with me when they do something interesting. It greatly expands my photo options for scrapbook layouts.

This past weekend they went to the pumpkin patch. They had a great time picking pumpkins, both for carving and decorating.

And I got a big batch of nice photographs of my lovely grandchildren.

Morning Sunrise

Patti

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Journal prompt link

I found this on Pinterest (thanks to Katie Nelson), and I think it's a good resource for journaling:

This is Me Challenge

I don't have a lack of pages about me, thanks to Cathy Zielske's Me The Abridged Version class, and numerous other challenges/projects. But I do think this is a good way to jot down little details about my life that might (or might not) be of interest to others some day.

I plan on doing this in my junk journal, in a not-too-committed way. I started junk journaling due to the Got Glue? class at Creative Passion Classes. I've decided it's a great spot to play. Paint, ink, stamps, oil pastels, water colors, anything goes, along with journaling and small ephemera from my life. It's where I plan on sticking odd bits of my life that I don't really want to make a scrapbook page for.

I'm using a small Moleskine book for my junk journal, but when it's full, I'm definitely going bigger. I think buying small was my way of keeping it manageable to start out with, since I was not convinced this project would stick with me. Thanks, Trish, for the push to get this going. Since I scrap almost entirely digitally, I'm really enjoying having my paints and inks out and making a mess in a very free way, with no expectations about the end result.

I might post some of them here as well, at least once in awhile.

Dysautonomia Awareness

Since I happen to be one of the many who have dysautonomia, I thought it worth a few minutes to post this (graphic thanks to a fellow sufferer).

What on earth is dysautonomia? It's an autonomic nervous system gone awry. Which is not a good thing. Your autonomic nervous system controls all kinds of automatic functions, like heartbeat, blood pressure, sweating. As you can see in the graphic, there are a variety of maladies all under the Dysautonomia umbrella.

I don't even know for sure which variety I am. I do know that I have a dramatic drop in blood pressure when I move from lying down to sitting or sitting to standing. I become completely exhausted from short shopping trips, and I suffer from exercise intolerance, which basically means I don't recover normally from exercise - something seemingly easy and brief and sometimes leave me recovering on the couch for days. And yet exercise is important. It leaves us in a "damned if you do and damned if you don't" conundrum.

Many people who have dysautonomia faint. I'm lucky in that I've never fainted. I get "grey outs" instead of "black outs" - it effects my vision, and I know what's happening, so I compensate by sitting back down, or dropping into a crouch.

There is medication that helps the low blood pressure, at least for some people. It works fairly well for me, for which I am grateful. Sometimes when a younger person has dysautonomia, it is a temporary thing, but for many it is a condition they have to learn to live with the rest of their lives. There is no cure, and it can cause very serious consequences or only mild ones. The causes are myriad, so patients often spend a lot of time and money trying to figure it all out.

If you want to learn more, this site is a good resource: http://www.dinet.org

Patti

Playing

I've been playing all afternoon with an assignment from the Color Confidence class at Renee Pearson's great online classroom.

Our assignments have largely been related to various ways to pick color palettes. The teacher, Cilenia Curtis  is a digital designer and artist. An assignment for this week, the last in the class, was to create a color palette using various combinations on the color wheel, and then to create some artsy papers using brushes, overlays, textures, and blend modes. 

I started off picking a hue of blue that I wanted to work with, and went from there. The photo shows my color wheel picks, and some of the papers I created using these colors. I went with the tints because I generally like my background papers to be just that - in the background. The papers are not repeats of one another with just a color change - I took the time to change brush layers and blend modes, etc. so there would be a variety in more than just the color.

I highly recommend the class when it comes around again. 

Trish, they're in Dropbox if you want them.

Patti