My Life & Times

I recently acquired this journal, My LIfe & Times by Sunny Morton. The subtitle is A Guided Jounral for Collecting Your Stories. I've looked at it for awhile but just recently decided that it was time to get it.  This particular version comes as a D-ring binder, accompanied by a CD so that you can print out more pages as you need them. An example might be the pages for listing the places you've lived. If you have moved every few years, you might well have lived in more locations than there is room for. You can print out extra pages to accommodate this.

The binder is very nicely done, and the journal is full of great prompts. There are pages to record the basic facts, such as you mother's basic information, as well as pages for listing their siblings information, what schools she attended, various places she lived, who she was named after, what the house was like she grew up in. For those of us whose mom's are no longer living, there will be questions we don't have answers to. But there are also pages to record that kind of information about ourselves, so our children and grandchildren will be able to read it in our own handwriting. 

This journal is a long-term project - something to keep near at hand and fill in bit by bit as the mood strikes. It's a great place to gather together all the little bits of information about your life that you might not otherwise think of jotting down.

Patti

iPad Scrapping

One thing that is new in my life is scrapping on the iPad. I recently took iScrapIt taught by Renée Pearson. Class is over now, but she will be offering it again, so watch her site or sign up for emails so you don't miss it. If you've got an iPad, and you scrap, you want this class!

 I've been wanting to scrap on my iPad since I first purchased it. I knew there had to be a way to do it, but I didn't have the know how to figure out which program would work. Having almost no experience with creating presentations, I never even thought of using Keynote.

Keynote is a presentation program for Mac OS, and there is a very functional version available for the iPad. It makes creating grid-based layouts on the iPad very easy and quick. Keynote comes with twelve themes, each with their own color palette and photo style, but these can all be switched up and altered with a little know-how. Custom colors aren't possible, but the range of hues and tones is quite large, so it's not really limiting. Hopefully in a future version, Apple will allow custom color palettes.

These layouts are not in a standard size for printing, but they are close to an 8.5 x 11 landscape. One of the things we learned is how to use the layout done on the iPad to make a 12x12 page. Here's an example of the Teton Park layout put on a 12x12 page.

I find Keynote a great way to create an album on the go. I'm considering just getting all my vacation pages printed in an 8.5 x 11 format as a photo book. 

We also learned how to change the file size of our digi supplies to a size that works perfectly on the iPad. This means that, with a little planning, pages can be quite artsy or embellished.

Another discovery I made is that the popular card size many digital creators are making for Project Life are great for using as background in Keynote. They do have to be rotated to landscape, so I look for designs that will rotate well.

Here's a layout I made using Anna Aspnes' Salty Living ArtsyKardz & a bit of lace from the kit:

Needless to say, I'm having a good time with this!

I'm back from my trip, and starting to get settled into home routines. The trip was wonderful from start to finish. The image a photo I took of an old log building that sits in the very small community that my paternal grandparents homesteaded in originally. It's not too far from the farm I grew up on, but I had never been over there. My brother, who lives on our family farm, had never searched out the community either. It appears on Google maps, but it is really just a collection of a few houses, out on the prairie a few miles from a small town in Montana.

It used to be more of a community, with a church built on land donated by my grandmother. There is no sign of where the church was specifically located, so I'm going to have to do some research to find out. There is an old grain elevator still standing, possibly from the 1920's or 30's. Everything else in the neighborhood is much more modern.

I had been hoping to find some remnants of the church building, but I'm happy at least that this old log building still stands and I got the opportunity to take a photo of it.

The Truth Is

Morning skies (II), a photo by Vince Alongi on Flickr.

The truth is, I hate mornings. Which means I hate going to bed. Because that makes the next event (hopefully) morning.

This is not conducive to getting a good night's sleep. Of course, neither is a rib out of place or arthritis pain. Yes, I'm griping! :(

Time to take some Tylenol, hope it does some good, and try to sleep. I wish mornings felt as lovely as this photo, Morning skies (II) by Vince Alongi, found on Flickr Creative Commons.

iScrapit

I have to tell you, I'm über excited about this class! Ever since I got my iPad, I've longed to be able to scrap printable pages on it. Leave it to techie scrapper Renée Pearson to figure out how to do this. Her class, iScrapit starts June 15th. I wish it was starting just a little sooner because I leave on a trip the 22nd! I will have internet access at least part of the time, so I'm hoping to be able to play along for most of it.

I'm really looking forward to learning how to scrap and share more digitally, as well as to print from these pages! I was surprised to see that it uses Keynote, which I recently purchased for my iPad. I've been playing around with it a little and was surprised to see that when exported as a PDF file, it's very high resolution. It is, however, a very different experience from scrapping with PSE.

One of the huge bonuses is this: I generally use my iPhone 4S for photography. That's going to be my camera on my upcoming trip. With PhotoStream, these photos (the last 1000) show up on my iPad and my Mac automatically. Thus they are automatically available to scrap with on my iPad. I'll be able to create pages while on my trip, and even embed them here on my blog. Video can also be included.

We are going to learn how to resize digital supplies for the iPad/iPhone so we can make use of our digital goodies. My only concern there is that my iPad is one of the smaller versions, so I don't have a lot of memory available. I'll have to clear out some iBooks I've read and other unneeded files so there is plenty of room before I'm on the road.

I can't wait to dig into this class and learn more!

31 Things

I'm in the midst of a class at Big Picture Classes called 31 Things taught by Ali Edwards. I always always love Ali's classes. This project is journaling based, with 31 prompts, given out each day over the 31 day period.

I'm doing my project digitally, using the templates Ali has provided with the class. The papers I'm using are from The Digi Files. I read the emails every morning, but often don't have time to actually do the work of writing and checking for or taking a photograph, so I do the work in clusters. Today I did four prompts, getting caught up with all of last week's prompts. I am just needing a few pictures to finish it up. I am not that worried about getting all the layouts done on schedule. My main focus is to get the journaling done so I can finish it up at my leisure, but so far I've done fairly well getting the layouts done as well.

Here's my 1st page:

When I read the first prompt, Jewelry, I didn't think I'd have that much to say, since I'm not a big jewelry person. But once I sat down to write, I found I had more to write that I'd thought. This seems to be the general trend with the prompts so far. 

This class just adds to my conviction that if Ali is teaching a class, I want to take it!

This Week's Project

Given that Trish is moving in a little over a month, she's on a mission to clear out clutter. She's been saving bits and pieces of interesting things, so we spent Monday combining them with card stock and covers to make some mini books. Neither one of us is quite sure what they should be used for, other than that they are not likely to become scrapbooks for photos and they won't be art journals. One idea is an inspiration journal. Another is a place to stick ephemera. Or a book to periodically write down current favorite things. Their future is yet to be determined, but we felt like we had a really productive day. We assembled seven on Monday, in addition to the two we made the week before.

Included in the books: parts of magazine pages, transparencies, envelopes (including everyday mailing envelopes - you know, the security kind with the interesting patterns inside), tags, pages from old planners and date books - you get the general picture. Lots of things that would have been junk have now been repurposed.


Patti