Scrap process for PL

I thought I'd show you some photos of the process when I made my personal Project Life for April. I want to apologise for the bad quality of the pictures, took them with my phone.

I start by choosing papers I like. I prefer when they are light and quite neutral, here I put some ledger papers over darker cardstock. When I do this I have a sketch on where the different stories will go, but as you will see, they do not always end up where I first intended.

I had three photos for this page (I don't feel the need to have photos of all my stories, epcially since I love the look of the written word) and placed them where I wanted them.

Now I have started to put some more things down, the month pocket is almost done and I have chosen a journaling card for the dotted paper.

Here I have done the book pocket and after I was done I realised that there were two round red journaling stickers right next to each other and I didn't want that so I moved the books down, but then I had to move the dotted paper and I didn't want to just swich places for then I would end up with three pockets with red in a row... And the dotted paper pocket holds the journaling to the baking photo so I wanted to have them side by side. Sigh... Oh the trouble of designing! You should now too that I can't move around the papers any way I want since I have cut down the pocket page both at the top and at the bottom to fit my American Crafts modern album. The pocket is swedish standard A4 which is slightly taller than 11".

And here's the finished page. I really have to use my utter most self dicipline not to over embellish the pockets, since it is so much fun, but I like the end result much better if I contain myself. If there is too much going on in all the pockets it just looks messy, so I will have to save the great embellishing for my ordirnary layouts.

Talking about ordirary layouts I have to say that doing Project life has changed the way I do my other scrapbooking. I used to do a lot of "we did this"-layouts and they were often quite simple, but now those stories end up in my PL and that leaves me the oppertunaty to do more layouts about feelings and connections instead and this pages tend to be more embellished and that is FUN.

Hope you enjoyed seing my process. Bye!

Project life: Monica march

I have had my personal PL done for more than a week, I just haven´t gotten around to take any photos of it before.

This month I used a buisness card holder, but I had to trim it down at the top and the bottom, since it was to tall for my 8 1/2"x11" AC album. I really took an effort to not overdo it, not too much colour and things, and yet I think that it just became too much when I put it all together. But it´s ok. What I can take with me is to only use really light backgrounds.

Every week I write a post in swedish about how far spring has come. We´re some swedish gardenblogger who do this ever week, to help each other keep the spirits up!
It´s 30 yrs since I became a mother!
And the last Twilight saga movie came out on DVD. It´s good but I didn´t mourn the end like I did when the Harry Potter series ended.

The Host FINALLY came to the cinemas and I. HAD. THE. FLU!! How sad was that?! I still haven´t seen it thanks to my coughing...

My subscription of Creating Keepsakes ended and I decided not to renew it. It really isn´t that good anymore and since I got my iphone I have all the best inspiration with me all the time. So when my cellphone company let me choose between upgrading to an iphone5 or get a tablet computer, it was just perfect, now I don´t even have to sacrifice the size!

My youngest daughter is really inspired by my PL and wants to do her own, that is so much fun!! This is really addictive! I have a lot of thoughts on the matter, but they will have to wait.

Have a wonderful day and enjoy springtime!

Project life: Monica

I have so much fun doing my personal project life, but looking back I can't help but wondering why I always end up using so much colour when all the pages I most like is the ones with much light and neutral colours. Is it just out of habbit or what?!

Here's my page for February.

I started with the two photos, one of a sunny day, taking the photo with the sun hidden behind a tree and the other one taken an early morning with no extra light, showing that the light really was coming back, since it was no longer completly dark when I got up at 6am. Both of the photos had very little colour with blue as the only colour besides black and white and I wanted to emphesise the blue and found this old Daisy day paper that matched perfectly. I could have used white for the other pockets but wanted a little more colour... So I ended up with these brown papers from an old 6x6 paperpad from K&Co which match so well. I have a lot of the (also very old) tags that I used for the bottom right pocket, in different styles, and thought about using them everywhere and it looked nice, but was kind of too unified, if you know what I mean.

So I had to think a little bit more and look deeper in my stash and I'm quite pleased with the result. I brought in a splash of green here and there which brought the layout to life, I think. I have to point out the fact that it is different kinds of greens, which is a big thing for me, I have a tendencee to be too riged, I need to losen up a bit and I'm working on that!

You know how you always have this picture in your head of how you want it to be and you hardly ever manage to make it that way? Well, besides from that, I'm quite pleased, but next time I will make it lighter, I promise!

A new toy and Project life: Monica

Last week I was going through the mall doors minding my own buissnes when a salesman from a phone company approched me asking what company I used and as I looked at their stand I saw that is was the company we use for our cellphones, so I told him. Then he asked me how long I had been a customer there and said he might have something for me since I had  been with them for more than a year. So he checked, and gave me the choice beween upgrading my iphone 4 to a 5 or get a tablet computer. Not bad. I chose the latter. I'm not a big fan of sitting by a computer and since getting my iphone I kind of only sits there to work with my photos and write my blogpost.

So now I'm sitting here in my comphy chair with this amazing thing in my lap writing and I'm one happy gal. I believe and hope that this will help me get more blogpost done.

I have another new thing to tell you too. I was pondering my project life and realised I really wanted to make that for myself too. Unlike many other scrapbookers I have never had any problems scrapping myself (quite the oppasite, actually!), so I guess this was unavoidable!!

Like with my family project life, I will be doing this monthly and I have done January and are working on Febuary. And it is so much fun!!

Here's my page for January. I posted a photo of it on instagram (my name there is emia23) but I have jazzed it up a bit since then.

 
The screenshot from new years eve is my introduction of the year, I didn't care about doing a separate page for that since welcoming the new year is a part of January. The lovely background photo of the sunflower on my sceen, and the photo of the Christmas tree kind of set the tone for the page. I had to make something that bound those photos together, since they have absolutly nothing in common exept for some green. So green and a touch of yellow and red made the trick, I think.

All these pages holds a veriaty of both new and realy old things and I like that. By the way, if anyone wonders, the tree holds the fact that as happy I am about welcoming Christmas in December, as happy I am about saying goodbye to it in January!

I don't know if this is a memory thing or not, but I have much more things written down for Febuary than January and even more for this month. Not that it's sure that everything I write down will absolutly surely make it's way to the actual page in the end.

Here 's a sneak from February.

 February´s page was quite a journey at the beginning, but I´ll share that when it´s all done.

Tomorrow it´s  time for a new post about signs of spring, though it´s still winter... Sigh.

Have a nice Saturday night!

Project life February

Since I made only one page of PL for January, I kind of only had one left for February and I had hardly taken any photos, so that is what happend. This is so much fun and I really want to do more each month, so I have to get better at taking photos and documenting what happens so I don´t forget. Anyway, here is my page for Febuary.

Birthdays, a happy girl, a friendly card and cut outs from an envelop and a note, is some of the things this month. I was really pleased with how the sum up page ended up with the circle stamp with the stamped numbers inside. Here´s a few close ups.

To have room for everything I paired the month with some writing, I like that look. This was about my own and my mother-in-law´s birthdays, that are only three days apart. Here I used one of the home made cards I showed in an earlier post.

My happy girl. She had waited for this activity forever and finally the day was here, on my birthady actually.

About me deciding that this was the time for me to go on a diet and start taking daily walks to help it along and get a little fit. Used my very old footprint punch to make the footprints.

Can´t wait ´till next time!

By the way, if someone wonders about yesterday´s post, it is a swedish photo challenge to follow spring slowly winning over winter in our country. A lot of swedish bloggers is doing this every Sunday from now on.

Have a happy week, all!

Project life: Title page and January

I have a lot of these divided page protectors that hold six 4x6 photos, so I will do my Project life with them this year. I really like Becky Higgin´s Style A pockets but that will have to wait. Using this six pocket pps makes for a little different style, kind of more freedom and that is nice too.

Since last year didn´t turn out to be all that I had thought it would be and things we did didn´t really match what I had put on the title page for 2012 I decided to just go with our family, you really can´t be sure what will happen during a year, can you?

So here´s the title page:

This is mostly about just the five of us who lives in this house, but since I had this photo of me and the children, including Josef and Adam, from Christmas I decided to use that and then put a seperate photo of Arnold (and the sticker with the paper reading man was perfect!) and also include one photo each of Sarah and Linda with their babies (those photos will have to represent their families, it´s impossible to include them all here!!)

I used three journaling cards from Simple Stories and the one with the house was perfect for holding "home" and our home is very important to us, not the house itself but the "home thing", being together, the love aso. I found a use for one of the typewriting ladies from October Afternoon´s 9 to 5 line, which, of course, represents me doing this documentation. The other card has "our family" and all those names that means family: mom, dad, sister...to uncle and grandchild.

January:

Two pockets on Elinor and her dresses. She went to a youth conference on the 2nd and she had made one dress herself, for the ball, which is amazing since she doesn´t sew! It turned out great, you can do very nice things from a sheet and a curtain... Finally I found a great place for the old "sew cute" die cut, since she is such a cute girl.

The dress for the fancy-dress dance was made by her sister Sarah who was delighted to having an excuse for making such a dress again. You can read her own blogpost about the making of it here, if you like. It is of course Bo Peep from Toystory. And Elinor won the price for the best costume. No surprise there!!

I´m not a fan of pink but I just had to have it here, since Elinor loves it and both the dresses was pink...

Other stories are about Adam buying us a new TV! Now that´s a loving son!! And about Elias making his first cooked dinner ever. And some other curch stuff too.

I love doing this! Hope you like it too.