Project Life: March 25 - 31

While going thorough some photos I realized that I hadn't shared my Project Life pages from the last week in March. I won't keep you in suspense any longer. :)

I have a pretty good system down now for completing these pages each week so that they don't take too much time, but are still somewhat interesting.

The first thing I do each week is load my photos onto my computer and move all of the photos that might get used on my page to a "print" folder in iPhoto. I keep my favorites in the folder and delete the rest.

Once I see how many photos I'd like to use that week, I flip through the different page protector styles and see which will work best.

I then print my photos and set them out on top of the page protectors white they dry and I get started with collecting paper for the week.

Next I clean out my purse looking for receipts, menus, ticket stubs or anything else that might have been collected during the week. This process has been great for keeping the clutter in my purse under control!

All of the extra bits are used to fill in the holes where there are not any pictures.

I try to leave a couple of blank spaces for journaling or even just some patterned paper so that they entire page isn't covered in photos.

The last step is working my way across the page designing the photo/paper/journaling for each of the pocket. I make an effort to keep it very simple and not to over think or overdo each section.  I'm afraid that if this project starts taking up too much time, I won't like it much anymore.  So the process needs to be simple and fairly quick each week.

It takes a couple of hours from start to finish, but it is rarely done in one sitting. Sometimes I only have time to do a pocket or two, but I just keep chipping away at it each week.

One fun thing I want to note from this week's pages is the two pockets in the upper right hand page that have screenshots from my phone. This week the five of us in our family all really got into playing Draw Something which is an app of the iPhone (maybe it's available for other devices too?) We have enough devices that each of us has our our account and we like to draw pictures and send them to each other. It's been a fun activity to do together.

Thanks for the visit today. Enjoy your day!

Supplies use on this week's pages:

InLinkz.com

Creation Books with the Silhouette

At church each Sunday I get to teach the class of 3 year olds. I have four energetic kids in my class and we have a good time playing games, coloring and hopefully having them learn a church message mixed in with the fun.

For the past few weeks, we have been talking about different parts of the creation each week. When we started these lessons, I had just receive my Cameo and was really excited to use it as much as possible. So I hatched the idea of cutting images to go with each week's creation lesson that the kids could use to make pages in a creation book.

The books are very simple and I think they are perfect for a three year old. This seemed to be the first time a couple of them had ever used a glue stick. Got to get them started on crafting at a young age, right?

All of the lessons are in our class manual, so I didn't have to come up with lesson material, I just got to teach and have fun with the kids.

The Cameo was perfect for cutting out simple shapes that went with each of our lessons. I did purchase a few of the shapes, but I have a subscription and it comes out to around 27 cents per shape.

Each week I would collect the pages. After a couple of weeks they started asking if they could do their books.

The earth was the only page where we didn't use a Cameo shape because I didn't really like the shape they had in the shop. This clip art image did the job.

Last Sunday we completed the last page of the creation book and I bound all of the pages together with my Bind-It-All after church. I'm excited to deliver the completed books to my class next week. I'm pretty sure I had more fun with this project than they did.

Project Life: April 1 - 7

Another week of Project Life is ready to share. My desk was a mess while putting this together and I just grabbed things out of the piles for this week.  So it is a bit of a hodge podge of product, but its seems to all work together. Once these pages were finished, I did clean up my desk and I'm now ready to make another mess!

This week I took a lot of pictures while our kids colored Easter eggs, so I decided to include an insert to contain more of those pictures. The front of the insert contains one photo that I printed and then cut into 2 X 2 inch squares.

 The back of the insert was perfect for placing some of my favorite photos from the egg coloring. I mixed in a few places with patterned paper and stickers to that it wasn't too busy with photos.

This week I used a lot of little label stickers for some quick journaling on many of the photos. I love that I can just stick a little label on a photo, write a bit and then slip it into the page protector. Quick and simple!

In addition to the label stickers, I also used a slick writer to write directly onto a photo too. It's another simple way to add some journaling without spending a lot of time.

With so many smaller pockets on the left hand side of the page, I went with only 6 bigger pockets on the right side of the layout. This made it easy to fill the space with bigger pictures and less time was spent creating fillers for a lot of pockets.

So there is another week of Project Life!  I'm still enjoying the process, but find that I'm lagging about a week behind. I need to catch up so that I can work on it during the current week. I think that will make it more meaningful to include journaling from that week instead of remembered pieces a couple of weeks later. I could keep a little notebook with thought from each week, but that just seems like a little more than I feel like doing right now.

I love looking at the book as a whole where lots of pieces of us are included in one place, so the project continues!

In addition to paper tape purchased from the office section at Target and these Heidi Swapp Label Stickers, these are the other supplies used this week:

InLinkz.com

Scrapbook Circle Sketch Challenge

This month on the Scrapbook Circle blog we have a great sketch designed by Diana Fisher and I had some time to play along.

The sketch challenge details are over on the Scrapbook Circle blog today. Stop by and check it out if you are interested in playing along.

Here's a look at Diana's sketch:

I decided to use the sketch as a staring point for scrapbooking photos of my kids meeting their new cousin Rose.We were all so excited to get to see Rose for the first time!  She is so sweet and tiny. The kids all loved taking a turn to hold her. Of course, I loved taking a turn to hold her too.

 I haven't used a sketch for quite a while, so it was a fun challenge to stick to some design constraints.

More of those Heidi Swapp Color Magic alphas that I used on a layout earlier this week were used on this page. I'm really loving that alpha!

 Can't wait until the next time we get to see sweet baby Rose!

The layout supplies are pretty basic for this page:

InLinkz.com

Bright Spring Colors

The bright colors of spring are making me happy! I'm really enjoying working with bright colors on my recent layouts.

Today I have a page with some egg hunt photos taken last weekend. Our friends threw a huge egg hunt in their backyard. The kids had a great time searching for eggs and doing a watch balloon toss. Audrey and her friend Eden even won the water balloon toss! (I may have to do a layout on that sometime soon.) We also enjoyed a potluck breakfast before heading out to another Saturday activity with Hannah's choir.

I had three Heidi Swapp frames left from the Daydreamer Kit, so it was perfect for a photo of each of our kids. Although the frame colors would work great for a lot of subjects, they worked out perfectly for these egg hunt photos.

Lots of frames on this page. In addition to the Heidi Swapp frames, I loved using the little frame paper from American Crafts. It was perfect for filling up with bits of journaling and another photo.

We now have so much Easter candy around our house. I'm beginning to think Easter could be worse that Halloween. It's time to start slowing throwing out jellybeans so that we don't eat them all! I'll keep the chocolate though.

Layout supplies // Daydreamer Kit //  Hello There Kit

Coloring Easter Eggs

Last week on Good Friday, we had friends come over to enjoy the day off from school for some playtime and coloring of Easter eggs. The weather was perfect, so we set up a table in the backyard for the egg coloring. We had 12 different egg dyes and 5 dozen eggs. Perfect for six kids to dive in for some messy, creative time.

We added some olive oil to some of the egg dyes and it created a pretty cool tie dyed effect. The main problem with this technique is that the egg shell is oily and it doesn't really wipe off. We are not really big hard boiled egg eaters, so it was more about the fun of dying the eggs rather than how they would look later.

Of course, I needed to document the event with a layout! My favorite thing about this page is the Heidi Swapp color magic letters that I used for the title. They start out plain white and then you can mist them to make them any color.

Since I knew that I wanted a variety of colors of letters, I spread the letter stickers out that were going to be the title on my Bazzill splat mat so that they could be misted. Nothing sticks to the mat, so the alphas were easy to peel up after misting. I didn't want to mist the entire alpha page since I didn't want to color all of the letters.

After spraying the mist, the letters just needed a little blotting with a paper towel and then they were peeled up and stuck to the layout.

Pretty cool stickers! I'm flying through my first pack of alphas and think I may need another one. 

Thanks for stopping by today!

Layout supplies:

InLinkz.com