i.Scrap

Well, I did it! I dove in and just signed up for the i.Scrap mini album project with Stacy Julian on Big Picture Classes. Stacy is the co-founder of Big Picture Classes (BPC) and was the editor of Simple Scrapbooks, one of my favorite publications although it is no longer in print. To top it off with a big red cherry, she lives right here in the same town I do! I am so excited! I think it is just what I need to get a little motivated to scrapbook right now. I need to create. I feel a need to create. This will get me off the couch so to say. Plus, it is online so I don't have to leave my snowy driveway except to go to work and pay for said scrapbooking classes and paper addiction.

I love this project album because it is about "I" statements. We have to come up with nine photos and "I" statements to go with those photos. What I like most about the project is that it focuses on me and allows me to tell my own story which I said in an earlier post is so important. No one else can tell people who you are or who you were or if they do, I know they will get it wrong. It also allows me to go through a years worth of photos and figure out which ones I really love. It is almost like scrapbooking my year in one little album. I haven't come up with my photos yet and I haven't gotten my i.Statements figured out, but you better bet that I will be thinking about it all day when I should be doing other things. Bonus: I get to go do a little retail therapy after the loss of my paper in the laundry room flood. I am soooo excited about this project. Did I mention that already?

When Disaster Strikes...

It really started when we had a horrible snowstorm last Thursday. Schools were closed and many offices in town were closed. My university was the only institution of higher education open so I had to go to work although we were delayed an hour and a half. I dug my car and later my Expedition out of a total of three snow drifts in order to get out of my driveway but I made it to work on-time and picked up a Caramel Macchiato at Starbucks on the way. What was drifting snow quickly turned into subzero temperatures.

My washer and dryer are currently located in my Art Studio so it isn't always that warm out there as it is in another building next to our house. It was actually our woodshed that my husband rebuilt for me. The washer often freezes up during very low temperatures if we don't use it regularly so I did three loads of laundry Thursday to try to keep the water from freezing, but by Friday morning we were frozen and all I could do was wait for my husband to thaw it out. Seriously, I could have done it, but it makes a good excuse not to do laundry. Plus I had to work and get my daughter to the mountain. He had been out of town all week and wasn't going to be home until Saturday and our youngest had a commitment to coach for the ski race team on Saturday so we headed to the cabin.

My husband came home Saturday night and early Sunday morning he got to work on the water and some carpet cleaning. He thawed the pipes, started a load of laundry and when back to cleaning. He went back out to change the clothes and found the place flooded with five or so gallons of water. He'd forgotten to put the drain hose back in place.

I came home thinking that I might make some cards. I didn't feel well, but I was in a bit of a crafty mood. He told me that I should probably go out and see what the damage was to my scrapbooking paper before I got too excited. Sure enough, I had been stupid enough to leave some paper out on the floor when my daughter and I were getting ready to go to the cabin. We were going through paper to take some up there. Well, the damage included about half of my paper. I was able to salvage some of it as in many cases it hadn't reached the whole 12 x 12 piece of paper. I took out my trusty giant Fiskars paper cutter from Costco and began cutting the wet pieces away from the dry parts often leaving me with a 12x6 piece of paper. Unfortunately, a lot of my ski and winter paper was a total loss, but I was able to keep some of my Stampin' Up cardstock. Well, lesson learned. Put your stuff away. Isn't that what I tell the kids. Things don't get ruined if you put them away. Had I taken the time to put my paper back in the cabinet, it would still be here and I would have had some time to make cards on Sunday. Crafting will have to wait for another weekend.

Hooray for Other Bloggers!

Hey all! I just want to give a shout-out to a great lady named Liza who I met when I went to a Provocraft Swarm in Salt Lake City last Oct. My sister and I met her and even hung out with her in her room when we hanging out with some of the members of the Cricut Circle of which I'm not, but they let me hang out with them anyway. Liza's blog, Hoo's Crafty is a lot of fun to follow if you like paper crafting. Liza is full of great ideas and crafty projects to share. Take some time to get to know her by reading her blog at http://hooscrafty.blogspot.com
Enjoy!

No time for Crafting

Well, it is ski season at our house which means my week is too full to do much. My daughter used to ski race, but last year at 14, she retired. I thought that was the end of the weekend rush especially when she said, "I gave that team the best nine years of my life." Well, I was wrong because this year she said she wanted to give back and help with the ski team. Now she volunteers as a ski coach for 5-7 year olds. So now every weekend we head to the mountain where she volunteers for the team she "gave the best nine years" of her life? Why does this matter? I still don't have time to craft in the winter. In fact, my week pretty much consists of this: Head to the mountain for the weekend, ski, get home cook, sleep, go to work, come home, cook, correct papers, do my lesson plans, watch TV while doing school work, do laundry or something domestic that allows us to survive, sleep. This goes on Monday through Friday to just go skiing again. Did you notice that cleaning wasn't even on the list. Basically during ski season, we eat and are lucky to have clean clothes. So I basically get my craft fix at night by reading blogs and drooling. It's somewhat like someone who is on a diet who watches The Food Network or reads cookbooks. Which I do when I am dieting. Thank goodness for Google Reader so I can at least organize the blogs I like to read and for my Droid which allows me to read them on the go and for Verizon for letting me read them on the way up to the ski hill.

Why am I telling you all of this? It's because I'm going to highlight some fun projects from other blogs once in a while until I can unbury the building I call my Art Studio, which doubles as my laundry room right now and is covered in ski gear! Watch for some fun things ahead!

Project 12 Questions

As promised, here is a list of the questions I used for my version of "Project 12." If you missed what I'm talking about, check out my previous post. This is so easy anyone can do it and the best part...your journaling is once a month and in the cloud so you can do it from anywhere you have internet including a smartphone! Follow me to see how I complete my project! Only one more month to go!

March ??, 2011
The best thing about today:
My favorite TV show right now:
My favorite song right now:
The last movie I watched:
The last book I finished:
The last blog I read or podcast I listened to:
Major accomplishment:
Something I am looking forward to:
Something I am dreading:

Most fun/exciting thing I have done this month:

Someplace I went/shopped/visited:

The nicest thing that has been done for me lately:
What I ate for dinner last night:
Someone I'm thinking about today:
The last person I spoke to on the phone:
The last person I texted with:
Something new I have learned or tried:
One thing I love about my life right now:

Google Docs for a 12 Months Worth of Journaling Project Made Easy

I am almost at the end of a year of a project I may actually complete since I haven't been very good at the Project 365 thing. It just somehow seems like a lot of pressure to take photos and download them and upload them and then write about them every single day. Then there is the question of what to take do I take a photo of today. I somehow miss some step along the way and it is usually the take the photo part. Seriously, our life isn't very exciting and even the boring photos became redundant. Just how many photos do you want to look at outside my window at work?

As a family historian and scrapbooker, I do feel that it is really important that we tell our own story and chronicle our lives. Frankly, no one else can do it and no one else will try until we are dead and then as we all know, they WILL tell it wrong. So last April, one month after my birthday and several failed attempts at Project 365, I decided to do something I could keep up with instead of something that was fun, but created a lot of pressure for me.

I guess you can call it Project 12. I took a series of questions, typed them into Google Docs and saved them. Then I copied and pasted them 12 times following a month so what I had was April and then the questions and then May and then the same questions and so on. Then around the middle of each month, I would go into the document and answer the questions. I tried to do it close to the 15th of each month, but sometimes I did it around the 20th. I didn't want any pressure. I also knew that I would have at least one photo of myself and/or my life each month because I am always snapping photos, but it always comes in spirts. Again, this was not difficult and I didn't feel pressure to keep up. Now I am almost at the end because today I completed my second to the last entry. Only one more month to go! Yay me! I may actually finish a project! Keep a look out here at my blog or better yet, follow me as I will give you my questions in a later post.