Distracted...

I admit it.  I got a little distracted after that last blog post...a month ago.  Sorry.  Want to know what's been getting my attention?

Mostly I've been getting things done.  Things like these:

and these:

Yay for getting lots of gifts off to their recipients...and making some space in the closet!

In the middle of all that this showed up in my mailbox:

Yup, as soon as I saw the cover I sat down and read the entire magazine.  Can you blame me?  I really want to make that cover quilt...but maybe a miniature version since this one takes nine yards of fabric just for the yo-yos.  Sigh.

and then these showed up:

After flipping through that top one at least a hundred times I ordered this, and ran to the mailbox every day to see if it had arrived yet:

And yes, I read the whole thing the same evening it arrived.  Can you tell what I'd love to be working on right now?

Oh yeah, and those TWO sunny days we had during this alleged Spring - I spent in the garden:

So far one brave pea has emerged, and has been snowed on twice.  Ugh.  I often have nostalgia for snowy winters...but I just can't say the same for cold, wet springs.  I really hope the sun comes out soon.

In the meantime I'm hunkering down indoors, with a few more distractions:

I promise to be back soon with more on all of this...for now I'm just thankful to have a few quiet minutes on the computer, while this sweet girl is napping.

She's a little under the weather today and daycare's closed since they're sick too, so I came home early.  Best part of my day?  When she asked me to snuggle with her on the couch while watching a movie.  Guessing that won't last too much longer. :)  (Second best part?  When she told me she wanted to go to sleep at the exact time I wanted to put her down for a nap.)

How are you spending your days during this dreary Spring?

Full Weekend

A busy, but good, weekend.  Saturday started with a trip to the quilt shop for the block-of-the-month club.  A quick trip home was followed by a birthday party for our now 3 year-old niece.

The birthday girl, blowing up balloons.

Ada was the only one not dressed as a princess, but she didn't notice.  She also didn't eat any cake.  But she was completely into the flower balloons. :)

After another trip home for a nap, we headed off to birthday party #2.  This one was held at a place full of inflatable slides, jumping arenas, etc.  Ada was completely freaked out by everything at first, but once she got hold of a ball she got into things and ran around in circles, and tumbled, and fell down, and jumped, and had a good time.  And then ate her whole piece of pizza + a piece of cake and wanted more.

And today Chris got some solo time, Ada got some play-time at Grandma and Grandpa's, and I had some girl time, which meant spending the afternoon touring expensive Parade of Homes houses.  And of course I took my camera.

Here's what we saw:

Sigh...love these butterflies.

And this great ceiling in the master suite.

And the tile in the master bath. (+ the walk-in shower)

What I didn't love: The bedrooms were fairly small and there were odd built-in decorative elements throughout the house, like the weird floor-to-ceiling mirror thing in the dining room, that would take a ridiculous amount of work to get rid of if you wanted to redecorate.  And last but not least, the thought of trying to deal with 20' curtains.  Who wants to clean those?

The next house - a bad floorplan + a cramped random bedroom off the side of the upstairs loft that you could only get to by going behind a half wall and down a couple steps.  Two thumbs down.  But I did like the railing here on the stairs.

House #3 - Cute girl and boy rooms connected by a bathroom.  Saw this in a few of the houses.

House #4 - After walking through this one we both said, there's a lot of WALL here.  Another bad floorplan, terrible flow, and huge expanses of wall all over that made the house feel like it was broken up into weird chunks.  The laundry room was tucked in a far corner upstairs, on a different floor and opposite end of the house from the master suite.  The island in the kitchen had 2 chairs on one side.  The range was on the counter behind the chairs, and there was so little space that if someone was sitting at the island it would be impossible to cook at the same time...but, at least you could see the huge flat screen tv in the adjoining living room from anywhere in the kitchen. :)  This house also featured one of the largest lampshades I've ever seen:

Come back tomorrow for part 2 - lots of good stuff in some of the other houses. ;)

PS - I can't resist sharing this last pic, from St. Patrick's Day:

And yes, there is several more inches of hat that got cut off. :)

Waiting for Spring

January Modern Quilt Guild Meeting

Had a GREAT time at our guild meeting last night.

Back at the November meeting we traded scraps in a blind swap to make mug rugs for each other, and last night we gave the completed mug rug back to the fabric owner.

Here's a closer look at the mug rug I made for Kelly with her scraps:

 

And here's a bit about my process.  I had wide both wide and narrow strips of most of the fabrics.  I took the wide strip of the leaf print and cut a chunk off that looked about the right size - literally.  No measuring, no squaring up.

Then I took several of the narrow strips, sewed them together, cut off chunks about 1 1/4 inches wide, again not worrying if things were completely straight because I wanted it to feel a little more organic to go with the leaf print.

After sewing on the border I squared it up, added the batting and backing and worked on the quilting.  The first thing I quilted was Kelly's name in the bottom right-hand corner (this was just free-hand):

Then continued from the "y" at the end of her name to stitch just inside the outer border until I got back to the end of her name.  Then I stitched another line in the outer border.  And last I stitched around the middle vein and outside edges of each leaf.  I used my darning foot for all the quilting, including the "straight" stitching around the border to keep the organic feel.

The binding is a Flutterby print from my stash that just seemed perfect; a light pattern to it, and a nice deep brown to frame the piece and set-off the busy patterns.  The binding was a bit of a bear to stitch; I wanted it fairly narrow, but with it only being a 1/4" on each side it was harder to pull around and do the hand stitching on the back.  Probably not something I'd want to do for a larger piece, but I really like it on this piece and am glad I didn't go wider.

And here are a couple close-ups of the mug rug I received from Alyson.  I love it, and it's now lookin' pretty on my desk at work.  I really like the bits of pattern fabric used in the binding; it adds a little something extra that just kicks it up a notch; love it!

The pattern scraps are Meadowsweet left over from an apron, and some coordinating solid scraps I had on hand from a different project.

And - yes, there's more!  We worked on a fun little project last night and everyone left with something COMPLETED!

We made these cute little wallets using paper and vinyl:

Really easy and fun.

Nichole gave a demonstration and walked us through everything - and pre-cut all our vinyl for us.  All we had to do was pick out a sheet of double-sided scrapbook paper, make a few cuts and start sewing.  Pattern is from Martha Stewart.

Happy crafting!!

(And no, I haven't forgotten I promised that post on my word for this year; my only excuse is that I've been busy actually working on something related to my word.  I'm hoping to be ready for posting on all that in the next few days.)

Project Life + One Little Word

Okay - here's a bit (okay, a lot) more info on the whole Project Life thing.

Project Life is a term coined by Becky Higgins; it describes a concept that started with Project 365, which involved trying to take a photo a day for an entire year.  Scrappers of course turned this into scrapbooking a picture a day, and voila, Project Life was born.  I've made not-very-big efforts at this project the last two years; since I'm really, really bad about printing more than just the pictures I'm scrapping at the moment I haven't stayed caught up on getting pictures into albums.  I do have a whole bunch of them organized in folders on the computer, so at least that will make the printing process a bit less painful, as I do still want to print a bunch of our photos from last year and put them in the 2010 album.

First let's take a look at the album and then I'll talk about my personal plan for it this year.

As I mentioned in my last post, there are 2 printed versions of the kit available (there's also a digital edition that you do entirely on your computer and then have a book printed).  I love a lot of the elements of the turquoise edition, but felt the amber edition fit our pictures and my style a bit more, so went with that one.

The kit comes with everything you need to scrapbook 365 pictures, or one photo a day for the entire year.  But, the nice thing is that you don't have to scrapbook 365 pictures.  It's super flexible, and that's one of the things I love most about it.  The kit is affordable and comes with tons of supplies, AND I can customize it to fit me and my time.  You can scrapbook a calendar year, you can scrapbook your child's first year, you can just do a page or two for each month, have an album of special events throughout the year; lots and lots of options.

Here's a better look at the contents and how I set up my album:

The kit comes with an album, and page protectors that are divided into 4 4x6 photo slots and 4 3x4 journaling slots.  If you're doing a photo a day, a 2-page spread allows you to add 7 photos a week, with a journaling card for each day, one extra 4x6 cardstock card introducing the week, and an extra journaling slot that can be used with an extra photo or journaling that you have for that week, or can hold some other little bit of life such as tickets, movie stubs, etc., or you can just put in a piece of pretty paper.

Here's a look at the first week of my album with the date card up at the top and a couple of journaling cards filled out:

Extra cards are included to create an introduction and closing page; I just used those suggested cards as placeholders for now.  You can customize like crazy here too; lots of people have a family photo or photos of each family member included on their cover page.  I'm planning to customize mine, but wanted to get in the swing of the more daily additions, so am still thinking on how I want to modify the cover page.

Here's a look at my cover page and closing page at this point, with no customization, just played with the layout a bit and put the cards in the slots:

Also included are monthly dividers, Jan. - Dec.:

The kit comes with several versions of the weekly date cards and the journaling cards, along with some decorative cards that can be used for those extra slots or if you don't have any journaling for that day, as well as some folded journaling cards that can hold lots of extra writing for those days that you want to record more.  All those cards come in cute little boxes, but to see them all at a glance and be able to quickly choose the cards I want, I chose to include a few extra page protectors at the end of my album and inserted one of each style of card.  The extras are stored in their boxes near my album.

It took me maybe an hour to set everything up; looking through everything and then putting the page protectors in, adding the monthly dividers in the appropriate spots (I had my calendar next to me and counted the weeks in each month and then flipped that many pages and added another divider), adding the cards to the intro and closing pages, and adding those extra pages at the end with all the individual cards.  Some people do extra set-up and just insert all their week and journaling cards at the beginning, but I'm picky about matching up card styles to my photos so I'm choosing the cards as I go.

My approach is that I'm in no way holding myself accountable to take a photo a day.  But I do naturally take at least one photo most days, so I'm just planning to use the pictures I do take for the album.  In order to help myself remember to get those photos printed, and to do the journaling as well, I'm putting my album out in the open where I'll see it all the time.  It's living on a dresser near our entry way, with the boxes of cards tucked in a drawer beneath.  The dresser also holds the writing utensils, so I'll have pens at the ready to just pull out a card and jot a quick note about our day.

So what about those photos?  I may print some photos at home, but won't be printing most of the photos individually; instead I'm planning to order prints in small batches and pick them up locally.

One last thing I want to mention about the album is the possibility for including more than photos.  As I mentioned earlier, you can use those slots to add bits of mail or memorabilia, but you can also add in additional page protectors - say an 8 1/2 x11 to pop in an enlarged photo, a sheet your child brings home from school, a sample of their artwork, a program from a play, birthday cards, or a letter you write to your spouse or child; maybe you add in a scrapbook page that commemorates a special event from that week.  There's so much opportunity to really make this your album and capture some of those pieces of daily life.

And if you're joining me on this venture and want another way to stay motivated, there's a free Project Life Community you can join at Big Picture Scrapbooking where people will be posting pictures of their albums throughout the year.

Who's in?? :)

PS - I'm hoping to get a post up tomorrow on my word for this year, but it may have to wait for the weekend.

2011

The year started a bit rough with all of us being sick together over the weekend, so I didn't finish my December Daily album yet, but will hopefully be able to share that soon.

I'll also do a more in-depth post on Project Life tomorrow, but for my sewing friends who are interested in the Becky Higgins kits, you can see more about them on her site here.  There on links of the bottom of that page to purchase the 2 versions of the kit, as well as information on a digital version.  There's even a comparison page of the paper vs. digital kit here.  So nice to see all you ladies again!!