Scrapbooking Crisis: It's Official

I'm officially having a Scrapbooking Crisis. No, it is not that I no longer find it meaningful or satisfying, it is not that I've run out of creative juices, it's just that my boys are not willing to get into photos for me anymore. The whole of January they were refusing to get into pictures and I only have their birthday photos and the rest of the photos were shot whilst they were unawares or caught by surprise! Sigh.. I guess they are just at that teenage phase, or they feel awkward in front of the camera, or most likely they are having Scrapbook-Mom-Burnout!! Hehe!

So what's a scrapbook mom to do? Besides getting smarter and more ingenious at capturing the boys without them knowing, lol, as we started 2013, I have been also wanting to include more than just photos of what happens everyday. So my focus this year: to capture what is on our minds, our thoughts, our prayers. I'm further inspired by Ronnie (find her at Pink Ronnie) 's post on tips on taking pictures for Project Life. If you haven't, you must go check her blog out, or start with this post. This is what she says in her point #4: Don’t let your photographs always be dictated by the subject matter (ie. people, food and objects). Instead, try to focus on capturing a ‘moment’ once in a while. Totally! New focus: capture the moment, the mood, the atmosphere, the feeling, the interaction, what is on our minds, our thoughts, our prayers, all that which makes up the complete story of our everyday lives.

January 365 digital pages
Firstly I rounded up January with my usual two half-monthly layouts. These are daily photos captured 95% on my iphone. I'm departing from last year's staple background of graph papers, but still keeping it simple and very quickly done.

January marks the beginning of the school year for dh and the boys so it is a hectic change indeed, everyone gets into school mode, we start our days very early (up at 6am) and school days and homework fill most days. It is hard to escape from the same photos for 365, but that's our life and it should reflect in our pages.

The main other thing occupying our days is working on our renovations, and shopping for furniture. I think we have too much a set idea in our heads so it is really hard to find that dining table or bedroom set we have in mind. It's a fun adventure nevertheless, though dh and I joke that wherever we are now, we can only notice the flooring, the table tops, texture, grains, lines and so on.., lol. We are novice at this but do love design of any sort. It's been quite an education! We are renting now so there will also be another move really soon, hopefully early March. So more hectic days in Feb!!

January Project Life
For my PL pages, as intended, there is more focus on capturing thoughts and prayers and more journaling. On this page  I included is DH and my Word for the year (following Ali Edwards' One Little Word) as well as more journaling by DH and on the new school year.

You can read more about our journaling on our word here: My word is Less. I am more determined not to let this year's word slip out of my view so I will be dwelling more on it and how it is taking shape in my posts. Accountability really helps!

And Dh's word is Accept

This page captures their current craze: Ryan's is Dungeons & Dragons, and Jared's is Adobe CS 6 of which he uses Illustrator (he takes a half year class on this at school this year). Then some anecdotes hand-journalled on Becky Higgins' journaling cards from the Cobalt kit. And I do love these series of shots of them sharing a few moments.

This is how the double page looks like. I stuck to the orange and black/grey theme picked up from the series of photos for R & J. I like color themes. 

On this next page I added collages of photos related to furniture hunting and home improvements. I simply layered the photos haphazardly and crop off the edges. And the other half are part of the boys' birthday spread. I used up one and half of the PL pages, to include photos, Birthday prayers and journaling. 

 The Birthday prayer is a tradition we started a while back. You can see prior year's prayers here and here and here and here. This year I wrote Ryan's prayer and dh wrote Jared's prayer. 

 

And on the last page for Jan is the rest of their birthday spread. Yes, they are fourteen and sixteen (gasp!) and their birthdays are 3 days apart so we always celebrate together.

This is how the double page look. I really like it!

Beijing Album
Finally I have started on my Beijing album! We visited Beijing on a dream trip in December 2011, so I'm one year late on my travel albums, but fantastically up to date on my everyday Project life album. Good enough for me! I've reverted to my usual double page spreads, so you will find these in the store for the next few months at least :)
First layout is of the budget Red Lantern House lodging we stayed in, which are housed in re-furbished courtyard houses of Old Beijing, we loved it. Except that it is not very well insulated, and we the tropical Singaporeans completely froze in the winter cold. They gave us extra portable heaters and it was a good thing we got more used to the cold after a few days :)

The very next day we landed in Tian An Men square and were quite awed by the square, though due to over -expectations from dh's descriptions and the biting cold which caused us to be all hooded up and to have 'tunnel-vision' we missed the grandeur quite a bit, lol. Later we will visit again and appreciate it so much more! I'm getting excited over the coming Beijing pages :)

And finally this is a layout I made for my in-laws family celebration to welcome in the New Year. Happy 2013! It is our Christmas cum NY's party so  i used a christmas ornament theme.

You can download this Christmas themed template HERE. Thank you for dropping by and love to hear from you