Currently..

We are enjoying the first term break for the year, a one week school holidays. And what a wonderful break as we had just (almost) completed renovations to our home, and starting to settle in! Lots more to do, and will post more pics as we go along, but maybe just this one sneak peak :)

Boys chatting over dinner in our dining cum library area

Project Life for Feb

You probably know I work on Project Life once a month, though I'm gathering the stories and photos through out the month. I scribble on journal cards, and take photos all the time, always upload to my Photo365 app, and sometimes keep short captions in the app too. Then at the end of the month I decide which photos and stories I want, at one go, print them, and have the happiest time assembling them into my PL.

In February, my principal from back when I was in secondary school passed away. We were terribly in awe of her back then, but now that we have teenagers in school ourselves, we realised she made school such a secure and safe place for us to grow and find our unique paths. About six years ago I met her at BSF (Bible Study Fellowship) and was blessed to find her a fellow sister in the Lord and enjoyed great fellowship! She had touched many lives including mine, which I journaled on this 4x6 card, next to picture of fireworks that I snapped on the way home from her funeral wake. Thankful for the blessed Hope of meeting her one day!

In February we were still deep in renovations, so I included a photo of the 4 bathroom basins we were choosing, which one did we get in the end? 

We rarely celebrate Valentines' but did have some chocolates and some moments to share :) 

February is also Chinese New Year, and I love the bottom left photo of my dh's family boisterously digging in to Yu Sheng (a raw fish salad that I really enjoy). Included these two photos of R & J having their own fun  (that only they understand)  - that's everyday life.

Finally I really liked these shots I took or my three 'men' laughing and chatting as we strolled to the subway station. These are the best and most precious moments.

We started watching the Korean "Running Man' series and are hooked! They are our constant companions every evening these few weeks so deserve a place in the PL. And finally the Army movies that we greatly enjoyed recently, which set R & J laughing and thinking hard - they are due to join the Army in 3 and 5 years respectively!!

Jared did this interesting art piece for school - so it gets included in PL.

He had folded it when it came back from school so I did not feel bad fitting it folded into a standard A4 plastic pocket. Also included his write-up that introduces his concept behind the art. I was so impressed by his write up.. The Title was Community. "Spaceships are Community?" I asked. His articulation in the write-up was super. Here are some excerpts:

....my idea is of a fleet of futuristic but realistic ships leaving a ravaged Earth. This post-apocalyptic Earth would have black, charred continents, rivers of lava and seas of magma...This is meant to signify the fact that, even in times of distress, a proper community must remain together to survive. 

Me: When did you learn to write like that? This is superb English and prose!

J: This is the way I always think and talk....(puzzled at the hoo-ha I'm making)

Project 365 Layouts
My photo-a-day for Feb gets captured in these digital layouts. Did you notice in the middle of this layout there is a screenshot taken on my phone of BeckyHiggins' facebook page, where she posted a link to my Hawaii Project Life Post!!! Over the moon! So honored!!

More everyday moments like haircuts, homework, and special moments like the photo of Ryan with his godmother, my dear friend who lives in Beijing and comes back only once a while. Many of these photos will only make sense to us and be precious to us in the future, and I'm so happy they are getting captured now!

Beijing PhotoBook
It's moving slowly, but I press on to capture the amazing trip we had to Beijing in 2011.
We are the museum/art gallery/science centre kind of people, so definitely had to do the National Museum of China - brilliant history from Peking Man to Qing dynasty,

and we chanced upon this temporary exhibition of the Communist Party art in celebration of their 90th anniversay. We love history and we love art, so this was awesome.

And we never miss any city's land planning exhibits, if they have one. We were here on our first day in Beijing, and it gave us wonderful bird's eye view and orientation of this huge city, so cool!

More layout insipiration from other scrapbookers
This very lovely layout is by Riki, I just love the pictures, the tone and mood that she brought out in this layout. You can find more of her layouts on her blog here.

This is by Tamie Wilson. Love her layout with the fun, team shots! You can find more insipiration on her blog here.

And here are more layouts by Thess Holmqvist. She uses lots of photos too and her use of color and embellishments are just perfect. You can find more insipiration on her blog here.

Template to share
Finally, here's a template made from my Beijing Planning Exhibition Hall layout shown above. I'll be so happy if you are able to use it to scrap some of your memories! Thanks for dropping by!

This template is now available as Template Pack 9 in the Store. Thanks for your interest!

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

Blessed 2013!

Blessed New Year! May this year be all you hope it will be. May we love more, laugh more, feel more, smile more, engage more, forgive more, praise more, thank more, make more memories, record them more, notice more, live more!

Here's a verse from Isaiah 43: 18-19 that really touched and spoke to me for the new year:

I'm quite sure this verse is not saying we should forget and not record everyday memories like we scrapbookers eagerly do (smile), but in the Lord we can leave any regrets behind and confidently look forward to where He will lead us, where we will know and experience His purpose and love even more than before. What a promise! May you and yours be richly blessed as we go into 2013.

Project Life 2013 Title Page
I couldn't wait to do up the title page of my Project Life 2013! This is the digital version which I did up in photoshop, to see how everything would match up, before printing them individually as 4x6 photos at our local photo store. I don't do this all the time, but since my title page was all digital and I wan't planning to add any physical embellishment, it made sense to work on it digitally as a whole first.

Project Life Title Page 2013

These were photos from our recent trip, the boys had been very unwillingly to get into photos, so I tried to sneak up on them and take 'self-mode' photos by holding my phone up high and pointing back down at us. They were still trying to avoid it, so we ended up with these fun candid shots. Love them! They make the cut for the title page! This is how they looked like in the album.

Chalk board look is all the rage and I'm crazy about it too. I downloaded a few new chalk fonts to create the top left card. The fonts used here were: Tiza, Schalk, HVD Bodedo. I also really like chalk-hand-lettering-shaded font - all free! You can also download free chalkboard backgrounds here. And even customise any other font or swirls to look like chalk by following this tutorial here.

Scrapbooking 2012 and 2013
I'm so pleased and really enjoyed how I scrapbooked our 2012, I'm continuing into 2013 without changing a thing!

My Process
As everyone has said, there is no right or wrong way, not even a better or worse way, just whatever works for you. Thought I'll just share my process, it might give someone some ideas :)

A) I rely heavily on my iPhone app - Project 365 (there are other similar apps too, I do not use the upload to internet or export or sharing functions, preferring to download the photos to my computer, so I can't testify about the other functionalities) to help me remember to take at least a photo a day on my phone. After a while, it becomes a habit and even if I missed, I fill in with something related and on we go again. It really worked for me! These are the iPhone screenshots of 2012 photos captured in my app. Cool!

B) Then at the end of every month or mid month, I open up photoshop and 'slot' the photos into one of my Half Monthly 12x12 templates, then print them with Persnickety (when they have a sale) and physically slot them into my Project Life album 12x12 pockets. To simplify, I stick to a template of graph/note paper backgrounds and embellish with word arts plus only a few touches. This is how they look printed out

And how they look in the PL album:

Easy!

I get the best of both worlds: digital scrapping which is faster for me and allows me to capture a photo a day painlessly AND get to use my digital stash, PLUS the physical part which has the great touch and feel, gets in my hand-written journaling, and allows adding physical memorabilia.

And best of all, right now my entire 2012 album is completed!!

Here are my 365 pages for November, and 2nd half of Dec (Did not do one for first 1st half of Dec since I had covered that in the physical PL pages I did on our Hawaii trip)

(Credits: Yin template 317E, background paper from Ladybug Hugs by Chelle's Creations, word arts from Bee You by Sabee's Creative World, alpha by Karah Fredricks)

(Credits: Yin template 317B, background paper by CD mukovsky in The Lily Pad Gratitude collab, word art by Gretchen Tripp, wooden words by Gina Cabrera,alpha by Karah Fredricks )

(Credits: Yin template 317F, background paper by Weeds & Wildflowers, elements from Coming Home by JustJaimee, alpha by Karah Fredricks )

All of the above are made using my Half Monthly 12x12 templates, available in the store. If you have been using them, do leave a link in the comments!

C) At the end of each month, I'd look for any photo, story that I want to highlight or record more about, and only print those out for my physical PL along with any physical momentoes, art work, tickets, etc to be included. So sometimes I have a lot, sometimes less, it's all good and so much fun to work on.

Now this is the last page of my 2012 PL. On the top right is a story of the picture (of some korean star probably, I've no idea who that is, lol) I showed to the hairdresser when I brought the boys for a hair cut, of course it had to be adapted to suit school guidelines (no hair touching the ears, eyebrows or collar), and the resultant haircuts, respectively, haha! Also included the boys' notes/prayers from camp (folded and tucked in the pocket) and our thoughts for the much loved Les Miserables! (Used cards from Becky Higgins' Turquoise Kit)

What a year, lovingly cultivated, and lovingly recorded (to quote Becky Higgins and thanks to her inspiration)!

Alternative 365 templates
Alternatively, you might be interested in my P365 templates which I used in 2009 for an entire year to record a photo a day. The format was 2 weeks (14 days) on every double page. This is what they looked like, and the download links are on the right sidebar. That was a fabulous photobook, I must say!

Finally also completed a themed-page for Christmas. We broke tradition and had a Barbeque party for Christmas - yes, it is hot here year round :) I was inspired by those ultra-simple looking wooden christmas trees from Muji.

(credits: Background paper by Michelle Godin, elements by Chunlin Designs)

I'm sharing this template - Download it here, hope you like it for one of your Christmas layouts!

And do sign up for my Newsletter HERE. If you like this template and download it, please leave a comment, love hearing from you, thank you!