trimmingthesails

WIML '12, Monday

 This, alas, is as far as I've got in Ali Edward's Week in the Life; plus a clutch of Tuesday's photos which are still being processed along with notes in my diary. But I am not giving up hope, or giving up on the project, yet!


How is it going for you? And if you're not doing it yourself, do you get weary seeing it around the blogosphere or do you quite enjoy it? Hoping you are creatively thriving as we steamroller through another week!

OK, so you might not ...

... in the fresh energy of January, be contemplating any digital projects for recording daily or weekly life, or marking the unfolding of an aim or goals for this year. You might not even be thinking of doing any projects at all. But if you are, and it might just involve digital or hybrid, then please do help yourself to the layered digital templates below. Because drop shadows operate differently in Photoshop and PSE, do make sure you download the one you need.

Download 8.5and12GridsPhotoshop
Download 8.5and12GridsPSE

Just in case. You never know. And if you're dithering about digital, perhaps feeling a bit apprehensive (and I can remember what that feels like), I might have a little something in a week or so to help you get a foothold ...  :)

Thank-you for all your wonderful, inventive, and witty suggestions for scrapbooking products as part of Wednesday's post: I really enjoyed reading them and am pondering what we ought to do with them all! In the meantime, however glowering the clouds and fleeting the sunshine, up here this weekend we will be trying to get our feet into boots and head for the hills ...

 Warm good wishes to you wherever you are - see you Monday?

Decluttering? Don't!

I thought I had it sorted. Clean, quick digital December Daily pages, printed out in a jiffy, job done - especially with the (truly delightful and welcomed) prospect of masterminding eleven of us here for at least part of the festivities. If Himself hadn't helpfully popped in with a cup of chai, and if I hadn't paused to drink it and idly open the albums I was shifting, it might never have happened. This was the page I saw first ...

... and then I began to look at the lines and the shapes, the punched out holes, the stitching, the inking ...

... and I started to fall in love with hybrid scrapping all over again. Dang! Now what am I going to do?

Spiralling into control ...

Having wrestled with the whole post-bound or D-ring album debate and a dollop of my-goodness-they-weigh-a-ton disquiet, you might remember that I decided back in January to experiment with putting everything into a single home-made spiral bound album this year. To my chagrin, my This is 2011 album has been piling up in loose sheets, and seven months on it is clearly Time To Get A Grip. You might think that an argument against a spiral-bound album is that you can't insert pages later? Well ...

• a recent post by Mary Anne reminded me that, years ago, I bought a file in which the holes of the transparent pockets have a little slit so they can be easily moved on and off the spiral binding. I found it and had a good look.
• after making a row of holes with the Bind-it-All in a piece of card, I snipped from the edge to the centre of each hole.
• with a finger gently pushed the card into place around the spirals: you might think it would fall out or pop out on turning the page, but it is quite secure.

So this weekend, I will be putting it all together: current completed pages, blank pages for the future, and resting content in the knowledge that if I want to insert a page somewhere, it will be possible. Here's how the first spread of a Week In My Life is shaping up:

• journalling cards with dotted lines (never mastered writing in a straight line)
• strips of double-sided tape, using a journalling card as a guide, to make a pocket on the back of the printed photo-sheet
• photo-sheet stuck onto album page, card slipped into the pocket behind the photo, easy to pull out, with hidden journalling
• double page spread in the queue for the spiral-binder

Only another six to go! Have you finished yours yet? Please feel free to leave a link so we can come and visit. :)

Thank-you to a recent visitor, Justasiam, whose interest and nice comments reminded me that access to the archives was not clear. After some steep learning curves and wrestling with html code and CSS style-sheets (refusing to accept Typepad's assertion that the words Archives and Categories could not be styled in a colour to match the other headings), I am pleased to report, a little puffy-eyed. that they now display in the column on the right.

Time to stop going round in circles and get spiralling somewhere instead! Hope your weekend is lovely. :)

WIML (Tuesday 2 August 11)

Phew, it's Friday: high five!

• One of the things I love about journalling, is that I never know what I am going to write. Even as I start, I am quite often unsure as to how a sentence will end. This is what happened below: a very mixed day needed to be condensed but its flavour felt on the tongue ...
  
• I'll be tucking a further story of each day behind the long photos in this Week in My Life mini-project - hoping to show you this very soon.

• Thank-you so much for all your lovely reponses to my last post. Himself was very touched, and a little bemused, by all your good wishes. I don't think it occured to him that he could have a starring role on a blog which he doesn't write.

• We are bunking off this weekend for thirty hours of culture, sculpture and pop-corn. :) Any guesses?

Oops, that's only four! Here's the fifth, then:

• I was wondering: how you do your journalling? Do you slot it into the space left over after the photos are in place? Do you write it first and make everything else fit in around it? Does it ever turn out differently from how you'd envisaged at the start? Hoping you have a lovely weekend ... See you on Monday?

WIML (29 July 11) and Happy Birthday ...

to you!
... the 'you' being Jemma, of Just Jimjams! Exactly a year ago today, Jemma's first post popped into the blogosphere with four short points. Here's what it said (hope you are happy for me to do this, Jemma!), and my thoughts in italics:


To join in the celebrations and a lovely give-away, find the number on the layout above. Hold on to it as you hop along to each of Jimjams' Blogiversary friends, put the numbers in numerical order and then email her with the number which is missing from the sequence. Got it? If you've just joined here, you could pop back to Hilary's lovely Pictures and Paper Bits , or you can hop on forward to Helen's not-at-all-imperfect Craft Imperfect. Happy hopping, and hope you have a lovely day, Jemma!

A Week in My Life (Friday 29 July, 11) ...
... and still managing to keep with up with Ali Edward's project, as I collect photos and notes on alternate days across the fortnight. Here is Friday's page and later this week, I'll add the ones from this Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday.


And a photo ...
... which just needed a very simple page of its own:

WIML Day 1

Still keeping up! As an alternative to taking a week to record and document, then another to put it together, I'm using the fortnight slightly differently, working in pairs of days: collecting photos and making notes on day one, then putting that page together the next. Mine will be Monday, Wednesday. Friday, Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday - but I'm OK with it! Here's Monday's page ...

If you're participating, how\s it going? And if you're not, what are you enjoying about glimpses into other lives? I know I'm finding it both fascinating and touching. :)

Now got camera, batteries, and printer ink: off to a better start today!

A centenary for WOYW (9 March 2011)

I know. I can hear you all from here. "Is that really your work desk?" "Have you tidied up specially?" No, actually, it often looks like this. Being a simple soul, I can only focus on one thing at a time, alas. I regularly envy the glorious desks I visit, cornucopias of gorgeous colour and shape and texture accessed at The Stamping Ground, with the lovely Miss Julia. But right now, this is as good as mine is going to get - the next spread in my This is 2011 album, with the pages from the second half of February. A bit of a hybrid again, with a striped pocket (paper is KI Memories, I think) holding bits from my birthday bash, and some journalling ... 

Here's the desktop version before I printed the left-hand side onto card, and the images onto silk photopaper. To ring the changes from previous pages, the text and pictures are reversed, I've rounded the corners for variety, narrowed the strips of colour on the journalling bands and deepened the colours on the strips this time in lieu of making them paler. (Bother, just seen a spelling mistake! Resisting the temptation to reprint ...). The taupe-coloured card behind the photos features here because on its reverse is the page celebrating Gladys; my pages are two-sided in this album.

 And as I am a hundred-posts-old today, I'd just like to say a heartfelt thank-you to all of you who come and visit, read along, converse with me, or just pop in and sit on the porch for a while. I am gladdened and honoured by your company. :) Wishing you Wonderfulness On Your Wednesday ...

WOYW (2 March) and a psd

On my workdesk today? Well, there are two today: a wooden one and a digital one. The former shows a work in progress - a double-page spread covering the second half of February, for my album This is 2011. Just some quick work with the Bind-it-all, a splodge of two or Herma and a pocket left to make - hybrid is, I think, my natural default setting. Below the photo, from my digital desktop, I'm adding the template I designed for January as downloadable zipped psd. files for anyone who is doing a weekly or monthly page or two, and would like to experiment with it - or anyone who just wants to play!

Should there be any problem, please leave me a message or send me an email and I'll do my best to help out (I may not be able to reply till next week). If you create anything with it, then do send me a link! It comes in two parts: the left-hand side of the double-page spread, and the right. The latter is more layer-heavy, so may take a little longer.

Download ThisIs2011TemplateAlexa01Left.psd
Download ThisIs2011TemplateAlexa01Right.psd

Right, off to see what wonderfully varied creative desks are awaiting around the world today, through the inventive Julia at The Stamping Ground. Fancy an explore?

A quartet with some fuzzy thinking ...

Hello! No, we've not gone all musical up here (though a tuneful ditty in praise of Fridays would be welcome): we're a bit more visual today. If you can see clearly, that is ...

One
I promised a photo of how my all-in-one 'This is 2011' is developing. Though the covers are still in progress (that's an optimistic euphemism, by the way), the pages are held in an open spiral for the moment. Book-rings will keep things together once the covers are ready until there are enough pages to bind. I'm not - and I realise this may be heresy for some - using any page protectors, though I may trim some into single sheets and slip them in between pages if I sense any stickiness.

Two
To make the best use of resources, the backs of the double-page fortnightly spreads also hold a layout. Here, a page was glued onto the back after printing the spread but - with careful planning - it will be possible to print onto the back of the spread should this be needed.

Three
The New 52 skinny pages are printed directly onto double-sided white, matt, archival quality A4 art paper. Made especially for fine art and digital art printing, both Fotospeed's High White Smooth Duo and Hahnemuehle's Fine Art Inkjet paper give excellent results with no bleeding through of colour from one side to the other. Additionally, it's slimmer than two lots of card, which is a bonus. When you count the cost of, say, two sheets of Bazzil card plus A4 Photopaper by makers like HP or Epson, then the art papers compare favourably. And it's a whole lot simpler ...

Four
Fuzzy photos. Not having got to grips with the SLR, I snapped these of my little grandson in winter evening indoor light with no flash and a point-and-shoot camera. Naturally, being two, he was not going to stop moving while I fiddled around! Now, I know photos like these are often discarded as not being good enough; my dilemma is that sometimes they're all I have. And so, I'm thinking - albeit a trifle fuzzily - it seems more important to have some kind of record than perhaps none at all. (And - as a protective measure in on-line work - fuzzy or blurry photos make identification harder.)

Oh, and speaking of photos ...
though hers are not at all fuzzy!, then do have a look at Kim's lovely work, tutorials and classes over here. I've just found her site, and if you are beginning in Photoshop/Elements, or would like to try out textures and photos, this looks like a great place to learn. As I am already experimenting with backgrounds, I will be doing Kim's great free class Learn Textures in Ten. (Yes, that's ten minutes!) See you there? Or back here next week? Happy photo-taking and crafting ...