trimmingthesails

Reading Habits ...

It has been niggling away at the back of my mind for weeks. Ever since the 9th of September, in fact. I'd pinned the questions on the cork board above my desk and added tattered notes around them, cricked my neck trying to take artsy photos, played around with Project Life-type pocket design in little chunks of time - then abandoned much of it. Finally, I can honour the lovely Helen over at I Will Bloom, who tagged me in her post on Reading Habits, with a page about my own ... (Click on the image for clearer print and detail).

As soon as I've popped these into my This is Life 2015 photobook, I'll be thinking 'What next?' Before we know it, it'll be time for the very talented Julie's Month In Numbers. Anyone seen October? I think it's done a runner ...

Saying it with flowers ...

Hello and lovely to see you! and thank-you for coming by. I wish I could say with Rogers' and Hammerstein's fervour that June is bustin' out all over (it ain't) but the end of May put in a pretty good performance - just in time for our niece's wedding. After a knee-cramping, rear-end-numbing two hundred and fifty miles, we eased ourselves out of the car, slipped our camera straps over our wrists, and strolled up a path through waist-high meadow grass to the twelfth-century church, just in time to be with these lovely people ... (Click on the photo for a new window and a sharper view).

The rest of the day was equally magical and fun - more from our This is Life 2015 photobook to follow. But in the meantime, if you'd like some floral fonts to play with, have you tried Flower Ornaments and Florals 2? (They're downloadable as the seventh and eighth on the page here). I've used some in green in the circle date above, and bookending the journalling; I'm thinking they'd be great as paragraph dividers too.

Hope to see you soon; we might even be out of socks and fleeces by then. On accounta it's June ...

 

My Month in Numbers (April15)

Hello to you and welcome! Up here, I've been working on finishing April's My Month in Numbers, brainchild of the very talented Julie over at Notes on Paper - Julie always provides an entertaining read, so if you haven't popped over, then do :).

It's been fun playing around with the grid format in my This is Life 15 photobook, and a great way of scooping up all those little bits and pieces of life that might not make it onto a weekly or fortnightly page. I could see this working very nicely too for any of you who are doing a paper version of Project Life; as Julie points out in her super tutorial, there are numbers attached to every story. And you don't always need to have a photo either; I've popped in some screen shots from websites in mine. (If you'd like a closer look, click on the image for greater print clarity).

 

Deciding on a format in advance and then just adding things as and when they occur, helped to keep it moving. Which is what I really need to be doing, as my Bank Holiday Brain is only just catching up with the fact that we're sliding into mid-week already! Looking forward to calling in on you, and being back here soon ...

 

It's rather more fun ...

 ... than I thought it would be! And although it is sometimes said in the scrapbooking world that 'being caught up' is unimportant, I have to confess that I rather like the feeling of keeping pace. After all, when you're trimming the sails to make the best of the prevailing winds, you really don't want to be weighed down or get caught in an undertow. And making sure your log book is up-to-date is essential :).

Keeping it simple and flexible, like the design, I'm not planning to have set periods of time for popping photos and text together; a page or a spread might be a few days, a weekend, a fortnight, or anything inbetween. I think I'll just see how it flows ...


So far, so good: photos get taken and edited, quick notes made, and stories written. Nothing very earth-shattering or profound. But I think I'm getting the hang of it :).

 

This is Life 2015 ...

Hello and welcome! Hoping that these last few days have offered you some sun, or chocolate, or family - we have been lucky enough to have all three. After the long, cold, grey March, I can't tell you good that has felt. I've seen a fair bit of glorious knitting of socks around the blogosphere but (whispering here) I have to confess that now we have double digit temperatures, I have been going around without any. Sorry. Probably too much information. Moving on ...

Inbetween the lunching, munching, and crunching, there's been a bit of scrapping too. I'm not sure that this qualifies as Project Life -  it's an 8x10 inch format, and these weekly or fortnightly summaries will find their place in amongst all the other types of pages I am planning to include in our This Is Life 2015  book. Truthfully, exploring and experimenting with design gives me so much enjoyment that keeping to one format for a whole book is just not going to suit me; I think I want to leaf through something that looks more like a magazine :). But the templates I designed fit the bill for an overview - this combination is E and H ...


Needless to say, there's a backlog of stuff in the camera, a computer that complains it hasn't been backed up for ten days, and a monitor that whines to be calibrated every time it's turned on. I am off to assuage their demands. Since when did technology get so needy?