Entry without Pictures (or Ideas of how to get through my picture backlog.)

I've been making great progress on my goals. I took the month of February off and enjoyed working on the Love Album which was a lot of fun and was really a stretching and growing experience. So for March I decided to really focus again on my chronological back load of pictures. I like being able to pick great pictures that go with the kit I need to work on with my CT work but I also wanted to make sure I don't scrap the same pictures twice or leave an event out. So I came up with a great solution. The next album I needed to work on was the Family 2005 album. So first I checked my layout files and made a list of any 2005 events I had already scrapped. Then I went through my 2005 picture folder and made a list of each of the events that needed to be scrapped and the date. Now when I open up a new kit I've downloaded I can match it against my list of layouts needed for 2005. So I can feed my need for order and still be creative and work "out of order". I'm doing other current layouts here and there as well and when I get ready to work on that album straight through I can just mark off the events already completed. So if you are a bit OCD about wanting to create chronological albums but still want to be a bit creative this might be the solution for you.


Second decision regarding the 365 day project. I love it and really want to use all of DigiTreats great kits this year. So I decided that I wanted to take full advantage of all the great stuff that comes out during the month. I've had a couple of times where after I've finished the layout for the week the perfect element comes out. So my decision is that from now on I will wait until the end of the month and then scrap that month's worth of photos. I've also thought about doing a month in review layout as well and this would make the process really quick and easy. So watch next week for the final layouts for March. Then the beginning of May watch for a month's worth of April and so on.

Saying goodbye to 2008

I spent the end of 2008 working on my layouts. I didn't come close to making my layout goal but I think it was way over the top of realistic. But I did almost hit 600 so I set that as my goal for 2009. This year I completed an album about my trip to the twin cities, School albums for 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and part of 2008. And as the last few minutes of 2008 slipped away I finished the family album for 2003. Not bad.

The last two pages for 2003 were from out trip to Brevard county. We stop at this little art and science center and then went to look out over the Indian river which is part of the intercoastal water way. The kit is Mel_H Nicola's Memories. The first page uses Andrea Gold Template #409 and the 2nd page uses Template #425. Both of these are part of her huge new template kit available at Go Digitial. The handwriting is Lucida Handwriting.

Goals for the coming year are to continue to get through my mountain of digital pictures to complete albums and to work on the 365 project. I also want to take on the Faith Sisters scripture and names of God challenges. I also plant to continue to be active at My Scrap Shop. Challenges tend to help me learn new things and to think outside the box. I also plan to continue to be active on the CT teams that I'm involved in.

On my paper list are the albums for my oldest-Dakotas, BBQ Tour, San Francisco, Road trip to college, China, and South Africa. Plus if he visits Japan before hopefully starting his job in South Africa later this year.
Digitial Projects -
Family albums 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09
Hannah 08, 09
School 08-09,
Joshua 05, 06, 07, 08, 09
Caleb 05, 06, 07, 08, 09
Hayden 05, 06, 07, 08, 09
My mom's poetry

Advent Starts

This is the season of preparing for those of the Christian faith. For me part of the preparing also includes reflection. Especially this year when we have been hit hard economically I still have much to be thankful for and more wonderful things keep happening everyday.

My goals for this season of preparing are to stop by and share one or more layouts each day and share some thoughts. Some days I might get more than one post and well knowing my life I might miss a day or two.

So blessings in the last few weeks that I want to be mindful of include both in real life friends and my cyber friends who have been as special to me as those IRL. So some recent blessing came in the form of a long call from a friend both IRL and online. It was wonderful to just have a great chat. An online friend has offered to send to barely used CD players for my youngest two one blue and one pink which is just perfect. My oldest called to say he was sending down a box of stocking stuffers since he won't be home for Christmas. A friend at church had some "extra" stocking stuffers that she didn't need for her grandkids and passed them on to me. My church is allowing me to work in the nursery 2 days a week for $50 and they even paid me for the day I was gone on a retreat. A wonderful retreat experience where I received the blessing of service to others. My #2 son agree to go on the teen retreat. Him having a good time and expressing that he was glad he went. Our church surpising us by paying his retreat fees. Friends who wrote him wonderful letters of encouragement. Another friend who gave us $100 in grocery store certificates when I know this represent a sacrifice on their part. The blessing of being on some really great CT teams who make very nice comments on my work. It really brightens my day. A great designer who decide to bless me with her newest kits for free because we have become online friends this year. My husband's paycheck that was just enough to make November's mortgage. A side job that he did that was almost enough to take #2 out to celebrate birthday #18. And for his brother who chipped in the $10 he earned this week taking care of the neighbors dogs plus his $10 Christmas bonus. Just when you think they are totally self absorbed the surpise you.

And the list continues. I pray that I keep my eyes open for the blessings that God is providing daily in my life.

Today's layout is Cousins. It was taken in 2003. Its funny to see how little they look back then. This was one of the last times we had all of them together. Now the oldest has his MA the youngest is 7. There as been a new cousin added and he is 2 already. The kit is Lisa Minor - Quilted. It is a beautiful kit with great papers and wonderful rich colors. I love everyone of her kits and find them to be great to use for a variety of layouts. Click on the side bar link for her blog and there you will find a link to her store Scrapdebris where you won't believe the great prices. To make hit easy click here for Scrapdebris. The template is Racketty Scrappity #56 and the font is Calligraphy.

And speaking of Racketty she has recently given birth to premature twins. One of the baby did not survive and the other is going through the roller coaster of NICU. She has a blog about her son Crew here.
Plain Digital Wrapper is offering a Charity Kit where all proceeds go to the family. It's a great deal at $10. It can be found here.

Half Way to my Goal

I'm so excited. If you check out my ticker I've passed the half way mark of my layout goal. Of course we are 3/4 of the way through the year so I'm pretty sure I won't make my full goal but I'm going to make my best effort. So which layout made layout #404. Well its is this one from my trip to the Twin Cities. This is a layout I did about attending church with my son. His church was featured on the national church magazine so I included that cover in the layout. This great kit is currently a Freebie over at Lisa Minor's blog. If you miss it look for it in her store for $1-2. The kit is Promise and was just perfect for this layout The font is Long Island.

The other great news is that other than a cover and title page my Twin Cities trip album is complete.

Some changes

If you didn't notice there is a slight name change on the blog although nothing else has changed. I decided that I wanted my design name to be somewhat separate from my scrapping name and since there is already a Lighthouse Designs I had to work on something else. So we discussed it as a family and I have a design name. So I will be the Lighthouse Scrapper for my scrapping and Harbor Designs for my designing. I have another freebie from the DigiTreat family almost ready to go but I wanted to come up with my design name first. So I will not be reissuing my first few offerings but all new offerings will carry the new design name. I plan on rewriting my TOU to make it simpler and easier to understand as well. So as soon as I get all that together I'll have a freebie for you. I have also started work on the next ADSDesigners Mega Kit which will be released August 1st. So if you enjoyed Backyard Playground which released July 1st and Popsicle Paradise that released June 1st, I'm sure you'll love the kit as well. Who knows how many designers will be part of the group by then.

Finally just for fun I was playing around in PSE today and created a little lighthouse that may or may not become part of my logo. Let me know if you like my simple little hand drawn element. I was hoping to work on some elements for the August kit and do some layouts but decided to back up my PSE catalog of digi things real quick before I got started. I'm still waiting on that of course. I guess I forgot how long it takes. I wish I had thought to start it before church this morning. I suggest you come back later this week for another freebie as I have a bunch of stuff going on the first part of the week.

Thanks for stopping by.

Lots Going On

I've been chosen to part of OScrapMoMo also known as Lisa Minor to work on her Creative Team. I've already used a lot of her great kits in the past and now I get to work on them before they come out I'm so excited. I just got the new kit and wow. Watch in the next couple of days for some great layouts. I've also been reading posts in the Yahoo Group adsdesigners. I'm learning and lot and maybe someday I'll be brave enough to try some of my own designing. I'm going to work with one of the designers kits as well and do some layouts and feed back. So I have a lot of stuff to work on. And then to top it all off the great adsdesigner members created a great collaboration kit called Popsicle Paradise that looks like it will be loads of fun to work with. Here is one link to get you started on finding this great kit. DigiScrapalicious You can also find out more about the Designers Yahoo group as well.
GOAL UPDATE: Can't remember if updated my goals but 2004 School album is done and 2005 is about 1/2 finished. I think I must of been camera happy in 2005. I have twice as many pictures for this year than any other if you take out vacation pictures. Also I think I maybe able to talk Hannah into letting me do her 2008 album in digital form as well so that might speed things up. That would just leave Jacob's albums to be done in paper which will be a great way to use up my supplies as I still have plenty of stuff to do for him. Not sure how many individual albums it will turn out to be but he has pictures from a month in South Africa, a month in China, some general school pictures, his road trip to Luther, his Great BBQ search trip, and his most recent trip to South Dakota. Mainly I have a bunch of pictures with out correct dates and locations waiting for him to send pack proof sheets with the appropriate notes that are on my computer just waiting to be printed. And then he has more on his computer that he needs to get to me. My goal is to buy no new paper until I use up what I have.

Goal Check Up

Well here were my goals for this year. So at the end of another month how am I doing?
Must Do's:
Family 03,04,05, 06, 07, 08 ?
St. Augustine on going - P or H
Child #5 -, 08 P
Child #4 - 05, 06, 07, 08 P or ?
Child #3 - 05, 06, 07, 08 P or ?
Child #2 - 05, 06, 07 08 P or ?
Child #1 - Road trip to grad school P 06
Month in South Africa P 07
Month in China P 07
Highlights of the Luther Years including graduation D 06-07
Road trip for BBQ
Trip - My Trip to the Twin Cities 07 D
Family Trip 08 D
School - 04, 05, 06, , 08 D

Well I finished up Hannah's album last month and I just finished up the School 07 album today. I'm about 1/2 way done with the 2004 school album. The more I work with digital the more I like and the more I plan to use so most of the ? will probably end up being Digital. I'm liking the digital so much that if I can get caught up I might redo a couple of trip albums that I have digital pictures for.

So I hope to have the 2004 school album finished this month. I'm leaning toward doing all the school albums and then go through the boys 1 by 1. I might throw a trip album in there if I need a break. I participating in a couple of digital page swaps also so as soon as I get those pictures I'll have to get those pages finished up as well.

Project Update

Well here were my goals for this year. So at the end of another month how am I doing?
Must Do's:
Family 03,04,05, 06, 07, 08 ?
St. Augustine on going - P or H
Child #5 - 07, 08 P
Child #4 - 05, 06, 07, 08 P or ?
Child #3 - 05, 06, 07, 08 P or ?
Child #2 - 05, 06, 07 08 P or ?
Child #1 - Road trip to grad school P 06
Month in South Africa P 07
Month in China P 07
Highlights of the Luther Years including graduation D 06-07
Trip - My Trip to the Twin Cities 07 D
Family Trip to Twin Cities for Luther Graduation 08 D
School - 04, 05, 06, 07, 08 D


Well for the month of February despite not being very diligent I completed 13 pages for our school album 07 and 08. And did a February and March picture calendar for my computer desk top. So not a total loss.

Already in March I completed 3 - two page layouts for Hannah 07 and hope to finish up the rest of that album today.

Goals for this week - Complete the last 30 pictures or so for Hannah's 07 album. Start on several March challenges I found on my favorite forums. Also I have become part of Stone Accent Studio hospitality team so I work everyday on leaving some love in their gallery. The bonus is I'm getting great ideas by taking the time to really stop and look at other layouts.

Bad Scrapper and Bad Poster

Well another week and I haven't really added anything to our blog or gotten any scrapping done. But I did get all my digiscrap stuff organized. First I redid my folders to reflect where the supplies came from. Then I used the catalog I mentioned in my last blog with some additional tweaking and now its all done. When down loading new things I download and open on my desk top. Drag the the correct folder in my file system. Then open organizer and load and tag each item. Even when I have several downloads the process actually goes pretty quickly.

But I found 3 new challenges from some of my favorite bloggers on the stores they are associated with. They are all due from the 23-26th of this month. Two are template challenges and one is actually a challenge to complete a page per letter. This week are the letters A and B. I'm thinking of doing this one with my daughter. Having her help me pick out the pictures and such.

So hopefully I will have something great to post later this weekend.

Not Much Scrapping Getting Done

Well I didn't get any scrapping down this week. I finally order the Digital & Hybrid Scrapbooking and Card Making from The Digital Scrapbooking Teacher that I've had my eye on for awhile. While all the video and only line stuff is helpful I really wanted a book I could refer to while I was actually working. I haven't really had a chance to read or apply it yet. One of things I got was the PSE organizer catalog complete with tags. So I've spent all week reorganizing all my digi stuff and getting it into the organizer. One change I made was to move kits and designers away from being a tagged item and created a collection for each vendor. So far I have all my folders reorganized and into the organizer. I have all the pieces into my vendor collections. The next and more daunting task will be to get everything tag by type, color, theme, etc. But it will be well worth the effort when I'm done. So instead of scrapping I've been organizing. I'm sure it will pay off in the end.

I had a couple of challenges I was going to do this week but time just got away from me. I had two days that should have been quiet at home days that got completely out of control. I thought I had a 2 hour party this morning that ended up being more like 4.5 which really cut my free time. Friday we got our tax return so it was off to Walmart to spend it on some much needed household items. First we stopped and got the boys hair cut in the store for 1/2 an hour. And then apparently everyone else had the same idea so after over an hour of shopping with all 4 kids and then standing in line 20 minutes I got home. Only to realize I had none of the things I needed for the salad I was making for today. Then my husband had to pick up a prescription so it was back to Walmart. Another 1.5 shopping because it was so crowded and 30 minutes in line. I feel like I spend my whole day at Walmart. Note to self---Never, Never, Never go to Walmart on Friday especially during tax return season.

Project List

Here is a list of scrapping pictures I would like to complete in the next couple of years. I'm including 2008 on the list as it is already 2008 and I'm sure I won't have everything finished by the end of the year any way. P means I plan to do this as a regular paper album mostly likely 12x12. D means I plan for this to be a digital album most likely 8x8 either printed and inserted into an album or printed as a digital book. ? means I haven't decided for sure which type this album will be either because I haven't decided or because I'm going to give the kids a choice. Or H- Hybrid a mixture of paper pages and digital pages. I will try to update around the first of the month to see how I'm doing and to be accountable to my goals.

Must Do's:
Family 03,04,05, 06, 07, 08 ?
St. Augustine on going - P or H
Child #5 - 07, 08 P
Child #4 - 05, 06, 07, 08 P or ?
Child #3 - 05, 06, 07, 08 P or ?
Child #2 - 05, 06, 07 08 P or ?
Child #1 - Road trip to grad school P 06
Month in South Africa P 07
Month in China P 07
Highlights of the Luther Years including graduation D 06-07
Trip - My Trip to the Twin Cities 07 D
Family Trip to Twin Cities for Luther Graduation 08 D
School - 04, 05, 06, 07, 08 D

What I already accomplished this year is Child #5 - 06, 4x6 template digital thank you notes for Christmas, Family Christmas letter that when out in January, and 3 layouts for a layout swap.

Projects that I'm working on right now are the School 07, and Child #5 - 07. I figure I can have one digital and one paper project going on at a time. When I work on Challenges I'll try to use items needed for current projects.

Would like to do - An album highlight pictures of his whole life up to ordination in a couple of years using the worlds from Mark Harris - Find Your Wings song. D
An album of my late mother's poems with pictures of her and pictures that fit the pictures from the family album. D
A heritage album. D

Last year I had a goal of 507 pages and ended up doing close to 700. Completed projects included school 02, 03 - Child 2-3-4 02, 03, 04, Me 74-88, Wedding 88, Williamsburg Trip 2 Volumes 06, Child #5 - 05 - P
Book of Quotes and Photos for Child #1 D

Getting Started

I've had a blog for our homeschooling for a while but decided to start one specifically for my scrapping to help me accountable for my scrapbooking goals, projects, and learning. I have a goal of 808 pages in 2008. I plan to use both paper and digital scraping. I got a good start by participating in the LOAD Challenge on Big Picture Scrapbooking and finished the month of January with 99 layouts. Next time I'll try to list all the current projects on my to do list.