steph's stuff

A transition

As much as I want this blog to go back to as a place for scrapbooking and crafts, I just don't think it'll happen. I've had a million thoughts run through my mind lately about topics to blog about and they're all about different subjects. I don't have the same interest in scrapbooking and quilting as I used to have. My kids are much older, I now own my own business and have three employees, and my hobbies have just changed. So I think it's natural for the blog to change. 

My thoughts going forward are that this will focus on running a business, empowering teens to follow their dreams, encouraging women to speak up and stand up for themselves and others, and encouraging kindness in all aspects. I truly think we all need more kindness and support and that's really been what my life has become centered on these last couple of years. Plus, the always crazy life being the mom of teenagers and young adults, two huge and messy golden retrievers, two overweight (and very furry) lazy cats, running a business and employees out of my house, dealing with 4 cars (OMG - the insurance!!!!), and no time to do anything as well as I want to. Not to mention that I now travel a lot! It's a huge change for our household and one I'm still wrapping my head around!

So, onward! I hope to choose to continue this journey with me, bathroom selfie notwithstanding. :)

 

 

 

 

Digital Scrapbooking Recommendations

Help! It's been over two years since I've scrapbooked and I'd love some recommendations! I know Designer Digitals and Project Life are great for digi scrapbooking, but where else would you recommend??? Catch me up and fill me in, scrappy friends!!!

Libby graduates in 9 months and I have at least 4 years worth of photos to scrapbook before then. HELP!!!!

And as much as I'd love to play with paper, I just don't think I have time. I own a clothing boutique now (The Shop with a Heart) and work about 50 - 60 hours/week so I need to be able to scrapbook quickly and on my computer. And I can't wait to start sharing a little bit about my shop - I just adore it!!! But meanwhile, I really need to get a handle on her photos and get a plan set in motion!

Thanks!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How does that even happen?!?!

The last time I blogged was over two years ago???? WHAT??? I knew I hadn't blogged in a long time. I was thinking maybe it's even been a year, but 27 months has elapsed?! 

So. Um. Hi!!!! It's me. Steph. Stephanie. StephPea. Remember me? Here's an updated photo just in case you have no idea who I am or why you're seeing this. 

I've missed writing so much and while I have exactly zero time in my day to go back to blogging, I miss it too much to give it up. So we'll see how this goes. 

Let's see what's happened since I was last here. Since it's been over two years!!! Still don't know how that happened. 

Emily graduated from high school. And, OMG, is now a senior in college. She skipped her junior year, so your math isn't off. ;)

Elizabeth is now a senior in high school. Please stand by while I struggle to hold in the ugly cry. 

Okay, whew. But it will come out. Believe me.

Andrew is now a sophomore in high school. And is taller than both Tom and me. 

Yep, funny how that happens. 

Oh, and I opened up my own business, work a bazillion hours a week, and turned 50. Now the ugly cry can commence. 

UGH.

Anyway, all of this drama is just to say that I miss blogging. I miss having free time. I miss having my kids be little. I'm really happy with how life has taken some turns, but there's definitely some things I miss. 

LIke scrapbooking. I really miss that. So I just might bring it back. Stay tuned. 

Finishing My Most Successful Scrapbooking Project Ever

Last September, I started working on finishing Emily's scrapbooks - a project that has me so excited that I've dubbed it My Most Successful Scrapbooking Project Ever. And what was going to be one simple blog post about it has now turned into three! You can click on these links if you want to go back to the beginning:

My Most Successful Scrapbooking Project Ever and Starting My Most Successful Scrapbooking Project Ever

But what does "finishing" mean, you might ask? I'm a pretty independent scrapbooker and I don't really care about trends, or scrapbooking chronologically, or following anyone else's set of rules. So I chose not to even look at anyone else's albums or Pinterest pins about albums. I just knew that for me, "finished" simply meant having some layouts about her life's events from birth to high school graduation done and in albums. Obviously, there's a lot that wasn't going to get scrapbooked and I'm totally okay with that. But I wanted to highlight some things from every year for her.

Besides figuring out that I needed to make pages from birth to age seven, and then sophomore through senior year, I also needed to decide how to make them. I've been a digi scrapper for the past nine years so that was my first thought, but I have albums and boxes of photos already printed from her early years. And then I have her high school years all on my phone or my computer. 

So I decided to do whatever was easiest with each set of photos - I made traditional layouts with the printed photos and digi layouts with the digital photos. And along the lines of doing what was easiest, for each type of layout, I made myself stick with just a few designs and colors and products and keep them very, very simple. 

Without much more chatter, here's what I did for her early years. I pulled out all of her baby and preschool albums. 

A lot of Anne Geddes peeking babies on my albums. LOL.

I went through the albums and photo boxes and marked the photos that I wanted to scrapbook with sticky notes. 

And then I decided to use white cardstock for everything. And please don't judge me based on the quality of these layout photos. I never, ever recommend photographing layouts still in the page protectors or with this much glare. But it was the fastest way to finally finish this blog post, so bad photos are what I'm using. ;)

 The only supplies I used were Ali Edwards' Story Kits (still my favorite subscription EVER!!!),

Project Life supplies left over from my year on the Creative Team, and

a few kitschy baby stickers and embellishments that I couldn't resist. 

And then I just started putting together layouts. I used the same 3-4 designs over and over again, depending on how many photos I wanted to include. 

I probably made about 40 paper layouts and, if it hadn't been for a local friend who kept me on track, I probably wouldn't have finished. The key was the pre-planning and reserving our time for each other. She and I planned a couple of days every month that we would set aside only for scrapbooking. On average, we scrapbooked 4-5 hours/day twice/month. And it was so incredibly helpful to have that time set aside for this project. 

For the rest of Emily's high school years, I stuck with some of my favorite digital templates. Most of them are Lynn Grieveson's templates - she used to be at Designer Digitals, but she's now here. I also used a few simple embellishments and templates from Designer Digitals - all older supplies that I had from being on their Design Team for seven years. 

I already had Emily's freshman year done so I started with her academic teams and added in some of her birthday parties and senior year activities. Here's a few digi layouts from those years:

 

I made four two-page layouts for the GAPP program but this is the first page. When Emily gets home from Germany, she wants to make a 6x8 Project Life album about her trip so those will be separate.

This is one of my favorite layouts - simply because it chronicles an incredible day in her life. If you're not friends with me on Facebook, you probably haven't heard this story. A few weeks before graduation, Emily was pulled out of class and asked if she wanted to meet and possibly interview Hillary Clinton on a campaign stop in town. Emily is a HUGE political junkie and she was over-the-moon excited and nervous. She had two hours to prepare! I raced a suit and some makeup to school for her because she was going to be the on-camera anchor for her school news, not to mention interview a former First Lady! The day turned out to be an enormous success and, as it turns out, Emily was the ONLY local reporter to speak to Secretary Clinton! She beat out all the local reporters. LOL! And the local reporters took note. She was interviewed by all three local TV stations, did a live radio interview, and a photo of her meeting Secretary Clinton was the lead story and front page of the newspaper. 

And that's where I ended her albums before her graduation party! So I still have 3-4 layouts to include about graduation and her party, but other than those, her albums are FINISHED. In all caps. FINISHED. 

And that's why it's My Most Successful Scrapbooking Project Ever. Because it's done. :) 

Of course, I plan on making a whole lot more layouts about her and I'll keep putting them in albums but she won't be living with us full-time anymore so it will be different and I won't be there to document her day-to-day life. 

And shhhhhh......if I have my way, I'll convert her to scrapbooking and she can start creating her own albums. ;)

Starting My Most Successful Scrapbooking Project Ever

My oldest child graduating from high school lit a fire under my scrapbooking butt like nothing I'd ever felt before! Last September, I realized that I had scrapbooks full of her layouts, but there were huge chunks of 3 and 5 years missing. And I really wanted to display her layouts at her graduation party. 

It would have been easier to throw a bunch of photos into a slideshow. And most of my friends make slideshows of their kids' lives to play at graduation parties, but I didn't want to go that route. I wanted more. We're a book nerd family. We read and read and read. And I love to look at other people's photos very much, but I want to know the STORIES that make up their lives, not just look at pretty photos. So that's what I wanted for Emily. 

I knew it would be a big job and take a lot of time, so I broke it down into monthly goals. But I didn't even know where to start so the first step was to go through what I had.

I had these two albums filled with layouts I'd done since she was seven.

I also went through all of my older albums shoved in the corner of our home library and realized I had two other albums that were just hers. Take a look at the wonder that it is her kindergarten album! LOL!

On the page below, I managed to incorporate the one 3x4 photo I had from the church directory, as well as her artwork, metal, rub-ons, alpha stickers, a double-matted photo, torn paper, ribbons, tags, Bazzill cardstock, my handwriting, and my child's handwriting. I'm not sure there was a trend that year that wasn't included. I was winning, eh? 

And then there is this album - it came complete with matching letter stickers to make the title for the front cover. The layouts in here were apparently not worthy of being in the other albums. Or something. I'm really not sure why I had them separated. 

And then I had all these photo albums and boxes that were full of photos that hadn't been scrapbooked at all.  

I also went through my Project Life albums. I've been doing Project Life since 2012 so I knew there were some layouts that focused primarily on her. All of the kids had weeks where their individual activities were my focal point. 

Her 17th birthday was a good example. She had a friend party and a family party so that's all I put in this layout. The beauty of digital is that I could simply make a copy of this layout and put it in her album and it was done! So I went through and pulled out all of those that I could copy and ended up with 5 or 6. 

At this point, I could set a goal. I knew I had nothing of her first five years scrapbooked and nothing since her freshman year, except a couple of random Project Life layouts. So my goal was simple. I wanted to have at least 3-4 layouts of every year of her life to put into albums for her graduation party. I had a minimum of 30-40 layouts to make and eight months to do it in. It seems easy, but when you factor in real life, it turned into a daunting task. 

To be continued.....

My Most Successful Scrapbooking Project Ever

Preschool picture and Senior picture

Last fall, I had the first of many mini-panic attacks about Emily graduating from high school this year. Besides the expected emotions that go along with your first-born graduating, such as joy, teary-eyed pride, worry, fall-to-your-knees feelings of sadness, fear that your family will never be the same again, and too many bittersweet tears to count, I also had that horrible feeling of I've-let-her-down-and-I'll-never-forgive-myself feelings of guilt that come with being a scrapbooker.

You know the feelings. The ones that arise when you see someone's albums all lined up on their shelves, neatly labeled with every year, and they casually mention that they're "all caught up."

"Caught up." They're dirty words to me. And invoke way too much guilt for me to even put into words. I'm not a chronological scrapbooker and I've prided myself on not ever worrying about being "caught up."

But there's still a part of me that worries what my kids will think when they look through their scrapbooks. In Emily's case, she could easily have thought, "Wow, Mom cared nothing about me until I was 7-years-old, then she scrapbooked only single, enlarged photos of me for three years with a lot of heavy, metal embellishments, then she switched to digital scrapbooking and I have hundreds of layouts of every year, every single moment of my life was documented, including moments I'd rather die than see recorded on paper, I have 100 layouts of my freshman year of high school and nothing since."

I couldn't live with it. I had flashes of putting out her scrapbooks at her graduation party and getting questions from everyone about where was her babyhood and why didn't I take any pictures of her last three years of high school. 

Scrapbookers' guilt overtook me, so I set a goal. It was a lofty goal, but only because I hadn't started scrapbooking until she was in first grade.

My goal was simple - have just 3-4 layouts of each year of Emily's life in her scrapbooks. Just enough to capture some big moments of her life without enormous gaps. It was meant to make me feel "caught up."

Which meant I had 30-40 layouts to do before she graduated. And I actually did it. 

My friend, Bekah, is also a scrapbooker and she has helped me tremendously this year. She helped me get organized last September and we set monthly goals for getting together to scrapbook. I couldn't have done it without her motivating me to keep going. 

I started with Emily's birth as my first layout and ended with her Senior Recognition as my last layout - an event that happened just one week before her graduation party. I'm not sure I've ever been more proud of a scrapbooking project than this one. 

I'll have another post soon with layouts that I made this year and explain the process fully. 

In the meantime, if you've got a scrapbooking project that feels too overwhelming to tackle, my mantra this year was to eat the elephant one bite at a time. And it worked. It's totally doable so start organizing!

2016 Project Life Plans

It's taken me a month but I've finally decided on a plan for 2016 Project Life. I can't stay interested in the same thing forever but I also love routines and consistency so it's been a bit of a dilemma. After playing with some products and different layouts,I think I've finally figured out what works for me.

Because I spent 2015 on the Project Life Creative Team and feel like I got a lot of use out of those products, I decided to change things up this year. I'm going to switch things up and use less product. It'll help me stay interested and motivated and it'll be faster and focus more on the photos and the stories.

And that's important because I still have a lot of layouts to finish for both 2014 and 2015. Which really ticks me off. I should have done more last year and I hate that I feel that way but I bit off more than I could chew in 2015. And, like I said, I love consistency, so because both of those in-progress albums are made with Project Life kits, I'll be continuing to use those kits to finish those albums.

I'm telling myself it's kind of the best of both worlds. For the 2014/15 layouts, I'll get to play with product and for the current layouts, I won't use much at all. I'm also going back to monthly layouts like I used to. Again, faster, easier... At least that's what I keep telling myself. 

I haven't done a title page yet for 2016 because I can't seem to have my husband home long enough to take his photo but it's coming. I've finished the first two pages, though, and I like the style. A lot. So much more me.

This template is kind of mine, kind of Cathy Zielske's Life Basics. I took her idea and her template and enlarged the boxes just a bit. I also changed the shadowing a tiny bit. If memory serves me, I think I have a half-inch margin around the edges, instead of the wider margin that she had. 

The title stamp is an old, really old one from Designer Digitals and I simply typed in the year under Jan. The circle, heart, bracket, and word stamps are all from either Cathy Zielske or Ali Edwards. If you want specific links to product, leave me a comment and I'll find those for you.  

So far this is all I have, but I have a month to work on it! I think I'll end up with 5 pages for this month. Maybe 6 at the most. Which makes 60-70 pages at the end of the year and I think that's a great size. 

 So yeah for having a plan! Now for finding the time..... ;)