Nihao, Cupcake!

Reason #257 Why I Love Project Life:

 

 

Because even with a desk overflowing with unfinished layouts and craft projects, I can always find enough space to fill out a journaling card!

To see everything Project Life on my blog, click here.

Enjoying the (sometimes) Crazy Culture of My Host Country...

We have been living in Beijing China for over three and a half years now. That is half of my youngest son's life. In all honesty, I am ready to move home. I love where I am from and miss so many things about it. But never the less, one of the things I do enjoy about living abroad, even in Beijing with its horrible air quality (worsening by the day), chaotic streets, and lack of concern for safety, there are some things I really still enjoy.

New Year's fireworks is one of them. I love the craziness. I love the huge fireworks I get to see out my window almost every night for two weeks.

This is the firework that was let off the roof of the apartment building across our courtyard (not a big courtyard, mind you - basically a small park). It is on the top of the building where I used to live. You can see the windows of the penthouse apartment. Rumor has it they own the apartment complex and I am pretty sure letting off those fireworks is illegal. But that has never stopped anyone around here before.

They have cracked down this year and there are definitely less fireworks near our apt this year as we live in the heart of the central business district and near (two blocks away) the skyscraper that burnt down two years ago on during New Year's. 

If you don't worry about the safety issue, [those fireworks in the first photo are bouncing off the building right next to mine (in my same apt complex of four buildings)], it's really fun and exciting. So far I have not gotten burned or lost my home to a fire!

I've learned to appreciate the dragon dance, especially now that all three of my children have been involved in it on some stage at one time or another. It is exciting especially with this being the year of the dragon and all.

I also love ICE CHAIRS which are unique (as far as I know) to China. I've posted about them before and we went again this week during the New YEar's holiday, so you will see me post about them again soon. The boys said they forgot how fun they were. Dangerous, but fun. Give three boys sharp stakes to push themselves around willy nilly on ice and someone is bound to get hurt, right?

It's those simple differences that allow me to appreciate the unique life that I am living.

I'm linking up at Simple Things Sunday.

 

BLOG HAPPENINGS

*You might like to check out the Layout A Day Preparation Blog Hop from Friday here. It's a great challenge and begins Feb 1st - join us!

*Come back on Wed, February 1 for the One Little Word Blog Hop when members of Ali Edwards' Big Picture Classes class share their assignment from the month.

*On February 5, we will have our monthly FAMILYx12 blog hop where we support each other in taking a monthly family photo. Email me (link on the side bar) if you want to join us!

Digital Scrapbooking: Your Questions Answered {reblogged from Layoutaday.com}

via www.layoutaday.com

Our very own Melissa Shanhun, who is a regular One Little Word Blog Hop Participant, is sharing some fantastic digital tips on the Layout A Day blog today. Go check it out. I am bookmarking it for EASY reference.

Welcome to the Pre-LOAD {Layout A Day} Blog Hop!

Welcome to my blog and the Pre-LOAD {Layout A Day} Blog Hop! LOAD is a challenge hosted by Lain Ehmann for scrapbookers. It is just like it sounds. A bunch of us scrapbookers commit to producing a LAYOUT A DAY for one whole month. We post our layouts every day (by midnight PST) in our Flickr group gallery, cheer each other on and offer encouragement. Lain sends us daily emails with prompts, and this month she's got 29 videos to inspire our creativity! There are even prizes.

This blog hop is meant to offer ideas and encouragement for newbies and alumni alike on how to prepare for the month ahead. Some of us are seasoned alums with lots of wisdom to share, others of us are brand new and sharing our goals and plans and some possible fears for the month ahead.

Before I tell you about my LOAD experience, I have to begin by telling you about the layout at the top of this blog post. I made that layout in 2002. Guess how long it took me to make it?

GUESS?

It sat on my dining room table for ONE WHOLE MONTH before I finally finished it. I wanted so badly to design a layout like the ones I saw in the magazines. I had Becky Higgins'   Creative Companion at my side and I studied all the different self-made backgrounds she had so neatly indexed. They looked so finished, impressive and even easy but for some reason, I couldn't pull them off.

See the border of blue rectangles at the bottom of the page? I had originally made an entire background using those rectangles, but it didn't look right to me, so after a MONTH of arranging and rearranging the parts and pieces, I finally came up with that finished layout. 

Now it is a nice layout and in all honesty, it doesn't look too dated. It is a pretty classic design and tells a nice story and does a good job of highlighting the photos. BUT IT TOOK ME A MONTH! That is just way too long.

I would hear about people with shelves bursting with albums filled to overflowing with scrapbook pages and all I had was a handful of painstakingly made layouts. At this rate, by the time I died, each of my 3 kids would be lucky to have two layouts each! I needed a different strategy.

Fast forward a few years...

Along came LOAD. 

I signed up for the very first one. It was January of 2007, lead by Lain. January wasn't a good month for me (too close to the holidays with a birthday towards the end). I only finished one page that first time!

The following year it was going to happen in February. I was so excited because I was committed and raring to go. I loved the idea of a challenge and I knew if I had the right mindset, I could do it. And guess what? Much to my amazement, I did it! I completed one page every single day in February of 2008. It was so much fun!

We did it again in May and October. And I am proud to say I completed 31 days in May and again in October.

Now it is 2012, and I have participated in two or three LOADS every year and have completed countless layouts. I now have shelves bursting with albums overflowing with pages. I've been published, I'm a BPC Library of Memories coach and I was asked to join the Ella Publishing Take Twelve Design team. I even have some wonderful new "internet friends" since joining LOAD back 2007.

I credit my regular participation in LOAD (among a few other habits) to be a large reason I was able to make all of these scrapbooking goals come true.

You could say I am a seasoned LOAD veteran. 

So how can you be successful at LOAD?

*Besides having some basic supplies at your disposal (i.e., for paper & hybrid scrappers: lots of your favorite adhesive, plenty of cardstock & patterned paper, printed photos, etc), most of the preparation for me is the mindset of being comitted to a layout a day. 

*Plan the page into your day. Decide the night before or first thing in the morning the photos you will work on, the story you want to tell. Think about it throughout the day so you have a basic idea of what you want to do when you sit down to work.

*Refer to your favorite inspiration: sketches, magazines, your photos

*Mine your blog for stories. I have a category on mine for Future Scrapbook Pages - couldn't be easier to find something to scrap about.

*Finish up any online classes that aren't complete - LOAD is the prefect time to do it.

*Finish up any incomplete albums (vacation albums, mini albums, Xmas gifts undelivered).

*Catch up with Project Life - this year or even last year! I always do a few spreads each time.

*Make quick decisions while making a page. Trust your gut. Glue it down and move on. 

*Get the story told.

*Leave perfectionism behind. LOAD helped me get over that and learn to trust my gut.

 

DONE IS BETTER THAN PERFECT!!!

 In Layout a Day DONE is the most important thing. 

If you messed up one day, you can do better tomorrow.

KEEP CALM and SCRAPBOOK ON!

 

LOAD starts on February 1st. If you are not already signed up, it's not too late to join us! Click here for more information. It's the nicest group of scrapbookers on the internet!

This month's theme is PAST PERFECT. The prompts will encourage us to scrapbook about our pasts, but how far back we go, is up to us. And if you want to scrapbook something totally unrelated to the prompt or the theme, that is totally fine too!

                 

Now on to the other inspiring blogs... But before you go... Leave me a comment - SEASONED VETRANS: your best word of LOAD advice; NEWBIES: your biggest LOAD fear.

Then on with the blog hop to KELLI. (Please return here if you get lost along the way, to make sure you visit all of the blogs on the hop today.)

 To see everything LOAD on my blog, including all my posted layouts and the last blog hop, click here.

Pre-LOAD Blog Hop Partcipants.

Margie                          http://xnomads.typepad.com   <--- You are HERE.

Kelli                                    www.scrapbookgirl71.blogspot.com   <--- Go HERE next.

Jennifer                         http://atthebluebarn.blogspot.com/

Lisa                                    http://lisahausmann.blogspot.com/

Monica                        http://scrapinspired.com

Kimberly                        www.kimberlykalil.com 

Eileen                                    http://thinkinkpaperscissors.weebly.com/blog.html

Danielle                         http://acoffeeaddict.com

Pam                                    dailypamage.blogspot.com

Katrina                        http://k84mansramblings.blogspot.com

Cate                                     www.lifebehindthepurpledoor.com

Gayle                                    http://www.lifeonlilypadlane.blogspot.com

Heather                        http://heathersdragonsden.blogspot.com

Gina                                    http://randomthoughtsmindlessmusings.blogspot.com 

Kristie                                    http://kristiesloan.com

Janet                                    http://khashabfamilymusings.blogspot.com

Lydia                                    http://lydiaink.wordpress.com

 

Affiliate links used when possible.

Just Me & Nicholas...

The kids have the week off of school for Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) - just when the temps start to drop for some reason the lunar calendar tells us, it is spring! Go figure! But I digress, the kids had the week off school and on this day, Nicholas and I stole away by ourselves and took a walk (a coule of miles each way) to a restaurant for some one on one time. Priceless! Now to make sure I get the same one on one time with the other two before the week is over.

I am linking up at Anderson Family Crew because I think Embrace the Camera is one of the best blog ideas ever. Thanks for hosting!

Project Life :: 366 {Photos for the Week of January 15 - 21}

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Studying all the Pokemon in his Pokemon book.

 

Photo #2

Braden loves this pic because he looks like a tornado.

 

 

Tuesday, January 16

Doing homework on the computer - Mathletics.com.

Wednesday, January 17 - NO PHOTO

 

Thursday, January 18

Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) Assembly - 1st Grade

Photo #2 - 5th grade at Spring Festival Assembly - the first batch of Dragon dancers.

 

Photo #3 - Dragon puppet purchased at school "Temple Fair." This was Braden's dragon for the year. Each child gets to choose one animal from the year during each New Year's holiday. Braden chose this marrionette.

Photo #4 - I found Braden playing quietly in his room building this mosaic. He has always loved this activity. I can remember him doing these (with the guide) the few weeks before we moved to China, the summer of 2008 when he was only 3.

 

Friday, January 19

Braden decided to spend his own money to buy ice creams for the whole family. I took him down to our shop and he did a great job picking out the ones everyone wanted.

Photo #2 - Braden had a twenty kuai note and a few one kuai notes. The price of all the ice creams together was 20 kuai, so after he handed the man his entire wad of money, the man just took his 20 kuai and handed him back his ones. Braden was shocked and disappointed because he was looking forward to getting some "real change." It was hard to explain to him why he didn't get change this time. So cute!

Saturday, January 20, 2012

 As we were leaving the house to go out to dinner, Reece haphazardly threw a dart at the dart board and it went straight into the BULLSEYE! Awesome!

Project Life {Jan 8-14 Layout & Jan 15-21 Photos} & More Catching Up

I tried to get this done before I lost all of the natural light, but I didn't make it. If I had realized how horribly this photo came out, I would have taken it again, because even with the light fading as fast as it was, I could still manage to supply a better quality photo than this!

I was hoping to add more embellies this week, but maybe I am still catching up from my month away. Ho hum! I do like how the colors came out across the two pages. It is hard to see with such bad photos.

I'm loving the Clementine Core Kit   . Such cool journaling cards and designs. I love all the little phrases. I hope I can do a better job in the future of making the most of the designs. That label on the bottom right photo is a Tim Holtz Glass Vial Label meant for one of his glass bottles. They come in a set of red & black together.

Here's a spread from September 2011. I'm slowly but surely getting that album complete. It is pretty amazing that the album is complete with photos, I only have to finish up with the journaling and memorabilia that I have slid in along the way. 

I have an incomplete insert in this one. The program is slid inside an 8.5x11 page protector. At some point I hope to sew it to its custom size but for the time being it stays as it is.

I've added one of the other page protectors as a possible insert. I have six vertical photos to fill the front and back but I do not have twelve 3x4" journaling cards, memorabilia or photos to put there. I may cut the page protector but I am not ready to do that yet. I'm waiting to see if I will need more page protectors since I can't easily get replacements.

I thought I would use more of the multi-pack of designs that I bought over Christmas. But so far, I am sticking to the traditional Design A. A couple of years ago only a few weeks into Project Life, I decided I prefered using all horizontal photos (no other page protector designs back then and I didn't like putting vertical photos on their sides), so I trained myself to take plenty of horizontal photos so I would have at least one for every day that I wanted to use. Old habits are hard to break. And it keeps the project simple.

I'm reminded of the additional page protector designs and inserts I have when I check out other peoples' pages and they look so nice. So, maybe one of these days I will experiement.

This post is getting really long, so I think I will post week 3 (Jan 15-21) photos tomorrow. I'm thinking maybe that is what I will do from now on - I'll publish weekly photos on Mondays and finished Project Life spreads on Tuesdays in time for Project Life Tuesday. What do you think?

 To see everything PROJECT LIFE on my blog, go here.

 

More Project Life Layout Catch Up...

Another spread from summer. I can't believe the time has passed so quickly. I feel like I just did all these things and collected all of these little bits of memorabilia. It was the week after A Week in the Life so I was in the habit of collecting everything & taking lots of photos! 

How easy is it to slip the ticket from the circus in with a photo from that day? It's also simple to punch a hole through the packaging of a toy...

...flip it over and write your story on the back side. I do find that I run out of room on the journaling cards, so writing right on the packaging is a great way to get additional writing space. I espcially find this is true if I use the journaling pocket pages for photos, receipts, tickets, etc. Adding journaling spots directly on to the photos also gives more space. 

Of course writing directly on your photos helps too, but I have yet to find a pen that I love. Those Sharpie fine point paint pens are great but they are so hard to find! And they run out so quickly.

I'll share more tomorrow. And since it is Tuesday, I'll be posting my photos from last week and hopefully my Project Life layout from Week 2 2012 (haven't gotten my photos printed yet, so we'll see if I can do it)!

Thanks for stopping by.

The Brady Bunch was my all-time favorite TV show!

On our recent trip to the States for the holidays we took a road trip from California to Durango, Colorado. I did this many times during the summer with my father and my brother. My father was born and raised in Durango and loved to go back in the summers. We would drive through the hot desert sun in the blue VW bus.

My dad made some of his own alterations to that van to make it somewhat of a camper. He used bungee cords to strap a Coleman cooler, that sat upright and was designed like a refrigerator, to the back of the passengers seat. Then on top of that sat a heavy plastic gallon water tank that when laid flat worked as a sink. It was a pretty ingenious invention. The sink was molded into the side of the water tank. I hope you can imagine what I am describing. The faucet was a pump and it even had a little soap dish molded into it as well. It also had a drain with a plastic plug. My dad took a clear PVC pipe, hooked it up to the drain and threaded that through the back of the seat (but not through) and down through a hole that he made in the bottom of the van. When we pulled the plug, the water would drain out into the street below. He never allowed us to use it while he was driving, though. We were only allowed to use this when we were safely parked at a campground.

That was back in the day before it was law to wear seatbelts, so we never did. If one of us kids were sitting in the front seat and he had to slam on the breaks, out would shoot his arm to prevent us from lurching forward. Of course, if it were a real accident or emergency, his arm really wouldn't have done much. But out it went anyway.

I also remember curling up in the shade and falling asleep because the desert sun was so hot. It was the only relief I could get from the smoothering heat. The van had no air conditioning.

My dad was a huge napper. One day when we were in Durango and it was pouring down rain. My dad decided he needed a nap. So there we were parked on Main Street, Durango with my dad asleep in the back of the van and the rain pouring so hard against the van windows that we couldn't see out. 

At this time I was a huge fan of the Brady Bunch and had taken my trusty tape recorder and taped one of my all-time favorite Brady Bunch episodes. The one when the Brady kids (Greg, Marcia, Peter, Jan, Bobby & Cindy) became a music group and sang in a contest to buy their parents a silver platter for their anniversary. Anyone remember that episode?

Anyway, I brought my tape recorder and that tape on this trip, so the way my brother and I passed the time while my dad was sleeping was to write down all of the words to those songs and memorize them. I can still sing almost every word to those songs to this day. SUNSHINE DAY.... everybody's laughing! SUNSHINE DAY... everybody's singing! SUNSHINE DAY.... everybody seems so happy & gay! It's a Sunshine Day!

How did you pass the time when you were a kid before the age of endless gadgets we are in today? Though, I guess that portable tape recorder was the very beginning of the gadgets we have at our disposal today, huh?

I wanted to link up to storytelling Sunday (the first Sunday of every month at Sian's blog), but I keep forgetting to have my post ready by then so I decided I would publish this to my blog any way and if I forget on the first Sunday of February, I can link this story up anyway since I love the idea so much!

Project Life 2012 Week 1 & Other Finished Layouts from 2011

Project Life 2012 Week 1 is finally ready to be published! Our internet has been spotty all week and some days I just have to give up. You can see I added a lot of memorabilia.

The journaling cards are from both the Amber Core Kit (the first journaling card) and the Clementine Core Kit (the date card and the second journaling card). 

The journaling spots on the photos are some old Heidi Swapp product I've had for a number of years.

 

The Sound Bites card is packaging from a toy my son bought with his own money and proceeded to annoy us with us for several days after. I printed out a smaller photo of him with it and adhered it to the middle of the packaging.

 

I saved some wrappers from the tops of our favorite yogurts that we can only buy when we go home. I tucked in a label from the Smash Book product line, EK Success K & Company Smash Captions to give more details.

 

Here's a double page spread from July I managed to finish up. I don't think I've shared this one before.

Here is a make-up spread. This is from July. I love the card from Capital M that I included in the middle. Isn't it pretty? It is a water color print of a couple of famous landmarks near Tian'anmen Square. They had the most beautiful marketing materials, I had to take them all to use in my Project Life book. The card in teh second pocket is from there as well. It shows a map of their location. I love including maps.

 

I slid in an empty packet of some of our favorite flavor of gum that we chew every so often. I used the back of the water color postcard to write down my journaling. I have been doing this more and more. I love how it adds a little charm and saves space. And then if the item should get separated from the album, the memory is still together with the memorabilia.

I also used avery labels to use as journaling spots on my photos.

I have even more spreads to share with you tomorrow! I can say that with confidence because they are finished and photos are taken, but thought I better save them for later so this post doesn't end up too long.

Also a blog friend of mine is hosting a monthly Project Life blog hop. She's announced information on the BIg PIcture Scrapbooking Project Life class message boards. IF you are interested, go on over there and check it out! The class is FREE!

To see everything PROJECT LIFE on my blog, go here.