Hopeful for a Renewed Meditation Practice

Tonight's card is about my desire to get back on track with meditating. There was a time when I dreaded meditating, and now I look forward to it. Despite this, I have been far too inconsistent with my practice. Our meditation at sangha tonight inspired this card:

An Index Card a Day

So I have been playing in my studio quite a bit lately. I have discovered the world of art journaling, which is good for me in that it is helping me break away from my creative rut. I am a very left-brained person, and art journaling is very right-brained, which makes this a nice break from the structured, rule-oriented person I can be.

While exploring some art journaling web sites, I discovered an index-card-a-day challenge and decided to do it for a while. I am not committing to any length of time because that would be another rule for me to follow, but I really liked the idea of something small and playful to work with. So here is my first ICAD:

So go play!

Cake Pops

Tonight I broke into this book to make some cake pops. I have always loved the way they looked, and after a friend bought me this book, I decided spring break provided a great opportunity to try the process out.

The process:

• Bake a cake and let it cool completely
• Mix in 3/4 of a container of frosting (This acts as the glue.)
• Roll into balls
• Freeze for about thirty minutes
• Melt melting candy
• Dip balls into candy

Here's what I learned:

• Kids love the taste; adults don't. (Bleh!) Maybe they would be better with different mixes. I used chocolate and vanilla frosting. Mostly, I think it's just the texture. It's like when that kid at lunch time would roll up his bread roll into a hard, moist ball. Just thinking about it gives me the
• We tried making egg shapes for Easter. This was definitely more difficult than just balls. They didn't come out right, and we ended up re-rolling them into balls.
• It was fun, but a lot of work. It's more about enjoying the process and the family time, especially since I can't stomach eating them.
• It helps having a friend there to keep you company and to speed up the process.

 The best part of the evening was the sale on both limes and mint, which means a mojito awaits me. Yum!

Smash Book Droolings

One more thing before I sign off completely. I am totally (read with a valley girl accent) drooling over these SMASH books. As soon as they are available, I am buying two - one for me and one for my daughter. Enjoy this happy little video.

Some Recent Creations

I love card-making because you can create finished product in a relatively short period of time. I am not a fan of using sketches for scrapbook pages, but for some reason I enjoy using them for cards. This one was inspired by Tuesday Morning Sketches. Here's the sketch below.

 Here are a few pages I have done recently:

I love the simplicity and the colors in this page. I am fond of blue and brown together and did my son's baby album in this color scheme.

I adore the little monster guy created with the Cricut. This page is a scraplift of a tutorial from Paper Clipping. I love Noell' approach - instead of providing you with a sketch, she teaches basic design concepts that can be applied to any layout. This summer, I plan on dishing out the money for her membership. In the meantime, if you are a scrapbooker, I highly recommend checking out her site and subscribing to the Paper Clipping Roundtable via iTunes.

 

At the retreat I went to a couple weekends ago, my friends and I all scraplifted the same page from a magazine. I don't have the issue, so I cannot properly give credit.

Because I am a fan of simple pages, this is one of my favorites. I also like that I combined photos from two different outings.

 Happy crafting!

A Shift in Approach

I have been contemplating my approach to scrapbooking for quite some time. The chronological approach has me frustrated and overwhelmed. There is a lot that plays into this - the fact that I printed over 700 photos from half of 2010, the fact that my scrapbooks are starting to feel repetitive, and the fact that I want my albums to be more meaningful for my children later in their lives.  When one night I realized I felt stressed about how "behind" I was, I acknowledged the absurdity of that situation. My hobbies should not feel like chores. I also realized that same night that I have three pages in one album titled "Joy." Someone was getting stale.

Because I was ready to start thinking about things differently, I found the iScrap class I took from Stacy Julian at Big Picture Classes to be perfectly timed for me. I was ready to play with a different approach to scrapbooking. Within two weeks I completed an 8X8 album, which could be considered a 2010 introspective. What I liked about this approach is that you start with the story or the message and then find the photo to go with that message. What I also found interesting is that by connecting the photo to the statement I originally brainstormed, I learned something about myself. For example, one of my statements was I went on a lot of train rides. This sounds simple and frankly not very meaningful beyond reporting on an activity, but as I journaled using Stacy's technique, I discovered that the reason I love trains so much is because they allude to a simpler time, a time free of iPods, cell phones, video games, and email.

So while I am not ready to completely drop the chronological approach - I will still scrapbook major events - I am ready to branch out more into the other approach. When I have some sun light and some time, I will photograph and upload images from the project.

In the meantime, here are some other projects. This is a card I made. The flower is made from a scrap of black cotton quilting fabric.

 These are hearts the kids and I made for Valentine's Day. Sawyer is clearly in love with scissors.

This page reflects my new approach in that its topic isn't event-centered, but rather relationship-centered.

Gearing Up for a Serious Weekend of Play

I will be spending my weekend with other scrapbookers this weekend. I hope to have lots of pages to share with you next week. I am also taking my first online scrapbooking course through Big Picture Classes. Although they all sounded fun, I chose iScrap, a class in which you make a mini album using I-statements with prompts from the teacher. I can't wait to get going.

I haven't been very good about uploading pictures, so I thought I would share some of my recent creations. The first three are cards I made using sketches from Card Patterns. I rarely use sketches for scrapbook layouts, but love them for cards.

 The next two are for my album I am making that is all about me. I want my children to some day know me as a person, not just as their mom.

 This is my resolution page for 2011. My goal is to simplify my life. I haven't been too successful yet, but I am working on it. So far, I have cleaned about my email in boxes and started cutting down on methods of email input.

These two are not my favorite in terms of design, but I love the topic because it is about the relationship between my husband and and son. They play a game called "Break the Pickle," which makes my son crack up. I was glad I caught this moment on film.