Aloha, all!
I've updated this blog post to update the photos that I included in the original. When I wrote the original blog post, I could not find my photo paper with which to print photos for my Project Life Pages. Now I have a new supply (I never could find the original supply with all this moving from one house to another!) and I'm redoing all my pages with real photo paper!
Have you had a chance to see any of the Creative Blog Hop posts of late?! This is a different kind of a blog hop where a creative person is nominated by someone else to be a participant in the "hop," and then that person nominates others to continue the "hop." I keep putting quotation marks around the word, "hop," because it doesn't happen all at once as most blog hops do. This one started way back when (when?) and continues as we all go along week to week.
I was nominated by my Stampin' Up! demonstrator friend, Mary Brown, and I, in turn have nominated two others to be in the hop. Once they have their posts live, I'll come back here and edit my post to give you their links.
So here I am this week with my own creation!
What, not a card?! No, not today! As I write this, I'm enjoying the first day of 2015. My husband and I tend to make a big deal our of our meal each year on New Year's Eve. New Year's Day itself tends to be just another day in which we try to catch up with projects we've left behind during the Christmas holidays (don't tell me you don't have things on which to catch up after Christmas!!!).
While we long ago decided what our Christmas/Christmas Eve special dinner would be, we'd not settled on what our New Year's Eve dinner would be. I think this year we finally have it! It's home made pizza cooked on my husband's charcoal grill. Yep, that's how we make our homemade pizzas! We've been doing this for a long time, but never thought about making a grilled pizza on New Year's Eve. Now that we've done this, it's an instant tradition!
And, no it's not a card. It's a set of two scrapbook pages made using Project Life by Stampin Up! products. So now the Creative Blog Hop information begins! There are four questions we have to answer, and I thought I'd answer them in terms of this one New Year's Eve Project Life Scrapbook layout.
What Are You Working on? This is the first FULL year in which Stampin' Up! has been involved in the Becky Higgins Project Life product. Stampin' Up! began last summer with Project Life. But one of the key types of projects on which I've seen Project Life afficionados focus is a year – a calendar year. And this is the first time I've had a calendar year in which to begin a new annual Project Life by Stampin' Up! (PLxSU) project. Of course I want to use Stampin' Up! products in my projects, cards and Project Life as well. For this project, I used both digital and "real" products from the Stampin' Up! Everyday Adventures Product Line.
One thing I've found I have to do to make my pages as I want them, using Stampin' Up! products, is to use not only the cards that come in Stampin' Up! Project Life Cards, but also the digital version of these cards. You see, once you use a card from a Stampin' Up! kit, that's it. If I want a duplicate, I find it in a digital file.
Here is a card that I used earlier in 2014 as a piece on a greeting card. Whoops! Now that I needed it for a "real" project life project, I no longer had it available. Out came my digital file, using Stampin' Up!'s My Digital Studio, and out came a duplicate of the card already used. Bonus!
Then there are times that I'd like to type out a bit of journaling rather than writing it by hand. If I have a digital version of a journaling card, I can add digital journaling as I did in this card. Get it ready in My Digital Studio, then print it out on some Whisper White Cardstock and, voila, there it is!
Even as I'm using some digital cards, I'm using realy honest-to-goodness hard copy cards with embellshments provided by Stampin' Up! In this card, I used a pre-printed Stampin' Up! card and added some self-adhesive lettering from the Everyday Adventure Accessory Pack, along with a bit of Pear Pizzazz Stampin' Write Marker journaling.
Question #2. How does your work differ from others in your genre. What I've found in online groups involved with using Project Life products, whether Stampin' Up! or not, is that there is a lot of effort to really decorate pages. In essence, the Project Life page becomes a work of art. I think that's wonderful for those who like to produce art work. But I'm trying to use the Project Life set of products to help me record my every day life so that my children and grandchildren will learn more about me and how I lived my life. My feeling is that, if the focus is on the art, the focus moves away from my life and more towards my art. To me, that's not what this is all about. Yes, I'll use a bit of embellishment as in the stickers in this picture. But this is more of a way to connect two parts of my page that to show off my artistic side.
Why do you create what you do? For my scrapbooking, I have always wanted to have in those books a reminder of what I did. Because traditional scrapbooks tended to be somewhat time-intensive, I tended in turn to scrapbook only "events," not every day life. Now that there is Project Life with which to work – and especially because Stampin' Up! has products to work with this set of products, I can easily capture what I do, well, every day! OK, not EVERY day. But more of those happenings that are part of an every day life, not something "special" that happens only occasionally. So Project Life it is for now. Actually, as far as I can see, this will be my effort in scrapbooking for the foreseeable future!
And now the toughest question – how does your creative process work? I've decided to answer this by telling you about the steps I take to make a page (or two or more) in a Project Life album.
To begin, Project Life has page protectors with a variety of picture holder sizes. I tend to use those that Stampin' Up! sells, though I'm not exclusively using those. What I do first is to figure out what I want to capture, take photos while I'm doing it, and then print out thumbnail drafts of all my pictures. Then I grab some layout page protectors and lay the thumbnail drafts on top of the various openings for photos. Once I see what I have, I decide which pictures I'm going to use and whether I'll have to print them landscape or portrait. (Usually these days, I'll take pictures both landscape and protrait to give myself more flexibility at this point.) Once I figure out the size and orientation, I print the photos out using my computer.
In finishing – I hope this gave you some insight into this side of my paper crafting. If you have any comments or questions, I'd be more than happy to see/answer them! You can do this here or on my Facebook page.
To keep the blog hop going, I have nominated Lisa Young and Terri Tank to be one of the next stampers in this series. Both of these stampers are fabulously creative and I know you'll love their projects. Be sure to check here next week for a direct link to their Creative Blog Hop projects. !
As I am a Stampin' Up! demonstrator, I thought I'd share with you the products that I used for this project.