The maintenance phase

Have you heard me comparing the spend less, craft more process to a diet?  Well if you haven't before, you will today.
A good weight loss program essentially involves consuming less calories than you use, and ideally consists of a carefully controlled intake of food (ideally a balance of healthy foods), combined with regular exercise. 
In the spend less, craft more "diet", I have limited my intake (spending) and tried to focus on healthy foods (essential items I will actually use).  My "exercise" has been pushing myself to try a range of challenges.
So far so good, but what happens to so many of us  when our "diet" finishes?  We go straight back to our old habits and the "yo-yo" cycle kicks in.
That's where the maintenance phase comes in.  That's when you gradually reintroduce extra foods, including the odd treat you've been denying yourself.  You may be able to cut down on the exercise a little too, but ideally you will have found an exercise plan that you enjoy and can stick to.  You are trying to find a balance which will maintain your weight goal.
So here's my maintenance plan for 2012:

• Still limit spending to $5 per week, with the following additions:
• "staple" items will be exempt from the $5 limit: staples being defined as albums, page protectors, journalling pens, replacement blades and adhesives.
• an additional $50 "splurge" allowance will be added, which can be accessed at any time during the year
• use what I buy!! How's that for a radical concept?  Ideally, this would mean only buying products I have an immediate use for, but we'll see how that goes . . .
• reset the goal of one scrapbook page per week initially, to be revised depending on how busy I find myself
• keep the goal of 2 online challenges per month
• balance that with the goal of 2 non-challenge pages per month.  (This would include pages such as school events, birthday parties and the like where there are photos of lots of other children).  some of these I might still post snippets of, many I probably won't.

And that's about it! Wish me luck, and I wish you all the best finding balance in your life this year too

How much does your cardstock weigh now?

If you've been reading since the beginning, then you'll know that a  year ago I decided to reign in my craft spending.  Here were my three goals:

• limit spending to $5 per week, or a total of $260 for the year (considering the huge amounts of craft supplies I have loaded up in my room that really should be plenty)
• and try and create something (scrapbook page, card or whatever) at least weekly
• to have a smaller stash by the end of the year.

I quickly expanded those goals to the following (see original post here):

• update this blog regularly
• do something creative every week
• complete at least 2 challenges a month
• complete a scrapbook page a week (single or double)
• work through my "projects" box with the aim of completing each item or considering getting rid of it.
• knit my way through my wool stash 
• make a list of my scrapbooking supplies (by group) and mark each time I use each item
• be prepared to cull unused items, and 
• weigh my cardstock, and compare in 12 months.

So, how did I go?

• update this blog regularly

At 80 posts in 2011, I think that counts as pretty successful!

• do something creative every week

Again, with a total of 133 scrapbook pages and 16 recorded "other" projects, a resounding success!

• complete at least 2 challenges a month

Some months I managed 7 or 8!

• complete a scrapbook page a week (single or double) 

see above!

• work through my "projects" box with the aim of completing each item or considering getting rid of it.

not so successful.  I did complete one sewing project and do a little bit on another, but paper-crafts have definitely taken precedence this last year.

• knit my way through my wool stash 

Again, less than fabulous.  I did knit some scarves and start a jumper for Maddy, but mainly I learnt the pointlessness of having a wool stash.  I hope to use and/or cull some more this year

• make a list of my scrapbooking supplies (by group) and mark each time I use each item

I definitely kept my list, and enjoyed marking it off at the completion of each project.  But I'll tell you a secret: I still have a lot of stuff!  For example, I can tell you that I recorded that I used ribbon in 75 projects, but see that box of ribbon that is my wallpaper?  It still looks pretty much the same.  And there are 3 other boxes with more ribbon in them!

• be prepared to cull unused items, 

I still have my "use it or lose it" box of papers, and I'm hoping to have a swap/give-away day after school goes back this year.  

• weigh my cardstock, and compare in 12 months.

I totally couldn't wait to get the results on this one . . . last year's total was 21.58kg (including some storage boxes).  That is now down to (drum roll please) 17.69kg, a reduction of nearly 4kg!
The amount of offcuts has increased slightly, with the most dramatic decrease being sheets of patterned paper.

• limit spending to $5 per week

I did it! (with the help of a few presents, not least of which being my Silhouette) I did it! I actually have $13.50 left over which is totally burning a hole in my pocket right now . . .

Pretty dance photos

For those of you who live in my part of the world, you'll know we've been having a cold, wet summer, so it was no surprise to hear the well-used phrase, "will you do some craft with me?"  The only surprising part being that we were almost a week into the school holidays before I heard it!
Last Friday night Maddy had her dance concert, so I pulled out the last of last year's photos to scrap, and Maddy decided to do an accordion album incorporating photos from both years.  She didn't get very far, so maybe I'll show you her creation later, but here's one of the pages I did:

It seems appropriate to me that some of the last pages (if not the the last pages) of the year should incorporate exactly the sorts of things I've been working on using all year.  In this case: older papers from SEI "Aunt Gertie's Garden" and various Scrapbook Walls collections, as well as an assortment of tags, ribbons and flowers.
And with that, I'll say goodbye and wish you and yours a very merry Christmas!
 

Product challenge to self: paper strips

It's the first day of the school holidays, and before I got stuck into all my chores, I wanted to finish this page. It is based on the December Scrapbook Boutique challenge, which is to use the colours blue, pink, red and white.  After a couple of false starts, I decided that this would be a good project to challenge myself to use  only paper strips. Since I decided to store my paper strips separately to my other off-cuts back here, I've found I've turned to them often.  I won't pretend the quantity has dwindled that much (or at all), but I'm using strips at about the same rate that I'm adding them! 

I hope I'm forgiven for adding a tiny bit of other colours to this page, namely the pastel word and letter tiles.  They were just too perfect for this page, and just scream "baby girl".  As my baby is now 8,  the number of baby girl pages I have still to make are pretty limited!

For embellishments, I sewed the ribbon hearts on the machine.  I just folded as I went - no agonised pre-planing here! - and just finished them off with a button and word tiles.

November Stretch your sketch.

I had the November "stretch your sketch" sketch from Two Peas up on my ideas board for a couple of weeks or so before it occurred to me that if I added another photo at the bottom, it would work really well for the rest of the photos from this day when Rohan was "teaching" his little cousin how to skateboard!

Here's what I came up with, this time for Rohan's own album:

It has been a while since I last used the Silhouette - even the kids had noticed! - so I used it to cut the arrows and stars for this page.  No off-cuts today, the multi-coloured paper is from the most recent papers I purchased and the stars and arrows are from a 6" pad.  The orange which mats the photos comes from a pack of Basic Grey "Indian Summer" papers I bought a couple of craft shows ago.  I don't know why I bought them - the colours and patterns don't often work for me! (I think I just saw the words "Basic Grey" and "special" together and my brain just went to mush!)  So anyway I am slowly working my way through them, often in tiny doses like you see here.

11 photos on a double-page-and-a-bit

Today I want to show you a page I made based on Shimelle's latest 4x6 photo love for November.  The concept is to use a photo protector between the two pages of your layout in order to add an additional 4 photos and 2 4x6 journalling blocks.
I don't own the actual 6x12 divided photo protectors that Shimelle demonstrates, which hold 3 landscape photos on each side.  On the other hand, I do own a truck-load of the 12" ones, and I was quite happy to cut one down.
(A couple of years ago, I bought a whole lot so that all the un-scrapbooked photos could be held chronologically in the same album as my completed pages.  That's what I do with my kid's albums, but I very quickly realised that the cost to do that with the family photos would be astronomical, hence all the spare photo protectors)

I felt a bit like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat as I was choosing papers for this layout, I kept on finding more and more Basic Grey "Marjolaine" offcuts in my stash.  I ended up using 3 of these papers and some of the matching stickers.  I only ended up adding my own Mini alpha stickers for the sub-heading, and some tiny flowers and brads.

Product challenge to self: sue's RAK

Life for me, at this time of year (like the rest of you) gets pretty hectic. I thought finishing TAFE would give me a bit of breathing space, but no sooner had I finished, the school I've been doing my placement at offered me 7 days casual work!
So it's only now I'm getting around to telling you that I had a bit of a winning streak last month, winning two challenges in a row at Let's Scrap, as well as the monthly sketch challenge at my local scrapbook store!
To the right you can see the lovely goodies I received from Sue, and you'll see how I've already used some of the flowers in a moment.

Here are the lovely My Mind's Eye stamps I received for the second challenge.  I am so excited, they are just the sort of versatile stamps I can see myself using over and over again!









Here is the first page I made using Sue's flowers:  it's the sort of story to warm any crafty mother's heart.  If you've been following my blog you may have already seen some of Maddy's lovely creations and know that she loves to join me for a bit of paper-crafting goodness.  Because of this page, I will never forget how proud i was when I saw her ink her edges for the first time - I'm not sure if it's a skill I taught her in a formal sense, or whether she just picked it up by watching.  Either way, she's a natural!

Did you notice I used the same letter stickers to make my title as she was using in the photos?  And yes, I did ink the edges with the same shade of ink as well!

This page was inspired by Shimelle's weekly sketch last week.  I started it between finishing work Friday (I finish at one) and picking up the kids from their school, then finished in bits and pieces over the weekend.

These photos were taken during our Christmas card photo shoot 3 years ago, the year Maddy had a broken arm.  I love that, other than the flowers from the RAK, everything on this page is very much from the stash.  Behind every single one of those circles at least one element has been cut and stretched to fit!