sunrise

If you follow me on Instagram you might have seen this picture I posted earlier in the week of the sunrise. No filters, no processing, just my iPhone pointed at the sky.

It really was a stunning morning.

project life - february

This year I intend to link up with Nightwolf's Den for my Project Life posts.  I'm aware is it's now three weeks into March and I haven't posted any of my February layouts yet.

Time to fix that. Here are some of the February pages and a couple of pages from January to give you an idea of how I'm approaching Project Life this year.

Firstly, I'm not using any of the core kits, so I'm using my own supplies. This involves a lot of Kraft cardstock, craft tapes (like Washi, Cavallini & Co and Tim Holtz), papers from my stash and digital supplies. 

I'm making my own journalling cards and backgrounds for the photos and also journalling directly onto the photos. I'm doing it mostly digitially (mostly onto 6x4 canvasses), then printing the whatever I have ready to print once a week at my local photo processor.

So here are some of the results.

Double layout plus A4 journal insert from our camping trip and the Zoe saga

Close up of folded journal card on page 2 of the above layout

Journalling inside the folded card

February first page

February page - including wine label on Kraft 6x4 card

One of Juniordwarf's February pages

I'm also putting in quotes & thoughts I notice during the month

6x6 hybrid in a Design E page protector (from the Bushy Park show post)

 
That's how things are going at the moment. I've tried to stick with one basic colour for most of the layouts each month - February was a sort of pinky-red - to make the pages match up a little bit, but I'm not sticking rigidly to that if I see something that matches the photos or the theme for a particular layout.

I haven't done any photos or layouts for March yet. I hardly had any photos for the month and then all of a sudden everything started happening and I've been overwhelmed with photos. So there's a lot of sorting and editing to be done before my next post.

hobart from a high place

This week I am guest tweeting from the @WeTasmania account on Twitter. This is an account where a different person tweets each week about their experiences, thoughts and life in Tasmania.

There are lots of these types of accounts from different places on Twitter - @WeAreAustralia, WeMelbourne, @Sweden, @PeopleofCanada, @Netherlanders, @CuratorsMexico  to name just a few.

My first day was yesterday, and I spent some time walking around town and tweeting photos of some of the things I saw.

Today I took some photos in Hobart which I didn't have a chance to tweet during the day, so I decided to put them all on here rather than quickfire tweet them at the end of the day.

So without further ado, here is Hobart from a high place.

Looking towards Murray St - St David's Cathedral on the right

Mt Wellington

Large cruise ship on the left, MONA ferry departing on the right

Princes Wharf and Castray Esplanade

Looking towards Sandy Bay. You can just make out the casino

adventures in antiques #1

Item 74 on my 100 things to do in 2013 list is ‘visit every antique shop in our town at least once’.

There are at least eight shops that I can think of that I would need to visit to achieve this. In theory this shouldn’t be too difficult. I could probably go to them all in one day, but they would be pretty rushed visits and I don't think that's what I had in mind when I wrote the list in January.

The way I’m going on getting through my list, going to one shop will be a challenge. However, I’ve come up with a plan. I thought of it after our visit to the Copping Museum last Sunday. 

The iconic sign at the front of the museum

I said to Juniordwarf that it was just like one of our local antique shops that we sometimes go into (for completely non-antique reasons, so these visits don’t count as part of the task). He agreed.

I took a few pictures of things that caught my eye in the museum, and I thought it might be fun to go to a different shop each week, take some pictures of things that I like and post them on here, as a gallery of stuff that interested me on the day. Not promotion or advertising or anything like that, just stuff I see in the shops that I like. If the owner of the shop is happy to let me do this.

So in anticipation of taking on this project some time soon, here is my selection of things in the Copping Museum that jumped out at me, aka Adventures in Antiques Part 1.

Steel beer cans

Imagine one of these in your kitchen

Love the old radios

Stack of car rego plates

Another radio. Well before my time.

I wonder whose number was 84

My parents always had a bottle of this at home. Rarely opened.

Reminded me of my Dad

Juniordwarf loved this selection of "babies"

Old school music

Try explaining this to a 6 year old

Dunalley Hotel

Yesterday we went to Dunalley, the small town that was devastated by a huge bushfire in January.

The road to Dunalley

I’ve tried several times to write about the trip, but what can you say when faced with such huge devastation? It was heartbreaking to see the effects of the fire, but inspiring to see things like the new school that was up and running for the start of the school year, about a month after the fire.

We had lunch at the Dunalley Hotel. I have a vague connection to this pub, as my Great Great Great Grandfather built it.

Dunalley Hotel

 

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The original hotel was built in 1866 and burnt down in 1891. My Great Great Great Grandfather, Alfred Dorman, was the builder of the new hotel. 

My mother, the family historian, did some digging into the story of Alfred, and found that he arrived in Tasmania in 1883 under a program intended to increase the supply of skilled labour in the state.  He lived in Hobart and worked as a builder on projects including a number of hotels and Marine Board buildings. 

The plans for the new Dunalley Hotel were drawn up by Robert Huckson, the architect whom Alfred had worked with on some of the Marine Board projects. Alfred was engaged to construct the new hotel. It would seem that once the building had been completed, the insurance money paid to the previous owner of the hotel was nowhere to be found and so the building was auctioned. It was purchased by a Queensland investor, who installed Alfred as licensee.

This appeared to have been a wise move for Alfred, as he was able to build a large accommodation block adjoining the pub to house people involved in the construction of the nearby Dension Canal, who presumably would also have regularly patronised the pub. Such was Alfred's investment in the area (he also successfully tendered for some of the work associated with the canal project), that one of the locals named the canal ‘Dorman’s Ditch’, a name that stuck for quite some time.

 

Alfred did so well out of the hotel and the other projects that he was able to buy it in 1912, but sold it two years later. After taking a world tour with his wife and three of his children, he returned to the area and purchased a property at Eaglehawk Neck, where he first started apple farming, then turned to vegetable farming and timber milling. He remained there until he died in 1933.

View from the pub looking to the Dunalley Fish Market

We had a great lunch at the pub (which has been refurbished and added to considerably since 1891) and then went for a drive (in the wrong direction, well done navigator). We didn’t have a lot of time today as we left fairly late in the morning due to other commitments, so we didn’t have the chance to look around as much as I’d have liked to.

We did, however, stop in at the Copping Museum on the way home, where local wine tastings were available. We picked up a couple of bottles, a Pinot Gris from Yaxley Estate, which lost most of its vines in the fires and is hoping to rebuild to begin producing wine for 2015, and a Cabernet Merlot from Bream Creek Vineyard.  The last Bream Creek Merlot we had was one we’d bought on our trip to Dunalley for our wedding anniversary in 2005 and cellared in our extensive wine cellar* to be opened on a future anniversary.

So it was a short half day trip to what is a beautiful part of the state. Next time we go I want to spend more time in the area and have a really good look around and find some of the places mentioned in my mother's research. Maybe even camp for a couple of days. I’ve heard there’s a great campground in the Tasman National Park.

*Not extensive and not a cellar. There is wine though.

organising my albums

I've been working on my Project Life a lot lately and haven't been doing much ordinary scrapbooking.

Today I decided to do something that I've been meaning to do for quite some time - start to put all my layouts into three-ring binders.

Until now I've been using the "snap load" albums, which are expandable but you have to take them apart every time you want to put in a page. That starts to get painful after a while, unless you work out all the layouts you're going to do for that album put in exactly the right number of page protectors and then stick exactly to the plan, or things start to get messy.

This, for the uninitiated, is a snap load binding. It's a lot easier to use than a post screw binding.

Basically you just lift up those little tabs, pull the cover off the album, take out as many pages as you need to put the new page protector into the right place, and put it all back together again. One of these albums can hold a lot of pages. My largest is about 2.5 inches thick (and I just noticed tonight, the expandable spine has come loose from the rest of the album. I wonder how long it will stay together for.)

The only thing that was holding me back was the fact that I really like the look of double layouts in these albums, as opposed to the ring binder albums, because they have that uninterrupted look.

Exhibit A - snap load album

Exhibit B - ring binder album

See what I mean?

Of course I could keep all the double layouts in the snap load albums and put the singles into the ring binder, but that would upset my chronological sequence, and we can't have that!

So today I started to attack this shelf.

I transferred all of my 2009 layouts into two of these albums from Pioneer Photo Albums.

(Photo from a retail site that I now can't find again  . . .)

So this reduced the number of albums for 2009 from three to two, with a lot of room for more layouts.

The reason I started at 2009 is that it's the final year I used these albums. From 2010 I've been putting my layouts into my Project Life album so that the whole year is in one place.

I'm not sure what I'll use the 12 or so empty albums for. Probably some smaller projects where I do several layouts on one theme, like a holiday, or else random pages that don't really fit anywhere else.

I expect this will take a while, as I'll probably need about eight of these albums. And they might also become my Project Life binders for future years. If I haven't got them all by the end of the year, they might end up on my Xmas wish list.

And that was about the extent of any productive activity I did today. How was your Saturday?

february catch up

 Item number 19 on my 100 things to do in 2013: Blog at least three times a week.

Number of posts in February: five.

That doesn’t quite add up, does it?

I’ve started writing several posts and either never finished them, or decided I didn’t want to publish them after all. Or I’ve thought, why would anyone want to read that, and given up.

Not really what I had in mind when I wrote the list and decided I wanted to blog more often.

Now it’s the start of a new month.  It’s time to review the past month and (possibly) get inspired to blog again.

So what’s happened?

Project Life

I’m pretty much up to date with this and just have a few more photos to print for February, and then I should have a few layouts to share. I also managed to finish not one, but two layouts in the “in progress” album. Progress indeed.

Food

These are the posts I’ve been struggling with. I really don’t know what to write without looking like I’m trying to justify myself or defend what I’m doing. 

That looks so stupid now that I've written it down. I don’t have to justify making healthy changes to my life. Quitting sugar is the way I decided to start. There are a lot of opinions about whether sugar is really so bad. I don’t know the answer to this one. 

Anyway, the quit sugar thing has really turned into quitting a lot of the processed food with added sugar, which is what I’ve been trying to do (see Item 1 on the list). So I haven’t followed the Quit Sugar program completely. I’m still eating small amounts of fruit (which the program says to cut out, and reintroduce later on when you’ve broken the sugar addiction if you want to).

Apart from that I’ve been sugar-free, other than a couple of meals that other people have cooked that have had an ingredient that contains sugar, for six weeks now. I’ve politely refused desserts, have been into coffee shops and ignored the cakes and haven’t so much as even looked at the 85% chocolate in my fridge. (It’s there for me to test whether having not eaten sugar for an extended time changes the taste of that type of chocolate – whether it actually will taste sweet to me.) And I haven’t really felt like I’m missing out or depriving myself.

One thing I’ve noticed is that my coffee has started to taste quite sweet now from the lactose in the milk. I’ve never had sugar in coffee, so this is quite a strange sensation. 

I’m happy with how things are going at the moment, and I’m continuing to read about food and trying (most of the time) to make the best choices for me. 

Exercise

As soon as I read that exercise can make you fat I gave up exercise.

Well not really, since to give up something, you actually have to be doing it first.

Ha.

But seriously, I have been doing some form of exercise most days, even if it’s just walking to work. At the start of the year my goal was to be walking 15,000 steps a day and to get back into yoga. It’s still my intention to do both of those things.

I bought a yoga DVD a couple of weeks ago and have been getting up earlier most mornings to do one of the routines. Juniordwarf has been joining me, which is fun. 

Next Month

I do want to blog more often. At least, more than five times in the month.

Related: does anyone have any regular link-ups that they participate in that are fun? I did Wordless Wednesday once and then promptly forgot about it . . .