sorting photos

After an epic photo editing weekend, I had over 150 photos to print on Monday morning for my August and September Project Life layouts. (I might add here that September was a huge photo month, with Juniordwarf's birthday, his party and our holiday to the East Coast, so there were a lot of photos to go through. I think I did well to cut them back as much as I did!)

I'm really not good at culling photos or picking one or two to capture an event. So where other people might be doing weekly layouts and choosing the best photo (or two) to put in their album, I end up with an entire page.

Case in point:

I love these Design C page protectors because I can just slot in six 6x4 pictures (or in this case, five and a title card), no cutting or resizing required. Not even any journalling, although I could have replaced one of the pictures with a 6x4 journal card. What I might do is tack a card to the back of one of the pictures, do the journalling and put a tab on the top so that it can easily be pulled out.

(I hear some of my scrapbooking friends laughing hysterically as I mention journalling.)

I also find it very difficult to reduce the number of photos I take (thereby increasing the sorting task) because, even though I already have heaps of photos of a particular thing (Juniordwarf asleep comes to mind), there is always a slightly different angle, a new expression, something that catches my eye that I just have to have a photo of . . . and so I do.

I'm trying to cut back, but I've always been a prolific taker of photos, and once I got a digital camera, there really were no limits. The challenge for me is to try and take fewer photos, but better photos, and to let go of the ones that don't contribute to the story.

I suspect this will take a while to achieve.

getting organised

While I'm still trying to catch up on my 2012 Project Life album, I've been gradually formulating a plan for my 2013 album.

It's going to involve some blank grid cards, some left over stuff from my 2011 Turquiose Kit, possibly the digital version of that kit, and this lovely selection of products, mostly by Tim Holtz.

I actually bought the paper for my One Little Word project.

Yes, I know, the idea for OLW is to use stuff you already have in your stash and not to run out and buy heaps of new products. But as I was looking through my stash, the look that appealed to me for OLW was the sepia-toned, old-fashioned stationery, twine, brass, clocks, keys kind of feel* . . . and I realised I wanted to carry that through to my 2013 Project Life album as well.

I knew that what I had wasn't going to be enough for a full year, and that the paper collection I really loved had sold out very quickly in our local scrap shop. And I already had several of the Tim Holtz pins and brands and other bits and pieces, so it wasn't that hard to justify buying just a few more little bits and pieces (and I didn't have to buy them anyway, thanks to my birthday gift voucher that I was wondering how to spend).

Win-win.

So where am I at?

Project Life: I've finished editing the August photos and I've almost finished getting the September photos ready for printing. Just the hybrid 3x4 photos for the month overview to go. (The most time consuming of the lot.)

One Little Word: I've decided on my word. I can't decide whether to use an 8.5 x 11 album as Ali suggests, or go with my idea of an A4 art journal. In the mean time I've cut out the 18 cards for the January project. Yes, that is actual progress.

And just for something different, this is my set up for my diary/staying organised system for 2013. If there's anything that contrasts more with the vintage stationery look, I'd like to see it.

This is my Masterplan Diary, Lamy rollerball pen (thanks to Santa aka my Mum), Delfonics ball point pen (thanks to the lovely people at Notemaker who gave me the pen as part of their pen amnesty in 2011) and a Rhodia No.13 pad for taking notes during the day (thanks also to Santa aka my sisters in law).

With this system, I'm trying to integrate my daily planning and record-keeping with the photos I take, so that putting together my album won't be too difficult, and won't require too much searching through my stuff to find out exactly why I took that photo three months after the event. Also I intend to keep up to date, so that I don't have to go back months to find out why I took that photo.

Next step: reduce the number of photos I take ;-)



* I put the some of the blame for this on the new vintage stationery and letterpress store that recently opened in our town. It's made me want to get out the typewriter (which is still in storage) or even hand write some letters on beautiful paper. I refer you to number 21 on my list of 100 things to do in 2013. But first things first, let's get this digi scrapbooking under control . . .

100 things to do in 2013

I've been sort-of trying to get my mind and my life back into some sort of order now that I'm back at work. I thought I was making progress in getting things back on track after the disruption of moving house last year, but then along came the festive season, ad my will-power went on holidays too.

One of the things I've been working on over the last few days is a list of 100 things to do in 2013. I'm struggling to get to 100 and, of those that I have, I'm worried that a few of them sound awfully like New Year Resolutions, which I resolve not to make.

Whatever, I'm working through the process and have come up with a list of (almost) 100 things to do this year, including habits to get into (or get back into in some cases). The habits will be things I'll work on during the year - they aren't things I expect to start all at once in January and stick to all year. Rather, I hope that by the end of the year I'll have made progress in them.

So, to keep myself honest, here are the ones I'm prepared to talk about. Maybe even blog about.

1. Improve my eating habits to make at least 90% of my diet free of processed food.
2. Reach my target weight (lose about the same again as I lost in 2012).
3. 15,000 steps per day.
4. Complete my 2012 Project Life album.
5. Keep up to date with 2013 Project Life.
6. Eliminate gluten.
7. Do the One Little Word workshop.
8. Plan a new herb garden.
9. Start a small vege garden (along the lines of the book One Magic Square).
10. Keep the house organised (establish routines).
11. Finish the DVD from our 2011 holiday for Juniordwarf.
12. Make DVDs for Juniordwarf for events from 2012.
13. [Private]
14. Scrapbook more.
15. Get back into routines I'd started last year.
16. Regular weekly "me time".
17. Weekly meal plan.
18. Go to bed before 11 pm.
19. Blog at least three times a week.
20. Learn to make yogurt.
21. Use beautiful stationery.
22. Reduce alcohol intake.
23. Get back into yoga.
24. Sew something. Anything. Just use the damn sewing machine!
25. Keep my One Line A Day journal.
26. Buy decent walking shoes.
27. Go to a National Park I've never been to.
28. Go camping at least twice.
29. Internet-free time.
30. Ride my bike.
31. Get my bike in a rideable condition.
32. Read []
33. Read []
34. [Private].
35. Read []
36. [] project.
37. Make bread. Maybe gluten free.
38. Start DVDs for Juniordwarf's 1, 2 and 3 years.
39. Eat more vegetables.
40. Give Mrs Smyth her mix tape CD of 2011 songs.
41. Donate blood.
42. Use some of my scrapbooking stash.
43. Drink more water.
44. Revisit my Happiness Project commitments.
45. Perspective!
46. New habit: if it takes less than 2 minutes, do it now.
47. New habit: put stuff away where it belongs straight away.
48. Make a list of jobs that I can do in 5/10 minutes for when I have a short gap in my day.
49. Laugh more.
50. [Private].
51. Do parent help in Juniordwarf's class.
52. Drink more herbal tea.
53. Get a notice board for the kitchen.
54. Get a notice board for the study.
55. Decorate the study.
56. Order the new blind for the dining room.
57. Take a photo that I want to display in the house.
58. Set up a worm farm with Juniordwarf.
59. Watch the Wizard of Oz with Juniordwarf.
60. Make decent dinners on Sunday nights for leftovers for weekday lunches.
61. Declutter regularly.
62. Go to MONA.
63. Do NaNoWriMo.
64. Be more organised at work.
65. [Private]
66. Make vanilla essence.
67. Make tomato sauce.
68. Enter a photo in at least one show.
69. Submit a layout to Creating Keepsakes.
70. [Private]
71. Appreciate the small things.
72. Notice things.
73. [Private]
74. Visit every antique shop in our town at least once.
75. [Private]
76. Change my hair colour.
77. Decide what to do with the old chest of drawers.
78. Find a magazine rack side table.
79. Go on a yoga retreat.
80. Turn my handwriting into a font.
81. Write the children's story that has been in my head for years.
82. Learn some basic Italian.
83. Use hand cream more often.
84. Cull some more books.
85. Avoid footy tipping.
86. Finish The Mysterious Island.
87. Participate in a semi-regular blog linkup.
88. [Private]
89. Do a cyber crop.
90. Write to my Aunt.
91. Stand up for myself.
92. Investigate ways of making my work environment more conducive to the work I'm doing.
93. Don't buy stuff I don't need.
94. Reduce/reuse/recycle.
95. Use most lunch breaks for walking, not shopping.
96. Keep better track of my spending & the household budget.
97. Take down the not-an-Xmas tree.
98. Stop using the couch as storage.
99. Fix the things that have to be fixed, or throw them out.
100. Don't stress if I don't do everything on the list.
101. Reward myself when I do something on the list.

That's a pretty full list - as I was writing this post, the final few things came into my mind, so the list is now complete. Yay! There should be ample blogging material there for me to achieve #19 at least.

If you have a similar list for 2013 on your blog I'd love to read it - just leave me a link in the comments section :)

Now I'm off to get all my stuff off the couch.

camping

Last week Slabs, Juniordwarf and I went camping at Mt Field National Park.

We really love going there, and it's been the subject of several previous posts (examples here and  here). It's wonderful to be so close to such a beautiful place, so peaceful and so far removed from the rest of our lives.

I've already told the story of how Zoe went swimming on our walk to Russell Falls. Here are some photos to tell the rest of the story.

Slabs and Junordwarf did some fishing

Lake Fenton, where we had hoped to see a glorious sunset, but it wasn't to be

The amazing colours of these trees almost made up for the lack of a sunset

They were beautiful trees

Pandani on the Urquhart Track near Lake Dobson

Eagle Tarn

Mt Field from Maydena

Russell Falls

A grateful Juniordwarf and Zoe after the great rescue

Juniordwarf is getting the hang of using the camera

Tyenna River, right where we camped

Tall trees at dusk. They really are massive!

We had only intended to stay for two days, so we weren't too put out when we were told on the Thursday night we would have to leave by 9 am the next morning as they were closing the park due to the forecast high temperatures (forecast 39 degrees, it actually reached 41 in Hobart) and strong winds, combined with the fact that there was a bushfire relatively nearby.

It seemed impossible to imagine, in the cool and still of the evening, that such conditions could eventuate. But eventuate they did, and not long after we got home, the sun came out, the clouds disappeared and Tasmania sweltered and burned.

Late on Friday afternoon, the sky around town looked like this

from the fire that had prompted the precautionary closure of the park. It was nowhere near us, but it was still a fearsome sight. In the following days we heard of heartbreaking losses from communities around the state, especially around the Tasman Peninsula.

Today it is a lot cooler, even though the rest of Australia had its turn for record temperatures, but the fires are still burning and everyone is hoping for some relief very soon.

the Zoe saga continues

You might remember this post from about six months ago, where I told the story of losing Juniordwarf's teddy Chocolate-the-Girl (AKA Zoe).

Just recently, Chocolate has now taken on her real name of Zoe. In fact, she's always been Zoe, according to Juniordwarf. Chocolate is her nickname.

One Sunday late last year Juniordwarf informed us that Zoe would be leaving school (this is the class of teddies that Juniordwarf "teaches" in every free moment he has) and. at the ripe old age of six, would be opening a shop. She would spend Monday at work with me for the last time, on Tuesday she would be at our house setting up the shop and cooking the food, and the shop would open on Wednesday.

And from Wednesday, our house wasn't going to be a house any more. It was going to be Zoe's shop. Yep, we were pretty excited that our new house was going to be taken over by a small orange muppet. However, we were assured we would be able to continue to be here. How considerate!

The shop would be called Zoe's Kitchen and was going to have pretty much everything you could imagine, including a huge pie warmer for the party pies and sausage rolls.

He told us that the shop was going to be open every day, bascially from the time he got up to the time I went to bed at night. (It would be my job to take Zoe to bed each night, as the shop would be open later than Juniordwarf's bed time.) I asked him when Zoe was going to do all the cooking, after the first day of cooking and preparing, to restock the shop once the food started to be sold, but he didn't quite get the idea that things would run out if you sold them all.

Anyway true to his word, he set Zoe up in her shop first thing on the Wednesday, and ever since then she has been sitting in her shop until it's time for bed. She hasn't had a single day off.

That is, until Wednesday, when we went camping. Juniordwarf said that Zoe was going to come with us, and one of the other teddies was installed in Zoe's Kitchen.

As soon as Juniordwarf's tent was set up, he put Zoe inside and said that her shop was now in his tent. Including the pie warmer, apparently. I'm not sure what that left in the shop at home though. And it's not much of a holiday for poor Zoe.

Well, she did get a break. We went for a couple of walks in the national park, and Juniordwarf insisted on bringing Zoe with us. That was fine until she, er, went for a swim off the bridge.

I didn't see what happened, but Slabs said that Juniordwarf was dangling Zoe over the edge of the bridge and let go.

He was, as you can imagine, distraught, and my first instinct was to step into the creek to pull her out. Only the creek bed was something not dissimilar to quicksand* and I had to get out before I sank. Hello filthy, soaking wet shoes.

Calmer heads prevailed and we waited for her to float slightly closer. A combination of very careful creek walking and a long stick saw Zoe rescued and returned to a grateful Juniordwarf. Afterwards Slabs said it would probably have been easier to fish her out from the bridge, which, in hindisght is probably true.

Anyway the teddy was safe and no harm was done.

There are no photos of the actual incident (and thankfully none of my near immersion in the creek), so here are two after-the-event pictures. Juniordwarf's version and mine:

I asked where the water was, but he said that was too hard and he'd done his best.

Where's Zoe?**

Despite all that, we did have a fun camping trip and we saw some very cool trees, but that's another post.



* author asserts the right to over-dramatise events in places.
** author claims no Photoshop expertise.

organising project life

In my last post I said that I was several months behind in my Project Life album for 2012. I tried to keep up, but once I got a little bit behind it became easier and easier not to do anything, and the photos built up and up.

If I was less of a perfectionist, I'd probably say something like, "stuff it, I'm just going to grab a few of the most memorable photos from each month and make a couple of spreads for each month and be done with it in a day or two".

Alas, I am not that person. I feel like my album is half full with the style I went with at the start of the year (note I never got around to posting Part 2 of that post . . .) so it would look weird to suddenly do a truncated version for the rest of the year.

So I've made a start at sorting, organising and editing the rest of my photos from July to December.

It's become a four-stage process.

I met a fellow Aussie Project Lifer, @Kelmscott_Girl, on Twitter a few days ago, and her post on catching up had some great ideas about keeping your photos under control.  I also recently discovered that I can create folders in iPhoto (on my Mac), which has made the sorting process a lot easier. (Yeah, I know, I've been using Macs most of my life and I didn't know about folders . . . )

So, on to what I've been doing.

Stage 1 is simply sorting out which photos I might want to use. I create a smart album in iPhoto for all the photos I took in the month. Then I made a copy of that album as a normal album, so I can delete the photos as I transfer them into their subject album (this is probably not necessary, but you can't delete photos out of a smart album and I like to be able to see which photos I've allocated and which ones I haven't used).

I create standard albums for each month:

• Little photos (for the Design F summary page - like the card below)
• Random photos (with one or two photos per event)
• Photos of the boy doing random stuff (same)

Then I create individual albums for events or things that will have one or two pages devoted to them.

I make a folder for the month and put all these albums in it to keep the side bar tidy and so I don't get lost.

Stage 2 is to decide which photos I will actually use, and which page protector design will work with them. Here is where I'll work out the structure of the month, because the design I choose for one set of photos will, to some degree, determine which photos I can use on the next page. For example, I can't follow a right hand Design A page (the 6x4 landscapes) with a page of portrait-oriented photos on the left on the next spread.

I write this all down with basic page designs so I know where to put the photos when I get them printed. Then I export the photos into equivalent folders into my Project Life folder ready to edit.

Stage 3 is editing in Photoshop Elements. This could be simply tweaking the levels or cropping and resizing, or it could be creating photo montages, or making hybrid journal cards like this one (from the Little Photos album).

A word about the hybrid journal cards. They seemed like a great idea when I started doing them, but they take more time than I thought they would. I'm not totally sure whether it's any easier than cutting out the photo and hand writing the card. But I kind of committed to the style this year, so I want to stick with it to the end. It also means I have A LOT of my Project Life kit left because I've done so much work with the digital kit.

The final stage is to print the photos and put them into the physical album, filling in any journalling cards that I haven't already done on the computer. This is where I tend to procrastinate, as I'm not good at journalling. I use a date stamper for the dates, as this came with the original Project Life kit in 2010, but I've decided to stop using it after this year. It's easier to hand write the dates.

After all that, as of today, I've got July ready for printing, I've sorted and organised August and September and I've culled October, November and half of December.

My approach isn't as simple as I'd like it to be, so I'm hoping to streamline it in 2013. Also I don't intend to get six months behind again, so I won't need to be doing six months at once!

it's been a busy year

Regular readers of this blog (if I still have any left) will notice that this is my first post in over three months.

I'm not really sure where to take this blog now. In 2011 I achieved my goal of blogging my 365 Project every day, and earlier this year I managed to post semi-regularly, which dropped down to almost never.

As the year went on I felt like I didn't need to blog like I did last year. It wasn't as important, and there was no real incentive to do it. So I didn't.

Part of me says maybe it's time to get rid of it. I don't really see myself as a "blogger",  I don't interact with a lot of people's blogs (and those that I do are mostly people I know personally), and I'm not really into the blogging "scene".

On the other hand, I like having this space. I can post things when I want to get something out there, or share stuff with my family, friends and readers (and any random strangers who happen to pass by . . .)

The upshot is I'm not sure. If I do keep it, I want to try and post more regularly than I have this year.

So while I'm thinking about it, here are some of the things I might have posted about this year if I'd been blogging more often.

First up, we moved house in October, so from the time we made the offer on the new house in July to now, when things are almost as we need them to be in the new house, my life has been mostly packing, decluttering, getting a house ready to sell, more packing, moving, unpacking, moving stuff around, more unpacking, more decluttering. And that has resulted in me being six months behind in my Project Life album for 2012, among other things.

Just some of the packing that had to take place

 Following in Slabs' footsteps, both Juniordwarf and I started our own radio shows on the local community radio station.

We opened the bottle of Millennium Ale that we'd had sitting around since, well 1999.

I had a hair cut after about nine months of not being bothered to pick up the phone and make a hair appointment. Goodbye long hair (again).

 We chased a rainbow up the river.

 Juniordwarf turned six.

 We made the occasional visit to the Two Metre Tall Farm Bar, and Juniordwarf enjoyed the puddles.

I participated in the Walk To Work Day photo competition and my photo collage made the Top 20. I also participated in a 10,000 Steps pedometer challenge and (just) met my goal of 1 million steps in ten weeks.

My boy picked me some flowers

Juniordwarf continue to improve his swimming.

We had a weekend in Launceston to celebrate our wedding anniversary

Re-enacting our wedding. What?

Family snapshot

We saw a baby monkey at City Park

The Chairlift at Cataract Gorge

Stopover at Holm Oak Wines . . .

. . . and Moores Hill

Willow Court Open Day. This is the Barracks.

I got to know Mrs Spider (with seven legs), who resided on my kitchen window, until I had to move her so that we could fit the window screens, and sadly she never came back.

We got some chickens. Say goodbye to the vege garden.

A new local market was set up in December and I was the lucky winner of their first email prize. It's a great idea and I'm looking forward to seeing the market grow in the new year.

Merry Xmas from Juniordwarf!

Yes, it really is Xmas.

And that's the past six months in a nutshell.  As to where I go from here, well I'm still thinking.

Happy New Year everyone :)