Project Life | Week 44

Hello and welcome to Week 28 October - 3 November.

This week I really felt it was time for a large photo... and I wanted to include some of the pirate maps Liam has been drawing a lot of.

But first the left side :: I think its the first time this year that I managed to use that specific date card :: Our new diningroom table and the story that goes with it :: A summary of the week. The journaling cards were freebies from Nisa Finn, I think :: I managed to get good photo's of both the pets this week, Zoe is usually very camera shy, but here it looks like she's posing. :: The first of my cherry tomatoes :: And a story box I made for the little kiddies at Sundayschool.

And here is our enlargement and another pirate map. I LOVE this photo, because it so much tells the everyday-life-right-now story. And the fact that Liam is doing a belly flop into the pool is telling me how much things changed since last year's swimming season.

I square cropped and divided up the page digitally, and then had them printed at a printer as single photo's.

Word art is from Ali, and available at Designer Digitals (who's having a sale right now, ending tomorrow). And that was Week 44.

Project Life | Week 43

Hello and welcome to Week 21-27 October. This week was a bit of a breather for me, as Theunis didn't have to be away from home on site. But the reason being that he was writing two exams during that week. (And still working very hard at the office). What can I say, the work play balance have been totally off for us this year.

This week ended up with a lot of violets, pinks and blues. All colours represented in the Cobalt kit. I think it can totally work just bringing out certain kit colours in a spread and letting the whole album combined then make up the colour scheme.

So here I was :: Making some progress on a Granny Square blanket I'm working on :: And this made my day: the boys playing with the fish-eye feature on Reuben's kiddie camera. The results were hilarious.

"Home sweet home" word art is from Ali @ Designer Digitals.

I went to a Christmas craft market and at home took a photo of the stuff I bought :: I also took a photo of a pirate map by Liam. He was drawing quite a few of them lately. I sometimes include the actual art, or take a closely cropped photo. Here I included some background :: Pink bunny was my first, and probably last, attempt at Arigurumi. I made it for someone's babyshower together with a lovely large muslin cloth I bought. Muslin cloth was one of my favourite baby products when my kids were small and I think it will be a go to babyshower gift for me. Idea: I photographed the bunny on some kitpaper for a background.

The babyshower was really cute with so many touches I didn't even photograph :: I'm glad we stopped en route somewhere to photograph the Jakaranda flowers. This time of year Joburg is full of the lilac blossoms and when it rains the streets are covered in it too.

Right now I'm thinking about my kit for next year. I think I'll be going with Sea Foam, but we'll see.

Project Life | Week 42

Hello and welcome to week 14 - 20 October. Catching up on posting PL spreads this week.

This was the last week of my Mom's visit... I love all the creams here (though not my favourite colour).

I couldn't find a datecard that quite went with the page, so made one from the (Cobalt) kit cardstock.

My Mom did a lot of knitting (for charity and also made the boys some beanies). Theunis was away on site again for a couple of days. We tried to Skype in this time, but the reception was so bad that we had to Skype & phone! I loved us dropping the kids off at school while he was away, and journaled a bit about our drop-off routine. I was so glad that he could be back for Reuben's Chess Prize night. His team got a Bronze in the regional trials, and the school did very well overall.

The highlight of the week was a daytrip for my Mom and I to Dullstroom (Theunis dropped us off on his 2nd trip to site that week). For those not too familiar with South Africa: It's a little tourist town known for charming shops and flyfishing is big in the area. Some of the things I loved: The chocolatier, the year round Christmas store, the Polly Potter Toy store, all the fresh country air, the charming old houses with rambling gardens, me and my Mom on a little adventure, the porcelain art, the craft shop (of course), and eating deluxe pancakes at Harries Pancakes. Oh, and the Tsonga shoe shop. It is an empowerment project for rural women and there were beautiful large photographs on the walls of some of the women contributing to the project.  

I added a flip-open pocket for a few more Dullstroom photo's.

Other things recorded this week :: Eating rusks with my Mom (in our PJ's) on slower mornings. It's a little tradition- I always make rusks for when she visits. I found the sparkly circle in my beadstash and thought it perfect to record us going to see the Diana movie (so much a Mom & daughter outing). For Saturday I liked this foot photo instead of a busy picture of the party the kids attended. And Sunday we were saying goodbye again. We really prefer the smaller Lanseria airport to the busier OR Tambo. Great to have a choice!

I'll be linking up at The Mom Creative on Tuesday.

Project Life | Week 41

Welcome to Week 7 - 13 October. And yep, he's holding a cloud.

This was the 2nd week of my Mom's visit...

My husband is in the commissioning phase of his two year project and away on site a lot. The photo of him at the bakkie is me saying goodbye to him for another weeklong site visit (gratefully it ended up being less than that). Feels like I'm saying goodbye to him all the time (although there are as many hello's as goodbyes if you think about it :-) :: Celebrating a Birthday in our Women's group :: Kids taking turns to sleep in my bed when Dad's away - that stopped because they're not very concientious co-sleepers :: I recently picked up a few wooden embellishments, mostly for December, but couldn't resist adding the star here.

Really appreciated how my Mom connected with the kids, getting involved with homework and games :: Mall and lunch outing for me & my Mom :: evening out for me and DH :: a trip out to a creative place where the kids made sand art :: and my turn at Sunday school. We talked about rain in our story so I made them a big cloud, which they loved. If you, for whatever reason, also want to know how to make a cloud, you can find the Pinterest link: here. It was actually surprisingly easy.

Wordart is from Ali, picked up at the Designer Digital's quaterly sale.

And that's Week 41, pretty straightforward.

Project Life | Week 40

Man am I glad to be back. It feels like forever since I've last been able to do a blogpost. But happy to say that the problems with the land line my homecomputer runs on have finally been resolved, and I'll be doing some catching up in the week to come.

So without further ado, welcome to Week 30 September to 6 October...

This was the week the kids went back to school after a short Spring break, and also the 1st week of my Mom's visit. Although it was great to have her here, my vision for the pages was to not just have a lot of portrait photo's of us with my Mom in different settings. (I've done that with previous visits). So here we have :: Last day of school break and lunch at the Spur and some time on the Go-carts :: Liam dropping off his bag in his classroom :: and some ABC's by Liam.

This page :: My crazy Jeronimo's in the pool. I added a fabric Everyday tag found with clothing I purchased :: a date night we seized while my Mom was here to babysit :: the dotty card is a Birthday invite Reuben got for the Saturday. We all went into different directions as he and Dad attended the party, my Mom and Liam went to make pizza and chill at a coffeeshop/playarea, and I attended a pendant making workshop. My Mom joined me later to browse through the many stalls at HobbyX. I was a bit dissapointed with what the Scrapbooking stalls had on offer. No Projectlife products anywhere in sight, or any of the stuff I fancy on the Internet. I got a few things for my Christmas pages though.

A pull-out card tells the story of the day.

And here is a close-up of the pendand I made. This is actually the back, the front has a raised heart outline on it. This was such an awesome process to work with silver clay and then to see how the clay turns to silver after firing (by hand) and brushing. Loved it.

I'll be linking up at Simple as that for their Saturday share, and The Mom Creative for Project Life Tuesday.

Hello....

Hi,

I've been absent from my regular blog posts lately. My home computer uses our landline to connect to the Internet. It appears that an underground cable for this landline have been affected by lightning and the people supposed to fix it is taking a very long time to get the job done.

I'm posting via laptop right now. It used to also be connected via the same source, but I've managed to get connected via a little Vodafone device. (Hear between the lines about two weeks of no Internet and a mission to get this other option sorted out.) As soon as I've figured out how to upload photo's via laptop, or they sort out our landline, I'll be back at blogging and catching up on Project Life posts. In the meantime I'm enjoying making huge progress with my backdated 2008 album.

Ps: Please note that I'm also not able to get into my Inbox right now. Please leave any messages on my blog. Thank you and take care..

Project Life | Week 39

Hello and welcome to Week 23-29 September. The week of school break influenced a fun page playing with colour and circles. 

My use of colour is also to an extent dictated by the colourful Cobalt kit I'm using this year. And I think it goes well with the ages of my boys. I'm planning on using the Seafoam kit next year, and will see how that influences the photo's I go for...

 This page :: Top photo was entirely inspired by one I saw on Ali's blog some time ago :: We tried out a new frozen yogurt place - icecream on tap and add your own sprinkles = fun (the frame used was a freebie from somewhere) :: Braai in the neighbourhood & sparkles for the kids (we now have so many kids in the circle we live in) I digitally made a blank circle and added a day of the week sticker and handwritten journaling after printing. All the other circle Wordart is from Ali - AE Circle messages Vol 1&2 - and  available at Designer Digitals :: I'm not sure what they were doing with the dogbath and hosepipe , but they had a great time (and the pool got filled and garden watered) ...

On this page :: More water fun :: a collage of their games & crafts over the schoolbreak- temporary tattoo's are becoming a holiday tradition here, Reuben did a selfportrait with a transparency on a mirror (idea pinned here.) and made fridge magnets on printable magnet sheets (previously blogged here.). Theunis took the photo of Reuben and the dogs (he doesn't pick up the camera often, but when he does, it's usually great photo's) :: I took the one of the Tuscan looking building against the dramatic skies. Shot out of the car when we stopped at a robot (This is part of Montecasino, Jo'burg loves all things Tuscan) ...

The photo of the gift has a journaling card at the back. It tells a  story and a deeper story that links to it :: The photo of us was taken by my Mom who flew in on the Saturday. She wanted a bragbook photo of the four of us. I added the "us" in felt stickers and drew the rest by hand. 

 I photographed these photo's a while ago and have since added my Mom's boarding pass to the stripey card.

  I'll be linking up at The Mom Creative (Tuesday) and Simple as That (Saturday).

Project Life | Week 38

Hello and welcome to Week 16-22 September. I'm still very current with this project, and hope to catch up with posting over the next week or so. Right now life is out of it's normal routines with my Mom visiting and hubby being away a lot for work.  Grateful for PL to keep some grasp on what's happening with time.

This week here was fairly routine still. No inserts or extra photo's.

This page starts with an out-of-focus selfie of me getting some early morning on-line inspiration. Love it out of focus, as for me it records a week starting as a challenge :: Then there's a block  of everyday life moments :: Leggo (or something similar) instructions :: Liam in his school t-shirt after a visit from an animal farm to the school (he loved the porcupine and baby lion) :: Cake photographed at a little birthday celebration at a friend's (remember kicking off our shoes, sitting in the breeze and chatting about keeping silkworms and some-one's daughter's gap-year at a sculptor's family in the Karoo) :: Reuben staying out of school the one day (he had a sore foot on the day they had athletic trials) and us playing Monopoly.

On this page :: First salad crop from the potted garden (hand drawn word-art) :: Taking the kids for a practice photoshoot. The "Why I love this photo" card tells the story of me bribing them to pose. On that particilar photo you can see Liam totally at the end of his smiles but still putting in an effort for me. Love that :: The actual photo shoot was for a friend's daughter's matric dance. The beauty you see  here. It was my first official "shoot" and I so enjoyed it. Might do a blog post about it. The "Hello story" card was made from word art by Ali (that I recently picked up at the Designer Digitals sale) and has a pull out card behind it that tells the story of the photo session :: And the card bottom right contains a ribbon with text printed on it. I attended the Shine Women's conference and high tea at Bryanston Church and the ribbons were included in our goodie bags. It was such an uplifting morning, with great guest speakers. More about it here. 

I'll be linking up at The Mom Creative (Tuesday) and Simple as That (Saturday). 

And if any Project Life'ers missed it and would be interested: The Design Team call for 2014 is out on Becky's Blog and closing Sunday, 20 October.    

Kids' Art Fridge Magnets

I recently bought a pack of Printable Magnets sheets. The idea was to print some intsagram/polaroid looking photo's on them and then use it as fridge magnets. (Still planning to do that). There's a cool idea of this found on Elise's blog, pinned here. But then an idea popped into my head that we had to try.

I thought, if they're printable, they should be draw-able too...

So my eager-to-crafter had fun drawing images onto the paper. And colouring them. It was very easy to cut them out. 

And just like that we had fridge art that we love.

More ideas: I'm defnitely thinking of printing kids' artwork in frames onto the magnetic paper, looking something like this. Then I think kids' art cut out and laminated like this would also look great with a magnet glued to the back. And these shrink plastic ones were adorable too! 

PS: Locally I found the Printable Magnet sheets at the plastic shop at Lifestyle Centre, Randburg.

Project Life | WITL Week-end

Welcome to the 2nd spread of my WITL week, this one being all about our Week-end. A little trip to the charming town of Parys, and an overnight stay on the Vaal river.

I again went with some favourite photo's for the large pockets. This one's for Saturday. I have a previous post where I uploaded just the photo's & stories here.

And then I added some business card pocket pages again for more photo's of the day. Day of the week highlighted with felt letter stickers from Typo. They go on top of the plastic leaving the block transparent. Film strip washi tape added in the gap between photo's.

I still need to add a Sat & Sun tab onto those inserts.

Loved how willingly Reuben posed for that photo against the door.  Love how much of his personality shines through in that photo. A favourite :)

Here is the middle section of the two insert pages. On the left: more of Sa, and then on the right Sun. I cut the logo from complimentory stationary at the place where we stayed.

Sunday was also fully blogged here. The "Mamma" card (Afrikaans spelling of Mama) was actually cut from a birthday envelope. Not directly relevant to the day, but it landed up in the album and was showing through the transparent page and I liked it so much there that in it went.

 I thought the the quote freebie from Rebecca's blog, Simple as that was perfect to end my Week in the Life project with. It reads: "One day it dawned on her that life was not going to happen some time in the future. She realized that her happiness was right here and right now. "  

It certainly resonates me as something I've learned along the way.

Not familiar with Week in the Life? Read all about it on Ali's blog

I'll be linking up at Simple as that's Saturday share, and also at The Mom Creative on Tuesday.

Everything Project Life can be found on Becky's blog.

Project Life | Week 37 & WITL

Welcome to Week 9-15 September 2013. This was of-course the week a lot of us participated in Ali's Week-in-the-Life project. I did blog on it during the actual week, posting the photo's day by day, but as mentioned, I only got on board on the Wednesday, finding it too inspiring to resist. Here's how it all came together in my Project Life album. (I didn't do a seperate album for WITL)

I again forgot to add the date before photographing the pages! WITL felt alphabet from Typo. Monday and Tuesday didn't really have a many photo's. (The day of the week digital art was a freebie from Design Editor, I think). The selftimer photo of me and Liam is a little blurry- defnitely place for those in my album too. As from Wednesday I added two "normal" photo's per day. The first double page lay-out goes to Friday, and the week-end continues on another spread..

And off-course I had a few more photo's to add. For this I used businesscard sheets that I was very fortunate to come across in the week I was photographing this project. (Locally available from the Plastic place in Lifestyle centre, Randburg) I added some Washi tape down the middle to fill the gap.

Wednesday continues on the back of the first insert...

...And on the right we have Thursday...

Thursday continued, and Friday... Those selftimer photo's with the kids are really the gift of this week's project for me. The photo's I don't usually think of taking.

(If you look reeeally closely you'll see I added a little tea tag here, and a little washi tape camera there...)

 I added some of Wednesday's photo's to Friday, as I had too much of the one and too little of the other. The dishwasher etc, things that haven't changed in three days.

 And that's the last page (week-end continues in a next post). Oh yes, I do like me some pink, even if my album is mostly about my boys.

The Katrina Kenison quote was found via Ali, I think. I had it written in my diary for some time, and it was just perfect for this week. It says: "It has taken me awhile, but I certainly do know it now- the most wonderful gift I finally learned to cherish above all else, was the gift of all those perfectly ordinary days."

Yes, if documenting my life taught me nothing else, it certainly taught me how precious everyday life is.