I do have other hobbies too.

Apart from my absolute passion for Project Life, I do have other (somewhat neglected) hobbies too. One of them is Mosaic. I haven't been doing it for a very long time, so I'm not that good at it - but I rather like the rugged look. It's something I really enjoy- mosaics. I think it's the element of play and really making something with your hands. I even enjoy the grouting and cutting tiles.

This little table has been a work in progress since last year. It stood around 90% finished for about two months. But at last I can call it done! As far as I'm concerned - my husband might still add some wheels and a dishtowel rail to make a handy little braai table out of it.

There it is, full of sunshine and happiness. Love that this little table has been in my family for years..it once served in my grandmother's kitchen, then for long it was tucked away forgotten, and now it has found a new purpose, and look to go with it.

Weekend update

This week-end we got up (fairly) early, stopped for croissants on the go, and then took a two hour drive.

We were finally taking the kids to Sun City for Reuben's Birthday treat.

I loved the Sunflower fields along the way.

I'm really not a theme park kind of girl. Give me the real ocean, or give me real and rustic, and I 'm happy. But it was a fun get-away out of Jo'burg.

We spent the day at the Wavehouse. A man-made beach (unbelievable the amount of sand that must have been brought in), complete with a "sea" and waves. The boys just loved playing in the water. Especially when it generates the big waves. It was a good day spent so far from any real beach. And it was so funny to be shaking sand out of our clothes back home in Jo'burg.

Sunday afternoon we took another walk at Emmarentia dam. Enjoying late summer.

And the late afternoon sun.

And all things real and rustic...

Project Life 2013 :: week 5

Week five was the week that Ali had her first "Day in the life" project for 2013. I initially decided not to play along, as I already had an insert for this week, and we had a fun outing planned for the week-end, ie. more photo's, but not really Every-day photo's. Come Friday night how-ever, my son fell ill and our week-end plans got postphoned. Somewhere on Saturday morning I felt like documenting the everyday routines of our week-end. They normally don't make it into the album because there's usually an outing on the week-end that gets documented instead. I also remembered documenting a stay at home week-end a few years ago, and how valuable those photo's are to me now.

So, I decided it's not too late to join, and did a mini week-end version of Day in the life.

But first a look at the entire page:

On the left: A canvas prize I won last year in a local paper's "Photo of the week" competition finally came home.  (That is a 2007 photo of my boys that I entered). Then a drawing by Reuben. I'm not sure why I'm in red high heels:) I only own red flat sandals.

Zoe is our Cocker Spaniel (not me), she's such a sweetheart, but a little high strung when it comes to visitors.

On the right I included a self-timer moment taken by the boys. They love selftimer photo's. (Word art is from Ali at Designer Digitals). Then a quote on something Liam said. It's in Afrikaans, and translates as:

 "Mama, look at my circus!" (him jumping into the pool).

The "Day in the Life" word-art is a freebie from Ali's Day in the Life post. Cutting machines around here cost about the same as a small African country, so I printed mine on a black background and cut it by hand.

I cut out the top left quarter of a Design A page to create a little insert for photo's I just couldn't leave out.

The little tag is a freebie, that I folded in half. It says "Heart" and I added "This selftimer moment".

Here you see the little insert turned over. The photo top right I've taken of my boys admiring a backdated 2008 PL album I'm also working on. I got intelligent questions such as "Did our nappies stink a lot" etc :).

The 10 000 card marks the number I've reached in Pins on my Pinterest boards. Crazy.

And the two photo collages then documents my mini "Day in the Life" for Sat and Sun :

SAT::Waking up with Husband (week-days he's usually up before I'm awake), our standard Sat. Breakfast, a trip to the library, and more errands on a pretty hot day.

SUN:: Sunday school duty (discussing using your talents), relaxing at home, eating mango icecream, and bath-time. The orange star card folds open and documents it all pointwise.

I also slipped a piece of folded paper behind the white card, just to tell a few more precious stories of Liam right now. Like the Treasure Island fantasy game he and a few friends have going at school. The fact that he wants me to lie down and listen to piano music, and that he loves me to the moon and then ten thousand billion times around the sun and back.:) Important stuff of life right now.

Thanks for making it through this long post!

Happy to say that I'm now up to date with my 2013 Project Life posts.

Not familiar with Project Life? You can find out about this memory keeping system on Becky's Blog.

Want to know more about the Day in the Life project? Check out Ali's blog.

Project Life 2013 :: Week 4

Still so exciting to be sharing my PL on-line. And so love this Project! (That's actually an understatement).

I'll start with sharing some Photography Tips from this week:

(these are just things I'm learning along the way - no expert!)

Tip # 1: Try to bring light into your photo's. It really adds so much life to a page. One way of doing this is to shoot into the sun at late afternoon (or early morning ). I also find that the point and shoot camera's tend to have more of a glow when there's light involved (as opposed to my SLR).

You might also find this pin on working with backlight and sunflare quite useful.

Tip # 2: Explore the options of getting an underwater camera. There are relatively cheap ones out there.

This photo was taken with my sons little Nikon Coolpix.

And here's my week 4: 

(click on photo to enlarge)

On the left I'm documenting flowers in bloom outside our fence (there's actually 3 trees blossoming in 3 different colours.), a clothing tag and a photo's of Ali & Becky that I downloaded from the internet. On a freebie card I just typed a bit about them being the inspiration and creator behind my Project Life albums.

 Ali Edwards 's been my daily read for years, and always, always inspires me.

The card middle right documents the fact that I have 36 cousins on father's side. Something that's recently been brought to my attention when I connected with some of them on Facebook (I knew there were many).

PL tip : Keep an eye out for nice patterns inside corporate envelopes.

 The fine printed paper background was cut from the inside of an envelope. It contains many little numbers, which I thought matched the journaling.

The photo's at the bottom is from Interhouse atletics at school. The book-end journaling was actually also something I saw in Ali's PL album.

Photo tip # 3: Take a photo of a photo being taken. Great way to also capture the camera's you use.

(This was actually an idea I picked up from Trisha Harrison's 2011 album. A great PL!)

For me also capturing something I see a lot around here, with my son enjoying his new camera so much.

So happy about that!

The little bracelet (broken and missing a lot of beads) was something Reuben bought to support a "Save the Rhino" fund. He's very passionate about wildlife.

The black card far right was cut from the box of a Lamy pen that my husband bought himself. Behind it there's a card that he wrote on with the pen and some journaling about his love and search for a Lamy (pens are his thing), holding out for the right colour, and then walking into a very cluttered German stationary store, to find a whole rack with a wide selection of Lamy's. He was beyond thrilled!

Photo tip # 4: What is your magic time right now? Our's is late-afternoon pool time with the sun sparkling on the water.

The "Life" card lifts up to reveal some journaling on Life right now. I just hand drew around it with a grey koki, but Ali has some similar word-art available at Designer Digitals.

Not familiar with Project Life? It is a memory keeping system created by Becky Higgins. I see that she has a post called "Explaining Project Life" up today for newcomers.

Project Life 2013 :: Week 3

Welcome to Week 3...

Another full week as we celebrated Reuben's 8th Birthday.

Plus :: his main gift from us was his first camera = lots of photo's!

The left page starts with another "the kids were here" moment. I hope to do those through-out the year. Yep, that is a toy stuck to the ceiling.... The happy faces stamp was a gift from a non-scrapbooking friend, and just perfect to use on this page (to document our breakfast date). Middle photo is a view from our pool. The "hello afternoon" word art is a freebie, and I added "swims" in a similar font. Then - our live wire - Basjan, the Wire Haired Terrier. He's a camera magnet. And the party packs I made for Reuben's class.
I went with a "Back to school" theme and included some funky stationary with the sweets and chips.  The big 8 was stapled to the back of each party pack.

First insert: A Design E page protector cut in half to include some journaling I wrote about Reuben. Below is the cover of his birthday card that I cut up (with his permission, he saved the back containing our message).

While he was at school, I spur of the moment did a collage of  his eight years. Love it. (That's also where the inspiration for the journaling on the flipside came from, just thoughts that came up as I was selecting the photo's.)
Then I have an insert inspired by Tracy Larsen, where I included some black & whites of the (many) photo's taken with Reuben's new camera. They're not paying me to say this (they may if they want to hehe:), but we're all very impressed with this little shockproof, waterproof Nikon Coolpix camera designed especially for kids. It comes with all sorts of bells & whistles :- fun apllications like "fish eye " and "diorama" effect, frames, even plays music, and came in a really cool rugsack too. Great for giving them an early love for photography. It was interesting to see how much Reuben picked up from my Project Life photo's, doing foot photo's, his plate from above etc. Or perhaps it is as the Einstein quote says that every child is an artist, the trick is to stay one as we grow up...

This is the back of the last insert, and the page on the right. The two bottom photo's have similar journaling spots as both stories tell of how sweet my husband was over the week-end: to sort out my computer room, and keep the kids busy with invent-them-as-you-go stories while I had the flu. Both these photo's were actually taken with the little Nikon, as my SLR's shortest lens is a 50mm. Love having more options between the two camera's.

Hidden behind a journaling card (freebie), I included another photo of Reuben later on his Birthday, still mesmerised by his camera. I also wanted to include this photo as it captures him in the "normal" clothes he got to wear to school because it was his Birthday (as opposed to school uniform).

Oh yes, I do love this Project!

Not familiar with Project Life? It is a revolutionary memory keeping system designed by Becky Higgins. I'm using her Cobalt kit this year.

Project Life 2013 :: Week 2

Hello, and welcome to my PL catch-up post for week 2. This week marked the beginning of the school year in South Africa, so quite a full page (and also a bit of blurred out school related info, if you'll understand).

The left page just documents the last of their carefree at-home days, sleeping in, spending time in the pool... and getting school supplies ready. The non kit cards are freebies you can look up on my Pinterest boards.

The star t-shirt was a Pinterest project Liam did using fabric crayons and a star stencil that I cut for him.

The first insert actually documents the First Day Back @ school. I used a fold-up journaling card for each boy to document their first day back. (Liam's is on the flipside). I made the "Back to school" card by adding text to a "school" word art freebie I had. I use Microsoft's Photo Editing program for this, as I find it very user friendly.

This is the other side of the insert. More "Back to school" documenting. The blurred-out certificate is for First day in Grade R.

A drawing from Liam's first day, and on the right more of life right now:- Decluttering, painting Sting-rays, cocooning as a family, and a great dog walk we discovered. That's our Wire haired terrier of who'm you'll probably see a lot if you stick around. The journaling card on the left documents what's in Reuben's top drawer after a de-cluttering. Quite interesting. I'm not too happy about how grey the foot photo is looking, so will highlight it more and replace that one. I'm really wanting more white space on my photo's.

And that's Week 2. Thanks for stopping by.

PL 2013 :: Cover page and Week 1.

Hi,

I'm SO SO happy to be able to post again! I was errr... technically challenged blogwise for quite a while (think it had something to do with stuff not being updated), I tried a few things like opening another blog both here and somewhere else, but none of that was successful...but this blog sort of magically sorted itself out, and I'm back in blogland! And really feel the time is right for it. My computer room is decluttered, I got some photographing PL tips from Ali that seems to be working, and everything is just coming together here.

This is my FOURTH year doing Project Life. 2010 and 2011 were digital albums. Plan on working them into kits at some stage- so many lovely kits, right! Last year was my first kit album with the Turquoise kit. Loved it. I'm hoping to put all those pages on Flickr at some point. I'm also working on a backdated (Clementine) kit album for 2008. I'm sure there's a name for people like me, but I'm not the only one!

So, I'm happy to present my cover page for 2013:

I'm using the Cobalt kit this year. Living in South Africa, this one was the most accessible to me, as it was available via a local distributor - who apparently now stopped importing PL kits here :(. Hoping to get some of Becky's new kits in store locally!

Let me just say :: I don't think I look great on this photo - it was a very early morning, as we got up to take the 6 hr drive back home from the Berg. But the colours just went so well with this page (without it being planned). And I love the memory of this selftimer moment being taken off the bonnet of our car.. and the countryside morning being so crisp and beautiful, I had choose this one.

Here's WEEK ONE ::

My biggest struggle with PL? I always have too many photo's. I know there are people who some weeks don't have enough photo's, like there are people out there who are too thin and find it hard to put on weight. I'm just not one of those. So I started off my year having two pages for week one. At least this doesn't happen often. Here is the first page, left:

 It documents New Year's day in the Drakensberg where we were on holiday. And then our drive back home on the 2nd.

The right hand side just documents some trip details (that's us in The Wimpy), and my One Little Word for the year :: FORWARD.

The non-kit cards were freebies found via Pinterest. You can have a look at my Pinterest boards for all the Freebies I use. They should be either on my "Project Life 2012", "Project Life 2013" or a new board:  "PL freebies and card ideas". Have fun.

The arrows on the orange card came from the back of a plaster.

Week one, page 2, left::

 This page documents the rest of the week, back home in Joburg. I love that the sparkle in the water repeats on the card on the left. The card says in Afrikaans (our home language) ::  "Mom, if I'm on a cloud, could I stand, or will I fall through?" (quoted from my 5 year old). Bottom right I included a "kids were here" photo that I hope to keep as a theme popping up through-out the year. They are always here, but it just captures little things, like where their toys are, or a mess they've made etc. Moments that makes me stop and smile and think the kids were here...

 I love this one capturing Liam's toes being worn through underneath from all the pooltime he's been having. (Sorry about the glare, still getting there).

And week one, P2 right::

Haircuts before the school year starts, puppy time, and a fun Ten Pin bowling outing. You'll see I also included on the left page a card listing children's books bought that week.

 That's it. A long one. Thanks for hanging in there. I hope to update the blog next week with all my 2013 pages.