The Designer Digitals 2nd Quarter sale is on now through next Wednesday at 3 a.m. E.S.T. Everything in the store is marked down 30%. You can find my collection by clicking here. It's a great time to save on anything you might have your eye on or what to try out!
OBSERVATIONS: Another week, another set of photos and stories I love. The process of putting this together each week is really becoming a true labor of love; a chance to look at the notes I've taken and the photos I've shot, and see what our lives looked like for another one week stretch. It's good stuff, people. It truly was a joyful week. Here are my pages.
My favorite photo this week is a tie between me and Dan, and the red heart. The red heart came home with Dan and serves as a reminder that our time apart was a key for re-connection. Using InDesign, I typeset a line of text from an email he wrote while he was there.
Sigh. A little slice of romance indeed. Moving on…
Thank you, Aidan Zielske, for taking this picture. I love your eye.
And speaking of my first born, here's a wee story about her.
And no early summer would be complete without the Zielskes finally getting around to burning our Christmas tree. Note to self: up your homeowners insurance for the next round. That thing was a pyre of potential disaster.
And that concludes our coverage of Week Nineteen for Project Life.
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Project Life, created by Becky Higgins, is a flexible, easy-to-use, highly customizable way to save your memories in a fun, stress-free way. Learn more about getting started with Project Life by clicking here.
I'm getting on a plane tonight for the first time since the fall of 2008. I don't really go anywhere very often via large metal flying machine. I used to, back in the glory days of Simple Scrapbooks magazine, when I'd fly to beautiful Salt Lake City (read: Draper) for editorial meetings every 8 weeks.
Even though I got good at packing light, carrying my bag on, keeping my liquids in their tiny plastic 3-oz containers, I never really loved the traveling.
I remember thinking back then, "How did this get to be part of my job as a graphic designer?" Graphic designers sit alone in darkened rooms very much engaged with terra firma. Flying places for work was something my Dad did when I was growing up. Was I really that grown up?
I made this page in 2008 to document the fact that I'd become a fly girl.
It's funny. I still carry the same purse (although my present one is in black) and I still bring as much in-flight entertainment as possible (my iPad is loaded up with three flicks). Hopefully, it'll be smooth sailing all the way to good old Seattle, Washington, the city of my birth.
One thing that hasn't changed for me as a traveler is that even though there is always a bit of excitement or nervousness on fly day, there is also the part of me that truly wishes her feet wouldn't be leaving the ground at all.
Up, up and away, as they say.
Yesterday was one of the nicest days I can recall in the annals of Mother's Day history.
To all of you mothers out there, or those who are mother figures in anyone's lives, I hope you all feel loved and appreciated as often as humanly possible.
OBSERVATIONS: This week was all about two things: Dan and changing up the color scheme. Lucky for me, Dan's best friend is a serious photog who sent me 650 photos from Dan's 11 days in Slovenia. I would download them from Facebook as I eagerly followed along with their daily adventures.
One of the photos, the image of grafitti that says "I love her," informed the color direction for this week. I decided to go with a drabish mustard. There's no law in Project Life that says you can't change up a week, right? I also went with more black and white photos than in past spreads, which I may continue here and there. I liked the monochromatic feel of this spread, with the litle bursts of color provided by Dan's Slovenian Adventure.
The other thing here? Dan. Featured heavily. And why not? I mean he's not hard on the eyes, people.
This week I created a few new products which will be on sale this weekend at Designer Digitals as well. Let's take a look at the pages for this week, shall we?
How fun is this? All Dan, all the time? Ridiculously fun, I'd say.
I used a Project Life folded card to write a more personal note about how vital this time apart for me and Dan was. You can read more about that here.
Here's my recap of the week with a new colored background in place.
One of my new products coming out this weekend is a layered 4 x 6 photo template set that includes simple black labels. Less wordy than Tiny Templates, there's just enough room for a sentence or a few words here and there.
You can change the color of the bars as well. Here, I wanted to continue to mustard theme.
And, a new month meant a new page divider. I'm not quite in need of a second album yet. I would say I'm going to have to break my Project Life into 2 binders. Mostly however, my pages are so flat that I really seem to be fitting a lot into the one I have.
And that is all she wrote for Week Eighteen.
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Project Life, created by Becky Higgins, is a flexible, easy-to-use, highly customizable way to save your memories in a fun, stress-free way. Learn more about getting started with Project Life by clicking here.
I posted last week that Dan, also known as My Better Half or My Partner in Crime and Therapy, spent 11 days visiting his best friend, Christopher, in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
It's been a coon's age since we've had this much time apart. Once in the 1990s he flew out to Santa Cruz for work for three weeks (I know, rough place to be), but that's the only other time we've been apart for any real length of time.
I've written here a few times, admitedly not much, that Dan and I have been working on our, for lack of a better word, shit, for the past few years. We've been a couple since 1989 and that has translated to an awful lot of stuff to work through, understand and figure out.
It has been and continues to be a slow process but a much needed one.
As we planned this getaway for him, part of me thought the time apart would be good for just chilling out, not thinking so much about 'us' all the time and just using the time to simply be. In other words, I thought I would use the time to check out mentally from always trying to work on myself and on us.
If there's one thing I'm learning, however, it's that checking out translates to very little progress ever being made. It's also a great way to avoid reality, something I've done an awful lot in my 46 years of living.
But the exact opposite happened. I wasn't prepared for the depth of the transatlantic communications that ensued. It seemed that by removing ourselves from the grind of everyday life, we were able to connect in a way that has been elusive during the past few years. We were able to lower our defenses and realize that sometimes, the mucky muck of our neurotic selves needs to take a back seat to love and kindess and nurturing and seeing what is right in front of you.
I believe anyone who's tried to work on a relationship knows that it can be incredibly challenging at times and that it can also seem effortless at others. I also believe that making the relationship work is not always the right path for every couple.
For Dan and I, it's the path we've both chosen, together, come Hell or high water or 11 days in Europe.
Or everyday life right here in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
As Dan wrote to me in an email on his fourth or fifth day there, which he sent with the very first picture of this post: "It shouldn't take a trip to Europe to realize how much I love her."
I think for both of us, this trip was exactly what was needed.
Thanks to Christopher and Kjara for providing so many wonderful photos from this adventure.
You remember last week when I posted about Aidan's most recent role in The Theater, yes? Well, I realized that it's all well and good how often I blog about my life, but I do need to make a page or two every now and then. So much of my documenting is being done via Project Life—and don't get me wrong, I'm loving this year long experiement—but I still want pages for the kids' albums too.
I grabbed a handful of photos from the show and designed a very simple, old school Cathy kind of layout. No bells and whistles, folks. Just words and photos.
Here's my simple page:
Here's what it looked like before I broke it apart for printing (I'll explain this below.)
JOURNALING READS: Aidan played the lead role in GRS’s first ever musical production, Bye Bye Birdie. Coming right on the heels of playing the White Witch in Narnia: The Musical, she was initially thrilled with getting the part, then the excitement waned just a bit for reasons of which we aren’t completely sure. But on the weekend of the performances, Aidan was really on. Her performance was memorable to say the least. The Shriner’s Club scene was laugh out loud funny. I had tears in my eyes watching my 16-year-old daughter trying to seduce a table full of those shocked Shriner’s Club members. The sight gags were so funny and so well done. We’re so proud of her for doing these shows. It’s quite a remarkable thing to see your child up there being simply amazing. Way to go, yet again, Miss Aidan. Your curtain call was well deserved.
DESIGN NOTES: This is a very simple, photo-intensive page with an asymmetrical balance, in the sense that if you divide this page down the center, the elements are not equal to one another. Notice also the space between the photos and the journaling—all equal on purpose to create an underlying sense of unity. Notice the inch wide cushion of space that surrounds the entire design. This adds a bit more breathing room to a content-rich page. A little note: having the black title box break out of the frame outline and bleed to the edge also adds a small element of surprise to an otherwise very straightforward design.
TECHNICAL NOTES: I designed the entire page using Adobe InDesign. Then, I moved the copied the photos and the title box into a new doc to print those out onto photo paper. Then I printed the remaining journaling and box outline onto white cardstock. I've been doing his process for years. Rather than just print the whole design onto a sheet of 8.5 x 11 photo paper, it gives me the opportunity to do the cutting and pasting that I love in hybrid scrapbooking. One cool tip: I use a program plug in for InDesign called Cropmarks from Cacidi. This little plug in allows you to add crop marks (trimming guides) to each individual photo. Why is this important? It allows you to extend the photo a bit past your crop marks for a true trim to size, so that what you designed is what you end up being able to create.
DIGITAL VERSION: I created a fully layered digital version of this template that you can find here.
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ABOUT ARCHIVER'S: Archiver's is THE place for photos, memories, and creativity! The stories, photos, and memories of your life are important, and we want to help you share them. Our stores are filled with thousands of creative supplies for scrapbooking, fresh ideas to inspire, cool solutions for digital photos, savvy ways to preserve your memories, fun classes and workshops to get you started, plus supplies for card-making and paper-crafting, too. Or, shop online anytime at ArchiversAnnex.com!
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OBSERVATIONS: I love it when there's lots of stuff to take pictures of in a week. Granted, this doesn't happen every time, and it's always surprising to me how many shots I have to choose from even on the seemingly uneventful weeks.
But last week? We had The Theatre, people. And when you have The Theatre (said with a haughty, dramatic, vaguely British accent), you've got photographic gold, baby.
I received an inexpensive, refurbished Canon 70-300 zoom lens last Christmas and I was not expecting it to be as great as it has been for shooting in such low light and at such high resolution, but I'll be damned if it isn't pretty dag nab good. (You remember the Theatre post from the other day, yes?)
Here are my pages for the week:
If you see the dark, grainy photo of Dan Zielske, that's from our first FaceTime video chat after his arrival in Slovenia. I took a simple screen shot to save the image. Oh, technology. You are amazing.
More photographic gold from The Theatre indeed. Also last week, I attended a house party here in St. Paul to celebrate the release of "Train Like a Mother" written by the amazing duo of Sarah Bowen Shea and Dimity McDowell. I am just tucking into the book now, and it has the same cheeky, hilarious tone as their first book. If you are a runner, or if you know a runner, and you or she is female, I highly recommend checking these books out.
Here's my weekly recap:
And a few other close ups:
Yes, I did have to save that story. That kid makes my inner 6th grade boy laugh out loud.
And that is all she wrote for Week 17.
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Project Life, created by Becky Higgins, is a flexible, easy-to-use, highly customizable way to save your memories in a fun, stress-free way. Learn more about getting started with Project Life by clicking here.
