Tim Holtz magic

Hi, how have you been? Sometimes it feels like ages before I get to post again. Our lives today seem to be so busy. I took time out from my juggling act to feed a bit of my creative side, with a class from Tim Holtz. It is an amazing class and I urge you all to do it ( I understand that you can still sign up and have access to the class) it is a great way to fit in a class when you are busy, and who better to teach you about Ranger and Distress products that the man himself.

The class is called : Creative Chemistry 101. and can be found here: http://www.onlinecardclasses.com/

The techniques are great so I thought I would put one of them into practice and make my sons birthday card.

 I did the technique on water colour paper and it came out with a great hessian type of texture.

The technique uses embossing powder, distress inks, permanent ink and sprinkling of water (only I think I drowned rather than sprinkled)

A first attempt, really like this technique so will be trying again, and again and again. Love the way the embossing pops right off the page :)

Need a lot of work to get it better, but happy with the results of this card.

Scrapbooking Australia has a great range of Tim HOltz products, in fact he has his own category lol.

Distress inks and stains, masks and stamps, lots of things to choose from.

And after doing the some of the classes, I have brought in the Dyan Reaveley sprays 'dylusions' also  a ranger product.  Fantastic depth of colour in these sprays!

have you been playing with any new techniques lately?

Micro scrapbooking- warning really poorly taken photos of project

I wonder how many of you have gotten the micro scrapbooking bug. 

By micro scrapbooking I mean taking those little snippets we would usually forget about in a week, or month and put them into a project such as Ali Edwards Week in the life

or Becky Higgins Project life, click here to go to her creative team March takes on Project life, so inspiring.

And if you browse around heaps of scrapbookers are doing this.

Cathy Zielske

Karenika the savor project

just to name a few. Go looking there is heaps of inspiration out there.

I am going to share my story about my projects and I have put in photos of my projects,  I want to apologize for the photos, I did not take the projects out of the sleeves, I just wanted to give you an idea of the project, not an in-depth look at the journaling and so on :)

I tried a few years ago to do a December daily album, inspired from Ali Edwards I printed off a calendar and then I got all gun ho and was going to take a photo each and every day, journal about it and then once a week put it in the album. Well I got off to a great start December 1 rolled around and my batteries for my camera were flat and no of course I didn't have spare.

 

That was alright I just picked myself up determined to keep going, used a photo as a representation and I was off on a roll. Now December can be a busy time any year, the year I picked was so extremely busy. Not an excuse just a fact.

Well a couple of weeks ago I finally printed the last photo for that album and it is done. The album starts off with lots of journaling about the everyday happenings. and progressively gets less and less information as I had to rely on the notes I had made on the printed out calendar (thank goodness I did that).

I love this album, every page of it. As it documents December 2008.

Ahem yep 2008.

So what that told me quite loudly in fact is that I am no good at doing a day a month, so I never did start on the project life, photo and story a day.

 But I loved the idea and really wanted to do it in some form.Instead I took the idea and made it fit what I could do. 

This is how I do mine:

I do a double page a month and then a page divider I use the We R Memory Keepers in different formats.

 In this way I document the life little moments. I also decided that I needed to have photos of me, not something I ever have liked, but wanting to leave a reminder of me around for the future.

 I make sure that each month I take a photo of myself. I also try and get one of everyone who lives in the house. I started off trying to get one of each of my children, but as they are for the most part grown ups and don't live here it was hard to remember to take the photos when I saw them. So I adapted to just those of us in the house.

I also try and take a photo of my dog, he was a new puppy when I started and I love that I have a record of how much he has grown. 

Usually there is also a photo of a meal, it will most likely be one of the ones that the kids cooked, or sometimes a meal when we went out. I take a photo of my garden or more accurately what is flowering in the garden as I found I could never remember when things flowered and this is a great way to keep note of it.

I have an alarm on my phone so that on the last day of the month I get a reminder to take photos, this gives me a chance to have a look at what is still needed and then take them.

When I do the double page it usually has a theme and then the dividers are made up of what is left over. I also add a calendar each month to the back of the page, that way I can note extra things down.

So my project life album is now in its second year and this year I teach it as a monthly class.

I really treasure this album, it has also had some benefits that I had not thought of, by printing out the photos each month, I then get to see what events, and stories that I want to tell in a bigger form. So in a way it informs my scrapbooking.

A question keeps coming up a lot in the forums is "is it too late to start now?" I don't think there is a right time or a wrong time to start, I think the hardest part is just to start. Make it a project that works for you, either a daily, weekly or monthly micro look at what you are doing with your life right now.

Be inspired by the little things that make up your life!