Craft Organization

My Sister has me wanting to reorganize. Well, her and the fact that we need to do a whole-house-furniture-shuffle in order to create the nursery for the new baby. See, the baby is due in Jan., so my third trimester will be during the holidays, which sounds like a bad time to be moving furniture and painting walls. So, I really need to start now reorganizing my office so it can become the office/guest room. I suppose then, that the fact that I'm focusing on organizing my scrapbooking stuff (which I've been told is already fairly organized) instead of working on my office closet is a form of procrastination.... oh well.

As Deanna mentioned, I've been keeping my stamps in clear pencil pouches that I got on sale last year at back-to-school time. They've held up well and I'm happy with them. However, I've been keeping them in a tool box and that's been ok, but it's hard to carry for very far because there's no shoulder strap and I'm constantly on the move with my paper stuff. So, I pulled a dusty rolly-briefcase from the top of my closet and moved in. Now I can pick the thing up of roll it around!

The next problem to be solved was having to flip through all the pouches to find the one with the stamps I'm looking for. For example, let's say I'm trying to make some Christmas cards. I know all the Christmas related stamps are in the Christmas pouch, but I have to pull out every pouch until I run across the Christmas one! So, I pulled out my trusty P-touch Label Maker and labeled them all- even the pouches with felt and ribbon! There's just nothing I love more than neat and tidy labels!!!!

Lastly, I moved all my inks to my cute little pick tote that I got full of paper craft stuff on clearance for $4. I had tried the stamp pouches in it for a while, but that wasn't working. Having the inks in there works nicely because they aren't buried anymore.

Now if I could just figure out how to make my paper lighter. I weighed it today, and my paper bag is 31 pounds (and that doesn't include the new pack of 300 sheets of paper I bought on clearance this week!!!) Suggestions anyone?

Vote Now!

I'm trying to make some cards appropriate for guys. It seems like every time I have an occasion to send a card to a man I'm really stretching to find something that doesn't have GIRL written all over it. So, I made this set of cards last night as Man-cards. I was so proud and showed them to my husband and he informed me that they weren't really all that masculine... huh.

Now, I need to know, is my husband crazy or are these too girly for guys? Help me out here. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being all man and 1 being all girl, how manly are they?????

Journaling, Cut in Half

I know I posted almost the same pic yesterday, but since I got the journaling done, I had to post an update. I really wanted the journaling to run right off the first page and onto the next page like a photo cut in half, but I didn't want to cut any words in half, so I did a crazy amount of work with two text boxes (as shown in this screen shot) and some extra spaces where needed. I really love how it turned out! (Click on the photo to zoom in) Surely one of you wants to share an easier way to do this- I tried right and left tabs, but apparently, I don't know how to make those work either.

32 Photos in 2 Spreads? No Problem

Christmas 2008 is done! ...except for a little journaling, of course.

Retrofit

Several weeks ago (maybe even months ago) a friend and I went to a local expo for women. Now that I think about it, I think it was on Mother's Day weekend... Anyway, one of the businesses there let you sit down and make a fun layout right there. It was a neat takeaway and it involved some techniques I hadn't done before, so it was double cool. Here's a photo of it.

However, as soon as I got home I realized I had no idea what I would do with it. It seems like such a crime to create something so pretty and then never use it, but trying to retrofit a completed layout to my photos is sooooo hard for me. I usually start with the photos and then figure out a layout to show them off.

In early May we got some great family portraits done, so when I picked them up in June I decided I wanted to use them for this rouge layout. Of course, then I realized another problem: I only had one layout and I always do spreads (two layouts that are meant to be seen together). Ug- a retrofit with a challenge...

In the end, I decided to cut the layout and put part of it on one layout and part on the opposing layout. Then I stole some white paper (see photo at right) from where it wouldn't show to frame NJ and added some blue as accents around the other two photos. I did my journaling on the computer and printed on vellum again (even though the snooty lady at the out-of-town scrapbooking store swears it doesn't work). Here's the end result! Now I just need some embellishments...