Craftster Feature and New Scrapbook Pages

I am most honored to be notified that my DIY Batman Soap Tutorial was a Craftster-wide feature recently, AND was also chosen as a featured project for Quarter 2 of 2009 in the Bath & Beauty section.  WOW! I really appreciate all of the “this rocks!” votes I received on the tutorial and am glad it’s gone over so well :) Thanks everyone!

This weekend I got around to some much neglected digital scrapbooking. It feels like it’s been forever! Several months ago when I was doing more digi scrapping I had started stockpiling various quick pages that I’d found on DigiFree as I came across them daily.  I was just saving them for a rainy day I guess! The weather has definitely been rainy here in Calgary lately, and so on Sunday I went back through the folder and turned around 33 of those quick pages into new pages of my digital scrapbook.

Firstly, I went back through photos I had on my hard drive, which took me all the way back to November. There were a couple of events in the fall and winter that needed to be scrapped, such as Lucas’ birthday party, outings with friends, and Christmas. I also realized that the more digital pages I had in a single scrapbook in My Memories Suite, the slower/longer it took for the program to load the scrapbook when I wanted to work on it. This makes sense since it had to render all of those thumbnail previews along the bottom, and the more elements and extras on a page to render, the longer that would take. Multiply that times 40 odd pages or so, and you can see where I’m coming from. To help with the clutter, I decided to sum up the end of 2008 by adding a few more pages to finish off the year, and then start a whole new, separate album for 2009. So now I have a Family Life 2008 album and I’ve started a Family Life 2009 album that will be ongoing for the rest of 2009.

Family Life 2009 was a fun one to start on and where I had the most catch up to do, because we’re already just over halfway into the year and so much has happened in the first part of 2009! Really the pages just started flowing once I went back through the photos I had stored away in my Pictures directory. I had some great new photos of Oliver and Winston in their Flames gear to scrap and some Calgary Flames quick pages I had created myself last year to use with them. I had quite a few newer photos of Lucas and I together that were begging to be scrapped, and of course a LOT of photos from our recent anniversary trip to Nova Scotia. It was hard to narrow down all of the fantastic photos we’d taken to just a few digital scrapbook pages, but I managed!

Then I scrapped our recent family outdoor activity of choice: rollerblading! Lucas and I have been rollerblading fairly regularly for almost a year now, but just recently (like 2 weeks ago) we decided to start trying to rollerblade with Oliver and Winston, too. This has been ridiculously hilarious and A LOT of fun, and a great form of exercise for the whole family. Oliver could stand to lose a few pounds, tbh. But shhh, we don’t tell him he’s fat. (Ok we do, but it’s mostly hair, right?)

Then of course most recently, as in this past weekend, Lucas and I attended our first Calgary Stampede ever!  As I mentioned in my previous post, the Calgary Stampede comes to town for 10 days every July and turns the entire town into a rodeo.  Suddenly everyone here thinks they are a cowboy. To be honest, the Stampede was very much like the Indiana State Fair, just with a rodeo attached. It was great fun though, because it’s been years since I’ve been to a state fair of course.

All of this work to catch up my digital scrapbooks inspired me to create something of my own to share, and I played around with some new background papers and a couple of matchy-matchy elements to go with them. Nothing fancy, but I plan to give those away later this week, along with a quick page I made to go along with them. How exciting! Although knitting has dominated my crafting time for the most part the past several months, I don’t plan on letting my digital scrapbook get that far behind again, so hopefully that means more scrapping and more freebie goodies for you, too :)

In creating a 2009 album and leaving it open-ended to add on as life happens, I’ve started fast-forwarding in my mind to imagine what other upcoming pages I’ll need to scrap about. Most exciting is the next chapter in Lucas and I’s lives where we move back to Indiana and roadtrip with Oliver and Winston to get there, along with the birth of my first nephew coming up in October. The 2009 Family Life album sure will be a monumental one!