random reflections

2015 Recap

It's the last day of the year, and time for a little assessment of the intentions I set last year with my OLW: Simplify. It was the second year for Simplify, and although I hadn't really finished with it, holding on to a word for a second year didn't prove to be very helpful or inspiring. Lesson learned. A year ago I typed up a document outlining my intentions for 2015. I found it this week, and it was fun to see exactly how well I’d done with them. I’m putting them out here as a way of being accountable, but fair warning, it’s a pretty long post.

Here they are with a bit of assessment:

One sketch a day. I didn’t come close to meeting this goal although I did completed one sketch a day during the month of May and again in October. I filled more than one and a half sketchbooks with finished sketches, and have another book nearly filled with experiments with different media and efforts to master a certain technique. There’ll be some kind of intention around sketching for 2016 as well.

Project 365 with the iPhone. Yes, I did take a photo every day with my iPhone. The intention was to learn how to use some of the many apps I had on my phone. I used Collect to organize the photos every month. I played around with a lot of editing apps, and have settled on Afterlight as the main app for editing photos. I also use SKRWT to correct images with distortions, PicTapGo when I need a good overall filter, & Retouch to get rid of elements I don’t want in the photo. I also like LetterGlow, Waterlogue, and HDRPhoto, although I don’t use them often. So I accomplished what I set out to do. This is the second Project 365 I’ve completed, and I don’t think I’ll tackle another one in 2016.

Participate in Helena’s meme: Pairs. Every week. Loved it. Looking forward to Snap in 2016.

Photography project: master back button focusing and panning. Nope. Not either one.

Read three books a month. Yep, exactly. I could certainly read more books if I read fewer blogs, but I get a lot of inspiration and information from blog reading, so I’m satisfied with this one. I also subscribe to and read three periodicals.

Organize and catch up with Project Life. In June I was all caught up, and I do have an organizational system set up. But being away a good part of the summer put me way behind again. I have four months (July is nearly done) to complete once I finish my Christmas Journal. (There’ll be no December PL pages.) Even though it’s hard to keep up, I love this system of memory keeping, and plan to keep at it.

Participate in one card challenge/week using a different stamp set each week. Not really. I did, however, make well over 200 cards this year. It’s still one of my favorite hobbies.

Purge and organize the basement. Done.

Purge and organize the attic. Not so much. On the list for 2016.

Organize art materials on IKEA cart. Yes, one of the best purchases of 2015.

Exercise: two spinning classea/week; three weight-training sessions; average 5,000 steps/day. Pretty inconsistent. We never got back to spinning class after our summer vacation. Weight training comes and goes. I was doing great this fall until Thanksgiving. I average 5,000 steps a day, sometimes it’s 12,000+ and others less than 5,000, but it averages out. Tracy and I hiked 76 miles on our vacation this year---a record for a three-week span. My friend and I have walked 5.5 miles once a week all fall and up until Christmas. If it’s not too snowy, we’ll be back at it in January.

Continue with no preservatives/whole food eating. Yes, we’re good about this, and I enjoy cooking. One of my best Christmas gifts was The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking with Science. It’s huge, but I already know I’m going to love reading it and trying out the recipes.

Practice portion control. This is probably my biggest deterrent to weight-loss. Once again it’s inconsistency that’s the problem.

Continue with volunteer commitments. I sit on four committees (three church-related, one mission center), volunteer at an after-school program once a week, cook meals with a Dining Room Ministry Team, and provide dinner for families staying at our church with the Rochester Interfaith Hospitality Network. The last two are rotations that come up every two or three months. I plan to continue with all of them next year, and don't anticipate adding any new ones. We're away so much, I have to be careful what kind of volunteer commitments I make.

Make photo book of our trip to Istanbul and Greece. This has been on the list for two years now. I’m not sure why I’m avoiding it, but obviously I need to get some help with it.

Participate in Voices every month. Voices is a noon-time discussion group at our church focused on a reading we get in advance. I’m there every week I’m in town. There is a core group of us (12-15) who are there every week, and it’s become a wonderful community.

Last, but not least, I had a long list of online classes I wanted to complete. I made a dent (a little one) in the list, but it will continue into 2016. I did complete several sketching classes (two by Liz Steel that were intense and wonderful), several Online Card Classes, and have been working on Cathy Zielski’s Clean and Simple: The Workshop over vacation.

I’ll be back soon with my One Little Word for 2016. I've been living with the new word now for over a week, and think it will serve me well. We’re still in Chicago visiting Sarah, and will only be home two days before we leave to take Tracy’s mother’s van to Florida. The schedule doesn’t lend itself to blogging very well.

Just an hour and a half until we usher in the New Year in Chicago! Not sure I'll still be up, but I am wishing all of you the Happiest of New Years. I hope yours is filled with many blessings!

Pairs: Portraits of the Birthday Boy

Today is the last week for the wonderful Pairs meme hosted by Helena. It's been a lot of fun and I've managed to come up with a pair every week. I'm looking forward to next year's meme, Snap. You can check out the pairs for this week and some information about Snap at Helena's blog.  A huge thanks to Helena for making this possible all year long. 

Today is also one little boy's fourth birthday. We've been opening presents little by little all day long. As I type this his dad and Grandpa are putting together a big boy bed. The double bed is going to be a big change from his less-than-single sized bed he's been in for the last couple of years.

We started the morning with pancakes.

Chicago has gotten some snow in the last few days, and Caleb couldn't wait to get outside with his sled. They have a flat yard, but somehow his dad managed to get the sled to slide across the yard by itself. But it was throwing snow at each other that proved to be the most fun.

So my final pair is Caleb:  INSIDE and OUTSIDE on his birthday.

I forgot to take a photo of his birthday card before I left, and he's saving his cards and one last present to open after dinner. I'll be back eventually (finding time to edit photos and post is proving tricky) with that and posts from Christmas. I still have quite a few pages left to do in my Christmas Journal once we get back home, so it's likely you'll be seeing Christmas here well into January.

DECEMBER 2015 Papertrey Ink BLOG HOP CHALLENGE

Today is the Papertrey Ink December Blog Hop. It was the colors of the inspiration piece that got to me, and I grabbed a few minutes when I first saw it to create three tags. I didn't have anything specific in mind for them when I made them.

The tags were premade by Graphic 45, and then stamped and embossed using Papertrey Ink's  Spruce and Sprigs, the Holiday Folk Mini-Market kit, Rustic Wreath,  and Believe. The "joy" is from WPlus9's Hand-lettered Holiday set. Here's a look at them side-by-side.

Then just this week, I needed two quick cards, so two tags were quickly adhered to some Paper Source 4-Bar cards. I had time to grab a shot of just one of them.

The last one was used on one of the Christmas presents. I ended up switching out the plaid ribbon for some gold thread.

We're on the road today, but Tracy assures me I'll be able to link this up to the hop when the time comes. When I get to our destination I'll be checking in on the rest of the blog hop projects which you can find here.

Pairs: Christmas Cookies

We got some fantastic help this weekend making Christmas cookies. Skylar came on Saturday, and we rolled out both sugar cookies and gingerbread cookies. Then on Sunday, she returned to help us frost the cookies. She caught on to the rolling pin right away, and really enjoyed cutting out the cookies. 

BAKING

Although she liked frosting the sheep and adding coconut for their fur, she was quite sure she didn't like coconut and wouldn't like eating one. The regular frosted cookies were just fine, though. She was back again tonight for our Christmas dinner (we celebrate early with Matt, Betsy and the girls), and was eager to have a frosted snowflake for dessert.

FROSTING

I doubt there'll be another post before Christmas, but you never know. Just in case, I hope all who celebrate have a wonderful holiday!

Elf on the Shelf

Needless to say, we aren't doing an Elf on the Shelf project, but Sarah and Adam do one with Caleb. When I saw what Nicole Heady did with the Holiday Pin-ups kit, I asked Sarah if she were interested in anything similar. I started with the card. Sarah asked that I make it possible to change the notes each day, so there's both an outside and inside.

Sarah's intention was to put a piece of velcro on the elf so they could stick it up somewhere. I used Papertrey's Pure Poppy and White patterned paper for the background, and added stamps from Postmarks and City Scene Sentiments (all PTI). The little elf was pre-printed in the Holiday Pin-ups kit and the pieces only had to be die cut and glued to the clothespin.

I used a new Reverse Confetti "Gift Card Holder Tag" to die cut the slit for the cards and the cute little banner. Sarah has a set of 25 cards she can slide in and out of the slot.

While I was at it, I made three other clothespin cuties. They'll probably go on Christmas packages for the grandchildren.

This has to be one of the most fun projects I've put together this year.

Christmas Journal: Days 9-11

Creating a Christmas Journal gives me opportunities for experimenting. Most of the time, I'm pretty happy with the results and I have another technique up my sleeve for Project Life pages. For December 9, I tried printing on one of the patterned papers that came with the Ashley G. mini-kit offered by Ali Edwards. Can't say I'm thrilled with the results since reading the text is more difficult than I'd like, but I decided to go with it anyway. The idea for the page originated with the Ten on Tuesday posts that I discovered on Honoré's blog. This one was to record ten things you love to do around the holidays. 

You can't tell from the photo, but the little dots are a beautiful gold, so the only embellishment was the 9 from the American Craft thickers I used on the cover of the journal. This list records ten things I love about Christmas: time with family, celebrating with friends, decorating the house, listening to Christmas music, entertaining, making Christmas cards, wrapping gifts, baking cookies, creating a Christmas Journal, and sitting by our new gas fireplace enjoying the lights on the tree and mantle.

December 10 records our trip to "meet" Santa at the George Eastman Museum. They always decorate the mansion beautifully, and this is the first time I've ever visited during the gingerbread house display. I have a lot more photos from this trip than I could fit in the journal, but even so I gave it three pages!

I wrote about Skylar's hesitations around meeting Santa, and you can clearly see that in the photo with Grandpa. I blurred the face of the little girl talking to Santa since I don't know her at all. I'm not sure I would have thought to take a portrait of Grandpa with the girls on the staircase, but it seemed to be a pretty popular activity, so we joined in and I finally got a shot without anyone's feet going up and down the stairs in the photo. The left-hand page is a free photo template by Cathy Zielske.

On this page, I included the two photos I shared yesterday for Pairs, one of Matt showing Skylar some projects on his phone while we were waiting for dinner, and one of the many gingerbread houses on display.

Day 11 documents our book group meeting. We meet at someone's house and discuss the book, then go out to dinner. That night we went to Lemoncello's, one of my favorite Italian restaurants. I decided to include a list of the books our group read in 2015.

I read all but one of them. Fortunately, there's no pressure in this group (Tracy, Mary, and I have belonged to this group since 1990!) to read a book that doesn't speak to you, or if you're just swamped with other commitments. Although most of our group liked Gutenberg's Apprentice, neither Mike nor I could slog our way through it. As you can see, we don't manage to meet every month; some years we read more than eight books---it all depends on peoples' travel schedules. (Lovely to be retired!) I'm planning to do a post of the best books I read in 2015, but I can recommend any of these except Gutenberg's Apprentice (which you might enjoy since others did) or Bury Your Life (a murder mystery that just had too many evil characters in it for my taste.)

The journaling card is from One Little Bird, and I colored the books with TomBow markers after printing it. As you can tell, the embellishments are pretty minimal. They take me the longest to figure out, and since it's the photos and stories I want to get done, I often give up after a few minutes and say, "Good enough." Maybe I'll come back after the holidays and reconsider, but I think I'd best get back to my Project Life pages!

Pairs: At the Top, At the Bottom

One of the fun things about visiting Santa at the George Eastman Museum is watching him come down the Grand Staircase in George Eastman's mansion. Here's Santa at the top.

And greeting some children at the bottom.

I'm linking up to Helena's meme "Pairs," and delighted to see that she has plans to host another weekly photography meme in 2016.

Happy Anniversary

Today is Matt and Betsy's anniversary, and I'm here to share the card I made for them. It's so nice to have them nearby, and to be able to hand deliver our card and gift. It's a good excuse to get a little time in with Skylar and Ella as well.

This card was inspired after pinning this one by Joy Taylor awhile ago. I made a few changes, and I'm really happy with the results.

I started with a piece of Tim Holtz's watercolor paper, and added some Kuretake watercolors in two shades of pink. Then I sprayed a bit of Heidi Swapp Gold Color Shine. The gold thread is from a spool I bought so long ago, I have no idea where it came from. I die cut two words from the Wet Paint dies by Papertrey Ink in Raspberry Fizz, layered them, and added the stamped sentiment from the same set. A narrow gold mat was added before putting it on the white card base. I think this is a design I'll be using again.

Hope your week is off to a good start. It's a busy one here, as I'm sure yours may be as well.

Christmas Journal: Days 6-8

Day 6 in the Christmas Journal is all about getting Christmas cards made and in the mail. I know most of the cards have reached their senders in this country, but I'm not sure about those "across the pond." At any rate, there's a spoiler here if you haven't received yours yet.

I cut the front off from one of the Christmas cards and punched holes in it to add to the album. I enrolled in Ali Edwards December Daily Workshop this year, and have gotten several ideas from the lessons, including this one.

I covered the back of the card with a piece of patterned paper from Ashley G's mini kit. December 7 documents the first Day of Little Candles in our neighborhood. One of our new neighbors is from Columbia, and introduced us to this annual tradition. Anny had hundreds of tea lights lining her sidewalks as well as the little angel at the corner. We lit luminaries and lined our sidewalk, but I decided to include Anny's Facebook invitation instead of a picture of our sidewalk. It's events like this that make every Christmas Journal unique.

One of Shimelle's recent prompts for Journal Your Christmas talked about the tradition of wish lists. I journaled about the need for wish lists for adult children as well as grandchildren. In the space of one day, I went from being about half done with my Christmas shopping to nearly done---thanks to receiving wish lists from Sarah and Betsy. On the right hand side, is a page protector that I cut down from nine squares to six squares. (Thanks again to Ali's workshop.) Here's a better look at it with a piece of paper behind it.

I finally broke out my fuse tool and used it to seal two of the pockets that I filled with glitter and some star sequins. Here's a look at the back side.

This was a really fun "page" to create, and I may include another one before the month is out.

 

Christmas Journal: Days 3-5

I've been keeping up with my Christmas Journal, and so far it's been a December Daily. I haven't done as well getting it photographed for the blog, but today I had some time to work on that as well. Here are the next three days, and I'll be back soon with a few more.

I always document something about the holiday decorations. This year I decided to focus on the new things in the house. The big one is our gas fire place. We've talked about doing this for years, and should have done it a long time ago. We're really enjoying it, despite the fact that we're having one of the warmest Decembers in recent memory! I also found some tiny white lights for our mantel at a little shop in Indiana in October. I've looked for just the right thing for several years, and finally found them. The silver tray with candles is also new, and a bit fancier than my usual collection on the coffee table. The big red candle is a citrus cinnamon, and smells delicious!

I also like documenting the Christmas displays I see around town, and here are a few that caught my eye this year. Love those little polar bears with their noses stuck in the shopping bags.

December 5th was a busy day. We visited the South Wedge for their Christmas festivities, and hosted a family dinner that night. Skylar and Emma are sitting in a little chair that belonged to my father.

As always, I'm glad to be capturing these bits and pieces of our holiday season.