Tis the Season...for holiday cards

I love checking the mail box this time of year.  It is the one month that I can expect to find something other than junk mail (a waste of paper) and bills (a necessary evil).  I'm always intrigued to see who we will be receiving cards from as well as the types of cards that are sent.

In the past we've received everything from the homemade, handcrafted holiday 3x5 note cards to the 7 photo photo-paper card to elaborate professionally taken family photo for the triple-ply card stock 5x7 with silver-lined, embossed address envelope.  They come in all shapes and sizes, from friends and families, near and far.  All are cherished and sit in our kitchen during the entire holiday season.

Holiday Cards

However, while I love receiving these festive greetings, I find that I'm at a loss for what to do with them once the holidays are over.  When we first started receiving them, I would keep them and put them a scrap album so that we could look back over time and see the evolution of the families sending us their cards.  But after about the first five years of collecting, while scrapping the cards was fun, it was extremely time consuming and not a terribly efficient way of keeping the cards.

I then switched to a card box, which I indexed by year.  This was great because it allowed me to catalogue them and put them away, but now I just have boxes of cards put away that we really never look at and are sitting in my home office taking up the limited space I have in there.

Over the last couple of years, the cards have just been sitting in piles on my desk, waiting for a place to go.

So this year I'm putting it out there to all my card giving/receiving and crafty friends to share what they do with all the lovely holiday cards they receive?  I'm curious to know as I would love to figure out what works for you and maybe try it too!

Happy Holidays to everyone and I can't wait to see your cards and your suggestions!

Pass the Page Kit Please - A Thanksgiving Tribute

2014 is quickly coming to a close.  It has been one of those years that I don't think I will miss when it is over.  There certainly have been some memorable events that took place, but between the craziness of work and family life, the focus seems to have been more about just getting things done. 

I am thankful that in years past I have always had time for my creative outlets - cooking, writing, photography and scrapbooking - but this year, my time was filled with other things.  One might say that I'm imagining it and that I still took as many photos as years past, or I spent plenty of time piecing together pages for the girls albums.  But I'm here today to tell you that's just not the case.

At the beginning of the month, I sat down at my kitchen table, the first time in a year, to start working on page kits that I purchased about a year ago.  My intent when the kits arrived was to do a page a week.  As you can guess, that didn't happen.

Halloween 2013

It was at that moment I realized that I wasn't making time for myself anymore.  I was so focused on work and my family that I briefly (or not so briefly) forgot that I needed to make time for myself.  I openly pledged on Facebook, that I was going to try and complete one album, a 2013 album of the girls, before the years end.  Now, for some of you that might not seem like a big deal, but for me it is a huge undertaking. 

 

In order to accomplish this task, I hate to say it, I'm not relying purely on my own creativity.  I have given into the time saving, lovely page kits that I have found on the internet and been able to order.  I am thankful that these kits exist, because without them, I don't think I would even have a chance to accomplish my goal for the year. 

 

To make the pages my own, of course I add pictures of my beautiful girls, age with inks, write personal notes and embellish with buttons and ribbons if the mood strikes me. I am thankful I have my beautiful family to photograph and I am still able to find time an hour or two a week to put these kits together.  But on some level it makes me sad that I just don't have the time to play with the paper combinations and make the pages work myself. 

 

The good new is that I'm well on my way to finishing a 2013 Sisters Album.   I have about six months covered and I have six more to go with five weekends left in the year.  

 

Sisters 2013

My goal is clearly set.  I will achieve it.  I'm looking forward to the new year, when I can carve out some me time and hopefully get some much needed time away for a scrapbooking weekend so that I can return to the paper crafting activity I love so much.

 

PS - I am thankful for my followers...for those of you still following.

 

 

 

Where is Mom? A Travel Journal

2013 has been another year of great change.  It seems like every decade, I make major decisions, usually for the better, that completely redirect my life.  This hallmark year is no exception.

In January, our family grew by one, with the birth of our second daughter.  In May, I made the decision to go back to the corporate world to plan meetings and events.  Don't worry, I still have my business for a little while longer, though I will probably be dialing back on the social event planning. I'm stilling selling invitations, stationery and other paper products and gearing up for holiday cards and orders.  In June, my oldest daughter spent her first year at big girl camp.  It was a great but exhausting summer for her! And now, as we head into the Fall, both my girls are in full time day care / pre-school so that my husband and I can keep our new work schedules - including my very heavy travel schedule.

You see, as a meeting planner I have found that most of my meetings are not around home.  I have been fortunate that many of my meetings have been on the east coast since taking this job, but as I grow in my position, I expect that will change.  While I am okay with this shift in my life, it has been a big adjustment for my 4 year old.  She has done very well so far, but I know she misses me and when I am home all she wants to do is spend time with me.

So to help her, and me, with all of my traveling, I have created a "Where is Mom?" Journal for my girls.  The goal - to have a fun way to follow mommy's travel by including fun write-ups about the places I'm going and keep post cards that I send the girls.  The purpose - to help them cope better with all the time I'm away from them and learn a little bit about the places I travel to.

The idea came to me when I was traveling for a meeting last week and decided to send my kids a post card from the "Windy City".  I figured it would be a great way to let them know I was thinking about them and who doesn't love to get mail!   But what to do with them once I got home?  I know, put them in a binder, no better yet a journal.

So Sunday night, I got out my cricut and some paper and cut out letters to title the journal.  I used my Micky and friends cartridge and cut out 1 1/2 inch letters in caps and then affixed them to another piece of card stock.   I put some of my travel scrapping stickers on to enhance the cover.  Then I slipped it into the front of a three ring binder to create the cover.  Next I put in about twenty acid free sheet protectors so that I had clear pockets to put the postcards.   I typed an introductory letter to my kids and put it in the first page protector for them to "read" or rather for me to read to them.  I used regular printer paper, comic sans font and blue ink to keep it kid friendly and fun.

Finally, to make it more than just a place to keep post cards and make it more of a journal, I typed up two journal entries, one for my trip to Chicago and one for my trip to Boston.  In the journal entries I included a map of the state with a yellow star for where I was, some kid-friendly interesting facts about the city I was in and dated them so they can keep track of my travels.

When I presented it to my 4 year old the next day she was so excited.  When I took her to school, it was the first thing she shared with her teacher and when she got home that night, I was already on my way to my next destination, my husband sent me a text message from my daughter that said "daddy I love my journal".

I hope to be able to continue this great project.  If you are a parent who travels a lot for work, feel free to try this, especially if you have little ones at home who miss you.  It's a great way to keep them involved, keep them present and make them feel more comfortable with you being away.

Learning my A, B, C's and 1, 2, 3's

The other day I was shopping for some new educational toys for my daughter as a Chanukah present.  In particular, I was looking for flash cards with just numbers and letters (no words or associative pictures).  Ever since she was able to sit up, focus on things and play with toys, she's had a particular facination with flash cards.  When she was just an infant, she would grab her animal flash cards out of my hands and sort through them all by herself.  I would try to read them to her, but she insisted on looking at them by herself.  Today, she knows every animal and toy on every card and I swear she taught them to herself.
Anyway, I figured, if she could learn all the animals by flash cards, then perhaps it might be the best way for her to learn letters and numbers.  She can sing the "A, B, C" song beautifully, and she has the magnetic letters that we play with in the tub as well as books with letters and words to associate, but she isn't quite grasping them.  We also have electronic toys to reinforce, but she's really not into playing with them either.  So I figure, why not try the old fashion paper way - the flash card approach?  It worked with the animals.

Well, imagine my surprise when I went in search of what one would think to be a common item, I had a hard time finding just plain cards with just letters and numbers.  I went to the usual suspects, and none of the stores had what I was looking for.  Sure they had alphabet and number flash cards

 


- fun and colorful - attractive to a child's eye.  But they all had too much going on.  The closest thing I found was this pack of number flash cards - 1-100.  Just straight up numbers on a card - no words, no images to associate - exactly what I wanted, until I took one out of the box and realized that my daughter would destroy it in about 2.8 seconds.  The cards were fairly lightweight and really designed for an older child.

So, after much thought and debate, I dove into my paper reserves and decided to make my own.  Through the use of my Cricut and Plantin Schoolbook cartridge, I was able to make bright, colorful, yet simple flash cards for the numbers 0-10 and the alphabet.  I cut 3" numbers and letters out of cardstock and mounted them to double matted plain card stock in coordinating colors.  Once the adhesive was dry, I ran them through my laminator.  The heavy weight of the paper plus the lamination, should make them sturdy enough to withstand the abuse my daughter will put them through as she learns her a, b, c's and 1, 2, 3's.

Two Peas In A Bucket

I can't believe it, but for the first time this year, I actually used my scrapbook tools, papers and photos to scrapbook.  I did my first two pages of the year and here is the one that I actually completed. 

The pictures are from November 2009 and it was my daughter's first trip to Adventure Aquarium in Camden, NJ.  The papers I used were from Embroidered Papers and Cosmo Cricket.  The Embroidered Papers was a ready-to-use kit I picked up at either a CK Convention or a Scrapping retreat back in the day when I was scrapping a lot of skiing trips.  As it turned out, the embroidered design on the paper looked a lot like the coral reefs in the tanks and worked perfectly with the photos.

The fish paper is from Cosmo Cricket.  The actual paper title was Snorkel: School's Out and the second side was More Fish in the Sea.  Again, I don't exactly remember where I picked up this paper, but I purchased it in late 2009 or 2010, after I took these pictures, with the full intention of using the paper for this trip to the aquarium.

With a little creativity and some added embellishments, I was able to create a nice layout for her first year scrapbook.  Hopefully I'll be able to continue to work on it over the summer and will post some of my better paper pieces for you to see as I go along.

Earlier this week, I re-posted an article from my friend Kim's blog.  As a result, I got an interesting inquiry from another friend of mine who wanted to know where she could find good scrapping supplies in our area (southeastern PA).  Unfortunately, a lot of the independent scrapbook stores in our area have closed over the years.  They haven't been able to keep up with the bigger craft stores.  However, I remembered there was a store that is fairly local to me opened for a while, then closed its retail shop in favor of its online store when the recession hit.  Today, when I went to check if they were still operating their online site, it said they had reopened their retail location.  I wish them the best of luck and hope they continue to do well!

But for those of you who are comfortable buying online, I came across.

This online store is amazing.  It is well designed.  They offer great products and have everything for traditional paper crafters as well as digital crafters.  They even have online classes and video workshops/demonstrations that you can watch for free. 

So if you're in need of a new place to shop for paper, please check out Two Peas in a Bucket.  Click here if you would like to subscribe to coupon deals for Two Peas in a Bucket and watch my blog for updates and specials.

Escape into Scrapping Fun!: Win a FREE Echo Park Paper Collection!

This is a re-post of my friend and fellow paper lover, Kim Sheller's Blog.  She is the Owner of Creative Expressions Scrapbooking Escapes and is running a contest through tomorrow.  She's currently trying to decide which Echo Park Paper Collection to order. 

The Paper Princess has already weighed in on this and now it's your turn!

Visit the link below, help her decide and be entered to win a FREE Echo Park Paper Collection.

Escape into Scrapping Fun!: Win a FREE Echo Park Paper Collection!: "Echo Park Paper Company is one of my new favorite paper lines! It is so fun, bright & cheerful! But I need your help... I want to order some of the collections to have on hand at the weekend escapes and the online store.  Problem is, I just can't decide which ones to get.  So I am asking for YOUR help!  For all who comment on this post or the facebook post, you will be entered to win a FREE Echo Park Paper Collection when I place the first order!  


Please leave a comment below by Friday, 5/27 with your favorite collection and why.  You could be the LUCKY winner!!!  I will announce the winner after the holiday weekend on Tuesday, 5/31.

Thanks for participating!!!  I appreciate it :)

Sad Stacks and Left Over Paper

If you're a scrapbooker like me, you may have quite a few partially used blocks and stacks of scrapbook paper that you thought at one time were perfect for your project or album.  As it turns out, the paper didn't quite coordinated with the photos you were scrapping or you never got to use it and now you're done with the album.  The paper is just sitting in a your organizer, taking up valuable space, getting dusty, fading, and lonely.

So what's a paper lover to do?  Well, here are a few ideas of how to put that sad stack of paper to good use.

1.  Got Kids?  Give it to them.  Let them get creative with it.  Everything from making their own scrapbook pages to paper arts 'n crafts projects.  If they are too young, sit down and do a project together with them.  There are lots of great craft ideas online.  Download templates and instructions if you need too. 

This past fall, I found some faded orange and black paper.  I sat down with my daughter, who was 18 months at the time, and together we made paper pumpkins for Halloween. We added some details with black markers and crayons and presto we had jack-o-lanterns.

I then found some paper in my Old World Stack.  It was an antique brown paper with a design I knew would never coordinate with anything I would scrapbook in the near future.  I drew leaf patterns on the white side and cut them up.  I gave them to my daughter to crumple them up.  She loved it!  Next we took a  little walnut distressed ink and stickles.  With in minutes we made fall leaves to go along with our jack-o-lanterns.  Then we took them and decorated the windows.  We both had a fun and it was a great way to use up some left over paper.  Note - always make sure the little ones are supervised with scissors and any materials that may destroy your furniture, walls, and/or carpets.

2.  Paper swap.  What's old and unusable to you, may be new and perfect for someone else.  Compile a pile of coordinated papers from your stack (if you can swing it 2 of each paper) and make-up a couple swap kits.  Then the next time you are with your scrapping friends see if they would be interested in swapping papers.  It's a great way to rotate your inventory without spending money.

In the past when I've been on my scrapping retreats, we often have a share table.  We take out papers that we don't want and put them on the table for others to use.  I know I've put out some of my leftovers and have definitely picked up a few that have helped me with my albums.

3.  Donate it.  If you don't want to use it for your own projects or the paper is not perfect for a scrapbook, then consider donating it to a local pre-school or daycare.  I know they are always looking for art supplies and any donated materials are always welcome.  Just check with the person in charge to make sure they can use it or before you drop it off.  The last thing you want to do is have them throw it out.

Of course there are many more things you can do with that paper.  If you've got a favorite idea, please feel free to share it!  I'd love to hear what you do with your paper.