Re-using old designs

It has been a busy month for me! I collected student papers virtually, commented online, then finished  assessing the papers and submitting my grades. To make it more exciting, my district required me to go in for 4 of the last 9 days of school (while I was in the height of grading, of course!) to clean up EVERYTHING in my room and pack it away to make room for a deep scrub this summer and to help collect student materials. All this after I broke my toe. Gah.

I did some reading, some gardening, and some cross-stitching here and there, but I mostly graded. Now that school is out for the summer, I will have more time. Here's my inaugural summer page:

It is a traditional page I make every year that comes as the last page of my album. I pick my favorite 9 photos from the year and put them in a digital template.

The general design is always the same; the decorations differ. Here I started with an OLD piece of My Mind's Eye paper that was an ombre green/blue design; then I selected the Studio Calico muted cloud paper from my craps to serve as the title block. I used some new better stickers I got from Elle's Studio plus my standard chipboard letters from Jillibean Soup. (I ran out of O's, so thank you, button Stash! That's the best letter to run out of.)

At this point I took out my die cuts, which I organize by color in an office hanging-file folder case, pulled bunches in a few colors that seemed to fit the same muted tones, then played around fitting them in. I borrowed heavily from old My Mind's Eye and Elle's Studio dies.

Since I was doing a color challenge with my CKMB friends online this week, I challenged myself to add color in different mediums too: I stamped the numbers in orange on the right, I used orange thread in my machine instead of white, and I broke out my misting templates and added some painted flourishes.

So that's how I manage re-using old designs: Same structure, selecting basic papers, and then playing with product and techniques to make it fresh.

October Write Click Scrapbook gallery is up!

The new gallery for Write Click Scrapbook is up! I hope you had a chance to browse through it and see the terrific pages and get inspired. Our theme was A Day in the Life. I decided to scrap about something I never do: my teaching life.

In case you don't know, I teach high school juniors English. This year I am teaching what we casually call an "overage"--six classes in a six period day, no prep. I volunteered to do this so a colleague could go part time. Since I'm organized, I thought I would be a good person to do it. So far it's been terrific. Maybe it's just me, but it seems that every year gets more exciting and fulfilling professionally.

Here's my page:

I took photos of each class and shrunk them down to 2x3 so that I could create an even photo strip. I wasn't trying to preserve their faces because this page wasn't about them but my new schedule. I also took a photo of my breakfast coffee and my lunch time tea. They keep me going, ya know.

And more details:

Thank you for checking out my page, and letting me share a bit about my teaching day! Tell me: have you ever scrapped your job?

Busy busy busy

This week school started for me--sort of. Since I teach, I spent the week readying my room, working with colleagues, and attending training. I am looking forward to teaching my students this year. It will be fun.

I also spent the week finishing up a few assignments, most of which I can't share yet, so I thought I'd share this one (click on the image to see it larger):

After my son "messed with" a bee last year and was stung, he is now pathologically afraid of them, a problem considering how many gardens I have around my house. This page is a bit of encouragement for him to be brave, and not to "mess" with them any more. I used Studio Calico's August kit Boardwalk for this.

I dipped into my Basic Grey Bloomers supply for the page. Love love love them.


Pardon the punny title.

I also dipped into an older kit for the bee stamp, which I stamped, embossed, colored and blended with watercolor pencils, cut out, and adhered with dimensional adhesive. I also hand drew the flight line and stitched it.


This layout is a bit of a farewell to summer. Time to shift from jewel tones into burnt tones on my scrapbook pages.

Papers, papers everywhere...

So I have a little over a week of school left, and I am swamped with grading. I actually fell asleep grading a paper yesterday. For the next two weeks, I'll be busy busy busy, too busy to do what I have to do for scrapping, which is edit photos. Yep, I have officially run out of photos to scrap. LOAD wiped me out of photos.

I had a great time and learned a lot about myself as a scrapper in LOAD, but my mind will be fully occupied this upcoming week, so much so that my scrapping will be crimped. Rats.

Oh, well, it will give me something to look forward to!

Busy week

Well, darn those Vikings. As Rowan said, "We're back to game one."

Back to business, as a teacher, I can say some weeks are busier than others. This week, for example. I have conferences tomorrow night, so I'll be working from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m. I do get an hour break for dinner--at 2 p.m. I've been using a lot of time grading, planning, getting ready.

On top of that, the family business continues. Last night was conference night for our sons. They did swimmingly. Not perfect, but better than we expected. Rowan is reading well, good at math, but needs to work on his spelling. (I think Derick and I know who he gets that from.) Dominic has been working well in class, even well with others, which is good. He's also learning to persist.

Still, during a stressful week, I find it helpful to create to help me unwind. I did a couple pages with some photos I just got from Shutterfly. (Don't get me started on how insane their shipping costs are. I got the photos free for spending a sad amount of money at Archiver's, but they get you on shipping, which I have to do because with this special, I couldn't send the photos to Target. Rats.) This week I also want to send some photos to my preferred photo printing site, scrapbookpictures.com. I have some from vacation I want to enlarge, and I have some others from October and November I'd like to start playing with.

I'm stocking up on photos because I'm doing LOAD next month. It's something Lain Ehmann runs, and I liked it when I did it in October. I got a ton of pages done, and it opened my mind to new things, seeing as how I had to do a layout a day (hence LOAD) without taking time to stress about perfectionism. Yay! But it's easier if I have a lot of photos to work with.

Papers papers everywhere...

I have about 4 weeks left in the term I teach, and I am awash in papers. Yikes. I like reading them and seeing how the kids have (mostly) applied the lessons I've taught. What a great bunch of students I'm teaching now.

Still, it takes time, so the blog posts will be sporadic. As will the scrapping.

Rats.