Odds and Ends

The Best Laid Plans

Talk about your plans for the day going out the window.  Yesterday was one for the books.   Why can't you get better time estimates when you're having work done?  I knew I had to take the Camry in for the usual stuff plus a look at the brakes (they were feeling kind of mushy) and it's emission test (so we can get the license sticker for 2012).  So  I made plans about what I could do to kill the time.   I took the laptop over with me as I figured I could work on organizing 2010's & 2011's pictures while I waited to meet my friend from school days at 10.   I was told it shouldn't take any longer than 2 hours so I figured I'd leave the power cable at home - Note to self:  Don't do that ever again.  I did also take my Kindle (more about that later).  The plan was to work away on the laptop till either the car was ready or they gave me a ride over to meet Janie at Starbucks at 10.  Somewhere in there I needed to go to Costco too to pick up some 12x12 prints I'd had printed of digital layouts that I had never printed off.

Nine forty-five comes along and I can see that the car is still up on the hoist and I can also see that I have hardly any battery life left on the laptop.  Hmmm, after a chat with them where I was told they needed 45 minutes to one more hour they gave me a ride over to Starbucks.   Janie and I had a great visit over our favourite Starbucks drinks (Tazo Chai for me) and she drove me back there at 11:45 (so they've had 2 hours extra at this point right?).  The car by their estimation should be done.   Whats this - I don't see it out in any of the parking spots.  I'm thinking Oh Oh.  I walked in and get "Its not finished.  Its taking longer than we thought.  We'll need another 45 minutes."  Whats with that?    Seeing as they are in the next town to where I live it's pretty senseless having them take me home and just a few minutes later come back and bring me back.  Ok, I did have stuff I needed to do but I'll make the best of it and read my Kindle.  I open it up and theres a screen staring me in the face telling me it needs charging and you've got it - the charger is at home.  ARGH!  

One hour later and finally the car is ready.   With my one very quick stop at Costco (less than 5 minutes away from them) I got home at 1:45  Almost 2 hours later than I had expected.   And I still had to have lunch.  Needless to say I was not impressed and I made sure the owner who we've known for decades knew I wasn't impressed.  He was actually quite shocked that the car or should I say his mechanic took that long.  If they had given me a better idea of the time initially I would have had them bring me home and got some work done for the kids' visit this coming week.  They've always been so good before at time estimates but this time was the pits.  :)

I decided after all that I needed some scrapbooking time.  Any excuse right and I think you need something to look at after reading about my morning yesterday.  Last night, I shared with you my version of the colour assignment for DYL (Design Your Life).  I decided it really needed another page to go along with it and this morning I managed to finish it off after flipping the template, reducing the size of the journaling block and putting in another picture.  I'm pretty happy with it except it shows my wonky big toe that I broke years ago (that's another story all together).  :)   I wasn't sure though, seeing as week one was about symmetry, if I needed to have a circle on the right page to match the left one but I don't think so as I think the bones of the layouts are symmetrical without doing that.  What do you think?  Does it need the extra circle for balance?

 
Here's the complete 2 page layout and I'm happy to say I've got something done from 2005.  :)  Supplies:Template - Cathy Zielske, Papers - blue -Jessica Sprague Beautiful You Kit, red - same kit, cream - Katie Pertiet of Designer Digitals Vintage Blooms kit, beige Jessica Sprague Grand Intentions kit. Date Stamp from The Voyager Collection at Digital Scrapbook Page by Kristmess, Ring on the far right are  from Flutter Expressions at scrappity-do-dah and the Believe in Miracles kit, the font is Tahoma for both title & journaling.

 

Toe Rings and Week 1 Colour Assignment

Evidently every week of DYL there is an assignment to do with colour and this was my first one.  Cathy gave us a colour scheme to work with but it just wasn't me so instead I took the colour scheme from an ad I'd always liked the looks of.   The colours were blue, cream, beige(brown) and red. Nothing to do with what it was an ad for (I think Citi Bank) just that I liked the colour scheme in it.  The template was for 8 1/2 x 11 page and I really have problems with that - I've always done 12x12 right from day one.

Back in April's Story Telling Time I shared part of the story of my toe rings.   Well today I did part of the layout for it for my colour assignment.   I will be doing a right hand side page to go along with it once I figure out how to adapt the template.  :)

 Papers - blue -Jessica Sprague Beautiful You Kit, red - same kit, cream - Katie Pertiet of Designer Digitals Vintage Blooms kit, beige Jessica Sprague Grand Intentions kit.  Date Stamp from The Voyager Collection at Digital Scrapbook Page by Kristmess, font is Tahoma for both title & journaling.

I'm going to pretty scarce probably for the next few days.  My niece is coming down next Thursday and bringing P-Man (4 1/2) and Miss M (19 1/2 months) and our house is definitely not toddler/small child proof so guess what I'm going to be doing.  :)  

 

Yesterday Was One of Those Days

It started well and then slowly became very aggravating and all because of one thing - my 12x12 photo printer or maybe it was me. 

The day started with me finishing the second assignment of week one in the Design Your Life workshop.  I did this one totally digitally.   I know summer really doesn't end for over a month from now but parts of the garden are finishing up while the fall stuff is starting to come on so I thought I'd do a layout of some of our favourite perennials we've planted over the years.  So following Cathy's template for the assignment I came up with this.

The journaling reads  When we started our gardens back in 1987 we were mainly into annuals but gradually we’ve learned that it’s much less work if we replace them with perennials plus then we seem to have more flowers throughout the season.  These are our most favourite ones we’ve had over the years.  sadly squirrels and such have done away with some of them though.                     

Supplies:  Template from Cathy Zielske, Kraft paper from Jessica Sprague's Digi in Deep Class Week 1 Cre8 mini kit, title font is Brush Script and the journaling font is Courier New.   The black around it is just a frame I added when I placed it on here.

It's a double page 8 1/2 x 11 layout and I've never really done that size before so it felt really weird.  I picked the green for the journaling block by using the eyedropper in PSE8 on that little bud just to the right of the columbine.

Here's where it started to get aggravating.   I decided to print it off to put in my album of class assignments.  That worked ok so I thought  I bet I've got a bunch of 12x12 digi pages that I haven't printed off yet so while I'm at it I may as well print them off too.  HAH!  Not!  I put the 12x12 paper in, picked all the options for printing including borderless.  So what do I get one side with no border, 2 sides with 1/8 inch borders and 1 side with 1/4 inch border.  Of course leaving off parts of the layout like part of the title etc.    OK, let's go back and try this again.   Maybe I did something wrong.  Nope - it came out the same.  After many attempts at trying different things I decided maybe I should just check the manual - ok so I was using the wrong feed for it.  I changed that, sent it through again and got the same thing!  It was just so aggravating.   I went in and did an update of the software and driver, changed to different software for the printing and no matter what I did - the same thing happened.

This morning I thought ok, enough of this I'm writing an e-mail to Epson Support and see what they say.   Just before I went to do that I discovered something, I'm using old supply and even though it says fits 12x12 it gives the measurements as 11.6 x 11.6   ARGH!  Wish I'd seen that yesterday.   I've now quickly checked the 2 new packages of it and am relieved to see they are bigger and they say Exact 12"x12".    Keeping fingers crossed.  Maybe I should have just sent them to Costco for printing.  :)

I Don't Believe It - Two Layouts in Two Days

I finished the first assignment of the first week of the Design Your Life course see yesterday's post and this one.   The subject for this week is balance and symmetry.  This was from a sketch that Cathy Zielske, the instructor, gave us to work from.   I'm thinking that I'll be switching over to doing it digitally unless I find a couple of my tools that will make it easier to line things up.  This one took a lot of fidgeting around with trying to get everything in just the right place.  I think everyone will recognize my subject but some might be confused by my title.   I decided to go for it's shorter name (as in Palace of Westminster) just to fit in there.  :)  Look at the wonderful weather we had - it was so good I actually got a sunburn.   This was June of 2008 just before our Baltic Cruise when we had 4 days in London.  It was my one and only time to Great Britain and I most definitely want to go back.

 
 Supplies were the sketch from Cathy Zielske, kraft paper from Recollections, the journaling paper is a scrap I had so have no idea what it's from, blue paper is from Keeping Memories Alive (glad they put their name on the back or I'd be lost as to where it came from too), the font for the title is Freestyle Script while the journaling font is Bradley Hand. 

I discovered something while doing this - I need to figure out how to print more than one picture on a piece of photo paper - talk about waste!

By the way that little silvery rectangle in the bottom left of the picture is the viewfinder from the camera my Dad carried throughout World War II.  One of the things of his that I treasure. 
 
 

Pre-Class Assignment - Design Your Life

I mentioned the other day that I've signed up for a class at Big Picture Classes.   It's a self-paced one as I unfortunately missed it when they ran it as an instructor led class but then again this way I can do it at my own speed.  The one thing I wish there was is some feedback even from others taking the class.   It's called Design Your Life and is given by Cathy Zielske.

We were given the template by Cathy along with the centre square and were to do a layout about what we love about scrapbooking.   I decided to do a why and what I scrapbook layout.   The pictures are top right the 2 of us, bottom centre my sister and her husband and left centre my parent's wedding picture.

I decided to use up some old supplies (including stickers).  Some things I have no idea where they came from as I wasn't good about keeping track of that in those days but I do know there is some Creative Memories in there (the smaller squares of paper and the Memories sticker), some K&Company (the camera sticker) and some DejaViews (the family rub-on).

The top left is hard to see in the layout picture so...

 
I was finding it hard to line up the letters and have them all fit on there so I decided to stagger them instead.  If I remember right I used to have a tool that helped me line them up.  Heaven only knows where it has got to.   I think we need to progress on getting my scrapbooking room done so I can find things.  :)

The square with the tree on it stands for our family histories/geneaology.  I'm not sure if I'm really liking this.  Maybe I should have done it digital instead.