the much-needed update post

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Whew! What a crazy two months it’s been since I’ve been here I decided to celebrate (sorta) being back to blogging by snazzing up my banner. Really trying to be better at making a cleaner-looking blog. I look to Peppermint and Liz really for any minimalist gorgeousness. A LOT has happened and things are only getting more hectic as the year wraps up. Holy wow, when did we hit November, seriously? I swear it was only April yesterday.

Anyway, this being an update post, I’ll try and breeze through my news as quick as possible:

- In early September I got the shock of my life–and it still boggles my mind–with an email from one Robin Carlton asking me if I’d like to be part of the CT at Sweet Shoppe Designs. I was so, so honored and scared to death! SSD is not a dream team–more like, it was so out there for me that I couldn’t even wrap my head around the possibility of being part of that team. I was really happy just hanging out in the forums. In fact, I always thought that I flew under the radar there because I’m not chatty at all. Yet knowing that people had noticed my work, and better–liked my work is such an amazing, uplifting thing. I couldn’t concentrate on work for the rest of that week.

- Double shocker was that very same day I got a PM from one Krista Sahlin asking me if I’d like to be part of her CT. Now HER team was on my dream team roster, lol. I honestly was scared I’d wake up from some elaborate daydream crying into my coffee and pan de sal breakfast.

- In late September Mark & I moved condos, to a unit of the same size and in the same compound, but lower to the ground and with cheaper rent. Despite my hemming and hawing, I’m glad we did move. This place is so much cooler because we don’t get afternoon sun (we are right between two buildings), it is way less dusty, it’s been repainted, and we discovered sweet bonuses: a shower heater in the bathroom and tons of kitchen cupboards for storage I unpacked 95% of our stuff in less than a week. I fixed up my creative space better, and I love scrapping and writing there in the early morning or late evening hours. Even better, I have an ongoing system of cleaning and organizing which makes me feel way better about keeping our Castle clean

- The Universe provides–I’ve been getting steady editorial work for the last few weeks. While the pay isn’t as lucrative as my online assignments, I like what I’ve been writing and am grateful for my industry friends for thinking of me. The flexible sked allows me to do more scrapping.

- We still don’t have our regular broadband Internet connection. It’s a hellishly long story, but currently we’re using a prepaid Sun subscription which at best is dialup speeds. Still, it beats going every morning to an internet cafe

- October can best be characterized as touching-base month. Met up with a lot of friends, had nice long talks, loud videoke singing, and my fair share of drinking, lol. And that’s saying something.

- Also, in late October on a crazy whim I signed up for NaNoWriMo. What exactly am I going to write? It’s something that’s been on my mind for approximately the last two-three months as an amorphous concept. But for the 30 days of November, I’m going to be type out what I’ve got just for the experience. Hopefully it will be something worth reading once I’m done I’ve told a few friends about it and am grateful for their support. In any case, all I’m focused on for 30 days is getting it out of my system. I’ll figure out everything else once I’m done. For the last week I was majorly stuck, then I figured something out yesterday and hopefully the writing will flow better. I’ve got less than two weeks left!

And that’s pretty much my last two months, give or take a few events. Right now I’m between deadlines. In a way this prepaid Internet is a godsend, because I haven’t been on Twitter or Facebook (well, I’m really hardly on there) or Pinterest *sob*. I’ve been able to churn out more work. However, it also meant I had to temporarily let go of blogging. Hopefully things will get better on that front in the next few weeks.

(And Claire–this update is for you! ♥)

project scrap stash: the misc stuff

I talked a lot about how I finally buckled down and organized my scrap stash–and my awesome results. I emailed Kayla about them and was so super tickled to see she’d tweeted my post. I have to admit I’ve now become a disciple of her method and cannot talk enough about my love for Adobe Lightroom.

Anyway, I thought I’d do another post tackling other misc things involving organizing my supplies. These came up during and after the process for me, so they may not have any real order.

First off, I talked a lot about my keyword process and how I took a peek at Kayla’s before developing my own. In case anyone needs it, here are my keywords (in Google Docs format). This is entirely based on my thought process and as a result, usually when I tag my previews I can pretty much predict which keywords to use.

Misc tagging: CTs

- I’m part of CT at CatScrap.com, so I created additional keywords for the store. So every designer who sells in CatScrap, I add an additional keyword of “catscrap.” That way, if I click on the “catscrap” keyword I get ALL the product from the store. This makes it way easier to “shop” my stash when I need to do 100% CatScrap layouts. The same can be said for my individual designer CTs.

- CatScrap also has quarterly collaborations, called the CatWalk. To keep these products organized, under my “catscrap” keyword I have the year and season of each collection (“fall 2010″ or “summer 2011″)

(click to enlarge)

Misc tagging: Collabs

I had the hardest time figuring out how to tag collab kits! Finally I decided on the following:

- I added a general “collabs” category, under which are keywords of various stores. I tag store collabs this way.

- For collabs with two to three designers, I would tag the preview with each designer.

- For any collab that doesn’t fall into those classifications (more than three designers, charity kits, mega collabs, etc) I simply tag them as “collab.” Simple and sweet

My purpose for tagging individual designers with collabs is that sometimes I remember only one designer and even the colors or theme of the kit.

Searching my stash: There are two main ways I search my stash–I simply click on the number to the right of each keyword and it pulls up everything I’ve tagged with that keyword. OR I can type out what I need in the text/metadata field above the thumbnails:

(click to enlarge)

What I’ve realized about myself & my stash as I did this:

- I have a LOT of alphas I’d forgotten about

- I have a LOT of date elements I’d forgotten about

- For some bizarre reason, I have a LOT of kits with the color combination of green, orange, and yellow (I like yellow. But green and orange? Hmmm). Lots of purples and neutrals too (but this I understand because I like purple and neutrals).

- I have a whole bunch of spring- and summer-themed kits. I even have loads of fall kits, and we don’t even HAVE fall over here! My stash of winter kits is laughable, obviously.

What happens next:

- As I scrap with my organized stash, I’ll be figuring out a new workflow (slight deviations from before, I expect) and will likely fine-tune my organizing in tandem with it.

- I’m considering organizing my photos through Kayla’s system as well (she has a separate section for photos). Maybe in a month or so, because–we’re moving! Again! LOL Packing has been hellish because I honestly cannot believe how much crap I’ve managed to accumulate in a year and a half, but then again, forced purging oftentimes for me is the best way I can stay organized.

If you want to learn more about Kayla’s organization system using Lightroom, visit her site here.  

project scrap stash: i’m organized!

It’s inevitable that an issue digiscrappers come across is how to organize their stash of products. I’ve long envied those scrappers who obviously work with some kind of system of organization, and sometimes it’s evidenced by the pages they do. Cindy Schneider is one example–she has the mutant ability to pull items out of various kits and put them together into cohesive, beautiful layouts.

YEARS of starting and restarting organizing methods has only shown me how glaringly “messy” I am with my stash. Thus, I decided to finally overhaul my organizing.

Pre-project:

The problem: I keep forgetting what OTHER designers (outside of my CTs) I had in my stash and whose kits I’d bought but wasn’t using.

Two, I’d also bought various element packs that had never seen the light of day on a layout. One example is my collection of daters. I LOVE date elements. But if you look at my pages there’s nary a one used. More often than not I end up scribbling the date in a tiny font somewhere. Of course, this reality doesn’t prevent me from buying more date elements. :S I can say the same as well for brushes and stamps.

Three, my scrapping style is eclectic. I like all kinds of styles and will try various techniques on my layouts. Which means that often I get into a “mood” when I go shopping. I’ll buy a slew of bright, happy, cutesy kits, or suddenly go all vintage. I often ended up buying kits that looked similar.

Enter Project Scrap Stash. My objective is to clearly see what I have and armed with that knowledge, scrap layouts that utilize my stash and then direct my future purchases to product I actually don’t have. Bottom line, I need to find what I need when I need it, and I need to save money!

What I’ve done in the past: When I first started back in 2006, I was scrapping entirely with freebies. I broke kits apart into papers and elements. This was well and good with a stash of about 300 items, but once I started getting into CTs and actively posting in the galleries, this became cumbersome and frustrating. (At one point, I had 200 unzipped kits/element packs!)

 I’d read a LOT of reviews and tutorials on using ACDSee Photo Manager, so I started tagging my stash with it. Shortly after I started, I got really overwhelmed. I then resolved to only tag my previews.

What didn’t work: I got lazy tagging in ACDSee. :S Also, tagging using someone else’s keywords (or organizational method) got tedious and boring. I realized I wasn’t tagging according to how I think when I scrap. As a result, it would take me ages to tag a single designer’s products, even if all I tagged were the previews.

As I was beginning to think an organized stash would be nothing but a pipe dream, I listened to Episode 5 of The Digishow, where Kayla Lamoreaux guested and told of her own organization process. This class was free until the end of August.

Why I like Kayla’s system:

- I am a kit scrapper. I currently have my stash “organized” according to designer and in that folder the various products I’ve bought from them. With Kayla’s system, I can keep that structure in my EHD, and use Lightroom to access them directly in Windows Explorer. I suppose the same can be said for ACDSee, but I like LR’s interface more (it seems faster somehow, AND it doesn’t randomly crash on me). Seeing as I use LR anyhow to edit my photos, I ended up uninstalling ACDSee and saving up on RAM and harddrive space. Woot!

- Importing and tagging only my previews shrank my catalog considerably. (Kayla’s system includes converting any PNG files you have to TIF) I work on a 7-year-old PC still running on XP, so I appreciated the extra space and RAM.

PROJECT SCRAP STASH

Pre-tagging to-do’s:

- I went through my entire stash and purged what I didn’t need or hadn’t used/had no intentions of using. I whittled it down to a “modest” size of about 150GB.

- Created my “pre-nup”–basically an identical backup of how I physically organize my stash (folder-tree system in Windows Explorer with folders for each designer)

- Sat down and thought about what inspires me to scrap and scribbled a process chart for how I think when I scrap (there’s a peek of what it looks like in the photo above). Kayla says it better. I can’t stress how much this helped me when I was coming up with my own keywords (though I did take a peek at hers). When I eventually started tagging it went by quicker than when I was tagging in ACDSee, because I already knew what was important to me: having everything by designer, by color, and by theme. While I was tagging one preview at a time, I could already mentally figure out which keywords to use for each.

(click to zoom in)

My workflow: 

1. Import previews of kits, element packs, templates, etc per designer. I chose to do previews because (1) it’s far less overwhelming, and (2) I’m a kit scrapper and rarely pull stuff from other kits.

2. Delete any imports that AREN’T previews (this was the only bleh part of the project because I was doing it manually and I didn’t know how to speed up this process)

3. Keyword previews. The least I could do was keyword the designer, the color, and theme of each kit

(This is modified from Steph’s method. I adapted hers because like me, she only wanted to tag her previews and not every bit of product she owns)

My workflow as I keep downloading new product: 

- Just to keep things straight in my head, all new downloads (whether bought or used for CT assignments) go into a Tag Me! folder. This is so I know immediately what I haven’t tagged yet.

- I move these to their corresponding designer folders.

- I look for the preview of each kit/element pack and tag them accordingly.

Results so far: I’m DONE. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve tagged my entire stash of scrapbooking products and photo editing things (LR presets, photo actions, overlays, etc) I was able to finish everything in about six days, averaging about three hours a day. Considering I work on a dinosaur of a computer, this was nothing compared to the most-likely months-long process it would take me to tag everything in ACDSee.

What was so amazing for me is once I started, I was like a woman tag-possessed until I was done. Every time I sat in front of the computer I would plug in my EHD and start tagging, even if it was only a few folders at a time. Something about this whole process just got me so excited!

I’ll do another post on some other bits and pieces, like how I add in CT products, how I can search in LR, and what I’ve discovered about myself and my stash. I’m just giddy with glee that for the first time in YEARS, I’m all caught up organizing. I’m sure I’ll need to fine-tune things as I scrap, but for the most part I am thrilled with being able to actively search my stash for what I need! Thank you SO much for introducing this system, Kayla!

For more information on Kayla’s system (and she explains it SO well!) have a listen at Episode 5 of The Digishow and check out her site, where she still has her class posts up.

week in the life: the process

 

Okay, okay, I promise, this’ll be my last Week in the Life post for the project! As a sort of summary of doing the project I thought I’d also share the process I went through to get my album.

First off, here’s my completed album (again) in slideshow:

Week in the Life 2011

And this was my workflow:

WITL Documentation:  Spent the week taking photos and documenting thoughts and events. I used Ali’s PDF printouts and thought I would use my OhLife account, but turns out I quite liked scribbling things down instead of typing it. At night before sleep when Mark and I talk a lot, I type a quick note on my phone and record it on the paper sheets the next morning.

The PDF sheets are always on top of my desk. I clipped them together using a tiny alligator clip and every so often I would scribble down thoughts or events as they happened. I especially loved how Ali had boxes that indicate thoughts I had, conversations, things to be grateful for (since it is my theme for the whole project), and favorite moments. It helped to organize my thoughts as I had them. It also helped me figure out how to put together my journaling.

During the day, since I spend the majority of my time in front of the computer, I took a lot of screenshots using Paint! I made a folder on my desktop and stick the shots in there. I had shots of work I was doing, sites I was visiting, tweets, etc. Majority of the time I was at home by myself so aside from just doing the same chores, what varied was my work and the places I visited online.

The next day, I would download my photos from my camera to the folder I created on my desktop (where my screenshots are).

WITL Album Preparation: Products to use: I’d determined beforehand which kits and other materials I would use. And I’m just a wee bit OCD in that I figured out which fonts I wanted to use as well (about three fonts, tops) and the color to use.

Product list & links

Papers (some blended) and elements from:

Kismet by Creashens

Everyday Flair by Creashens

Everyday by SSD designers (scroll down the post)

10080 Minutes by Traci Reed

Dog-eared by Traci Reed and Meghan Mullens

Painted Words by Designs by Lili (retired)

You Mini Line stacks by Ali Edwards

You Wordart by Ali Edwards

Templates from:

Scallop template from Template Toolbox 3 by Gina Miller

Bracket template from Birchwood: Clipped by Zinnias & Swallowtails

Misc:

Fonts: Clarendon Lt Light, District Thin, Marydale, LaCarte Pen

B&W action used: Florabella B/W Vanilla

Photo-editing: I use Lightroom 2 SOLELY to edit photos, not to organize them. My computer harddrive is so small that most of my stash and photos are on an EHD, so I don’t bother. I LOVE Lightroom–it makes photo editing SO freaking easy! It is photo editing for lazy people. Anyway, I started collections/folders for each day and edited the photos there (at this point I’d already chosen which ones I wanted) and exported the edits back to their original folders on my harddrive. I scrap using Windows Explorer open so to have everything there works for me.

WITL Album Scrapping

a. For each spread, I ended up using a mix of the 10080 Minutes Slip-Ins and the Templates of Traci Reed. I resized everything to 11.5 inches all around, so I could have a border of my kraft paper background.

b. First, I’d determine how much journaling I had, where to put it, and then choose papers and journal mats to use.

c. Then I’d figure out where to put the photos and which photos to use and clip them to the canvas.

d. Then I’d add little bits and details, such as the date, day, weather, what I ate, etc. I’d cluster elements in some spaces.

e. Lastly I’d fill in the journaling–I followed Ali’s organization in her PDF printout so I had spaces for “grateful for,” “overheard,” and “notable events.”

What Worked

- Editing photos as soon as I could, so it didn’t seem overwhelming to me

- Determining beforehand what materials to use. I ended up putting EVERYTHING in one go-to folder for easier access (since I scrap using Windows Explorer) during the process. I did end up not using some products and adding some, but it was very minimal.

- Determining my “pre-formats:” this meant what fonts to use (I didn’t want to use too many), color of my journaling, measurements of background papers, B&W photo action to use, etc. I wanted everything more or less uniform in the overall look.

- Ali’s documentation sheets–they provided a structure for my journaling and random thoughts I had during the day

- Scrapping as soon as the documentation process was over! While everything was still fresh and my enthusiasm high, I did an average of a spread a day. I did falter mid-way for my last three days, but I think I would’ve procrastinated for much longer if I hadn’t done this earlier.

- Making time to scrap this–I also had CT assignments, work assignments, offline obligations, so while I ended up doing less aimless Internet surfing, I got to finish this album. YAY!

What Could’ve Worked Better

- It took a lot of time (too much!) to figure out where to put my photos and journaling in the templates I used! I think next time I should just put all photos in one page and all journaling in another. Not as visually appealing, but mid-way through the project I was so freaked at how much time it was taking and I didn’t scrap for three or four days!

- I was dealing with HUGE layered files with all the papers and photos I was clipping unto templates. Definitely need to upgrade my PC to handle the load.

- using Paint for my screenshots–I needed more hi-res ones and I neglected to check the resolution of the ones I was getting. Next time I should just save screenshots on Photoshop.

 

CTM choice: torn bits by Creashens

Ooookay, here we go with my first CTM choice–the Torn Bits overlays of Creashens (images linked)

Often, I found that whenever I wanted a little more drama in my photos or if I was expecting to not clutter up my layouts in elements, I would reach for these. And I don’t use it just for photos–clip on some pattern papers, cluster them together, and enjoy! For overlays with spaces for three photos, try clipping papers on opposite ends and your photo in the middle There’re lots of ways you can play with them! With every new collection she puts out, they become my favorites, lol. Here are a few layouts of mine (images are linked) where I’ve used them

Super versatile, right? Anyway, hope this inspires you to check them out and play with them yourself Thanks for looking