Owing to some arm-twisting and bullying by my good friend Noel, it seems I have caved (for today, at least) to the peer pressure of participating in Project 365 (Quick, say that fast! ::peer pressure of participating in Project 365:: Now tell me, do your lips feel like they’ve just had a workout? 😆 ).
So for today, I’m playing catch-up and working backward on my photos that I’ve taken since the first of this year. (I knew there’d be a time when shooting in RAW would get me. It would’ve been so much easier if I just shot in jpg, but I just keep thinking, what a waste of pixels! … yeah, it must be photography pack-rat tendencies. >heehee< )
I’ve found a way to deal with the little nagging alter-ego imp sitting on my shoulder asking me “Yeah, sure, go ahead and do the Project 365, but can you sustain that for the entire year?” 🙄 Well, here’s what I’ve decided to do.
I’ve decided to commit to taking photos (as I really shoot practically everyday; I just don’t upload them into my compy everyday. hahaha! ). And… that’s about it! hahaha! I’ll shoot my photos as I usually do and not worry about whether I’m uploading daily or creating layouts immediately, as long as I shoot a photo everyday and upload them eventually. Now isn’t that much less threatening? (So take that, you little imp-on-my-shoulder! hahaha!)
Anyway… so here’s the first one for the first day of this year. I took it in that fab place we stayed in as we welcomed the new year. The teenagers and my sisters and brothers and DH were playing with sparklers and confetti bombs, and of course I just had to grab my monopod and shoot (Have I said that I am afraid of getting near any fireworks? tsk tsk. Pathetic=Me, right? 😛 )
I’ve always wanted to attempt to shoot a slow-shutter-speed fireworks photo, and what better time to have a first try at it than the first minute of the first day of the year, right? So, many thanks to my very cooperative subjects who obeyed without question when I called “Write 2009!”… here we go! 😆
(Bea, darling, this is for you! 😉 And for you too, Noel! heehee )
Photo #010109 – 12:01 on the First
(Click on image for larger view)
P.S.
I’d like to give everyone HUGE hugs for all the warm fuzzies you’ve left in my comments portion. Hearing from you really makes my day. I can’t even begin to tell you how much it means to me that you take the time to type in a few (or more!) words. Love ya, sweeties!
There are some questions that I received from some of you, and while I normally reply via individual email, I’ve seen in some blogs that the replies are written in the comments section too, so that others who may have the same questions can see the answers as well. Is this the right thing to do? What do you who blog do? 🙂
Anyway, for you, my dear friends, who asked me about stitching and the frame I used for my leaf-insect photo, I have the answers in the comments section here.
Now… gotta get back to the photos! (Will come back and edit this post to include the rest as soon as I’m done. )
I make daily resolutions (easier to do a check and balance that way, and there’s something very soothing when, if you find you’ve been unsuccessful with the day’s resolution, you know you have the option to say, “Well! Tomorrow’s another day!” a la Scarlett O’Hara 😉
Still there’s something quite auld-lang-syne-ish (okay, I just invented that adjective, haha ) about making the traditional New Year’s Resolutions.
So… what’s on your list?
Guess what’s at the top of mine.
Hehe… I’ve been oinking along since the middle of December, shame! (Well, I had to put the new weighing scale to good use, right? 😉 )
Seriously. Oinking. So this must be at the top of my list, most definitely.
And there’s more.
More walking, for one.
My 16-year-old son has been convincing me that I need exercise while respectfully omitting the “older people need all the exercise they can get” part, something I am grateful to him for. Bahaha!
Speaking of which, some days ago, my 13-year-old R –who’s a total movie buff–and I were talking about… surprise!… movies. He was telling me he didn’t want to watch some movie (I forget which one, but I think it was One Flies Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) because he couldn’t stand to see Jack Nicholson with hair (it was filmed in the 70s). He said it wouldn’t seem like Jack Nicholson if the guy had hair. ??? (Don’t worry, I didn’t get it either >teehee< )
So I said, “Why? How old was he when they filmed that movie?”
He said, “I don’t know, but he certainly had more hair than he has now. He’s really old now. He’s ancient! He doesn’t have much hair left.”
“Really?” I said. “How old is he now?”
“I don’t know… Old! Forty?”
Ahem. 😯
So. I must walk if only to prove my youth to my growing sons. Aside from the fact that exercise is good, of course. Especially in this ooooold age of ours (*tongue in cheek*).
Okay, so I won’t kill you with all the details behind my resolutions.
But I will just mention this, because it has to do with the word for the month that my dear friend Jes blogged about here.
What was your word? Mine was… tada! PRAY! Hence my No. 3 resolution! PRAY more! Don’t get me wrong, I do pray everyday. But I figure it’s a wonderful thing to do more of, and one can never lose by doing it more. I also truly believe that work done to the best of one’s abilities and offered up is prayer, so this is my way of reminding myself to turn everything I do into prayer. 😉
So. Five resolutions. Spiritual, health, personal aspects: check, check, check. I’m good. (I figured I’d stop at five. Five is do-able. Six? Seven? Eight? Too much room for me to fail. Haha! I’ll go the safe route and stick with five. )
What about you? What are your new year’s resolutions? If you share them with me, then we can encourage each other and cheer each other and support each other throughout the year! We’ve got… what, more than 300 days to make sure these things happen! Alright!
New year, new lessons: Stitching, anyone?
I have to say… I am totally a sucker for cheap thrills, and one of the biggest sources of thrills for me is learning a new thing! There are few things that make me feel more alive than discovering new things, no matter how tiny and little they are in the bigger scheme of things.
So… did I say I spent the latter half of the holidays (till New Year’s Day) in the southern mountains with my sisters and brothers? Did I mention that most of our time was spent exercising our jaws and stomach muscles? (READ: oink! oink!)
Anyway, we stayed at this fab fab fab place (and no, we don’t own it–we rented it 😀 ), with space huge enough to house 4 families (which we were), with an almost 180-degree view of the world’s smallest volcano and lake within a lake (it’s one of the places that author Patricia Schultz lists in her book 1000 Places to See Before You Die).
I was so awed by the place that I just had to take photos… so I took 8 photos of the view as you come down the stairs from the entry, knowing at the back of my mind that Photoshop would help me stitch them together. I’d never attempted to use Photomerge in the past; in the past I had always stitched photos by hand (Riiiight. That makes it sound a bit like doing a cross-stitch sampler, doesn’t it? 😛 ).
So I tried Photomerge for the first time last night, and oh, boy, I hafta say… it’s the *easiest* and most thrilling thing to do! Loooove how Photoshop takes all the hard work and does it for you! The only thing you need to do is (1) have enough RAM; and (2) know how to fill in the missing places once the photos have been stitched together (something that can be accomplished with the clone tool).
So. I began with 8 photos and ended up with this one:
(You can click on the image if you want a larger view. Originally, this photo was roughly 12+ inches by 36+ inches after stitching. I reduced it to about 8×26 in).
I promised some of my girlfriends that I’d share how I stitched this together (it’s really easy, and I so love sharing easy stuff!) Note: I use CS3, so am so sorry if you use PSE, but I’m totally in the dark as to whether Photoshop Elements 7 has this function as well or not. 😳
Here’s how to do it with CS3:
1. Open your photos that you want to stitch into a single panoramic photo.
2. Drag your photos onto a single document. Make sure that you hold down Shift as you drag in each photo so that it comes in centered on your document space. It doesn’t matter if on your layers palette you notice transparent spaces on some layers as a couple of photos end up in different areas of the total document size. As long as they’re centered when they come in, you’re good to go.
I used one of the photos as my base document and then saved it under a different name so that I don’t write over the original photo. It’s important to ensure that none of the photos save for the background layer is locked. Otherwise the photomerge function won’t work.
It might be good to note, too, that if you’re pulling photos straight out of your camera and you shoot in super fine mode or whatever the highest quality of your images are in your camera, you’re going to end up hogging the memory of your compy… so ideally you’d want to ensure that you have enough RAM to work with (if your RAM is limited, you’ll probably want to close other open documents and programs while you’re stitching).
Since I shoot 98% of the time in RAW, I first saved all my photos (without post-processing them) as jpegs. I post-processed at the end, after the photos were stitched.
3. Once you have all your photos in the single document, shift-click on the top and bottom layers to select all of them (they should all show up highlighted on your layers palette).
4. Go to Edit > Auto-Align Layers > Auto. You’ll get four options (Auto, Perspective, Cylindrical, Reposition Only) in the popup menu… I chose Auto. Guess what. I ended up with a stitched photo that looked like the Cylindrical option icon. I guess Auto makes the best decisions for you, which is a great way to do away with all the guesswork!
5. Wait while Photoshop does all the work. Go get yourself a cup of cafe moccha, or maybe munch on some Royce Potato Chip Chocolates (ha! Now you know what I was doing)… because depending on the number of photos you’re stitching together and your RAM, and oh yes, your patience level as well, this is going to take a bit of time.
6. When you come back, munching and sipping, you’ll be delighted to see on your monitor that Photoshop has done all the hard work for you.
Initially I started out with 14 photos to stitch, actually. There were some similar views, so when my stitched panorama came out, some of it looked a bit wonky. Not a problem. I found the layers that those almost-duplicate photos were on and deleted them from the layers palette.
It also helps to know before you take the photo that you’ll want to take each series of photos from the same height, more or less, if you’re planning to stitch them. (So, ideally, if I wanted a shot of the entire window view, I should’ve used a tripod, moving from left to right as I shot the photos… then to get the roof area, I would’ve tilted my camera on my tripod, again shooting from left to right. That way, I wouldn’t have ended up with huge gaps on my stitched photo and would have probably not needed to do any work with the clone stamp tool. But that’s in retrospect. For next time. 😉
Now you might find that your photos look a bit strange with different shades on them (assuming you didn’t do any post-processing beforehand); if this happens, worry not! Photoshop, our dear friend, will take care of that for you too! Here’s how:
7.With all your layers still highlighted on your layers palette, go to Edit > Auto-Blend Layers.
Wait patiently, knowing that this will take significantly less time than the stitching did a few minutes ago.
Blink your eyes a few times, and voila! MAGIC! The white balance and all the shades on your photos will be blended so they look … PERFECT! Or… sometimes, almost perfect, in case you end up with some transparent areas on the sides of your stitched photo.
Now what to do if you a less-than-perfect panoramic photo with some gaps on its sides on your monitor, same as the one I found on mine? (hehe. Don’t you just love experimenting? You learn a lot that way! LOL) Again, no worries! 😀 Paint in the missing parts with your clone stamp tool. That should take you longer than the stitching process… but since the stitching is the harder part of it, and Photoshop has done it all for you, what’s there to grumble about with the clone stamp tool at one’s disposal, right? heehee.
9. Do whatever post-processing you wantto do with your photos, in case you shot in RAW, and voila! Perfect panoramic photo! YAY!
Now, for a bit more about the scene on my stitched photo:
This house was awesome (as you can probably tell, since I’m still raving about it a couple of paragraphs down this post.)
You enter through a gate and drive down a relatively short path till you get to the front door and the rooftop deck where you can host parties and get-togethers (as long as there’s no slight drizzle) and have a 360º view of the landscape.
You enter through a massive wooden door and go down a couple of flights of stone steps and enter a huge place where you have a split-level living area connected to the dining area with an equally huge kitchen right beside the dining area.
There are four huge bedrooms with their own bath/washrooms (perfect to house my little family and my sisters’ families… we moved in for New Year’s Eve as we had been staying at our own place in the country club earlier).
Then there’s a nice little pool which the teenagers were the only ones brave enough to dip into (cold winds, cold water? No, thanks!). Beside the pool area, with its uber-lush pine trees on one side, is a viewing deck from which you can marvel at nature’s wonders… and if you fancy a warm adventure with water but without the biting wind, there’s a sauna/hot bath a few garden steps below (I wasn’t brave enough to try that either… because it involves getting out into the cold winds before you get back to the house, haha!)
Surrounded by nature on all fronts, thank goodness we only encountered this little fella in the garden:
Well, whaddayaknow? A visit from one of those leaf insects that you see on the pages of National Geographic. I normally don’t like bugs (hate, hate, hate cockroaches… you can’t even get me to squish one. Ugh, that awful crunch as you smack them–notice I say “you” smack them because I’ll be the one running in the other direction at 200mph. And they fly! And they bite! And they stink! Uggggh. Shudder.)
But this is no roach. So okay, I’m fine with this, and I can stick around long enough to take its photo. Since we were in the mountains, I only had one lens with me (my lucky brother brought his macro… I’d love to see how his photos turned out!). I wonder how the poor insect felt with all those lenses a million times larger than him, all aimed at his little body. My nephew “held” the insect on his old and tattered book, and it crawled onto the ledge long enough for us to shoot a few more frames till my sister said “Eeeek! Get it out now!” End of photo session. 😆
One more time, up close, sans macro:
Recalling the Resolutions (Do you feel the freebie coming? :D)
What was No. 4? Create weekly? Let’s take that resolution seriously today, and let’s see what we’ve got here:
Oooh! A freebie! 😆
But first, I want to say THANK YOU to all of you for your warm fuzzies and for sharing with me how you’ll be doing Project 365 (or some variation of it). The 12 on 12s is a great idea! I have to admit that I’m still sitting on the fence on this one, wondering if I’ll end up doing a daily (20% chance), weekly (40% chance), or a monthly (40% chance) project. I’m wondering: if I just upload my daily photos onto my blog, does that count? ROFL. (Oh man. I so feel like Charlie Brown right now, sitting on the playground bench, watching everyone play and wondering what to do next. bwahahaha)
So anyway. You know how there are ten million options open to everyone, and anyone can do what their heart desires, right? (That’s what I love about scrapbooking and art and creating! There are no hard and fast rules! Just create! And have fun!)
One of these many options I’ve heard about is this other easy approach to housing and documenting the photos, which involves using a 4×6 slip-in photo album and turning it into a scrapbook (think: you have the option to put in photos or journaling tags or digitally scrapbooked 4×6 pages, or whatever you fancy!). Have you heard about this?
Personally I love the square size of 8×8’s so I probably won’t be attempting this anytime soon (and need a reason to use all the Bind-It-All schtuff I ordered! :D). But I can imagine wanting to try this approach one day. So for those who are doing this approach now, and for those who are doing the regular 12×12 or 8.5×11 or 8×8 or whatever size pages, this freebie mini is for you and you and you! Anyone can use it!
I made this chipboard journaling tag, with rubbed-on designs, which you can use for Project 365 or anything else, really. (It just came in really handy for jotting my resolutions on, haha!) And it’s sized at 4×6, so if you want to go the hybrid route and print this out and write on it, and then slip it into your 4×6 album pocket-pages, or attach it to your cardstock, you can! Or if you want to digitally attach it to your purely digital layout, you can too! (I didn’t include shadows so that you have total freedom with how you want to position it on your layout and where you want the lighting effects to be).
Click on the image to download. And thank you so much for the love you leave as you download. 🙂
I’ll be back soon with more photos to share… for now, I have to get to tutoring the kids with their homework, and doing my own homework as well! 😉
And forgive me for being absent for such a long time! In my part of the world, the Christmas season is the biggest feast/festival/fiesta (as the Christmas carols playing on the airwaves as early as September would prove), and the number of parties and reunions and out-of-town trips increase tenfold! So yeah, I was pretty much buried under piles of Christmas lists, then Christmas wrappers and tape, then Christmas parties and reunions–and along with that, Christmas food (which is now safely tucked away in my stomach, thank you very much, BURP!)… and whatever time left over that I’ve been able to grab, I’ve spent working on a “couple” of things that have to remain a secret right now but which I’ll definitely share with you come mid-January 😉
So… for the meantime, I thought I’d share with you some photographic evidence that I have not been lying around doing nothing but filling my mouth with holiday goodies (uh… more like moving around doing a lot while filling my mouth with holiday goodies, heehee!) 😆
Wrapping Fury
Quick, answer this question: How many Christmas gifts did you wrap? You know? Well, I salute you! I bow to you! Because I can never count the total number of gifts I wrap each year; all I know is that if I seem to disappear for a few weeks during the holiday season, all anyone needs to do is wade through mounds of wrapper and tape and boxes and voila! You’ll find me buried under them, trying to work my way up. 😛
This year, I *did* attempt to count the gifts I wrapped… at least the ones for my sons’ teachers. I have to confess, though, that I lost count somewhere between 25 and 40. Multiply 4 kids in 4 different levels in 3 different schools, with a different teacher for each subject, then add the teacher aides and security guards, and you have… how many? See what I mean? 😆
So here’s the photo of this year’s bunch of teachers’ gifts:
And because gifts need a home… in comes the tree! 😀
The Tree Boys
One of the really great things about having five boys is that you eventually get to the point where you can assign certain duties to them, such as putting up the tree! 😀 Every year, we put up the tree on the weekend of December 8th (Feast of the Immaculate Conception, which also means that most schools give the kids the day off… so in our home, that means the kids have the entire day to hang out and put up the Christmas decorations!)
This year we deliberately kept the home decor simple, since we had men working on the annex that we’re attaching to our home (read: breaking down the wall to connect another unit and completely remodeling said unit). The work isn’t done yet, and I think it’s safe to say it’ll take us about 3-6 months to really fix up the unit (we’re changing all the bathrooms, installing blinds in all the rooms, putting in new furniture, etc. etc. etc.–you get the picture. 🙂 ).
So anyway, that explains why the Main Thing this year was our tree!
There are few things that beat the joy of watching one’s kids help each other trim a tree, don’t you think?
My eldest helping my youngest… mmmmm! What a lovely thing to watch! 🙂
S gets a helping hand from R:
And my little J gets help from his nanny 😀
We have a tradition of getting each child something of his own to hang on the tree each year. Then when they are old enough to have homes of their own, they’ll have a “starter kit” of their very own decorations to hang on their own Christmas tree, gathered from their very first Christmas from the time they were born.
But there’s one item hanging on the tree that has my name on it: this one! (Gotta love my Starbucks coffee! 😀 )
So it’s a 16 year old tree, and it’s not 10 feet tall, but it’s been with us from the birth of our eldest son and we love it. 🙂
The View from the 41st
On my side of the world, the holiday season gives everyone the best excuse to party. It’s a wonderful time because you get to meet up with people you hardly see the rest of the year. Relatives from around the world fly back home to be with family. Office people turn into party animals in a 180º transformation that puts the pumpkin-coach metamorphosis in Cinderella to shame. 🙂
My hubby’s office party was held in the 41st floor of a hotel, and as always, I brought along my Nikon D90 with me. His office Christmas parties are always themed, and the different divisions come up with a program of sorts where they compete against each other to win the prize for the best presentation. ‘Course I’d never pass up the chance to take advantage of the photo-ops! 😀
A couple of photos of that evening:
The theme this year was Asia; this was the winning team’s presentation:
Awards were given for best costume of the night… these ladies were the nominees:
(I think Asian costumes are so exotic! 😀 )
So anyway, when the party was over, I looked out of the floor to ceiling windows down at the city below and decided the view would make a GREAT shot! DH saw me fiddling with my camera (no tripod in tow), and teased me: “There is no way you’re going to get a clear photo of the street from this distance without a tripod and with the complete lack of lights.”
Well. Have I said that deep down inside, I have this little rebellious streak that surfaces when one presents me with a challenge that sounds more like a dare? 😆 So of course, I took a photo of the street from above. Here it is:
Don’t you just love those Christmas trees made of lights? 🙂
Project 365?
Are you doing this? Project 365, as I understand it (correctly, I hope? 😛 ) involves taking a photo every single day of the year (hence the 365). This was started some years back–the first time I heard about it was on the photojojo blog, with photos being uploaded to flickr. As all good things go, the interest in this project spread, and now some of my Spraground sistas have decided to join this project (boy, do I envy their energy and their ability to do this! I so wish I could, except that I’m also absolutely sure that I’d fail by the first week!)
I love taking photos and I joke that my Nikon is surgically attached to my body, but I’m not sure about whether I’d be able to keep up taking a photo every single day. Now if it were a weekly thing…
So I’m wondering: am I the only one who isn’t brave enough to take on this challenge? 😆 All this wondering led me to more thinking: what other options are there for people like me, who may not be able to keep up with the daily photo-vitamin requirement?
If I am fearful of my ability to tackle a daily thing, what about a weekly thing instead? Documenting a few days a week for 52 weeks in the year… that’s 52 layouts… hmmm! Tempting! *eyebrows going up and down*
What if weekly is still too daunting? What about a monthly thing? Documenting the highlights of each month for 12 months in a year… that’s 12 layouts… certainly do-able! *eyebrows going up and down faster*
Heehee. So you know where all of this is leading to, right? What can I create to share with everyone who wants to play with their cameras, whether on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis?
Yep! Here it comes! A freebie, finally! (A small one, but one that comes with a lot of affection anyway!)
Here’s a photo tag which you can use to write down the date when the photo was taken and a few notes to record the special moment captured. I’ve included two versions of the tag: one flat and one curled.
Click on the image above to download. Thank you for the love you leave on my blog as you download 🙂
I’ll be back soon, but for now I need to jump into bed because the sun is about to rise!
Happy New Year (((((hugs))))) to you, my sweeties!
Yep. Lotsa buzz going on around here. Starting to feel like a real bee (not a queen, though… that’s wishful thinking. I’m more like the worker type or the drone 😆 )
BUT! It’s all good, right? There is always so much to be thankful for! And on that note, before I forget, Happy Thanksgiving to one and all! Hope you had an awesome time celebrating all that’s warm and wonderful in your life (and hope you had a great Black Friday shopping spree, too! 😀 )
We’ve got a lot to catch up on, so I hope you’ve got your shopping for the day done (at least for today 😛 ). So get comfy, sit back, grab that cold drink (or warm, if the snow outside is starting to freeze you), and put your feet up… and here we go!
The Gift that Lasts Forever
Have you gone Christmas shopping yet? You have? No fair… you can do mine. 🙂
I haven’t done any Christmas shopping, but that’s okay… there’s time to freak. Let’s see… I have exactly 19 days to go on a wild race to the stores. (And believe me, given the Christmas traffic in my part of the world, that’s not a lot of days to shop in. It’s not surprising to spend a quarter of each day sitting in traffic–and that’s if you’re lucky. *sigh* Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating. It’s just that I like traffic–any kind of traffic, any length of traffic–as much as I like … hmmm… bitter gourd. 😛 Each holiday season, I tell myself I’m going to shop the entire year next year, so that by December I would have no one left to shop for–you know, that dream of sitting contentedly, all gifts wrapped and ready to be delivered way before the 20th day of December–and of course, every year December rolls around and I wonder where that shop-early resolution got shelved during the past 11 months. What can I say? It’s an elusive dream. 😆 )
But hey, guess what? There’s a gift you can give which doesn’t require you to lock arms with the rest of the country as they run around the malls, looking at their lists and checking them twice. Better yet, this gift is truly special, the kind that doesn’t make you fat, that doesn’t collect dust on a shelf, that doesn’t get broken if dropped. This is the gift that lives on, long after the wrapper has been turned into recycled paper… (the season allows me to be cheesy, right?). It’s gift of learning, of discovery, of creating, of celebrating.
So yeah! Give the gift of digi-goodness to those you love this season! (Yes, that includes you! You can give yourself this gift too!)
There’s a huge, first-time-ever, crazy-generous gift over at our Spraground, and it’s called the Holiday Sale! Jessica has taken the best-selling digital courses and slapped on a huge discount on them, and there are even bundled offers (where you get a really, really great class 😉 for free if you take the bundle of 3 courses).
It’s so awesome that you can even divide the bundle gift between you and your friends! (You can give the entire bundle, lock stock and barrel, to your BFF 😀 or you can give one or two courses to your friend and keep the third and the free one for yourself. Oooor you can even give the four courses to yourself if you just joined us on our Spraground recently for our super-successful Stories In Hand free course and decided you like our Spraground enough to paint your name on a swing. 😉
The sale goes on till Christmas Day, so you can totally do your last-minute shopping on the web as well. You can send the gift either with a print-able card (we’ve got them on the Spraground–you just need to download them and type or write the coupon code before you give them to your loved ones), or you can send the gift via email. See? Isn’t Jes awesome? She thought of everything to make life in the fast-season lane easy for you! 🙂
(Alright, you may run to the Spraground and grab those courses now… I’ll wait right here for you to come back. >heehee< )
(Oh and PS. the image is click-able… it’ll take you right over to our Spraground! 😉 )
PAD makes a Comeback
Remember the photo-a-day we had last May, where we took a photo each day of the month, and at the end we have an entire day-by-day account of the extraordinary found in the ordinary days? We have that going on again over at our Spraground, upon the suggestion of one of my dearest friends, Lindsan. We’re taking a photo a day for each day of December (especially tricky, if you’re wrapped up in a million things to do this month, or especially exciting, if you’re one of the more organized people who’ve got their decor up and the gifts all wrapped and are just waiting for the 25th to roll around. If you’re the latter, I wanna be you. 😀 )
It’s only Day 4 and over at the special December 2008 Photo-A-Day gallery that Jes put up for all those who want to join (yes, that would be you, too, if you haven’t yet joined… COME!), there are soooo many wonderful photos and layouts coming up! I wish I had the time to leave love on all of them (yep, that’s on my to-do list too)… one of these days, I’m going to be successful at catching up with this! (There were 24 pages of photos/layouts last time I checked. )
If you want to take a photo a day and collect warm fuzzies from the awesome folks over at our Spraground but just found out about it now, come and join us anyway! (You can always post the previous days, a few days late! 🙂 )
And in case you’re thinking twice… there’s another special treat that Jes has cooked up to make our Photo-A-Day adventures more fun! Go read about it on her blog HERE.
And just to show you what a win-win situation we have here, at the end of December not only will you have had the chance to win a great prize, not only will you have experienced the special brand of Spraground warmth in our community, not only will you have had something exciting to do with your camera for every single day of an entire month, but–best of all–you’ll have 31 photos worth of wonderful memories, preserved forever either in photographs or in layouts!
How awesome is that?
Totally! Here now are my first four days of December PAD (with stories interspersed):
Day 1: Bread for Breakfast
A few weeks ago, some close friends of dh and mine invited us to a joint-birthday celebration at this little deli where they sell the yummiest and freshest French bread ever! Since then, I’ve filled our table with all the different types of French bread (and yes, with the cheese and the sausages to go with it! Mmmmm!)
Warm bread and Christmas warmth… it’s a perfect fit!
Day2:Â Igloo, Southeast-Asian Style
When I was a kid, I wanted to have my own playhouse. I had a nipa hut in our backyard, complete with ladder and windows that you kept open with sticks (authentic!), but I didn’t really like spending time in there because it was hot and it made me itchy (and between me and the teddy bear family I kept in it, there just wasn’t enough space). And to my little mind, it wasn’t cool. hehe. What was cool for me and my brother, 2 years older, was having our own treehouse. There was just one tiny problem: though our backyard was full of trees, they weren’t members of the treehouse-strong-branch family. The closest we ever got to making our treehouse back then was hanging a floral blanket over the branch of the aratilis* tree. It probably looked pathetic to the adults, but for us, it was treehouse-teepee heaven. 😀
(*aratilis – For those with green thumbs: I did a google search for aratilis, and found out that it belongs to the genus Muntingia, and is a close relative of the Jamaican cherry. It’s tinier than the first joint of your pinky finger; it’s green and hard when it isn’t ripe, and red and squishy when it’s ripe. Never enjoyed eating it, though my sister loved it. 😆 )
So… this yearning for a playhouse–is it genetic, you think? Is it something that all kids pass through? Because all my kids passed through a stage of trying to build their own playhouses (never mind that there are Little Tykes ready-built playhouses; there must be a primal urge to build a cave with one’s own hands).
My fifth son just built his a few days ago. Right in the comfort of our living room.
Yep. I knew those huge floor throw pillows had to be good for sumthin’. 😆
Day3: Oh Happy Day!
Oh happy day! Oh happy day! My package finally came in! My long-awaited Bind-It-All, accessories, space bar, acrylic and chipboard covers, and o-rings, finally in my home! Yabba-yabba-yeah-YEAH!
Okay, so maybe I kind of went overboard with all those o-rings… shhhhh. ( Wouldn’t you, if it took about a month for the supplies to get to you? 😆 Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m justifying it. heehee).
Of course, since I happen to be a gadget queen, it should come as no surprise that I totally love this tool?
A corner rounder that can cut through chipboard and other thick stuff! Mmmmm! It’s like a long-lost relative of my beloved Cropadile! 😆
Now, all I have to do is learn how to use these. Unlock the Power of the Tools! Indulge in the Gadget Love Affair! Let the hybrid games begin! bahahahaha!
Oh! Along with the BIA, I also got a bunch of books (to read during the Christmas break–yay!), ordered from both Amazon and ideabooks4u.
Love these two stores, amazon & ideabooks4u. The best part? Great customer service. I ran into a snag with Amazon (Ali’s book was listed as available, and then not), and they fixed it up as best as they could. Gotta love that. This was the first time I ordered from ideabooks4u (to get that Ali book which wasn’t available in Amazon), and they did an awesome job of delivering quickly and shipping the items wonderfully.
I am a sucker for great customer service. The product, whatever it is, has to be fabulous–of course, or else, why buy it, right? But even if I’ve got an excellent product staring me in my face, if it isn’t accompanied by excellent customer service, I can easily turn around and march right out, empty-handed and wallet-full, without an iota of regret.
Let me digress a bit and mention that (based on my experience) all digi shoppes are awesome and I have not yet met a designer who wasn’t a really, really nice, generous, sweet person. But I need to give a shout-out to my friend, Becky, who handles customer service at Scrapbook-Graphics.com. Each and every time I have run to her for help, whether it’s a tiny issue or a huge concern, she has always treated my pleas for help with much gentleness, concern, kindness, and immediate action. If there was an award given for excellent customer service in a digi shoppe, I’d vote for Becky any day. She’s definitely one of the reasons why SBG is among my favorite digi-shoppes! 🙂
I think it’s totally great to take an ordinary day and make it special by celebrating people who do their jobs with much heart and dedication. Just appreciating them is enough to put a smile of gratitude and quiet contentment on my face! (Among these people would be the three security guards who serve at my sons’ school. They are such a joy to meet every morning! Everyday when I take my kids to school, I’m greeted with big smiles and warm “Good morning!” greetings… every. single. day. Rain or shine. No fail. I love that, you know? That cheerfulness in the morning that lasts all the way till later on in the day when I come over to pick up my kids–it’s so precious! They’re definitely one of the best things I love about my sons’ school! 🙂 What about you–whom would you like to celebrate today? 😉
Day4: Belen on a Deadline
Ever tried crafting on a deadline?
Last Wednesday afternoon, my son R came home with news:
“Mom, my teacher wants me to submit a belen for extra credit.”
Belen is the Filipino term for the nativity scene, which can be found at Christmastime in every Filipino home (that, and the ubiquitous parol, or Christmas star). 😀
I noted the information and… promptly forgot about it, thinking there’d be the weekend to deal with it.
Well. Yesterday afternoon, R came home with news again: “The belen is due tomorrow.”
And: “It has to be artistic.”
Whaaaaa? You need this is less than 24 hours?
Zoom. Off we rushed to the malls to look for a nativity scene that could be bought off the shelves. Shouldn’t be a problem, right? After all, this is standard Christmas decor fare.
Wrong. Six stores and two pairs of tired legs after, I decided to buy a nativity scene figure and some raw materials and c.r.e.a.t.e. the nativity scene. I had absolutely no idea how it would come out; I only knew that it was our only option, since the bookstores we went to had absolutely no books with a nativity scene of the paper-doll kind; and none of the toy stores had any toy nativity scenes.
Here’s what the preliminary stages of the nativity-scene-creative process looked like:
The bare naked facts:
The backside:
(jumble of rice lights peeping on the right side)
The front:
And let’s not forget the recipe:
Ingredients:
extra thick chipboard, leftover unused chopsticks from Japanese-food takeout, some strapping tape, glue sticks, PVC glue, brown crepe paper, glittery fronds, a set of tiny rice lights, leftover animal toys borrowed from children’s toy box, and one store-bought Holy Family figure
Tools Needed:
glue gun, cutter, cutting mat, and yer good old trusty Cropadile 😉
Procedure:
Mix together, pulling cobwebby strands of glue from the glue gun (which manage to find their way all over the stuff). Cut some, measure some, laugh a lot. Plug in the lights when done, and voila!
The finished product, and my Day 4 Photo-a-Day accomplished as well! 😆
Freebie Mini
And since you made it this far, I thought it would be really nice if I could reward you with a little freebie, right?
This is just a tiny one… I have found that if I wait till I’ve got a fuller set to give away, I end up not blogging for days while working away on my designs. Then I end up torturing you with these long, long, looooong posts! 😆
So I decided to try a different route and give off little freebies now and then… that way I get to see you more often, and you get to download more (albeit smaller) freebies! Does that work for you? 🙂
So here’s what we have for today:
This is a 6×6 chipboard journaling block… just type (or write, if you’re doing hybrid 😉 ) your journaling on the lines, and voila!
Click on the image to download the journaling block (or should I say journaling circle?) 😀
PS. 4shared no longer allows comments on the download page unless you have an account with them and are logged in… so I would totally embrace you if you took the time to leave love on my blog as you download. 🙂
And before I go (it’s mid-dawn once again!), I have a little riddle for you:
Question: What could a 14-year-old teenage girl and her middle-aged aunt possibly have in common?
Answer: A love for Jason Mraz! Well… more specifically, absolute adoration for the boy by the teenage girl, and absolute love for the music (not the boy, LOL) by the aunt.
And because my niece is in Paris, this one is especially for her, in hopes that she manages to bump into the boy of her dreams while he walks along the streets again, someday in the future. 🙂
Enjoy, and I’ll see you soon, my sweeties!
PS. I can’t believe the guy just chased those pigeons down! Ooogy! I remember the first time I was in Paris, and dh wanted to take a photo with all the pigeons on the street… and I love birds. NOT. I think you can tell from my hunched up shoulders and the body-tilt (away from the birds, far far away) in the photo below. bwahahaha! 😆
Dh showed this to me… and I could! It must be the alien in me. Are you an alien too? 😆
fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too
Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.
i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg.
The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid! Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae.
The rset can be a taotl mses and you can siltl raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Azanmig huh? Yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!
… after being buried under tons of paperscrapping tools and paper and eyelets and chipboard and more paper!
We are having the grandest time at my friend Jessica’s Stories in Hand course ( and I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re in it too! 😆 )! It’s so incredibly awesome to see so much creativity and so much storytelling coming together in one Spraground from all ends of the world! The course gallery is filled with wonderful works of art and the forums are overflowing with great reminiscing, and–best of all–friendships are in the process of developing or strengthening on the Spraground!
I am in a bit of a euphoric state (hehe) because I’ve finally finished my Stories in Hand binder, which houses the amazing system that Jes has designed for gathering and telling stories. Part of the happiness comes from finally, finally, finally getting to use all these tools in my scrapping drawers and shelves that have heretofore been referred to only as The Hoard. 😆 Can you spell g.u.i.l.t.-f.r.e.e.? I used to bite my knuckles every time someone mentions “paperscrapping materials” because I know I have a ton of unused stuff. Not anymore! YEAH! 😛
Before I put up the evidence of hands at work at more than a keyboard, here’s a little story:
When the course started, dh came home to a room filled with papers, eyelets, punchers, glue sticks and glue rollers, a brayer and a Cropadile… and said, “What is going on? What is all this?”
See, he’s used to coming home and seeing me create on my beloved Wilson compy. I don’t think he has ever seen me get messy (or mess up our room) with paperscrapping stuff.
So I answered him, with a quick glance up from punching tabs with my corner puncher, “Oh, just Jessica’s new course that we’re having on the Spraground…”
Well. I have to say, my hubby is one amazing man. Since that fateful day, he comes home and doesn’t ask about the metal ruler and the cutter and the strips of paper lying about. In fact, he accepts them as the most natural thing in the world. 😆
So. Here’s what he had to put up with while I wasn’t done with the binder:
(And nope, I’m not showing you what our floor looked like. This is embarrassing enough! hahaha!)
And here’s the final product:
The binder on the left is what contains the meat of the system and the little notebook on the right plays a supporting role. 🙂
Here are the front and back views of the binder:
Psst. Let’s pretend you don’t see that the stitching is crooked, okay? 😉
And here’s what the binder looks like inside! Open sesame! 😀
(I made the envelope and quote strips to go behind the three main sections–Roots, Family, and Self–because I wanted an excuse to use raffia. 😆 Just kidding… I love quotes and often I’ll find one and scribble it on a piece of paper… and when the time comes that I need it, more often than not, I’ll forget where that little piece of paper is. So I thought, hey, why not make some little strips that look nicer than those hastily-torn scraps and have them all in this neat little binder, so I never have to look for them again? Hence the quote envelopes and strips were born. 🙂 )
Here’s a closer look at the prompts (color-coded according to the tab they fall under–Red for Roots, Green for Family, Blue for Self)… and the inside prompt-pages that contain Jessica’s Stories in Hand magic!
The Family tab page, front and back:
And the Self page, which I renamed “Me” 😀 :
A few more pages from inside, including some additions I made to personalize the pages:
(I cut little slits where the photo corner diagonals are, and then printed each photo on regular photo paper. Then I inserted it into the slits. This way, if I ever feel the need to change the photos, I can easily slip these existing ones out and re-insert the updated photos in the slits. 😀 )
And the little jotter, of course!
And now that the binder and the notebook are all ready, let the story-gathering and story-telling begin! YAY!
On other fronts…
Thank you sooo much for all your kind wishes and your precious prayers during the rough month of sickies that my three kids were going through. I think it’s pretty safe to say they’ve finally scaled the walls and are now on the way to getting much better.
Before these past few weeks, I used to think that pneumonia was something someone got if they didn’t take care of a cough or a cold, or if you let a wet t-shirt dry on your back (yep, that’s totally unscientific, and Amy, Shell, and my other awesome doctor-friends, don’t you worry–I’m aware these are probably old wives’ tales that my nanny told me when I was a kid 😛 ). Well, this whole bout with the double-whammy pneumonia of my three babes began with a cough on the first day, a fever on the next, and by the 3rd day when I was at the pedia, it was pneumonia. (Sound byte from me to doctor: “In two days? Two days and it’s pneumonia? Pneumonia?”
It’s a good thing my kids’ pedia did not stick her face up mine and say, “Read my lips: P.N.E.U.M.O.N.I.A.” 😆
And I call it a double-whammy, because after 10 days, they did get well. But then in the evening of that very same day that the pedia announced that they were clear (they were feverless, after all), my youngest suddenly had high fever, and we were in the boxing ring for Round Two! *sigh* I think I’ve made friends for life with the salesgirl at the drugstore, from the sheer amount of medicines I bought and trips I made to her little medicine kingdom. 🙂
So I’ve taken that Excel file and dumped it in the trashcan (with relish! Aah! The end of all those medications! The kids are well!) and now this is the only thing that will remain on my bathroom counter for the next few days:
Halloween Hangover
So… since the kids were on medical “house arrest” during Halloween, they unfortunately didn’t get to go trick-or-treating. But they’re great kids–they watched the other kids go trick-or-treating from their bedroom window, clapped their hands as the parade and band marched around the streets, and… more than a week after, transformed themselves into…
PS. Yes, those are Spiderman figures they’re holding, and yes, they were watching a Spiderman vid. 🙂
I have *not* forgotten…
…the last set of my friend Lynne’s and my Fall into Fall freebie collab! Here, finally, are the elements that go with Set 4 (and coordinate with the first three sets that we released).
Because this is the last set of elements, we’ve filled it up with loads of stuff!
Here’s what you’ll find in the Fall Into Fall Set 4 Elements pack:
Fall into Fall Elements - Set 4
What is in this pack: 17 realistic elements (18 if you count the glass frame which comes in shadowed and no-shadows versions).
Click HERE to download the freebie! And thank you for the love you leave in my blog as you download. 🙂
Alrighty! Now on to the other stuff that fills my to-do list! Will be back soon, I promise!
In the meantime, huge (((((((hugs))))))) to you, my sweeties!
Wait! One last thing! 😀
PS. I just discovered a little button on my dashboard that says “Poll”… hmmm. So I wanted to play around with it and try it out. Will you join me?
See, on this Stories in Hand venture, I discovered that I enjoy scrapping with real stuff and playing around with my hands (I used to do a lot of crafty stuff in my former life, after all 😛 ) but I’ve also discovered that I really am a digital girl at heart. I love hybrid because there are just some things that can’t be done in digi (say, have tabs that really stick out of pages, or have real holes where eyelets have been pushed through the cardstock), but then I really, really love brushes and layers and the magic that is possible in digi… plus I really like definitely love that Delete key! 😆
So… let’s try out PollDaddy and you tell me: are you a paperlovin’ scrapper, a digiscrapper hopelessly hooked to the Dark Side, or are you right there in the middle-hybrid?
Ever tried climbing the walls lately? I think the past weeks have made me an expert.
But I like to call it celebrating the chaos. It sounds so much nicer than freaking out does, doesn’t it? 😆
It’s been a very demanding 3-4 weeks, what with three of my babies sick with pneumonia. Endless trips to the doctor, nebulizing round the clock, too many meds to keep count of… (yep, I totally needed to create an Excel file to keep track of what to give whom when, and here’s proof):
Ahem… it’s also proof of how awful and messy my chicken-scratch penmanship is… so thank goodness for Photoshop Blur! 😆
So I’m so sorry, my friends, if I’ve been missing in action lately. I’ve been missing you too! But you know what happens when real life takes you by the collar, right? You stop whatever it is you’re playing with and you come running. (Ha! Lots of climbing and running, wish it had effects on my body! ROFL).
But I’m back! My boys are on the mend (for good, with no more relapses, I hope!), thanks to all the prayers of all my wonderful friends worldwide. Like I always say, how can heaven not listen when there are pleas from all ends of the earth? 😉
A friend of mine told me something the other day. She said, God’s weakness is in prayer and our strength is in prayer.
I think that’s totally beautiful. God grows all soft when we pray to Him, and we on the other hand gather strength from Him when we pray.
Awesome.
So. I’ve been trying to get back into the swing of things… and I know that I owe you the last set of my friend Lynne’s and my Fall Into Fall freebie collab!
I also know that DSD has come and gone and I totally missed giving out DSD gifts (awwww 😦 ) and to make it up to you, I’ve come up with not one but TWO final parts for the Fall Into Fall freebie! (About time too, as the seasons are quickly changing and Christmas lights are starting to blink all around! 😆 )
So here we go: Fall Into Fall Set 4, the Paper Pack!
These papers coordinate perfectly with the other papers from the previous Fall Into Fall sets. There’s one patterned paper here, and the rest are solids–all highly-textured and grunged a bit. I hope you like them!
Click on the image to download. And thank you so much for the love you leave on my blog!
Now I’m off to bundle up the rest of the elements so I can get them up here too! (PS. Lynne has three more awesome elements to share with you!)
I’ll be back soon, so don’t forget to come back for the elements in this last set of the Fall into Fall Collab freebie!
I loved the movie (didn’t get to see the play)… Loved Meryl Streep, great actress that she is, and incredibly funny too (I totally get her humor in choosing to do this movie to embarrass her kids, bwahaha). And maybe Pierce Brosnan doesn’t make me swoon when he sings, but he doesn’t need to because he makes me swoon even without opening his mouth to say a word. 😆
So anyway, inspired by Mamma Mia and the Spraground Weekly Challenge last week on scrapping travel photos, I decided to pull out the 11-year-old old photos of our trip to Santorini, Greece (yep, back in them good ol’ days when long hair didn’t drive me crazy yet and I had the bravado to wear mini skirts 😛 ) and finally scrap them!
What was supposed to be a single page layout turned into a double-whammy.
Here’s what I came up with:
The Beauty of Santorini
(You can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish)
Click on the image to download the 24×12 layered template (this is huge!)
Now if you’re more comfortable doing the pages on their own as two 12×12 layouts, you may want to download the double-pager as two separate sides (the left side and the right side). I’ve gone ahead and created that for you as well, just to make things easier (yep, I’m all for easy!) 😆
LivEdesigns-Santorini Double-Page Layered Template-12x12 times 2
So click on the image above if you want to download the two 12×12 layered templates that make up the left and right sides of the double-pager.
Both downloads come to you as layered .psd files.
Have You Joined the Bandwagon Yet?
Everyone and everyone has joined the Stories in Hand bandwagon at our Spraground! Have you signed up? If you have, yipee-doo! You’re probably busy getting your supplies for this great event ready!
If you haven’t signed up yet, whoa! What are you waiting for? Come and join the par-tay! 😀 Sign-up is till November 8th, and I did mention the whole course is free, right? With loads of surprises! So come on, hit this image below (or the one on my sidebar) and go straight to the sign-up area! I promise you, you’re going to be in good GREAT company! 😉
Stories in Hand - SIGN UP NOW! (if you haven
Update on the final set of Fall Into Fall Freebie:
This one is coming soon. I know, it’s trudging along way more slowly than I would have liked, but I’ve been busy caring for my three sick kids (bad colds gave way to pneumonia… so I have turned my home into a mini hospital with three poor little patients… would appreciate a little prayer sent to Heaven for them! Thanks in advance!)
… is funny. It’s great almost all of the time; sometimes it gets poopy (really now, what country has things going great for it all of the time?). But mostly it’s funny. The people are funny.
That’s one thing I love about these beautiful 7000 plus islands. The people have such a great sense of humor. There is a saying we have which, loosely translated, means, “Everything can be solved if it is communicated properly.” (hmm. Somehow the English version loses much of the flavor of the native language, but it’ll have to do). Anyway, the point is: part of that communication, no matter how serious, is always offset with the lightness of humor. I think it’s the belief that if you can laugh about it, it can’t be *that* bad yet. Something can still be done. There’s hope.
Yep, this same sense of humor is what we ride on in the best of times, and it’s what carries us through the worst of times.
And many times, it’s apparent everywhere you look.
Case in point:
Remember this character? (He’s been around since the early 1900s apparently):
Felix the Cat
Now, check out the name of this barber shop, as featured in one of our biggest dailies:
How funny is that? (I’ll bet the barber’s name is truly Felix, too!… Wonder if he’s both barber and manicurist?) 😆
A Freebie, Sweetie!
It’s freebie time! Time to reveal what this was all about:
It’s a layered template for you! 😀 Here’s the full view:
LivEdesigns-Time of Year Template
Click on the preview to download.
The template comes with a curved text path, and you can absolutely change up the hanging strings and the bottom accents with stuff from your digistash so that it fits your taste. 😉
Here’s the layout I made with it:
LivE - Time of Year (Christmas Layout)
(Yeah, I know, it’s a Christmas page… what can I say? Gotta get those Christmas photos scrapped before new ones come flooding in, in about 3 months! 😛 )
CREDITS: (all from ScrapbookGraphics.com)
Meredith Fenwick: Crazy Beautiful-paper; Antique Paper Swirls (recolored)
Natali Designs: Christmas Needful Papers-paper
Studio Flergs: Denim Blues Strap; AptD Screw & Glitter; Rough & Timple Gemstone & Staple
Traci Sims: Flourish Date Stamps
Update on the Fall Into Fall Freebie
Yep, the last set is still being worked on, but check back in a few and we’ll have it for you! 😉 (Hey, that rhymes. Bahaha!)
liv.e simply 