I've been off the grid for a bit...not really, I've been in my apartment, just not writing in my blog. I was doing pretty well for a bit about regular posting, but not so much anymore. December is one of my busiest months of the year.
I'm not sure if I'll continue this blog next year. I feel pretty good about actually keeping up with a blog for a year, but maybe that's all I need. I don't know, I'll see how I feel as the month comes to an end.
I do have a few updates to my Smash book though, so I thought I'd post them tonight.
I haven't written in a while because life happened, a hurricane happened. I was lucky to live in a neighborhood that gets minimally affected by wind/floods. My hometown was devastated. My parents were lucky because our house is slightly elevated..we only had basement damage, but even a week later they are still without power, heat and water.
During the hurricane I was able to catch up on my smashbook. I scrapped a few halloween parties. After the hurricane I decided to do a 3 page spread on the hurricane. It is strange to scrapbook a bad memory, but I think if you are making a scrapbook of a year in your life (or in this case a season), it's necessary to talk about the bad and the good. The bad moments shape our lives, and shape our future. I can't just skip over it and pretend it didn't happen.
Tonight I took out the sewing machine - well I didn't really take it out, it's been sitting on my dining room table collecting dust since I brought it home from my mom's. I know how to use a sewing machine, but I don't know how to set up a sewing machine. I've never threaded the sewing machine myself. So my first goal is to learn how to do that.
I have a fantastic book to work with S.E.W. Sew Everything Workshop by Diana Rupp. Tonight I took scotch tape and labeled parts of my sewing machine. I decided to stop after that because I was too distracted by the TV. I think this weekend I'm going to put aside a few hours on Saturday to really sit down, learn how to thread the machine and do a few sample stitches.
It's also possible that I'll get distracted by something else and the sewing machine will sit on the dining room table for a few more weeks. That's just who I am.
As you can deduce from the title of this entry, I finally finished my Alaskan scrapbook. I added in a last collage page using my leftover materials and did a little trim along the edge of the front and back covered.
The last photo page of the book is our white water rafting trip in Denali. I feel that was really the completion of the trip. It was the last adventurous thing we did and even though we did the oar boat, it still felt pretty hard core going through category 4 rapids. These photos were taken by a photographer, so they are the best photos I have of the entire trip.
The last page, I did a final collage using my leftover scraps. I threw this collage together in 15 minutes. I did not think too much about placement, I just started gluing. I actually really like it.
The back cover has a little envelope that says "good finds". This holds the business cards I took from various businesses in Alaska.
Overall, I'm very happy with this scrapbook. When I look through it all as a whole, it is very different from any other book I've done and I feel like the collages added a different touch.
So I completed my goal (kind of): I finished my Alaska scrapbook......ish. I did the final page tonight, but I decided I have still have so many guides, business cards, leaflets, etc. left that I want to make a few more collage pages to complete it. For the most part though, I'm done and I feel satisfied.
I'll show the Alaska pages later in the week, but tonight I want to go back to my Smash book. I am a bit behind on it. Tonight, I scrapped our apple picking trip from a few weeks ago. The patterns in the smash book weren't ideal so I did some reupholstering. I bought Halloween paper on sale last year after Halloween and used the apple pages for the background.
I think the patterned scissor I used behind the fall festival picture was a bit corny for the page. It felt maybe a bit elementary for my taste. I want my scrapbooking to evolve over the years and these two pages don't give me that feeling. Maybe I'm just too hard on myself.
Nothing sparks creativity like watching the presidential debates. It's like having white noise or static in the background while I work on finishing my Alaska scrapbook by the end of the week.
Tonight was a quick page again at our campsite in Denali. We bought marshmallows to roast but the marshmallows were so large. My travel buddy Risa and I each tried to stuff a whole one into our mouth and eat it.
Tonight I learned how hard it is to glue pictures with a bandaid on your finger. My finger probably didn't need to be bandaged, but I had a hangnail that was bleeding a bit. Then I had a vision of glue and other scrapbook related chemicals getting into the cut and giving me some sort of rare glue poisoning and on my tombstone it would read DIed of Hangnail. Better to be safe than sorry.
I actually really love the page I did tonight. This page is about when we made it to the visitor center in Denali. There was a bear nearby and everyone stopped to take pictures of it since it was so close. I took the time to sneak off to the bathroom. When I came out, I couldn't find anyone and momentarily panicked that the bus left without me. Then I heard my friends calling, apparently the bear started coming towards them and they all ran into the bus. We were then told to go to the roof of the visitor center and we watched the forest ranger clear the trails as the bear headed in that direction. As the ranger was leading people off the trail, we saw a man walking on the trail above the bear, and the bear was slowly headed in that direction. We tried getting the ranger's attention, but suddenly a woman ran forward screaming BRENT! BRENT! Turns out that guy was her fiance. We all screamed at him until he finally looked over and saw us pointing. It took a while but he finally understood and turned around. The ranger also realized what was going on. Life: saved.
This is the page about the event. I don't generally do journaling because I find it a bit corny and forced, but this story needed to be told. So I took a design I actually used earlier in this album and made it better. The captions and title of the page are all typed using "felt marker" font. I also had this "wild bear: danger" sticker that worked perfectly with the page. I really like it.
