What Ailin Does Lately

I keep meaning to write about this because she has been so darn funny lately, and I don't want to forget. Also, it's sometimes useful for scrapbook pages.

Favorite Stories
Sleeping Beauty
Goldilocks & the Three Bears
The Monster at the End of the Book

Favorite TV Shows/DVDs
Hannah Montana
Backyardigans (She calls it Hippo Penguin-san)
Prince of Egypt (She calls it Luka Basket Dancing because of the baby Moses in the basket.)

Her Hobbies
She likes to hold books up in the way that teachers do and she reads them to me. She sometimes reads in English, but mostly she makes up the story in Japanese. It is a loose translation of the story along with an explanation of what's going on the pictures. At night, she has me read one story to her, and then she reads one story to me.

Gluing & cutting things has become one of her recent hobbies. She sometimes "helps" me with my scrapbook pages.

Wearing skirts is very important to her. She immediately changes into a skirt when she arrives home. Skirts are better for dancing in, I guess.

She tells me about her dreams every morning. At least, I THINK these are her dreams. They always involve an array of princesses and Disney characters playing on swing sets or slides with her. Sometimes, Mama, Papa, Baba or Jiji are there too.

Favorite Foods
Hamburgers
Bread
Sweet potatoes
Raisins
Cookies
White Juice (sports drink)

Oops, almost forgot about February!

I have been so crazy-busy preparing for daycare, getting my house in order, and starting to work again that I nearly forgot to put up my lay outs for February! They were done a long time ago.

This was done for Cathy Z's class and is one of my last completely digital lay outs.

Another digital lay out for Cathy Z's class. The challenge was to create the look of "inking" on the individual papers. I used an overlay frame on each paper and stretched it to the exact size of each stripe. The title on the left says, "Carry me on your back!" I made a Japanese version for Yusuke's mom as a Mother's Day gift.

"Growing Girl" is a double lay out to show her development over the past year. This is another Cathy Z lay out.

Now, by this time, I had started a new class called Adventures in Hybrid. May Flaum, the instructor, taught many methods for combining digital and real world elements on our papers. Can you tell which is digital and which is real? 

This was one of the first lay outs I made for May's hybrid class, and I love it. Problem is that I cannot frame it as it is too thick now. 

Another hybrid lay out...albeit a bit crooked! The lay out design was from Cathy Z's class and I used May's hybrid class to complete it using her hybrid techniques.

As you can see, I don't have a lot of time to explain these lay outs and how they were made. If you want to know more about anything specific, please contact me.

The Final Push: The Scrapbooking (Craft) Area

Now keep in mind that my scrapbooking area is simply a CORNER of the multi-purpose room that I claimed for myself when we first moved in.

I'll show you "pretty" first. This is probably the first thing many people see when they look over in the corner. Colorful plastic jars of ribbon help to make things look pretty and organized all at the same time. On the other side of the desk, there is another jar of (purple) ribbon and then a jar of all sorts of paper & material flowers.

The middle shelf of the desk is a nice place to actually display things. Here, I have displayed some memorabilia. Not shown here, but I often display my latest lay outs too by standing them up behind the glass jar. The scarf, the frog & the ceramic poppouri pot were all gifts from friends, and the jar is filled with various trinkets & charms we've collected over the years. (Where else do you put that crap anyway? This is a nice way to display it because it is, at the very least, colorful.)

                   

When I bought my desk, I purposely chose this type because I thought it would provide a nice organizing system for projects and books. There are 4 slots on each side of the desk. I have it categorized like this:

Magazines

Resources (x3)

Current Projects

Current Supplies

Incubator

Ongoing Project Supplies

                            

Embellishments for pages (and for any project, actually) are kept in this basket. I never had many embellishments until last year when I finally starting buying some here and there. This basket was the first size for my growing collection, but recently it has started to overflow a bit. Behind the basket, I keep my Cricut (a die-cut machine) and I just pull it towards the front of the cabinet, plug it in and use it, when I have more than a few things to cut at one time.

I mentioned the incubator above when I showed the desk shelves. Each month, I collect non-photo memorabilia in a ziploc bag and keep it for a few months. Sometimes, it gets used on a page. If it doesn't, I need to eventually decide what to do with it. Incubating helps this process because it gives me some time and distance to decide if that "thing" is important enough to keep around forever.

If it is that important, I will file it away in one of the memorabilia boxes. If not, I will chuck it. I can only fit about 3 incubator bags on the desk shelf at one time, so theoretically, everything gets a 3-month incubation period.

I recently added this magnetic strip to my desk where I can house some extra embellishments. It's cute, but not quite as useful as I imagined it would be. I think I need to change what is stored in there.

This is a small craft tool box where I keep everything I need for my current projects. It's portable, so I can take it with me to Craft n Chats, to the coffee table in the next room, to the floor of the multi-purpose room, etc. Yes, admittedly, my scrapbook desk is often too crowded to work at so I use the floor sometimes.