The Eclectic Otter: scrapbook

I am a bit behind schedule this week due to the fact that about half of day Monday was spent taking care of a flat tire. Luckily it wasn't nearly as cold as it had been over the weekend, but mean that some of my errands got pushed back to other days. Such as taking down our Christmas decorations. That also ended up taking extra time because I wanted to snap a few photos of our special ornament for this year to scrapbook later. I found exactly the right one, a passport to commemorate my husband's business trip to Canada. (Also his first international travel and first time flying ever.)

Making the airship for my husband's game has moved to the top of my to-do list. Now that the holidays are over they should be starting up soon. Since this entire story arc revolves around the party receiving their own airship he wants to have a sturdy reuseable ship plan before that happens. Right now we just have a very rough idea of the layout. We started with a list of rooms/ areas that it needs to have and have been looking at plans online for sailing ships and spaceships. Just for fun I also looked up plans for Spelljammer ships, which are surprisingly useful if you ignore some of the bizarre animal shapes.

Because regular ships don't include spellcaster's quarters

It also helps that we both just finished reading the Aeronaut's Windlass by Jim Butcher which has some pretty cool airships. Which happen to be powered by crystals similar to what my husband envisioned when he started developing his world a few years ago. Only a small portion of the story actually takes place on board but the airship battles are very well written, taking into account a ship's ability to tilt sideways and make attacks from both above and below the enemy. If you're interested in steampunk style stories you should definitely check it out.

Speaking of Spelljammer..... I'm going to leave you with this picture of everyone's favorite miniature giant space hamster Boo.

I really love the idea of scrapbooking, of having something to look back over the years at all the fun things you've done, or even the current trend of documenting the everyday so you can see how your family and routines have grown and changed. I have piles of photos that go clear back before I was born and lots of scrapbook supplies but somehow no scrapbooks. Not even a single page just waiting for an album to live in. I'm particularly interested in Project Life and other pocket scrapbooking systems like it. (I don't really know what it is but something about all those little cards just appeals to me.) I have downloaded a bunch of freebie cards that you can print yourself and never used them. Sometime last year I even purchased a few physical cards and a pack of pocket pages hoping that if I had everything I needed I'd be more likely to start... but so far nothing.

That all changes right now...

As soon as we got home from our camping trip I uploaded our photos from the camera. Then I got out my pocket pages and started planning...

Unfortunately one of the things that causes me to procrastinate is over planning. After uploading the pictures I browsed through my Pinterest boards for inspiration and to see if I had pinned any free Project Life cards that would be good with these pictures. I sorted through my digital scrapbook files and wondered how they could be used with the pocket pages. I pondered how I could use Photoshop to add journaling information to the photos before I have them printed. Exactly one week later and the only thing I had done was more planning.

So I made a list of all the photos I had and chose a page with enough pockets (plus a few for journaling) and started assigning photos to each space. It took me quite a while to do this. Some pictures looked much better in a horizontal format and others could be cropped to work either way so I ended up playing around with it for a while. At the end of the night I had a list of which pictures I needed to print and what sizes I needed them to be. I uploaded my photos to a website for printing, selecting the options to pick them up at a location near home. I did do just a little bit of Photoshop work. I added a compass and coordinates to a picture of my niece by the river and a caption to the bottom of another.

Weston Bend State Park- River Trail

Then Wednesday I picked up my photos on the way home from work and got started. It only took me about 10 minutes to get the pictures cropped and in place. I used a couple of really cool tools to make it super easy. (Scroll down to the bottom of this post for a list of supplies and tools I used to create these pages.) The first was a 3x4 card punch I used to crop some 4x4 photos and punch out some journaling cards. It was a size that I couldn't find online for printing photos but is used for journaling cards on a regular basis. I had purchased it when I found a good sale hoping that making things easier would get me scraping and after using it I can say that it really does speed things up. It would have taken much longer if I had needed to crop the photos by hand. I also used a pair of Fiskars Corner scissors to round the corners on all of the other photos. It looks like this product is no longer in production but they do have a punch that does the same thing.

After I had all the photos in place I printed out journaling cards for the remaining spaces and cropped them down using the same tools. See a before and after shot below.

After that the only thing left for the camping pages was to write about our trip. The page for Pi Day has a few hidden pull outs so it took a little extra work. I cut a small tab and glued it on the back of the leftover pizza so that you can pull it out from behind the other photo. I also scanned the comments from our guest book and shrunk them down using Photoshop so I could fold it easily and tuck it into the final pocket. Here are the final results I apologize for the glare and bad quality, I will try to get better ones and replace them later. (Update: Added New Photos 3/29/2015)