Keep Happy in a box, that way you'll never lose it.

So one of my favorite people to follow on Youtube is a gal who's channel goes by the name of PAPERSPEAKS.

Her name is Mel and she has a fun sidekick Pat ( a big white gloved pointer ).  She's a super duper nicehead and she does a lot of hand-made journals and cards and really cool stuff.

She recently posted a challenge to create something that would be like an aid when you're creatively blocked, or, as she put it, when you've lost your mojo.

And it happens to all of us no matter what we're into.   We play a crappy game of baseball, we sing bad notes, or sometimes we just wanna sit in the corner and cry.  And it's times like that where even the thing we love doing the most seems like a waste of time.  Though it probably doesn't seem like it... I feel like that quite often. I just wanna pack up my paper and photos in boxes and try to forget that I ever enjoyed scrapbooking. I start to wonder who I'm doing it for...  Will my daughter dread having her entire life documented in volumes when she's older?  I'm pretty sure the dog (s) don't mind.

Well anyhow... what I decided to make for myself was a recipe box just simply filled with photos that I like to look at. Because for me, the photo is what makes me want to scrapbook.  It's not the scrapbooking stuff...  it's taking a photo, printing it out and thinking...  SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEE... this photo is so delicious I could eat it!  And what makes it hard is that I take a gazillion photos a week, so just picking out a few to scrapbook is tricky. So for me ( for you for me... )  scrapbooking isn't solving my problem of getting photos out of boxes (or hard drives) and into scralbums, it's just highlighting what's in the boxes. I may actually get some good ol' fashioned photo albums and coordinate them with my scrapbooks.  So I can have the bulk of a photo shoot in a photo album, and then the real important stuff in the scrapbook.

So this was one of those CTMH recipe boxes I've had forever.   I had two.. but Roo decided to make one also.  She filled hers with smurf.  Who doesn't get a little happy from a box of smurf?

So I have different sized photos in here, some I took from Pinterest, some I took from my own photo stash, and I just tabbed the tops so I can pull em' out easy.

So out of all the challenges I've missed, I'm glad I was able to sneak this one in, because I think I actually will pick through this box when I'm feeling blue.  There's plenty more room in it to keep adding stuff so now as I come across something, I can just toss it in there.

Here's a link to what Mel made to help get her Mojo back.  I love it!

And thanks again Mel for the great challenge idea!  Looks like everyone got a very good something out of it!

Pictures of Eleanor - Jackson Park

I think the only way to stop me from taking pictures of Eleanor everywhere she goes is to get a puppy, or have another kid. I don't know if it's because I just like taking pictures... or that she's always a willing and pose-able subject... or it's just a mom thing. I honestly thought I'd get tired of taking her picture by now... but I honestly feel like she gets more beautiful everyday. (That's def. a mom thing...)



So anyway... I usually do a lot of APP editing to my photos. So the previous two photos I ran through one of my fav. photo apps called Phototoaster. I'm sure I've mentioned it before..
But here's one of the photos in the raw below so you can see the diff. I didn't do much, just added one filter called Aquatic. ( my favorite filter I've ever come across in any app!! Who doesn't wanna look like they're in water? Not anyone I know!) So I think this one filter added so much! It pulled her out of all that green background and really made her the feature.



So there are a lot of cool filters in this app... you can mess with it on your own, or they have pre-sets. Very worth the $1.99 for the 5.0 version. I've used the fiddlesticks out of it! I think photo apps are the only ones I pay for. Especially if you scrapbook... and are doing project life or smashing... or any of that... it's the quickest way to edit aside from pluggin' your camera into your computer. And most of ya'll know how to print from your mobile devices so... what's the prob. Spend a dollar and save your memories in a artsy way! Didn't you just spend $1.82 on a bagel this morning? And that's gone already isn't it??? ...thought so.

The following photos are not edited.. but I might still go back and play with em'.  I have to go through the other 70 and see if any are print-worthy.



OH, and lemme just plug another app while I'm at it. Though this series of pictures were not edited, I did throw them into a collage app called DIPTIC. It's basically just that... a collage app, but you can move your frames around which comes in handy. And I think you can add text... (honestly haven't used it that much...) And it's FREE!



I was actually shooting in monochrome for the first half of the park visit... which I normally don't do. I don't know why, but I tend to edit the color mostly after... but I like the way the monochrome ones shot...



And the hair-style she's sporting is called... combed out after being in a bun for two days! I actually trimed it a bit this morning due to many many knots. So it was fluffier than usual.

Well I'm gonna put my cheese and crackers away and call it a night!

xo Fitter

Eleanor I love you. More than ice cream.

I know I've said this before that I am not a photographer. I just play one on TV. However, 18,678,334,468,499.09 pictures later, I think I may try to actually look into getting a bit more knowledge on the subject. I mean, I at least bought one of those "REBEL T2i for dummies" books when I got this camera a few years ago... and I have to say, I'm still a big fan of this camera. It still gets the job done as far as I'm concerned. I've never tried Nikons so I can't compare... I've always had some sort of Canon. And when my nephews were born, they had trouble with r's, so they called me Aunt Kanen instead of Aunt Karen, so maybe it's fate. I won't mess with fate.

And this year starting on July 4th while were at a town fair, I finally let my daughter use my camera. I KNOW... everyone was looking at me thinking... "did she really just give a 3-year her big clunky camera!" Actually... if they didn't know us I'm sure they thought she was 5 at least... She's a mature 3. So she put the strap over her head and I showed her which button to push and where to look and 800 pictures later she was hooked. So now we share my camera. And I'm sure she'll be taking better pictures than me by the time she is 5.


So this photo shoot she staged happened a few weeks ago... but when she was done taking pictures of bear bear and (I don't know the other one's name... her cousin Tierney left it here when she slept over after the BTR concert.. Eleanor said she gave it to her... but I have to double check on that.. ;).. ) So let's just say Bear bear and monkey monkey! When she was done with the camera, she jumped in and asked me to take her photo with them. And I just got around to putting the pics on the computer and for some reason this pic:


just asked to be scraped. So I actually had an idea before I started which isn't usual. And since I planned on almost exclusively doodling for the page, I decided to print the photo bigger than I usually would. SO I did a little more than doodle, but not much.



And these were just American Crafts pens.  The black is mostly a project life journaling pen.. then I did a bit of coloring in with Tim Holtz distresser markers.

So here's a process vid for this layout.  I didn't do them for a few weeks because of poison ivy. .. lol.   Didn't wanna have to cut out all the itching.. :)

 

xo Fitty