New Stuff for Sept - LSNED and SU Holiday Catty!

So this is going to be a bit of a hybrid post.

Firstly,  Stampin' Up! Holiday catalogue has been out for a week - click on the sidebar for a look or email me at pinkcraftymama@gmail.com

I will be contacting my regular customers in the next few days to make sure they are all sorted for catalogues.

My indifferent state of health has really put a spanner in the works after a period of improvement, but hoping to be on the way up and getting ready to offer classes later in the year but more on that later.

So the next part of this post relates to an online class I've just started called Learn Something New Every Day.  Its a yearly class run each September by Shimelle Laine.

Each day has a prompt to reflect on and take a lesson away from it.  Shimelle writes up what learns in a notebook and then makes something scrappy with photos and a a line or two summarising what she learnt that day.

Shimelle mentioned she had been using divided page protectors the last few years and I thought that the reflections and small amount each day would be a great way to improve my journalling and jump back into my sorely neglected Project Life albums.

After spending a few days thinking and re-thinking HOW I'll put this together, I decided on a similar format to Shimelle since the object of the exercise is to restore PL and I liked the option of extended writing before coming up with a "take away point".

After going back and forth trying to decided whether I'd embed the LSNED into the spread(s) for September, I decided to do free standing PL style scrapping and will add the pages to either my yearly 12x12 album or the PL album in the relevant spot but it isn't something I need to decide now.

So first order of business was to find a notebook.  Some people do their writing and reflection daily but leave the actual scrapping until the end.  If I try this it wont happen so I decided to use an empty Smashbook that I've had for a few years and do several days of cards at a time.

And naturally it needed to be prettied up.  Not super thrilled with the watercolouring but may come back to it at some later stage.  I'm also aware the book with probably last more than one year so I left room to stamp dates as needed.

Since my craft area is in the process of being tidied up remodelled, I just grabbed whatever I could easily find. :-/

But what to do about the pages you can't easily write on?  I could add paper layers which I will do to some pages but others had graphics I liked and gesso seemed to be my answer.  (I forgot to do a before photo of the first page but the bottom left corner near the hydrangea shows the original green of the leaves)

Yes the pages buckle and warp a LOT in order to get reasonable coverage since it dries a little more transparent than when freshly applied but this doesn't bother me at all.

Here is another before/after:

I may also try writing on vellum and sticking that over the top.

So we're a week in and I need to crack on with the pockets for the first week.  I'll bring you more on that in a day or two

Right now though, there is a cup of coffee with my name on it.  A BIG one!