Jan 6 2018

Balancing Act

Posted on January 6, 2018 by daydesigns

As a Mum of three young girls and a wife to a busy guy, my life can quickly spin out of control.

Sound familiar?

Whether I’m working full time outside the home or not, the demands of caring for those four super special people tend to leave me tired, out of sorts, and dissatisfied. Tasks are constantly being bumped down the priority list because someone needs picking up from practice, or we ran out of milk (again!), or the laundry is as high as the washing machine, or … you name it!

Getting let go from my full time job in August allowed me time to step back, to evaluate our current state of affairs, and to prioritize our future needs. This has all led to me choosing the word BALANCE as my focus word for 2018. This may all be sounding kind of familiar – I talked about it in Wednesday’s post, perhaps you saw it? At that point I hadn’t created a visual reminder of my word but that has all changed!

Behold, BALANCE … Continue reading »

Jan 3 2018

Attitude is Everything!

Posted on January 3, 2018 by daydesigns

Words on Wednesday

You know that saying “laughter is the best medicine”? Something that my brother said recently got me thinking about it.

He managed to dislocate his shoulder (in an odd “this never happens” kind of way) while skiing on December 31st. Instead of ringing in the New Year at home with his wife and children, he spent it in the ER at Lion’s Gate Hospital waiting for surgical consults and CT scan results. My sister-in-law posted this photo on Instagram which kind of sums up how we Campbell kids deal with pain and adversity. Continue reading »

Jan 4 2016

Enough

Posted on January 4, 2016 by daydesigns

Ah Monday.

The kids went back to school today. Yippee! I am constantly grateful that my girls love school. They love it so much they look forward to the holidays being over so they can go back. Today was made extra special for them as we got about a millimetre of snow last night. Any form of the white stuff is reason to celebrate around here!

Well, for the kids anyway. I’m totally okay with green lawns all winter!

Monday also means Make It Monday … or at least it should. That is one of my goals for 2016 – to get back to regular blogging. Hopefully by next week I’ll even have coordinated a Blog Circle!

Today though, it’s just me. 🙂

I have been mulling over what my One Little Word for 2016 should be and there’s been one word that has cropped up a lot lately. You may have guessed it from my previous post. It’s … Continue reading »

Jan 5 2015

Welcome 2015

Posted on January 5, 2015 by daydesigns

Jan 4 2014

SWAT Drill #23 – Resolutions for 2014

Posted on January 4, 2014 by daydesigns

Okay, I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions any more. It was too depressing to constantly fail!

Since 2011 I have chosen One Little Word (check out Ali Edwards site and her class if you are new to this concept) and that has been better for me. Basically, I choose one word that represents what I want to invite into my life that year and when things get a bit tough, I can recall my word and refocus on what’s important. Makes the daily chaos bearable … most of the time! My word for 2011 was RELEASE as I was harbouring a lot of negativity I needed to get rid of. For 2012 I chose FOCUS and it did wonders for my scrapbooking! An unintentional benefit to be sure but I was grateful all the same. It worked so well I chose it for 2013 but less than half way through I had completely lost all focus and floundered for the rest of the year. Lesson there being, no matter how awesome a Word has been for you, chose a new one every year!

This year I have been thinking long and hard and have chosen SIMPLIFY. All that unfocussedness (yes, I am calling that a word!!) has got me down and it is time to regroup, take stock and make some changes! The girls over at SWAT have also been thinking about their Words for 2014 and we have some to share with you. Check out the link to see everyone’s pages. Here is mine.

Jan 12 2012

OLW 2012 – Focus

Posted on January 12, 2012 by daydesigns

In the interest of not boring my family with a million pictures of my scrapbook obsession, I am going to post a few pictures here and give you a link to my Flickr gallery where you can see them all.

I’ve been finding my focus (ha, ha! pun intended!!) falling on my scrapbooking lately. I am loving this! Let me tell you, the time I’m spending in my craft room has been fun and revealing. My ‘homework’ for Twelve (Big Picture Class with Stacey Julian) has had me delving into my old pictures (which are currently spread out all over the living room courtesy of 3 curious little girls) and thinking deep thoughts. It’s kind of awesome! Greg and I were looking at old videos of Marley last night because I’ve reloaded old pictures onto my laptop. Gosh she was cute!!

Anyway, I’ve titled this post OLW so I’d better get to that!
Here are some pictures of my album so far – for more detailed shots please follow this link.

Ali asked us to use a different 4×6 photo pocket which has it’s own adhesive strip along the long side but I don’t have those (yet) so I made my own. It flips up to reveal the January photo. I’m okay with this. It’s kind of fun. The only bummer is that you don’t get a really good look at all the little cards all at once. But hey, that’s a pretty minor thing!!

In my Flickr gallery I’ve included close ups of each little card so please head on over there and check it out.

And just to prove that I’ve been focusing (ha, ha! there it is again!!) and doing some homework for Twelve, here is my first official Twelve layout.

Yes, you’ve seen this picture before.

Yes, I will be doing layouts of Paige and Christine’s portraits too.

No, you don’t have a say in the matter! LOL!

I’m actually submitting this for publication so cross your fingers for me! The only difference is that I added the little yellow-green metal tag after I photographed it for submission!

The tag is a reminder that this is part of my “People” file for Twelve. If you’re taking the class you’ll understand, if not, just know that I know it doesn’t really fit but I don’t care!

On a whim, I decided to climb on board the 12 on 12 band wagon. This is where you take 12 pictures from your day on the 12th of each month. Obviously the 12th isn’t over yet so I’m not going to post any pictures but come back tomorrow (hopefully) and I’ll show you what today looked like around here. Not too exciting as Paige is home with a fever today. Poor thing! Thank goodness for wonderful neighbours who can help with the school run for Marley!

Oh, and I’ve also been working on some fun Valentines cards for a card exchange with Lain Ehman’s Scrap Happy group. I’ll be posting them on my other blog so check them out here … only not yet! Maybe later today but probably tomorrow!

That’s it for now. Thanks for stopping by!

Jul 25 2011

OLW July and MotherLOAD Week 4

Posted on July 25, 2011 by daydesigns

I managed to convince Greg to take the girls to the drop-in at Delta Gymnastics (thanks Colleen!!) so while I have the house to myself I thought I’d better post about the work that went on in my craft room this weekend. And today. But mostly over the weekend! 🙂

First up, was One Little Word. At the beginning of July I got caught up on the past few months of homework assignments (see this post here) and I’ve been working on July’s assignment all month. Let me explain. The task was to pick 9 songs that comprise a soundtrack of our Word as it applies to us right now. This was tricky for me. I love music and music can generate such a wide range of feelings in me. Greg and I have mostly widely differing tastes in music! He likes the new, edgy Rock/Alternative stuff (with a healthy dose of the 80’s and 90’s in there too – gotta keep those highschool memories alive!) while I tend towards more Rock/Pop/Country genres. It may be jouvenile for me to rock out to Miley Cyrus or Britney Spears but it gets those happy hormones flowing and that’s really what music is all about for me. Plus, the girls “get it” too so we can dance around the house together!

My word is Release and when I Googled “release” and “song titles” all I got was a huge long list of various artists album and/or song release dates. Which I kind of figured was going to be the case. So I went to plan B. I opened up iTunes and pulled up “most played” and went shopping for the tunes that spoke to me. Out of my list of 17 or so, I slowly worked on narrowing it down to 9. Then we were to make up little canvasses using our song titles and some lyrics from the song which spoke to our word.

Here’s what I came up with … initially.

And then in the divided protectors.

But imagine my horror to notice while editing my photos that I misspelt a word on my #7 tag!

Gasp!

I quickly redid it and here are the close ups.

1. Hung Up by Madonna

2. Don’t Stop The Music by Rihanna

3. Come What May from the Moulin Rouge Sountrack

4. Raise Your Glass by P!nk

5. Don’t Speak by No Doubt

6. F**kin’ Perfect by P!nk

7. Uprising by Muse

8. Intervention by The Arcade Fire

9. Don’t Stop Believin’ by Journey

Ali asked us to burn our soundtrack to a CD and put it into the album. On my soundtrack are 2 bonus tunes. They are The Landlord’s Walk and Nelson Mandela’s Welcome to the City of Glasgow by Blair Douglas. Both of these are purely instrumental (rockin’ bagpipes and drums mostly) so I figured it was safe to add them as I couldn’t exactly do the lyrics part of the assignment! They speak to my Scottish roots and always bring a smile to my face and a skip to my step.

I found this transparency in my stash and love the words on it. They really evoke everything that I want to invite into my life right now.

And here is the finished spread.

Everyone is back now and bugging me to put them to bed so I will continue this shortly …

Okay, girls are in bed, SYTYCD Canada is on the PVR, life is good.

For Week 4 of the MotherLOAD Marathon we are focussing on using what we love and loving what we use. Don’t those two things go hand in hand? I haven’t done the photo assignment yet which is to take a picture of our favourite ritual but I’ve done the other two assignments.

First up is the layout assignment. We were to dig out that paper or kit that we’ve been saving for a “special” layout and JUST USE IT!! I’ve been hording an entire set of Little Yellow Bicycle’s Zinnia collection waiting for …. not sure what. So, as per instructions, I broke it out and got busy. Here’s what I came up with.

I chose some pictures from our trip to Whistler for our 4th anniversary when Marley was 21/2 and Paige was 5 months old. See her there in the Snuggly? So cute!

But I digress.

When I pulled the papers and put them with the pictures I really wasn’t sure how it was all going to come together. But in the end I love this!

Here are some close ups. First the left hand page.

The ‘Beautiful’ is an acrylic accent (from one of the many embellishment packs I have for this collection) and the rest of the title was cut out on my Cricut.

The right hand page.

The quote along the bottom was actually like that in the paper and I loved it, so I cut out that strip and used it to frame the pictures along the bottom. They call the green accent in the top right corner a photo mat but I used it for my journalling.

Some more close ups of the embellishments.

At the last minute I added the ‘love’ and the number 4 (which is the only thing NOT from the Zinnia collection). I figured since it was our 4th anniversary and we were a family of 4 at that time it was fitting.

These are little fabric stickers and I originally just put them on the paper but it looked too flat and you could barely see the purple ‘love’ one. So (in one of those many embellishment collections) I found these acrylic flowers which I popped up with foam dots and voila! WAY better!

I created these little felt flowers from (you guessed it!) a kit! LOL! Then I added the acrylic leaves.

A closer look at the title work. I put it on top of two journalling stickers to which I added the dates of the weekend.

Okay, the final thing for this evening is the homework assignment. We were to put together 4 “snack packs” which we apparantly will be using later during the Marathon part of this class (yikes!)

Here they are!