Project Life Rewind

I haven't shared any of my Project Life pages since the beginning of March, so I thought I'd take a moment to update on how it's going. Mostly for my own record-keeping. For me, it's a way to make sure the simple every-day things are accounted for. Sure, we all remember the major events in our lives, but the little things are important, too. So truthfully, all of this will be completely boring to anyone reading this. But it's what makes me me and my life my life.

Here's a quick rewind of Weeks 7-37:
Week 7: Valentine's Day. My SIL's bday. Lunch with my other SIL near Delores Park. Bay Bridge Lights were turned on.
Week 8: Spent some time with the Bowen kids and Cousin and her kiddos then the weekend at the cabin.
Week 9: A day with Cousin and her kiddos, weekend watching roller derby with Jimmy. One of his co-workers is a skater.
Week 10: Went down to San Diego for oldest niece's wedding.
Week 11: St. Patrick's Day parade with Jimmy, met up with an artist friend while she was here for a show, went to a dance performance in Berkeley with my SIL.
Week 12: Hanging out with the Bowens and the Brewers. DeYoung Museum. Cabin time.
Week 13: Cupcakes with the baldwins. Also (not pictured) Cousin's mom in town, explore SF with the whole family.
Week 14: Ninja Nephew's birthday party.

Week 15: Chinatown with family. FIL's birthday dinner at Benihana's. Dinner with a friend I haven't seen in over 5 years.
Week 16: Class in Berkeley with Amy Tan and card 'marathon' with Doris in Sunnyvale. The new Exploratorium opened this week! Movie nite with Jimmy and John Roy.
Week 17: Went to SFMOMA and lunch with SIL. Silly time with Princess Neice. Hideaway weekend.
Week 18: Oh.My.God. So very sick.
Week 19: Both of us Still So.Very.Sick but had tickets to see Paula Cole at Yoshi's so tried really hard not to cough on anyone. We had front row tickets so at least no one was in front of us except Paula.
Week 20: Still sick. Yikes. Doris took that photo of my friends because I couldn't go to our monthly get together. So sweet.
Week 21: Finally feeling better. Visited Ninja Nephew and Princess Niece. Cabin weekend.
Week 22: A whole week at the cabin. Lots of work to do! But we managed to go out for a couple of rides on the Rhino, too.
Week 23: Time with the Bowen family and my cousin's family this week.

Week 24: Roller Derby night at Craneway Pavillion in Emeryville.
Week 25: Father's Day at the 'rents. Visited Mr. Peck's memorial at Washington Park. San Mateo Buddhist Festival.
Week 26: Mike and Virginia's wedding at Golden Gate Park (awesome!). Marriage equality! Cabin weekend.
Week 27: 4th of July. Ninja Nephew's golf tournament.
Week 28: Early bday celebration at Kincaid's with the family. The deck is finally being torn down! Cupcakes with the Baldwins.
Week 29: Sake and Sushi bday dinner w/ family. Benihana bday dinner w/ Jimmy. To the Cabin.
Week 30: Camp Retz week at the cabin!
Week 31: MIL's bday dinner in Sausalito. Volunteering with the Giants Race. A couple days with cousin and kiddos. Saturday dinner with the Bowens. Yelp family night at the Exploratorium.

Week 32: Our microwave broke! ugh. But my handy-man took it apart and fixed it! He even had the part that broke, which isn't something he normally has. Pretty cool. My hero! :)
Week 33: Ninja Nephew and Princess Niece came over for a few hours and they loved playing with my crafting tools! Bad Kitty birthday card for Jimmy from his Mom. Hilarious!! Monica and her son were here for 3 1/2 days!!!
Week 34: Our weekend at the cabin ended up being a bit of a nervous time because of the Rim Fire. Thankfully, despite the 256K acres burnt, our community was ok. It's still burning, over 4 weeks later.
Week 35: Heart Concert at America's Cup Pavillion. Turned out that Jason was there, too! We saw his check-in on Yelp so we met up with him and chatted a bit.
Week 36: The new span of the Bay Bridge opened! We crossed it the night it opened after the initial crowds died down. Friday night in San Jose with the family.
Week 37: Kiddos here for a few hours. Celebrated Jeff's birthday with all the Purple Magma friends. Another wildfire, this one near the parentals. Thankfully it was contained within 5-6 days.

3.1 March Daily

Attempting another month of daily blogging...
I...
can...
do it!

I got an awesome paper cutter for Christmas. I've been playing with it almost every day.

I made all these with the Cricut Mini. Plus about a gazillion other things. I can't stop cutting paper.
Birthday card I made for my SIL. Valentine's Day card for Jimmy with our 'secret' language. Birthday card for my friend Barbie. Flower I made for Princess Niece.

Honeycomb background on the bee card. Journaling cards for my Project Life album.

Here's a quick video I made for my girlfriend who needed some paper templates to make macaron cookies. Shows the very basics of how the machine works. You can see some other flowers I've cut in the foreground. And my messy desk in the background.

On the {crafting} table

In January, I mentioned that I was starting a new project for the year, Project Life. We're 7 weeks into the new year and so far I've kept it up.

Week 2: Jan 6th-12th
Finished the quilt I started in May. Humiliated myself by walking hard into a glass door and extended the humiliation by posting it on FB, which seemed to make my friends laugh a lot. Doris and I visited our friend June who suffered a series of small strokes during the holidays. The photo I have in this album is from 2 1/2 years ago.

Week 3: Jan 13th-19th
Saw a couple of movies: "This is 40" and "Zero Dark Thirty". Jimmy and I went ice skating at Union Square when it was 40 degrees out at 11pm. Visited the princess niece and ninja nephew (who are shy).

Week 3 addendum
I did an extra page with photos from our anniversary road trip to Point Bonita and Rodeo Beach.

Week 4: Jan 20th-26th
Jimmy was oh so very sick for 4 days. But by Saturday night, he was feeling well enough to go to Supercross in Oakland.

Week 5: Jan 27th-Feb 2nd
Jimmy left for a 10 day work trip to Austin then Boston. Wanted to see "Les Miserables" before the Oscars. Drove down to San Diego County with my MIL and SIL (who are shy) for Ashley's shower.

Week 6: Feb 3rd-9th
Superbowl Sunday! The 49ers were in it, but lost against the Ravens. Playing dolls with shy Princess niece. June passed away on 2/3/13, she was 92. Jimmy came home from Boston right before a big storm hit. His flight was one of the last ones out of Logan Airport before it closed for 2 days.

Week 7: Feb 10th-16th
We were in San Diego during my SIL's birthday so we waited till this weekend to celebrate. Explored Dolores Park. Valentines day. The bay bridge got a new lighting installment! So cool!

I have a couple more cards on my crafting table:
I'll use them for my exchange cards for stamp club next week and the week after.

Project Life

So last year, there was this new trend in the scrapbooking world called "Project Life" which is described as a "back-to-basics approach to memory-keeping". I read lots of paper crafting blogs and I enjoyed stumbling on random people's Project Life pages so I decided to start doing it this year. Basically, you take a week at a time and document the itty bitty parts of life (and the big ones of course) and continue throughout the year. Most of the stuff you'd document are minor things no one else would care about besides you, but it'd be fun to reminisce about one day in the future.

So this is my first Project Life week, Jan. 1-5th.
Each "page" has space for 6-7 photos, memories, quotes, receipts, just enough for a week.

I really haven't scrapbooked in a couple of years. I still make a lot of cards and do a few random scrapbook projects but nothing on a regular basis in quite a while. So I'm excited to start this project. In the end, I'll have 52 'pages' and a whole year of memories documented.

I also finished (finally) my very first real quilt.
I finished most of it last summer but was stalled by the binding.

But thanks to the advice from a few quilting friends and youtube videos, I finally mustered up the courage to finish it. More than likely, this will be my last quilt. I'm very happy with it, but it's a lot of work and paper crafts are still my calling. I have enough paper to fill up an entire room so I don't have any space for fabric. But it was a fun, enjoyable project and I can cross that craft off my never ending crafts-to-try list.