New journal project

This is my compromise to myself.  A digital art journal!  As much as I love the idea of art journals, and as much as I waste hours looking at other people's amazing creations, I just haven't created one of my own.  Too little faith in my own abilities, too little emotional connection to write anything meaningful and beautiful - and inclined to blame the lack of a thousand-and-one art supplies - has meant that I have stubbornly stuck with words.

And even that has been bouncing between mediums.  Now, I've decided to give my digital scrapbooking skills a practical use, and this is the first page of the result.  It's still going to be more words than anything else, but I'm really loving this technique.  I think I've finally clicked on the relaxing aspect that other journalers talk about, but I don't have the grinding OCD obsession with sticky fingers or spills.

For this page I've mixed all sorts of pieces from different designers:

• The alphabet used to create the letters - Tina Chambers from Digital Scrapbook Place
• Flower embellishment - Correen Silke 
• Cardboard embellishment - Meryl Bartho from Digital Scrapbook Place
• Green embellishment - Scrap Girls
• Circle embellishment - Bintys Designs
• Notepaper embellishment - Just Jaimee
• Background - Scrap Girls

Happy 2013

Summer has arrived with a hot, sticky bang - Christmas Day was one of the hottest in decades, so having a warm laptop sitting on me hasn't really held much appeal.  Today, the first day of 2013, is much cooler, so here I am!

2012 sort of fizzled a bit towards the end, in terms of creativity, so this year I've decided a bit of guidance will help.  To start with, I'm doing a prompt-a-day photo challenge through an art group I'm part of, with the photos being hosted on Flickr.  With a camera I want to learn how to use properly, and a bunch of accessories for Christmas, I'm excited to get started.

There's also a weekly challenge on Google+ that I'm thinking of having a go at, although I think I'll be out of my depth a little, judging by the quality of the photos from last years' participants.  Still, it'll be a learning curve, if nothing else!

And if photography isn't enough, there's a mixed media community on G+ that will be doing weekly challenges too, and I'm hoping to get some inspiration from the amazing art that's being posted there.  That, combined with the setting up of a new planner (new templates from scratch and everything!), means that I'm going to be happily - and geekily - busy for the week, before heading back to work and the miracle of air conditioning.

Hope everyone is enjoying their first few hours of 2013-ness!

Constructed

I have a confession.  After sulking about taking average 'snaps', instead of beautiful photos, I bit the bullet and went and bought myself the camera I'd been drooling over for the last few months.  And now I'm figuring out how to use it.  So, my first PhotoFriday shot taken with my new baby:

This is the new jetty at Momorangi Bay, around Queen Charlotte Drive in the Marlborough Sounds, and is new enough that it hasn't started to weather yet.

A Virgin Planner

For the last six months I've been using an A5 filofax as a diary, notebook and book tracker.  It's worked pretty well, although I had to resort to using a backpack walking to work so my shoulders didn't end up as lopsided as a galley slave.  Then I bought a beautiful new handbag, which was big enough to hold the A5 without complaint.
Which was fine, for the handbag.  For my shoulders, not so much.  I started to empathise more and more with everyone else suffering planner failure, and stopped using mine the way I need to.  So far I haven't forgotten anything really important, but I'm already losing track of bills and things, so I decided to do something about it.

A5 on the left, new Personal on the right

It's not a Filofax-branded binder.  It's made by an Australian company called The Last Diary Company, and was far, far cheaper than Filofax.  This one is actually the second - the first one was unwrapped in the car and promptly returned because a couple of the rings were separated.  This one has better rings, and they're easier to open.

It came with PPD inserts, with the weekends together on one page.  I've never been able to make that work, so will be printing my own inserts.  One thing I definitely like about the inserts it came with:

The address sheets have the contact details together, and the address at the bottom of each name!  Most of my contacts are name, number and email, and every other address sheet has the address in the middle, making it hard to skim through when you're in a hurry.  Will definitely be keeping these ones, and copying blanks.
There are A-Z dividers, which I probably won't use, and no section dividers, so I'll be adding those along with a different diary layout.  In fact, it's going to be completely gutted and personalised.  My A5 dividers are the wrong shape to cut down, so I'll be starting again from scratch.  Time to start playing with art supplies!

Shopping!

About once a year I'll have a big spend up, when we have a trip planned to the city.  This year, the Other Half entered a mountain bike event just outside of Christchurch, so that was where my money was destined to go.
Usually, inspiration strikes either on the way home, or a week or so after I've been, but this time I was ready.   My hobbies/obsessions tend to change with the seasons, and right now I'm looking for comics graphic novels.

Two Sandmans, three Hellblazers and a Preacher.  Which would be enough to keep me out of trouble for a while, only I'm a bit obsessed with reading things in the right order, and none of the places I visited had any even-numbered volumes.  So I've got gaps in the stories, and plans to start buying long-distance from an awesome bookstore in the city.

I also picked up another Gaiman title and a sparkly green pencil for my handbag.  Oh, and a new handbag:

It's probably too big to called a handbag - sack might be a better word.  My A5 filofax has heaps of space, and my tablet and camera should fit in just as easily.  Next week I'll probably be reviewing different back/shoulder pain treatment methods, but for now I love it.  The busy purple lining is even growing on me.

In Motion

This week's challenge is 'in motion', and has really driven home the idea that I want to be shooting well beyond what my point and shoot camera is capable of (and myself, come to that...).  I know what I want to achieve, and this photo... just isn't it.  So much so that I'm not even submitting it to the PhotoFriday site, and am only putting it here to prove to myself that I haven't piked on the challenge a mere two weeks in.

Mood

This is Dawson.  He is unthrilled that I'm within eight feet of his food, and can go from cheerfully starving to rabid fuzzface in 0.2 seconds.

This is also an attempt at a PhotoFriday challenge, with an outdated camera.  Hopefully my pics will improve (even if the subject remains the same!).