Feijoa Curry

It's autumn here, finally, and everything is turning golden.  This morning I went and climbed through the back fence to the feijoa trees, which have been dropping their crop for a couple of weeks, picked up a bucketful, and then came inside and found a yummy way of using them:

It's the first addition to my cookbook in what seems forever, using bits and pieces from Scrap Girls to pull it together.  The recipe itself came from here, and I'll hopefully be able to try it out next week.  The page is set up as A5 size - if anyone wants a print-quality copy, let me know :)

Journal spreads

I've given up trying to maintain any one system for journalling.  I flick from one to the other - art, typed, notebook, smash, scrapbook - at least once a month, so I've decided to just chuck it all into one book.  I'm loving it, although I still need to find a decent glue.  Double-sided tape and cheap gluesticks just aren't doing it for me.

These are a couple of digital pages that I've done and printed.  In between are pages from notebooks, index cards, and anything else I feel like pasting in, but I like these pages the best...

The photos in the first spread I took myself at a recent air show; everything else is from my stash of digital scrapping supplies.

Photo Challenge.org: Black and White

I found Photochallenge.org in the communities over at Google+.  While I'm generally pretty awful at maintaining challenges, their challenge this week was something that I actually felt able to do, and not something too intimidating.

I don't know if I'll do it every week, but it was fun to play with the camera.  I've never shot in monochrome before, and love how it turns simple things, like this grass, into something much simpler and more beautiful.

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!