Happy New Year and Scrappy Monday! I read somewhere once that you should spend New Year's Day doing the things you want to do for the rest of the year, so definitely don't do any laundry or housework. With that in mind, yesterday I spent some time in my craft room, I worked on two different stitching projects, I read a bit (starting off the year right with S. Morgenstern's classic tale of true love and high adventure), and hung out with the hubs and the kid. So that's what I want to do this year--work on creating things, reading good books, and spending time with the fam. More on New Year's goals at the end of the post but for now, scrapbook pages!
My parents visited us in North Carolina for Christmas 2019, and during that visit we went out near Raleigh to a Chinese lantern festival. That's the first time that the hubs and I have done anything like this and it was beautiful! I had a hard time narrowing down which pictures to use; we took zillions, I printed out a big stack, and then I tried to squeeze in as many as I could on two layouts. And then it turned into three layouts.
There were so many neat things to see! I'd love to do this again sometime but I suppose for now I'll stick to the European Christmas markets : ) Fair trade.
I knew right from the start that I wanted to use black for the page base, so then the question was what color(s) to use to mat the pictures. In the end I went with a whole rainbow:
Basic Black with Poppy Parade, Mango Melody, Daffodil Delight, Emerald Envy, Bermuda Bay, Starry Sky, and Orchid Oasis.
Supplies, all SU!
Stamps: Alphabet Antiques Upper & Lower, Flores Misticas
Ink: Poppy Parade, Mango Melody, Daffodil Delight, Emerald Envy, Basic Black marker
Paper: Basic Black, Poppy Parade, Mango Melody, Daffodil Delight, Emerald Envy, Bermuda Bay, Starry Sky, Orchid Oasis, Thick Basic White, Sunshine & Sprinkles DSP
Accessories: None
Okay, so time for some new goals! I don't make resolutions per se, more like I set intentions. You can see my goals/intentions for last year here; I always go back and reread what I wrote a year ago and kind of assess how I did.
1. Scrapbook layouts: I didn't have a set number in mind, but I made 136 pages in 2022, so not bad at all! For the past ten years or so my goal has been about 100 pages per year; some years I don't quite make it and others I blow right past that number. I do want to buckle down and do more scrapping this year so I'll stick with the usual 100 pages, and hopefully the upheaval of our move this summer won't last too long. It'll be harder to scrap during the summer with Ryan off school anyway.
2. Organize and pare down pictures: still ongoing. I haven't been as diligent for the past few months as I should be, so I need to refocus on this one. But I have made quite a lot of progress over the last couple of years and I do pretty well with getting new pictures organized into the proper folders (with labels!) as we take them. I may have to find a new photo printing service though; the last batch I got was just much poorer quality than I want. Hmph.
3. Reading: According to Goodreads, I read 102 books in 2022. A few of them were novellas and the very last one was a 9-page short story, but quite a few other ones were epic-length books (including several 700+ page chonkers) so I think it all evens out. I ended 2021 with 390 unread books on my Kindle, and that number is now 545 so I will never, ever run out of things to read. A couple of weeks ago I dipped a toe into Terry Pratchett's Discworld books because Hogfather was on sale for $1.99; I've now read three of the 41 books in the series and will likely continue for the foreseeable future. I think for all three books I spent the first 75% pretty much confused as to what was happening but I was having such a good time that it didn't matter.
4. Stitching: I currently have three projects in the works. The first is a Ghostbusters stitch; I finished the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man but I need to decide placement for the words to go with him, so it's on a break at the moment. I'm working on Pretty Little Dublin from Satsuma Street, and yesterday I started something new to me, a temperature tracker. I love how this one is potions bottles and makes me think of going to school at Hogwarts. Yesterday I had to choose fabric and get out all the colors for it, and I stitched my first potion bottle : ) This one should be fun to work on all year. After Dublin and the Ghostbusters, I have three more Pretty Little Cities and a slew of other patterns I'd love to work on, so I definitely need to clone myself several times over.
And when I'm not stamping, scrapping, organizing, reading, or stitching, I'll probably be cooking dinners for the fam and traveling. Which will then involve taking more pictures to organize and eventually scrapbook : ) Hope your year is off to a good start, peeps! Back tomorrow with this year's first SUO Challenges card.
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