Another Month Just Slipped Away - Again!

Can you believe it is April already and that the Easter break starts at the end of today? Cause I certainly can't. I will have my two little cherubs (cough, cough) at home with me for two whole weeks - say it with me folks - two whole weeks!

I must say there is not much going on with me at the moment. I am still in some sort of a quilting slump - the thought of doing more Farmer's Wife blocks is very, very far from my mind at the moment. I did pull out my Farmer's Wife book and was flicking through the pages and some of the blocks are starting to call out to me but not very loudly at the moment.

I did however pull out some Central Park charm square blocks that I had left over from doing my brother quilt - they were the animal print ones that I think did not really go with the quilt I was making and decided to make a baby quilt out of them. The progress so far:

I still need to put sashing in-between the rows and do a border or two. I am in two minds about what to do with it but I was thinking I might try my luck on selling it on either Etsy or Ebay. I have a few baby quilt ideas I would like to try out and see how I go.

I have been really, really busy at school these days as I have offered to help the Year 5 and 6 kids learn to knit to help make blankets for 'Wrapped with Love'. You can find more info on their website. But it has been a fantastic experience for our kiddies as we have had some ladies come from one of the nursing homes to help out and boy can they knit!

This one's mine

This one belongs to DS

I am not really much of a knitter and was willing to help by doing crochet but then decided that I should give knitting a go and yep - love it. I will try to do a few 10" blocks for the Wrapped with Love project over the school holiday and then see where the knitting bug takes me. DS and I have been knitting together in the evenings for a bit and he really has taken a liking to it too.

The other thing that has well and truly been taking up most of my time this year is me trying to catch up on all of 2011 scrapbooking (the scrap part of QuiltSewScrap). I have been digitally scrapbooking since 2009 and did several hundred layouts for that year alone, 2010 only saw about 70 layouts in all. In January of this year 2012 had zero layouts, so of course me being me I was totally obsessed  focused on getting all our 2011 layouts done before I got started on 2012. 

Well, that turned out to be a major project because I realised at this point that I didn’t like the way my supplies were organised and I had so many kits/elements etc that I just didn’t like. So, that of course lead me to reevaluate all of my digital supplies, which meant I deleted everything I didn’t like or hadn't found a use for. This cut my supplies down by over half. When I saw how many elements I had left I thought it was a good time to buy a few new things of course in the style and colours I now prefer and redo the way I store and sort out all of my supplies. I have to say it has been a very intense experience and I have learnt a lot about how I scrap and what I really like rather than what is new and 'in'.  I surfed and researched all the different ways to store and organise my elements and finally decided on using Lightroom for my digital element and I am now using Photoshop Elements 10 for my actual scrapbooking.

I scrapbooking in three different ways: I am doing Project Life brain child of Becky Higgins as a 'Photo a Day' kind of thing and I do manage to get a photo most days. Then I also supplement with event layouts or if there are any photos that need to tell a whole story on there own as well. I also started for 2011 a digital December Daily the brain child of Ali Edwards and I just loved doing it so I think I will keep it up every year. I really enjoyed catching up on all of last year's STUFF and realised that I really missed digital scrapbooking over the past year. 

I think I need to work out a better working schedule where I have time for all my have to do stuff like housework, and my quilting business, running a household, doing volunteer work at my kids school, being a mum (I think that should be at the top of the list) as well as my own quilting, quilting for Sew Generous and doing my scrapbooking as well as reading my supernatural romance novels - phew that is a lot of stuff to do no wonder I always feel tired!

Here are a few layouts from 2011:

Part of December Daily by Ali Edwards

Part of December Daily by Ali Edwards.

All up I think I did about 106 layouts over the last two months, I feel a little drained and my eyes are a little sore from staring and sitting at the computer so much but it was well worth it. The kids love looking at a slide show of all of last years layouts and I don't mind looking at them either! Hubby likes to peek over our shoulder but pretends he is looking at something else.