serene

labyrinth walk

homemade granola

sitting under the blue sky

on sabbath pond

time away

I'm off to Clare's Well for five nights of nature, books, fabulous food, fascinating people and time just to take it all in. I've scheduled a picture post to launch each day I'm away, so you can see some of what I'm enjoying.

Be well.

ireland pages

ireland pages, originally uploaded by jmk photos.

Spending time with photos and memories from my Ireland trip has kept me happily busy for a few months. . . and likely will for a few more. There's still many more stories to document.

I'm unifying pages in this scrapbook mostly through color and repeating layout designs. For colors I'm sticking with mostly white or off-white cardstock for a base, and accenting with oranges, blues, grays, some red and gold. Part of the reason I'm loving this hobby right now is that it's another outlet for me to mix patterns. I do this with my clothes all the time, and have so with my house decorating too, but working with paper greatly expands my possibilities and engages my imagination. I'm loving that right now.

I'm also including some divided page protectors with various size pocket openings - 2x2, 2x3, and 4x6 - which makes planning and placing photos and journaling in these pockets go a bit faster. At first I thought this album would be all 8-1/2x11 pages, but I quickly figured out I have many photos to include and a 12x12 album would probably be the way to go. So, I'm now working with the 12x12 size too. The best part is that I'm taking a nod from Ali Edwards and assembling all the different size pages in one binder style album. I love the look of all the sizes scattered throughout the album.

These are two spreads I'm enjoying right now. The one on the left is about our coach bus; the right is about me and my feelings about the trip, using one of the hotel mirror photos I snapped of myself.

And I've also discovered Picnik. I don't have photo editing software on my computer, so Picnik is great alternative for me. It's web-based and for $25/year I have access to some fun editing tools. I used it to make the photo collages on this post and my last. I'm sure it's not as robust as Adobe, but for me now, it's about all I wrap my mind around learning. It's also helped me solve my issue with posting more than one photo on this blog (ha!). I link the collages to my Flickr account, and blog from Flickr, which is so much easier than formatting a post in blogger, at least I think so :)