Fortune smiled on me as I managed to get my new American visa just in time (as in on the way to the airport) to fly out of Norway before the enormous ash cloud of doooom brought Europe to a stand-still. Since I just so happened to be flying Icelandair, I did get to take this photo of Eyjafjallajökull brewing on something as we were flying over her on my way to Norway:

It is rather sobering (especially for someone living in an area studded with volcanoes like, say, Washington) to consider all the earthquakes and volcanic activity we’ve seen around the world lately. The gods are angry.

In less eruptive news, I spent a very nice and relaxing Easter back in Norway. I think I really needed some rest (mentally); I spent most of my time reading, going for walks - my parents live in a beautiful place - and just enjoying the company of my family. Oh, and EATING WAY TOO MUCH, but that’s what you’re supposed to do when you visit your parents, right? Right??

Since volcanoes are all the rage right now, here’s a scrapbook page I made a while ago of our “climb” (ok, snow slog) of Mt. St. Helens last year. It’s been sitting on my desk for months, but apparently I am never going to get around to finding any embellishments for it…so here it is in all its naked glory. (I used a sketch by Becky Higgins.)

Thank you so much for all your comments and well wishes, it helps us to know that Bobby touched a lot of hearts.

It’s been a very tough week for us; the house feels so empty and we haven’t had much energy to do anything at all. It gets better with time, I guess. I’m heading home to Norway on a somewhat last-minute trip to visit my parents tomorrow, so that will definitely help.

I haven’t been scrapbooking much lately either, but I put together this one (using Karla’s products) last week - I’m thinking I should start making something like this for every season (or month?) so I can at least capture all the major goings-on in our life even when my scrapbooking mojo is nowhere to be found.

I haven’t made a scrapbook page since the dawn of time*, but today I felt an uncontrollable urge to make a page about our backpacking trip to Yellow Aster Butte (aka A Place You Must Go to if You Ever Have the Chance).

(Check out those retro BasicGrey letter stickers! I know the title looks cramped and borderline illegible, but I dug those stickers out from the deepest, darkest depths of my stash and I love ‘em.)

Even though I’m taking an (involuntary) break from scrapbooking, I feel like I should at the very least be documenting our favorite trips so I’ll have something to look at when I am old and grey and decrepit. It’s also a good way to start dreaming about future destinations now that the days are getting longer (hallelujah!) and it looks like summer just might come around again this year.

*November, approximately.

No matter how many good vibes and loving snuggles I give my little honeybottom, he doesn’t seem to be getting any better. I really, really hope he’s going to pull through this, but I can feel myself mentally preparing for the worst.

At least I’m getting to spend a lot of quality couch time with him - that’s always been our thing, being all snoozy and lazy together. The very first time we met, he curled up behind my legs on the couch and immediately stole my heart. It was love at first spoon.

(Thanks to my digital Library of Memories, it was incredibly easy to find pictures of the two of us together. These photos span 2002-2009, but they were all in one folder, ready to use.)

I’m enjoying autumn so much this year - I don’t know if it’s because of all the stored up sunshine I have from this summer or if it’s just because I’m suddenly in a much better place (and have a much better mindset) than I’ve been in years, but I just feel happy. And that’s pretty much awesome.

Being in the U.S. makes it hard *not* to appreciate the changing of the seasons though…ok, so it’s slightly annoying that the stores put out their Christmas displays in September, but I love all the seasonal foodstuffs (of course I do) like cider and pumpkin spice anything and the general excitement about fall. Corn mazes, pumpkin patches, insane Halloween decorations, I love it. Wellie gives the season four paws up too:

I finally started working out again, so that might be part of the reason why I feel so disgustingly content these days too. Ok, so I’ve been hiking throughout the summer, but going for a walk once a week really isn’t enough to shift lard from this bucket or maintain a somewhat consistent influx of endorphins. It feels great even though any positive effects I may have garnered so far must have been negated by my alcohol intake over the last week (as it turns out, happy autumn time = beer) - after a particularly festive the night before, I felt like I was sweating pure hops yesterday at the gym. Ugh.

Anyway, I don’t really know what the point of this post was except to say that I like autumn and that I have a very cute dog who seems to agree.

I’m taking Ali Edwards‘ class, Yesterday and Today, over at Big Picture Scrapbooking, and I am really loving it so far - sorting and scanning old photos, thinking about stories I want to tell from when I was growing up (back in the days of yore).

Part of the process was to go through my old scrapbook pages to see whether my “storytelling” was up to snuff. While doing that, I pulled out these pages to put in the Yesterday & Today album. They’re all strangely coordinated - maybe I should keep the green/brown/beige thing going throughout the album? Meh, that might get boring.

Good things I found when going through my pages:

- lots of journaling, whether short or long. I especially liked the ones where I wrote like I talk and it felt like my personality (as annoying as it may be) came through.

- layouts with multiple photos, simple design - keeping embellishments as accents and focusing on the words and the photos.

- white space! The layouts that had some breathing room were my favorites.

Not-so-good things I found:

- most of my earliest pages didn’t have any journaling, not even a little note about the time, place or people in the photos. I used to think I would always remember those things, but now I can’t even recall the names of the people I went to high school with. How sad is that, by the way?

- a whole bunch of “purposeless” layouts that were more about using a photo I thought was cool than actually documenting what was going on in our lives.

- I want to make more mini albums, more pages about our families, more pages about everyday life - not just about hiking…

- I love enlarging my photos, but sometimes they’re just too big. It’s better to have some white space around a smaller photo and let it breathe.

- chipboard letters that have fallen off since I made the layout. This drives me nuts - don’t market it as self-adhesive if it can’t even stick to a piece of paper for a year!!

- writing the full journaling in my handwriting (little snippets are ok) - it’s not just ugly, it’s totally illegible. A couple of days ago we were (privately) making fun of a car salesman’s handwriting (because he was a loathsome, lying swine of a human being who deserves to be mocked), and I realized I am not in any position to make fun of other people’s scribbles. But at least my handwriting doesn’t look like a second grader’s. Unless it’s a really, really drunk second grader.

- layouts with paint, inking and various other attempts at being “artsy”, which clearly I am not. I’ll stick to my simple style.

I’ve noticed that on most of my recent scrapbook layouts, I’ve printed computer fonts as titles instead of using scrapbook products. This is a consequence of my somewhat paradoxical role as a lazy perfectionist – I can’t stand the look of crooked, wonky titles, so instead of spending and hour nudging unruly letter stickers around until they look absolutely perfect, I spend 20 seconds doing it in Photoshop instead.

I love fonts, they’re so pretty (well, some of them). Unfortunately I tend to hoard them, so my font list in Photoshop is getting unmanageably long (does anyone know of a way to make my favorite/most used fonts stick to the top of the list in Photoshop like they do in Word?) - yet I keep going back to the same ones over and over again:

One of my favorite things to do is mix fonts in my title - especially when I sneak a handwritten font in there (apparently I also have a penchant for bad puns):

I love printing the title directly on a photo, but sometimes I’ll make it overlap (I’ll make the design in Photoshop, print half of the title on the photo and the rest on cardstock, then piece them back together) so it looks like I used letter stickers:

Sometimes I’ll just use the outline of the font to mix it up a little. In Photoshop, set the Layer style > Stroke to whatever color and thickness you want, then change the main color of the font to your background color.

Of course one of the best things about using computer fonts is that you never run out of characters (unless you run out of ink, which tends to happen at the most inopportune times) - it’s perfect for mini albums where you’re using the same style on every page. I can add extra pages to my Southwest album two years from now and not have to worry about finding matching stickers. Huzzah!

(click the photos to embiggen)

For all my talk about what a lazy scrapbooker I am, it’s not actually so much about the laziness after all. It’s all a way to make scrapbooking easy and quick enough for me to continue with it as a hobby.

The honeymoon period between me and scrapbooking is definitely over; I no longer swoon over patterned paper or pay any sort of attention to new releases (when was the last time I even bought anything new?), and I have lost my creative drive to come up with fancy, new layouts every time I sit down to make a page…but I still love this hobby and what it stands for, and I love doing something with the bazillion photos JK and I take and the memories we make – and being lazy (oh, let’s just call it efficient!) allows me to keep doing that.

When I started scrapbooking a couple of years ago, almost all the pages I made were single-photo layouts. Now that I’m scrapbooking all of these hiking photos, however, I find myself trying to cram as many photos as possible on every page - there are just too many views I want to remember!

I try to cull my photos at several stages in the camera-to-scrapbook process (actually, the eye-to-scrapbook process - I’m becoming more and more critical of what I choose to photograph. With a digital camera it’s way too easy to just snap away like mad, creating more work for when you get back to the computer. Bah!):

1) Looking through my photos in Lightroom, I delete the obvious losers (blurry, grainy beyond salvation, major exposure failage etc.) altogether, and then flag the ones I want to upload to flickr. Our flickr account is where we share our photos with friends and family, and I like to think of it as a backup in case all our hard drives crash or the house goes up in flames or something. I only edit the flagged photos.

2) Now comes the hard part - choosing which photos to scrapbook. I make an effort to include photos of us and our hiking partners on every page even if it means dropping a nature photo I love, because I think they will be more interesting to us in the future. I think I’m going to make a simple album with my favorite nature photos so I won’t have to worry about forgetting them.

I also save some photos to use for non-event, non-chronological scrapbook pages - instead of including this photo of JK and the pups on the Tuck and Robin layout, I’m going to save it for something else. Maybe a page about my favorite things? Or summer memories? Or how freaking cute my boys are? I store multiple usage photos like that one in a digital Library of Memories system.

3) Now for the actual scrapbooking part - I like to choose one or two photos to emphasize what I want to remember about the trip (these tend to be nature photos), then squeeze in the rest as supporting actors.

Since I am generally too lazy to come up with new, exciting designs all the time, my layouts tend to look very similar to each other. Case in point - the Tuck and Robin page looks a lot like the Mount Baker page I just made, and the Tank Lakes layout is based on a design from Cathy Zielske’s Design Your Life class that I have already used on another page…and quite frankly the two layouts in this post look almost the same. I don’t care; I’m just happy to be scrapbooking and getting these memories down on paper.

The first couple of times we went hiking, I ended up making several scrapbook pages from each trip - if I had kept this up, my shelves would be full of not-very-interesting albums. I definitely prefer this more succinct (if I can use that word about photos) style of memory keeping, especially since I don’t really have room for many albums in our house to begin with. Maybe we should just build more shelves :o)