I’ve never been big on Halloween, basically because a) I wasn’t raised in the U.S. and b) we don’t have kids yet. I’m sure that gene will kick in once I have a tiny little human I can dress up. I could dress Bobby up, but I try to save his costume humiliation for Christmas… :D

Nevertheless, here is a Halloween layout and an Autumn layout. ‘Cause it’s just that time of year.

This one is for a color challenge in Cathy Zielske’s Design Your Life class, and I blatantly stole Nichol Magouirk’s embellishment idea:

Saturday was our monthly “anniversary” - yes, we celebrate the 25th of every month because we started dating on March 25, 2001 - we remember this date every single month, yet we both managed to forget our wedding anniversary this year. Yup. Anyway, it was our 7 year and 7 month anniversary, so we headed out on a hike (huzzah, finally!) to celebrate. We needed something close and easy (after weeks and weeks of utter laziness), so we decided to go to Snow Lake and Gem Lake.

Snow Lake is probably the most popular hike in the Snoqualmie Pass area, so after hearing stories about the huge crowds, we didn’t want to do this one during the summer. I didn’t actually want to do it at all, but then it hit me that it must be this popular for a reason. It is. You get incredible views (and probably a good swim in the summer) for minimal effort - 11 miles and 2500 feet of elevation gain round trip to Gem Lake.

Most people stop at Snow, so we hiked on to Gem Lake and had lunch there all by ourselves. Perfection!

Bobby was happy to be out in the mountains again:

We brought a special anniversary treat with us! Kvikk Lunsj is the official (well, not really, but kind of) Norwegian hiking chocolate bar - we’ve kept this one in our fridge since we came back from Norway, waiting for a hike where it wouldn’t melt. I have shown impressive self-restraint knowing it was in our fridge all this time and not eating it, seriously. It’s so good. Anyway, we finally got to devour this bad boy yesterday, and man alive was it heavenly. Whenever I eat this chocolate, I get all these little flashbacks from ski trips when I was little. Sitting in the Easter sun eating Kvikk Lunsj and oranges….mmm. I think I’ll have to look for some old photos of these trips and some new ones and make a Kvikk Lunsj scrapbook page.

I love living here (even though Kvikk Lunsj are scarce) :D

By the way, the albums I showed in the last post (and the divided page protectors) are from We R Memory Keepers.

I am still not over how cool it is for me to use 12×12 albums. I made a couple 12×12 layouts when I first started scrapbooking, but soon realized that 8.5×11 was more my thing, so I just stuck with that. Now that I have these new albums, however, I am totally obsessed with the freedom of mixing page sizes. Combined with the whole Library of Memories system, this has made scrapbooking fun for me again.

There were so many photos from Andre and Ellie’s wedding that I wanted to have in my album, so I had a bunch of 4×6 photos developed with a white border and put them in a divided page protectors (from We R Memory Keepers). Anything that gets my photos of the computer and into the real world is fun, no? I love the absolute laziness of it; anyone could do this in five minutes.

Here’s the back (I added some photo descriptions on a 4×6 piece of cardstock):

I wanted a place to keep all the memorabilia, so I used one of the 12×12 folders from a CK Kit of the Month as the base for my layout and snuck the invitation, save the date card and menu (Andre & Ellie’s wedding was all vegan and the food was fantastic) into the folder.

Some of the random layouts that finally have a home now that I am using 12×12 albums: one of the first layouts I made (before found my style…) and the page JK made the time I forced him to scrapbook - how cute is that?? Almost better than the Valentine’s Day card I got this year:

I’ve also added pages that other people have sent me, like this super-cool one made by Ania from when we were teaching at Papirfest (I miss you guys!), and have embraced the opportunity to use really weird page protectors like this “hinged” one I used for the party layout (Design Your Life classmates: this page protector can make jumping the gutter feel less traumatic!):

Last, but absolutely not least - the albums (from We R Memory Keepers) look pretty freakin’ cute on my shelf:

Thank you for all the kind words and virtual baked goods after my last post - I am happy to announce that I am back to my happy healthy self again. I went to the gym today for the first time since…uhm…some time before the Enchantments. My muscles and lungs don’t like me very much right now, but it felt really good to move again after being sick for so long. I also took Bobby for a looong walk yesterday so we could pee on fire hydrants (him) and take in all the Autumn colors (me). Hopefully the weather will stay good so we can breathe in some fresh mountain air this weekend!

Oh, and speaking of the gym - am I the only one who thinks Seth Rogen looked much hotter when he was “fat”?

I am so bitter right now. Naively believing that I was out of the woods flu-wise, we planned a trip, well, into the woods. We were going larch huntin’. I tried to ignore the fact that I was feeling worse and worse on Friday, but then I woke up today with an awesome fever and a perfectly congested head.

THE SKY IS BLUE AND THE SUN IS OUT AND IT’S A BLOODY PERFECT AUTUMN DAY AND I HAVE TO STAY IN BED WITH BOOKS AND YOUTUBE.

Hrrrrmmmmfffff.

Tea and sympathy (and baked goods) are encouraged.

I finally kicked the flu! Huzzah! We’re looking forward to finally getting out on a hike this weekend even though it will most likely feel horrible after weeks of lardy sofa spudness.

Anyway, until anything more interesting happens, here is the first of my layouts for week two of Design Your Life. I have to say, I have never spent this much time on a layout before. All that cropping and aligning (all in vain; my paper trimmer is officially crooked as one of Bobby’s hind legs) took forever. Not to mention the fact that a double 12×12 spread is freakin’ huge.

It looks better in real life since the silvery shimmer in the cardstock reflected weirdly in the photo and you can’t really see the transparent embellishments (I love those things, they’re from the September CK Kit of the Month). Oh, and I had a brain fart and forgot that it is called a reception in English, not a party. Bah. Alright, enough excuses:

A clarification about fixing older layouts, like I mentioned in my last post: I’m talking about the layouts I made quite a few of when I was just starting out, following what was in style back then…one photo of something random, a bunch of paper flowers and no journaling or anything that would tell the person looking through the album what the page was about. I’m either adding something (mostly journaling that would help the page make sense), removing something (embellishments that take the focus away from the photos - this sometimes happened when I was on product-specific design teams), or, in the really grim cases, moving the entire layout into an album in my closet that I’m calling a crapbook. Hah.

The designing part of scrapbooking is just for me, to enjoy it right now. Just because it’s fun. Otherwise I would just use a regular photo album. But I want to be able to look back on my albums when I’m old and grey and rather have fewer albums with more substance than shelves full of layouts that don’t mean anything to me.

Oh, and the hiking pages? I’ve decided that since it is such an important hobby *cough*obsession*cough* for us, it should permeate all the album categories. Easy dayhikes and trails we do over and over again = things we do. Backpacking trips = places we go. Pages about overcoming some sort of hiking-related challenge or why we love doing it = all about us.

Alright, enough about that already. Sorry that I’m rambling on about this again, but when I’m down in the dumps and feel like I can’t control what’s going on in my life, I tend to react by microorganizing something like this. It makes me feel much, much better. :)

This has not been a good week in the Markiewicz household. Just as I was getting better from my cold last week, JK came home with some evil bug that has kept him home for three days (and JK is never sick), and now my body appears to have decided that resistance is futile so I’m coming down with it too. Our house is full of germs. Okay, the rest of this post is for obsessive scrapbookers only. Everyone else must look away or you’ll think I’m insane.

Since I have so much free time on my hands, I’ve decided to finally take Stacy Julian’s Library of Memories class. I signed up for this in the spring, but I didn’t make it all the way through. Luckily, Big Picture Scrapbooking gives you passes to revisit the classroom later. If you haven’t read any of Stacy’s books and don’t know what this whole system is about, you can read two very descriptive blog posts here and here - it goes deeper than just sorting layouts and photos.

After a period of dissatisfaction with this hobby, the biggest point for me is to make my scrapbooks meaningful so I won’t look back on them years from now and think what *is* this crap?? There is a difference between scrapbooking photographs and scrapbooking memories, and I want to focus on the latter.

Today I’ve started sorting and categorizing my layouts so I can put them into the right albums. For such a messy person, organizing is making me surprisingly happy!

I have to admit that as an incorrigible perfectionist, I am also weeding out the pages that are just plain meaningless (and serve no greater purpose than taking up space) and the downright fugly ones. I’m going to try to “fix” some semi-fugly ones as well. I just don’t want to end up with 700 huge albums full of crap.

Anyway, the implementation of this system takes time and can seem somewhat frustrating in the beginning. I’m sorting my photos digitally as it seems less wasteful than printing everything (and I start most of my layouts on the computer anyway) and luckily I’ve been good at weeding my folders before, but going through and tagging all of our photos is taking forever.

I’m also having trouble distinguishing between the Places We Go and Things We Do categories (like gaaah, where do my hiking layouts go?) - I guess I’ll just have to make some executive decisions there, after all it will eventually be my personal system and there is no right or wrong. I’ll just keep telling myself that… ;)

If anyone else is using this system I would really appreciate some insight or words of encouragement!

Alrighty, now it’s back to tissues and Dayquil.

No hiking this weekend (shock! horror!), and I actually don’t mind (more shock! more horror!) - we’ve done all sorts of snuggly, lazy, autumny inside things while listening to the rain outside. Can’t really complain about watching movies, eating homemade chocolate almond brittle (mmm, homemade chocolate almond brittle…) and spending time with JK and Bobs!

This downtime also enabled me to get started on my first assignments for Design Your Life - you can register until October 8 if you still want to join. The first one is from Park Butte, the day after we slept in the lookout tower. Please excuse the lame title, I just couldn’t help myself (for Norwegians: tarn = tjern).

This one is from that horrifying hike down to Mooney Falls. I struggled with how to embellish this one; my usual flowers and butterflies somehow didn’t seem to go with the whole DOOOOM-theme…so I finally got to use one of the cool Quickutz state dies to cut out a tiny little Arizona.