Sewing 101

I've been working on putting my Week in the Life album together, slowly for sure.  As a reminder, I documented one week in my life with photos and journaling back in July along with Ali Edwards and lots of other scrapbookers.

As I started laying out my album I decided to make 4 journaling cards for each day; one for each of the following:

• gratitude
• favorite moment
• overheard
• observations

I typed all of the journaling and cut the cards into the size I needed to fit into my page protector, which is a 9 pocket protector like a baseball card page protector.  Once I had them all printed and cut I decided to sew a line on each journaling card as an accent.  This required me to get out my sewing machine.  I would consider myself a novice sewer.  I have made a few aprons and one chef hat (I needed help with that!) and I once made myself a dress - a maternity dress.  By the time I had it done I was far too pregnant to fit into it, but I did wear it home from the hospital.

Because of my lack of experience this is what typically happens when I start sewing:

That's the instruction manual that came with my machine, and it gets a lot of use.  My struggle this particular day was the bobbin; for some reason I could not get it to work!  I tried many times (see the pile of thread up inthe left hand corner of the picture?) and then I consulted my manual and eventually figured it out.

I got my sewing done as you can see in this photo.  My goal wasn't to have perfect looking straight lines, I wanted them to look kind of messy.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it!  I decided to put the four journaling blocks all together in the same place for every day of the week.  That could change as I continue to work on the book.

When I pulled one of the journaling blocks out of the page protector to sew on it I accidently pulled out the photo behind it and didn't realize it until I had done the sewing.  So now this photo has the back side of my sewing efforts on it, which certainly wasn't my plan but I can live with it!

I will continue to share my album as I work on it . . . I hope to eventually get it done!  I think once I get a plan in place it will go quickly, but as usual the plan it taking a while.

Week in the Life - Friday and Saturday

Hi!  Sorry for the extended absence.  I was on such a roll posting my WITL photos every day, but then things got crazy around here!  Over the course of a few days we had several relatives arrive from a variety of states!  My Aunt arrived from Texas, then a few days later my Aunt & two cousins arrived from Colorado and then just a few days later my step-sister and her husband arrived from Arizona.  Those arrivals were followed by days and days of family fun!

When it was all said and done I was tired!  Then came the realization that having dinner at my parent's house every day was o-v-e-r and suddenly I had to cook for myself.  And open the mail.  And mow the lawn.  And do some laundry.  In other words, get back into the swing of things and that took me about a week!

Now that things are back to normal around here I wanted to finish up the photo sharing portion of Week in the Life and then I need to move into the creating an album portion.  As a reminder, I started my Week in the Life documentation on a Sunday, and my last post was my Thursday photos, so here are Friday and Saturday.

Friday and the end of the work week is always a good thing. I snapped this photo as I drove home from work.  I loved the contrast of blue, green and white.  Such a pretty sky!

I was excited to find this package waiting for me!  It contained my Hambly overlays.  I'll use some of them in my WITL album and some for a future project.

It was a nice night so I decided to grill some pork chops for dinner.

While they were cooking I admired my flowers and my brand new purple mushroom!  A friend gave it to me and I just love it.

After dinner I washed a few dishes.  I have a dish washer, but sometimes you just need to wash a few things by hand.  Especially when you have super cute gloves like me!!

I spent much of Saturday mowing my lawn using this Toro lawn mower that I have had for about 18 years.  It takes me about 3 hours to mow the whole lawn, which means that I get lots of exercise.

Since it was a very hot day I took lots of breaks, sitting in the garage in front of a fan.  It felt great!  I was doing laundry and hanging it on the line and my laundry basket quickly became a foot stool.

 

While I was in the back yard I looked over at the corn field behind my house and noticed how tall the corn has grown.  Nothing says "Kodak moment" like a field of corn, right?

It was late afternoon by the time I had the whole lawn done and I caught the sun peeking through a tree.  Then it was off to the shower - did I mention it was really hot out??

So, that's the end of my WITL documentation.  I have my album, my page protectors, the Hambly overlays and a few other things all ready to go.  My photos should arrive in the next day or two and I'm excited to get to work on the album.