Project Life 2014 - Week 7

February 9 - February 15, 2014:

Around here, Week 7 was a fabulous week! Dean started Piano lessons at the Maui Music Conservatory. I continued with my Clay Class and finally got the hang of Scraffito (a technique that I did not master in my first clay class). And, it was Valentine's Day.

I used lots of new Elle's Studio goodies in my layout this week, including several things from the Love You More Collection Pack and the Love You More Journaling Tags. The "Be Mine" card is from Emily Merritt's Heart Talk and the "This is Where it is Beautiful" is from her Snow Day (recolored). And of course, I added the yellow circle "7" from Emily's Dotted Numbers set.

I was so happy to add some of Dean's artwork this week! It's one of my favorite things to include in Project Life. I often include it inside extra inserts, which don't usually get shared on the blog, but sometimes when I'm short a pocket, I'll hand Dean a blank card and ask him to draw me a picture. This week I needed another 4x6 card to fill out the spread, so I asked him to draw a Valentine picture. He drew a picture of our family with lots of love. It's hilarious that he drew us all wearing green shirts and purple shorts (I'm pretty sure Dean is the only one of us who owns a shirt that color - one of his school shirts, and none of us own purple shorts! Ha!).

And there you have Week 7. I'm off to get started on Week 8!!

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Project Life 2014 - Week 6

February 2 - February 8, 2014

During Week 6 of 2014, Around Here Dean and I were both sick - he missed school and I missed work on Monday. Tuesday, the election results were announced and Dean discovered he had been elected the Class President of Mrs. Yuen's 2nd Grade Class at Pomaika'i Elementary School! So proud! The Olympics started Thursday, and as is tradition for us since Dean's first time watching any Olympics (the Winter Olympics of 2010), we are completely obsessed!! Saturday we went to see The Lego Movie (highly recommend - thoroughly enjoyable for the adults and the little ones!). And look how many times the cats made it into the PL spread this week - 3 times! I'm pretty sure that's a record! LOL.

Big variety of product this week. My Anchor Card is from the Midnight Core Kit, as is that "Perfection" 3x4 card and a few of my journal cards. I used several Emily Merritt products this week - her new Currently 3x4 cards, the 3x4 card with all the "xoxo"s on it is from Heart Talk (you'll be seeing more of this in my Week 7 layout, the "miserable" hashtag card is from Not My Day, and finally the number 6 week marker card is from Big Number Week Cards No. 2. The "Happy Moment" 3x4 card is from my January Studio Calico PL kit. And the two far right 3x4 cards are both from the Plus One Mini Kit.

And that's it for Week 6! I can't wait to share Week 7 - it's one of my favorite layouts so far in my 2014 Album. I'll be back soon with that.

Mahalo for stopping by!

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Project Life 2014 - Week 5

January 26 - February 1, 2014:

Playing catch-up on sharing my Project Life layouts. Around here, during Week 5 of 2014, life was pretty satisfying. We experienced our own version of winter here on Maui, which I know my mainland readers will laugh at, but we're just not used to it! It was cold for us (low 50s at night and only getting into the mid 70s during the day) all week and we got lots of much-needed rain. Honestly, even though we're not accustomed to that kind of "winter weather", it was kind of nice! We spent the evenings bundled up on the couch under quilts, watching movies, and I got to break out my comfy sweatpants and sweatshirts! Appropriately, Dean had a Snowman Project due to school, where he had to design and build a snowman. He did great. Wednesday I started another Handbuilding with Clay class up at the Hui. I took a similar class last fall and LOVED it! I'm not that good, but I'm thoroughly enjoying getting my hands dirty and stepping out of my creative comfort zone. And now I want a kiln to use at home! We celebrated Chinese New Year with an authentic Chinese Dinner from Panda Express (ha!) and Dean got to feed the lion a red money envelope at his school's Chinese New Year celebration Lion Dance. And finally, Saturday we attended a fun birthday party at Kalama Park for one of Dean's friends from preschool. And that sums up another fun and busy week for us.

Product Used: Kept things super simple - pretty much all Coral with the exception of one 3x4 filler card from Jade. I added the Number 5 from Emily Merritt's Dotted Numbers to mark my week, but otherwise very little embellishment other than the fortunes from our fortune cookies for our CNY dinner. I did use my new

And that's it for Week 5. How is everyone else doing? Keeping up? Catching up? 

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Classmate Valentine Gifts with Reverse Confetti

 

I'm so excited to be playing along in another Blog Hop this month with the fabulous Reverse Confetti Team! Today I'm veering a bit away from my standard Project Life post to share a fun little Valentine's Day project I mass produced for Dean to give to each of his 2nd Grade Classmates next week. A few Reverse Confetti stamp sets and dies made the mass production so easy! I'll get to all of the project details in a bit. First, the nitty gritty about the Blog Hop...

The hop started over on the Reverse Confetti Blog and you should have made it here from the amazing Heather Pulvirenti's Blog. It would be worth your while to start at the beginning of the hop so you don't miss a thing. We have tons of inspiration for you to see using so many of Reverse Confetti's amazing products!

For school parties, I try to steer clear of candy as the kids get so much of that already. This year, I found these awesome recycled paper pencils from a fabulous Etsy Shop - MoxiePear - and placed a bulk order of pink, red and white.  I already had the perfect sized cellophane bags, so I just needed to make a cute little tag. Reverse Confetti made the job super quick and easy! I pulled out my Tag Me die set along with the Arrow die and got to work cutting. As for the stamping, I used Crushin' for the decorative bits and then added Dean's name with Lighthearted Letters (I love using this stamp set on my Project Life pages as well). Repeat 20 times and Dean is ready for his Valentine's Day party!

I hope you've enjoyed hopping with us today. Be sure and hop with the Confetti Crew on the 8th of EVERY MONTH for more Reverse Confetti inspiration! Now it's time to hop on over to Stacey Schafer's blog. If you get lost along the way, you can find the hop order and list of all the participating designers over on the Reverse Confetti blog.

How would you like to win some Reverse Confetti goodies of your very own? Leave a comment on each stop along the hop for a chance to win a $15 Gift Certificate to Reverse Confetti! Comments are open until February 10th at noon CST!

Have a great weekend!

Project Life 2014 - Week 4

January 19 - January 25, 2014:

Around here, Week 4 flew by! Dean had quite a bit going on at school with a big project due for the 100th Day of School. In true Dean Style, he went completely over the top with this one. The assignment was simply to collect 100 of something and display it on a posterboard. I tried to convince him to do 100 Lego pieces, but he was having none of that. "Too boring". He's been really, really into all things Space since he could talk, so of course, it would be Space related. He decided to list his 100 Favorite "Space Objects", and he had to put them in order from smallest to largest. And then he decided nobody would know what any of them were, so he needed to label them (moon, planet, dwarf planet, star, nebula, etc). I helped him cut out the red letters using my Silhouette, but he did the rest of it all on his own. I've never even heard of most of the things on his list other than the planets in our own Solar System plus a few of the other stars and nebula just because of listening to Dean talk over the years. It was a lot of work for a 7-yr-old, but he did a great job! (it was really hard for me not to step in and try to get him to line up those sticker labels a little better or to try to get him to make his columns a little straighter, but I stepped back and let him do it himself and he did great! And he was so, so proud of himself!!). The other big news of the week was that a HUGE North Swell arrived in Hawaii on Wednesday with giant waves - it was expected to bring the biggest waves we've had in about 15 years. Waves on Maui's north shore were predicted to be around 40 ft with one famous surf spot, Pe'ahi (also known as "Jaws"), getting hammered with waves up to 80 ft!!  So my friend Jayci, Dean and I braved the absolutely insane traffic along with just about everyone else on Maui and headed out to the North Shore Wednesday afternoon to check out the waves. Our timing wasn't great, it was super windy, and the waves weren't that big yet (about 25 ft). It took us almost 2 hours to drive to Ho'okipa, which would normally take about 20 minutes, because of the traffic backed up in both directions with people trying to get out to Jaws. We decided not to keep going to Jaws. I wanted Dean to see the waves (the biggest in his lifetime), but I wanted to get home before dark!

This is one of the first times I've consistently used product from the Honey Kit throughout my layout. I have a love / hate relationship with Honey. I love the simple, clean designs of some of the cards (like the ones I used this week), but I don't like a lot of the other, more cutesy cards. But the colors are great and I do like the way this week turned out! I used another of Emily Merritt's Big Number Week Cards No. 2 to mark my week and added in a few bits and pieces from Studio Calico. But it was mostly Honey Core Kit this week.  That "Remember This" stamp on the bottom left photo is an old one from Evalicious. It doesn't look like they carry it any more, but I just noticed they have a ton of great new stuff that just released, including these Hello 2014 Misc V1 Puffy Stickers that I've got my eye on.

And that's it for Week 4! I just finished up my Week 5 layout so will be back in a day or 2 to share that as well. Thanks for stopping by!

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