Happy Mail for us :)

First:

Happy New Year's Eve!

Second:

We got Happy Mail today from my parents! Lots of pictures and cards, yay!

Font: Chalkduster

My dad made the cards for the Fourth of July, Halloween, Christmas, and New Year's. He enjoys thinking up and making cards with moving parts. This makes receiving one of my dad's cards a fun experience. We enjoyed the pictures. The one shown is of their Christmas train set-up.

The package was a big surprise since my parents said they were saving the pictures and cards up for when I visit in three months or so. Mailing anything to here is exorbitant, but from here is relatively inexpensive. So, I enjoy sending out Happy Mail, but don't expect to receive any and when we do get something, it's an event for celebration :D

Hopefully your last day of 2015 will be as happy as ours,

Theta

ATC flower and layouts with Project Life

I finished this ATC today. It took several days as I was working on other projects.

I looked into Becky Higgins' Project life and decided to download her free stuff and give it a try for our 2013 yearbook (yes it's 6 months late, but that's okay because by the time anyone gets a copy it will be 7 or 8 months late). So I downloaded her free starter pack, opened up Photoshop, and started piling in photos and cards. In a very short time, I had picked out pictures to use for each month and plopped in pictures and cards for every month except July. It went fast... I even turned and flipped some of the cards and resized photos when I clipped them to the mask. I did not add much in the way of embellishments - that would sending it out next year or so. July was a bit more difficult. That was the month we went on vacation to St. Moritz, Switzerland, and the big kids joined us, so we were all together for a short time. Too many pictures to choose from... so I made a few too many layouts of that time, but it really didn't take very long. After all the pictures and cards were loaded into the layouts, I journaled a bit in the spaces I had left for writing. That didn't take too long either. In less than a week I have a finished album ready for the printers that reminds us of what we did last year. This process usually takes me months and weeks and days. It was nice to let go and just plop things in. The kids love the prototype. Even though it's not up to my usual and the colors don't thrill me, I am incredibly happy that it is done, well almost - I have the challenge of uploading it to the printers.

Here are a sampling of the pages:

Project Life journaling card and paper, Theta photos and ATCs. The accompanying page has the birthday journaling and more birthday pictures.

Project Life paper, Theta photos

Project Life journaling card, filler cards, arrow, and paper, Theta photos, just a bit of photoshop brush on the month card.

I am planning on doing a separate album for our vacation using this system, possibly with my own papers and things. Although the colors in this free kit are not ones I would have chosen, they really worked well with the photos. I did recolor (using the same color palette) the two cards above Caramel and flipped one of them horizontally. 

It might be fun to do a black and white kit with my ATC flowers... hmmm...

Have a great day,

Theta