Swamped

Does anyone else feel like the year’s already getting away from them? Like they’re already going off the rails? I added an adjunct teaching position to my schedule and now I’m all of a sudden incredibly busy. It’s good. I like teaching at the college level. It’s just that I’ve become accustomed to a certain amount of leisure time and it’s being cut into pretty significantly at the moment. Reading things and making things have fallen by the wayside a bit. But I did manage to play around with the January release from Kelly Purkey Shop, and I’m so into this month’s kits! The high school I teach at has vacation next week and I have a huge to do list, but I’m hoping to play around with them some more.

The first project I put together is a currents layout. Current favorites, current loves, etc. I love including these in my albums. I try to do at least one a month.

This one is a 6x8 layout, and I used a 3x8 insert to add journaling. That allowed me to use more photos. Lately, I’m liking my layouts to be heavy on the photos. This layout uses the traveler’s notebook kit, Full Heart.

I love adding little accents to my photos. I stamped images and sentiments on white cardstock, cut them out, and adhered them to my photos.

To create the “current loves” script, I hand wrote the words on white cardstock with Sharpie pen, then cut them out with an Exacto knife. This used to be one of my favorite title techniques. I hadn’t used it in years, but I decided I missed it recently. It’ll probably be popping up here and there until I get tired of it again.

I love the white on white look of the number stickers I used on this layout. Sometimes, subtle works for me. Here, I ended up really liking it.

The next project I did is an intro page for my 9x12 album for 2019. I used the Life Map mini kit designed by Tina of Life Love Paper to jot down a few goals for the new year.

Those concentric rings are killing me. The patterns in this kit are so good!

I put together a couple quick traveler’s notebook layouts this month as well. This one highlights a couple new alphas that hit the shop this month. The blocky Brooklyn Heights alpha pairs perfectly with the Cobble Hill alpha released a while back, and I love it by itself as much as I love them together. I’ll definitely be getting a lot of use out of them.

And I had to use the Be Mine, Galentine stamp set on this photo of my BFFs. I love this picture, and the “thank you for being a friend” stamp is perfect. We’ve had a running Golden Girls thing going on for years now. We once ran a marathon relay wearing Golden Girls t-shirts with our (self-assigned) Golden Girls names printed on the back. I’m Blanche, for some reason.

I’m hoping things slow down enough for me to get back on a more regular schedule of documenting every little detail of everything. I really miss it when I don’t have the time!

Some of this months kits and stamps are still available in the shop. The link above is an affiliate link, if you’d like to check them out.