It’s no secret I looove Instagram.

It’s the one social media place you will find me hanging out the most. I’ve never really gotten the hang of Twitter and I find Facebook a tad confusing. But I do like the easiness and friendliness of Instagram. And photos + words = well, my favourite thing.

Now, I am still no expert over there in Instagram land,  but I do use a few different photo apps that I thought I would share today. In no particular order, here’s my

Top Four iPhone Photo Editing Apps — according to me

1. A Beautiful Mess

Well hasn’t this little gem taken the world by storm these past few days. I’m seeing this app used on a TON of Instagram photos. The brainchild of sisters Elsie and Emma from A Beautiful Mess blog, this little app allows you to “add new life to your favorite photos with custom filters, fun fonts, and hand-drawn doodles”.. This is such a fun little app and has added extra add ons such as extra fonts and doodles you can purchase for 99c.

It’s also a great little time waster

I’ve added text, cute little arrows and doodles and borders to create this Instagram photo.

2. PicTapGo

This has become my go to when it comes to editing my phone photos. I love it. I am a recent convert.

Why I like it – it’s easy to use and the range of filters and adjustments really do enhance my photos. My favourite filters are Lights On and the Auto Colour filter and a slider allows you to adjust the intensity of all filters quickly and easily. Layer on the filters, go back a step or two or start all over again with a quick tap on the screen. You can then save the finished photo to your camera roll, email it or upload directly to Instagram.

Plus you can take crisp, clear photos directly from the app.

And the more you use it, the more the app gets to know your favourite filter combinations and saves them for future reference under “My Style”.

3. Diptic

This is an oldie but a goodie. I’ve been using Diptic for ages to get nice rounded corners on my images or to create multi photo collages. They’ve recently upgraded the app and it now includes a ton of new templates for lots of photos!

4. Squaready

A free app that crops any image into a square, ready for uploading to Instagram.

However, the charm of this little app for me, is it allows me to add in a portrait or landscape orientated photos that I don’t want cropped into a square and it allows me to then upload to Instagram keeping it’s original shape.

For example, this photo was originally a portrait orientated photo and had I imported it into Instagram, it would have ended up cropped like this:

However, I wanted to show the whole photo in Instagram so I used Squaready to make sure the whole image was included. Then when I uploaded it to Instagram, the image is not cropped square and the whole photo is visible.

Have a great weekend everyone..

This was a much wanted Mother’s Day pressie. From my eldest kiddo.

Along with Kath & Kim Season 1 and a pair of novelty elephant head bed socks – because let’s face it, we ALL need a pair of elephant head bed socks in our life!

He chose well, although he was (strongly) encouraged to buy the book by me – it was high on my wish list!

And I scored big time this Mother’s Day from the rest of the family too with more fluffy bed socks, cosy pjs, a new iphone case, Milk Bath from The Body Shop and an assortment of other goodies. Plus breakfast in bed, flowers from Ken and the kids, lunch with my parents, flowers + chocolates from my sister, flowers from my dad AND a beautiful bath products pack from my mum. I was totally spoiled and I’m very thankful for such a beautiful family..although there were some squabbles amongst kids during the day as is normal for all families!

Anyway, I love a good business success story and have long followed Janine Allis and her Boost story so I was keen to dive into this book. I wish I had bigger blocks of time to sit still and read it all! But I have to be satisfied with snatching small snippets of time here and there to bury my nose in this book. I am really, REALLY loving it.

Here’s a snapshot of our Mother’s Day.

Yes, that’s a blurry photo of my mum and sister and me..but very nicely focused flowers in the foreground and the only half decent one of the three of us together. And no photo of son number two with his mum! He is most uncooperative and it wasn’t worth the argument..plus he had to dash off early for his work shift…

Hope you all had a lovely Mother’s Day too.

I’m always after cool new ideas to try out for Project Life and paper crafting.

I stumbled across this delightful blog today by Erica Hernandez. It’s jam packed with Project Life ideas, printables, craftiness and pretty pictures. I spotted this idea from Erica... to print onto label sheets. HOW COOL is that!

And instantly had to try it out..I only had a few Avery labels on hand and I wanted to have a few different designs, so I chose some digital papers from Paislee Press and layered them onto an A4 page in Photoshop.

If you are particular (I’m not!), you could certainly do a test print and see where your paper designs print on a blank page and then add your labels over the top to make sure the paper designs print on the labels you want and theres no overlap..but I didn’t do that.. I just eye balled it to line it up and off I went and my printed designs hit the labels I wanted without any issues..

I used double sided tape to attach the label sheets to my blank A4 page and fed it through my printer.

And voila! Pretty printed labels ready to add to your work. Easy peasy!

So what can you do with these pretty labels??

How about using them to decorate these super duper 3x4inch printable journaling card holders.Perfect for Project Life when you have more of a story to tell and can’t fit it on a standard 3x4inch journaling card..

Now I love a good hidden journaling pocket and I m the first to admit I love to tell a good story so I tend to have a LOT of journaling in my Project Life spreads…so this idea of Erica’s (she is a clever chicky!) really appealed to me..

Find the template plus the blog post from Erica here.

And the printed stickers were the perfect, simple finishing touch for these envelopes..And here’s my little cards waiting to be filled with journaling notes and bits and pieces!!!

Make sure you check out Erica’s blog. It’s delightful.

I am in love with this handy dandy little photo processing gadget.

Introducing my new little Epson PictureMate. And no this isn’t a sponsored post – just a post about my new found love!

I haven’t ever been totally, absolutely satisfied with the photo processing at Big W. Sure, they have a great matte finish option but I was starting to feel like my photos were a bit hit and miss. I do all my photo editing within Photoshop and was finding I needed to really pump up the brightness on all my photos as Big W tends to print them so dark! And it was tricky to gauge the right amount of brightness to add to each image.

It was becoming frustrating and I would get a batch back and while some were great, a lot weren’t so good. PLUS I wouldn’t ever run to Big W to have say one or two shots processed so I would have to do a big lot of photos at one time to make it worth the trip.

Enter this little guy!

I first read about the PictureMate on the Project Life Australia Facebook group a few months ago. The Project Life girls were raving about it and after a lot of research and deliberation and a chance visit to Officeworks for something else and spotting one on the shelf reduced in price, I decided to buy it.

And it’s been the Best. Decision. Ever.

Without a doubt, this little machine is the best! And it’s made Project Life much, much , much easier and more convenient.  I snapped up the last one at our local Officeworks for the great price of $120. It was easy to set up, works like a dream, prints out beautifully crisp and clear 4x6inch photos and I can print directly from my computer OR by inserting my camera memory card.I can also print two 3x4inch photos on the one sheet or even a 4x6inch sheet of mini photos just by setting them up in Photoshop and printing them out.

I compared the same Big W processed photo to one from the PictureMate and you could see the difference instantly. The PictureMate print was much lighter and brighter and more true to life…. the BigW print was much more dull and certainly darker in the detail of the photo.

The PictureMate comes with a toner cartridge and 20 sheets of 4x6inch photo paper to get you started. Additional ink/photo paper packs are available for between $38 (from Hot Toner) to $49.95 from Officeworks. The packs have 150 4x6inch sheets in them. The paper is glossy but not too glossy. If I had one complaint it would be that I do prefer a nice textured matte finish with my photos but the glossy paper is fine!

So yeah, I’m the first to admit that you can’t beat a professional photo lab for top quality photos BUT the PictureMate comes pretty close. Plus I don’t have a professional photo processing lab nearby. And as far as cost – yes, you will get cheaper prints at Big W and Harvey Norman and Kmart but in my opinion these PictureMate pictures are heaps better..

Plus it’s quite the crowd pleaser.. I did a demo for my family when we were at my parent’s place for lunch the other day and chose a random photo from my camera card and printed it instantly. Everyone was most impressed ..

But the main thing – I can print off photos instantly for Project Life – without having to wait or stockpile a ton of prints to ensure the trek to Big W is worthwhile AND that was the decider for me!

I’ve been experimenting in the sugar free kitchen again!

This time I made these delicious morsels of loveliness. Recipe is from My Food Religion and it’s a beauty!!

I used the walnut and coconut oil version for the base and left out the medjool dates as I am not a huge date fan and I made mini cheesecakes as I didn’t have any little individual pie flans like My Food Religion has used – which I must say makes the lime tarts look super cute! So mine are cheesecake “bites”.

I made the raw version instead of baking them and I’ve stored them in the freezer. They make such a nice little bite sized treat!!

It’s been a bit of a whirlwind around here the past week or so!

Because we have MEGA NEWS!

It’s no secret I love Project Life.

I love capturing and documenting the every day. I love that people who had strayed from creating scrapbook layouts (me include) are diving back into memory keeping with gusto in the form of Project Life/pocket style memory keeping. I love the direction memory keeping is headed.

Let’s face it – most of us are already documenting life. Even in the most basic form by sending out a tweet or posting a photo to Instagram we are memory keeping. And I love that.

Soooo, I am thrilled to announce we have a new project on the go. It’s a BRAND NEW MAGAZINE …

Introducing Jot Magazine.

Jot will be all about capturing and documenting life for the modern day memory keeper. It will be packed with plenty of ideas, techniques, step by step projects, stories and inspiration for anyone interested in scrapbooking, paper crafting and documenting life. We’ve come a long way since we launched issue 1 of Etzcetera and I have a very clear vision of exactly how I want Jot to look, feel and be and exactly what content we want included.

While Etz will continue to focus on a variety of lifestyle and general craft themes, Jot will be more paper craft/project life/scrapbook specific.

I have a beautiful team around me – my valued assistant and Ad Manager Lisa Pate, my trusted stylish friend Tamar Bostock who will be doing lots of editorial features for us and my incredibly talented Support Team girls Janelle Wind, Yvette Adams, Mel Nunn, Mardi Winen and Sheree Forcier who always, always deliver the BEST projects and ideas.

Issue 1 of Jot is still in the works. We hope to launch the first issue in May 2013. In the meantime, check out our little website here, and follow our story on our Jot facebook page here.

I’ll be adding updates here on the Etz site, in our weekly newsletter which you can subscribe to here and on Facebook and Instagram. Plus of course, I will be adding updates to the Jot website.

Stay tuned.

I have news.

Big news.

Exciting news.

Wonderful, I can’t wait to share type news.

Here’s a hint.

And it does have something to do with Project Life as some of you who follow me on Instagram and Facebook have guessed.

I am not *quite* ready yet to announce.

But will do in the next day or so. Fingers crossed it will be Friday afternoon to coincide with the release of this week’s newsletter. Stay tuned.

I’ve stalled with Project Life.

Somehow I went all gung ho for the first 3 weeks and then…

Nothing.

Well, half of week 4 did get done.

And I AM keeping up with plenty of regular photos and jotting down notes and things which is good. I’m using the Day One app on my phone  and it’s quite handy. Most of the time I add a quick photo and then I write in shorthand. Even just one sentence or a single word will jog my memory when it comes time to do my journaling. And I am still using iCloud which means all my photos are at my finger tips without having to sync phones to computers etc.

Here’s a sample of a random page on my Day One app timeline. I can then click through and see the photo and any notes I have added plus the weather, location and time and date.

Plus I’m maintaining my photo a day challenge by using my Project 365 Pro app on my phone. It makes THE BEST little monthly overview photos of each photo I have taken. Here’s my March photo a day collage.

and then on Monday..BIG DAY…

My very first Project life Studio Calico kit arrived. I have waited and waited (as have most other Aussies) for ages for this kit to arrive. I added my name to the waiting list waaaay back in December last year and finally was notified that I would receive the March kit as my first one. Apparently it shippped on 1 March. And took over SIX WEEKS to get here. I had already been billed for my next kit and I was still waiting for this one to arrive. I will admit I was frustrated and ready to cancel my sub but wanted to wait and see what this one was like before making any decisions.

It certainly does come nicely packaged.

And was much smaller than I anticipated. Small enough to be delivered with our letters in our letter box and not delivered as a parcel.

and inside – lots of kraft coloured shred..

And loads of goodies. Theres mini stamps mini letters, washi tape …

And a truckload of journaling cards…so many.

It IS a lovely kit. It WILL come in handy when putting together my pages. It IS value for money so despite my frustrations with waiting for the kits to arrive I have decided to stick with my subscription. For now anyway.

So now I am all set.

I have no excuses.

It’s Project Life catch up time.

I loved this idea in our latest issue of Etz.

Did you see it? Everyone loves happy mail!!!! And it’s just as fun to GIVE someone else happy mail!!!

Lisa Pate created the cutest little parcels of goodness to send out as thank you happy mail for a few of her special friends. Beautifully packaged and filled with pretty things, I am sure the happy parcels were very well received.

Other ideas to pack inside your own happy mail parcels include:

• Beautiful herbal teas
• coffee or hot chocolate sachets
• a cute pair of socks
• pretty stationary
• notebooks
• hair clips and slides
• small samples of bath oils or salts
• a good novel or a magazine

See Issue 9 for Lisa’s article on Happy Mail.

These OH SO CUTE bunny dishes are the creation of Belinda Stanton from Belinism.

We featured Belinda and her BEAUTIFUL range of hand built and hand carved sculptures and functional dinnerware in the latest issue of Etz Magazine. You should see her whimsical and unique sculptures – they are divine!

Anyway, Belinda is having a giveaway – you could soon be the proud owner of one of her quirky bunny dishes (your choice of one of the above designs) simply by liking her facebook page here..

Tell her Kim sent you *wink*.