Cathy Zielske's Blog

Project Life, Week Seven

2012-02-23T05:00:00-06:00

OBSERVATIONS: The love affair continues with Project Life. Here I am in Week 7 and still really loving this process. Some of you have asked me if I'm still doing regular scrapbooking, regular defined as creating separate layouts outside of this album.

The answer so far in 2012? Not really.

Part of the reason is that these two pages I do each week for Project Life feel like one, big 12 x 12 layout in and of themselves. It's been so cool because I don't have to simply keep the layouts to one particular subject. They can be a random mish mash of the week's happenings. This is such a freeing way to document.

I think that's why this concept is so successful: it is a very liberating approach to memory keeping. I know I don't have to cover everything that happens in my life and yet I'm really on the lookout for the stuff I want to keep, save and remember.

It just keeps getting better. Here are my pages for Week Seven.

I designed a new card set to use for my weekly recap journaling. It includes 11 layered cards in a 6 x 4 horizontal format. Aside from the "week in review" text, the set also includes each day of the week in "a saturday story" format. I wanted to create some more journaling cards to give me more room to share daily stories as well. These layered cards are fully customizable in Photoshop Elements so you can tailor the colors and backgrounds to match your album.

I plan to mix these up with my other layered cards throughout the weeks.

One thing that's been pretty constant from last week (and ho BOY for this week) is Zielske people under the weather. I'll be sharing a bit of Aidan's ER visit next week.

I also am continuing to love using Tiny Templates to document life. Last week, I went out for a fabulous dinner with two of my dearest friends. We took some really poorly lit shots with our cell phones, and I wanted to create a tiny layout card to celebrate. Tiny Templates are perfect for using your less-than-stellar photos to tell a story. Every bad photo looks just a tiny bit better the smaller it gets!

The other thing I added this week was some of the Project Life Big Envelope Pages.

There are things that I want to save throughout the year—like the Valentine's Day cards that Dan and I exchange every year—and I figured it was time to pop one of the Big Envelopes in the back of the album to have a place for such memorabilia. Anything that I really don't want to cut up to use in the weekly spreads will go back here for now. I may even add a pocket for Aidan and one for Cole.

I already figure that I will be keeping my Project Life pages in more than one album as the year progresses, so we'll see how these pockets end up adding bulk to the overall project.

And that, memory savin' friends, is all she wrote on Week Seven.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SUPPLIES:

InLinkz.com

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Project Life, created by Becky Higgins, is a flexible, easy-to-use, highly customizable way to save your memories in a fun, stress-free way. Learn more about getting started with Project Life by clicking here.

Writer's block and hospital visits

2012-02-21T06:52:31-06:00

Sometimes on Sunday nights, I have no idea what to post on my blog come Monday morning.

Since January 2007, I've blogged every week of my life. I've faced many a Sunday night, scratching my head, staring at a blank Typepad composer screen, thinking, "Okay, now what?"

Aside from posts about projects (layouts, step by steps, new products, Project Life—those come very easily), I like to keep a balance here on life, work, chub and scrapbooking.

In fact, my favorite posts are those where when I'm done putting it together, I think, "Why can't I write like this every single time?"

I still get quite a high when I can write about something really inane and still find an angle or a twist that I think, "My readers might actually like this."

So on Sunday night, as I sat there staring, not an idea in my head, I thought: "Well, that's it. The ideas have all run out."

It was bound to happen.

So I decided to just sleep on it.

I didn't know I'd be woken up at 3 a.m. on Monday morning by a girl in excuciating pain. I didn't know we'd be heading off to a first ever trip to the Emergency Room by anyone—knock on wood—in the Zielske family. I didn't know that I would be a very strong and calming force in Aidan's hour, or five hours as it were, of extreme need. I didn't know she could be as stoic as she was, keeping her cool for the doctor's, then falling understandably apart when they left the room. I didn't know just how much she still needs her mama.

I didn't know she would tell me on the way home: "This was a bad day, but it would have been the worst day if you weren't my Mom."

After a goodly amount of tests, she was diagnosed with a small, albeit extremely painful kidney stone. We came home around lunch time, I tucked her into my bed, and hovered over her all day and all last night. She is still asleep—pain free, thank God—this morning as I type.

In her lighter moments yesterday, we laughed when I said, "Well this'll be something to liven up the Project Life album, won't it?"

I'm going to take the week to nurse this girl back to full strength. Look for my regular Project Life post this Thursday.

Thank you for all of your well wishes for Aidan on Facebook yesterday. They were very much appreciated.

And don't worry. I'm sure I'll come up with some really good ideas to write about for next week.

Project Life, Week Six

2012-02-16T08:10:07-06:00

OBSERVATIONS: This week, it seemed like my camera and my iPhone weren't as handy as in the first five weeks of the year. Translation: I just didn't take a ton of photos. One thing I will say about Project Life is that it takes commitment.

Last year, I didn't have the level needed. This year seems very different. One thing I've really been looking forward to is Sunday afternoon. It's when I sit at my computer, gather my photos and go over the Day One entries I've made throughout the week, and basically pull it all together to create my pages.

It's my own personal Sunday afternoon crop and I'm really enjoying it. Even in a week where I didn't take a ton of photos, I still managed to save enough story and bits and pieces to easily compile my spread for the week.

I'm also managing to include a bit of ephemera again—a post card from our dentist's office and the packing from my new CS5.5 software. Nice little bits to add in to fill in the week.

I do think one of my favorite parts of this project is the weekly wrap up journaling card. It might not always be the most riveting read on earth, but it quickly sums up the basics of our week. I know this is something that I'm really going to be thankful that I have. It really serves as a weekly journal of our lives.

And though I'm still working to remember to include my old man in the weekly photos—sorry honey, you know it's not personal—I did manage to use my new wireless remote that I read about on Ali's blog to get a shot of my having my afternoon chai.

And yes, apparently I do extend my pinky finger when I drink.

Imagine that! Project Life has made me instantly more refined.

SUPPLIES:

InLinkz.com

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Song Share

2012-02-14T05:00:00-06:00

I'm in love, I'm in love and I don't care who knows it!

(Don't tell Dan but there's another man. Shhhhh.)

On this day that celebrates love, I'll tell you who I'm crushing on right now: It's Gotye, (pronounced go-tea-yay), also known as Wally De Backer, a Belgian-born, Aussie artist whose second album, Making Mirrors, is fast becoming my favorite album of the year.

I posted his "Somebody That I Used to Know" back in December after seeing it on Facebook and was instantly smitten. Mark my words: that man's gonna snag himself a Grammy come next Winter.

He has been compared to Sting and even Peter Gabriel in terms of his style. Considering PG is numero uno in my book, that's not bad company to be sharing.

Today I wanted to share another track off the album, a song called "Bronte." It's a beautiful, haunting tune, and it turns out, it's about his family friend's dog who passed away. The family put the dog down in the backyard. Gotye wrote this song for the dog and to commend the family on what an excellent job they did for helping their children cope with the grief, according to the Internet.

Hence the opening line "Now your bowl is empty, and your feet are cold and your body cannot stop the rocking, I know it hurts to let go."

So pet owners, it might make you a bit too sentimental. I'm just saying.

Aidan, who is also crushing on Wally—I love it when the teen and me can share music love—loves this video as well because it reminds her of a movie she loves, Princess Mononoke. But then again, give that girl some Japanese anime and she'll follow you anywhere.

I hope you like this song. Enjoy.

I'm thinking the tickets I bought to his show in Minneapolis will make me very happy. Very happy indeed.

Hey, how do you do THAT?

2012-02-13T05:00:00-06:00

The number one question I've received in the past few weeks is: How do you get that weather image like that and how can I do the same?

I decided to record a very non-fancy video showing you not only how I do it on my phone, but also how I use DropBox to upload all of the images I shoot on my phone (including my Instagram photos).

Of course, my steps only apply iPhones, but I would imagine that any smart phone with apps would let you take screen captures of your phone screens as well.

I'm also going to show you how I edit the weather image in Photoshop Elements, and size it to fit into a Project Life Design A pocket. Sound good? Good!

Questions? Comments? Leave them today and I'll do my best to answer! Enjoy your Monday.

The winners of the simplify 101 workshop is…

2012-02-12T22:08:36-06:00

The winner of the simplify 101 workshop Organize Your Paper Clutter with creative organizing expert Aby Garvey, is:

Jennifer, email me at czdesign@comcast.net! Thanks everyone. See you tomorrow on my blog!

Sponsor Giveaway: win a spot in Organize Your Paper Clutter from simplify 101

2012-02-10T06:18:38-06:00

simplify 101 is giving away one spot in their upcoming workshop Organize Your Paper Clutter with creative organizing expert Aby Garvey.

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP: Is your paper clutter zapping your creativity? If paper like bills, school papers, ideas for creative projects, memorabilia to scrapbook, recipes to try, to-do lists, magazines, and catalogs (to name a few) are piling up around you, it’s hard to relax let alone be creative. There is a better way! With the right paper organizing systems in place, you can free yourself from paper clutter and the stress that comes with it.

In Aby Garvey’s online workshop Organize Your Paper Clutter, you’ll learn a simple, step-by-step process to organize your paper. You’ll find out how to decide if you need a piece of paper (and for how long) and how to organize it so you’ll find it again when you need it. With easy to follow action steps, your paper clutter and your stress will be replaced by organizing systems you love and feelings of confidence, relief and peace of mind. (Which means you’ll feel more creative, too!)

SAVE ON ENROLLMENT: simplify 101 is offering my readers 15% off enrollment in their upcoming workshops. Along with Organize Your Paper Clutter, they are also offering a workshop this month on how to Simplify Your Life with Habits + Routines. To take advantage of this offer, enter coupon code CZ15FEB during checkout. It's good now through Feb 17, 2012 and cannot be used with any other offers. This offer expires Friday, February 17^th at 12 PM CSD and may not be combined with any other offer. (If you sign up and win the spot in the workshop, simplify 101 will refund your money.) The Paper Clutter Class begins Thursday, February 16^th, 2012. Click here to view the entire workshop syllabus.

TO ENTER: Here are the ways to enter this giveaway (up to four chances to win!):

Leave a comment on this post telling me you want to win the workshop.
Head over to Facebook and “like” simplify 101. Come back and leave a comment letting me know you did.
Pin this giveaway on Pinterest, then leave a comment letting me know you did.
Sign up to receive the free Mini Guide for creating a command central binder, then leave a comment letting me know you did.

ABOUT SIMPLIFY 101: Simplify 101’s mission is to make getting organized fun! Get a taste of simplify 101—and the organized life—with their FREE, simple-to-follow guide How to Create a Command Central Binder. You’ll put together a home reference binder that will help you get organized, save time, and minimize paper clutter and the stress that comes along with it!

I'll choose a winner on Sunday evening. Good luck!

Comments are now closed. Check back to see if you're a winner!

Project Life, Week Five + a video tutorial

2012-02-09T06:24:14-06:00

OBSERVATIONS: Five weeks in and I'm still on a roll. Want to know a secret? This is as far as I got last year. Somehow, this year feels different. It's different because I'm comitted to having this project be the main story telling vehicle for my entire year.

It's true that my scrapbooking is more sporadic in terms of making traditional (or digital) pages. I tend to bounce from story to story with lots of time and space in between. The thing I love about Project Life is that I'm honing in on the minutiae of my life and it's really bringing me joy.

That's it! I'm feeling joy about story telling again. Even during a week where it seemed like not much happened, I found little things all over the place to save and record. From a piece of packaging from a new gadget I bought, to sharing a 5-second exchange about something funny Cole said, life is just sitting there, waiting to be noticed.

I think Project Life is making me more aware and far more grateful than I have been of late. And that is a pretty cool thing. Here are my pages from last week.

Here is the Weekly Wrap Up (and I am loving this process of typing out what happened during our week.)

And here's a close up of the Boy Who Missed a Week of School:

Here's the second page:

This week, I decided to add a little packaging from my favorite spice shop, Penzey's, onto a Project Life grid card. I'm trying to add a bit more of the ephemera from our lives into this album, but you know me: this requires baby steps. I am just now getting used to staples!

Here is a close up of of my journal card with a great, short story about Cole:

Yes. My boy has seen and memorized much television. We are so proud.

Today I have a video tutorial to show you how to take a PNG file as you see above and customize the color for use in your own Project Life albums, or other hybrid projects. If you have any question, please don't hesitate to post in the comments and I'll do my best to answer. To watch the video larger over at Vimeo, click here.

SUPPLIES:

InLinkz.com

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To visit Designer Digitals, click here.

Potent Potables and Other Quotables

2012-02-08T05:00:00-06:00

Most people have favorite things they like to quote. Maybe it's from a movie. Or a television show. Or a book.

Are you like most people? Because in this respect, I am.

I've had pretty steady access to media throughout my life. TV, music, movies—stuff that makes up pop culture, essentially. And there have been so many memorable scenes, or lines, or catch phrases that have stuck with me, filling my brain so that when and where they are needed, they can quickly be retrieved and applied correctly to any given situation.

Take for example the clip above, from one of my favorite old movies, Airplane.

Yesterday, Dan had a long, busy day at work planned, so I decided to send him a text early in the day that said this:

He knew it was Leslie Nielson, but he kept guessing, "Police Squad?" Throughout the rest of the day, whenever he would text me, I'd simply reply with: "Good luck. We're all counting on you."

SIDE NOTE: Yesterday around mid morning, I looked out into the backyard to see two St. Paul police officers, weapons drawn and police dog at the ready, on my deck and in my garage. Turns out they were looking for 'a guy.' This was how it went down via text to Dan, keeping my quote theme in mind:

Of course this got me thinking of my favorite things to quote. Two nights ago, we were flipping channels and landed on Pulp Fiction. Now this is a movie you either loved or hated or didn't see, but we're huge fans, so we started watching. I can't quote a lot of it here on this PG-rated blog, but we decided last night we'd try to work more of Pulp Fiction into our Dan–Cathy quote habits. You okay? Nah, man… I'm pretty f-in far from okay.

One movie I will quote here is probably my most oft quoted movie of all time, Silence of the Lambs.

I know what you're thinking: Cathy, you're sick. But seriously, aside from the fact that I believe this movie to be a veritable master class for writing, directing and acting, it is also one of the richest founts of quotable material in the celluloid realm.

But not just for the great (albeit disturbing) scenes like this (which you will have to watch on YouTube, as embedding has been disabled):

I can do this scene from memory. Macabre? Perhaps. But you know what is totally awesome? When you can drop parts of this into casual conversation. Or when you can recite it via the Talking Tom Cat.

In this house, we go well beyond the 'fava beans and a nice chianti.' You get what I'm saying?

My friend and frequent contributor to The Pioneer Woman's Entertainment blog, Mark Spearman, shares my love of this movie and it's exceptionally high quotable quotient. But not just SOTL, we also love to quote Contact, Aliens, and only recently have begun to mine the sorely overlooked material from Poltergeist.

Our Facebook exchanges often will take whatever is going on in the world or our lives and will be made over to fit into borrowed dialogue from any of these movies.

Take the following scene from Silence of the Lambs—and I will not share a clip because it's a bit racy—but there's a scene when Lecter says to Clarice, "Apparently Jack Crawford likes you, and you like him too…true, he is much older than you…" and then he proceeds to get completely inappropriate. Does this ring a bell?

Mark will lift such dialog directly, clean it up and drop it right onto my Facebook page, like this:

And that just makes my day.

Go ahead, make my day!

What about you? What do you and your family quote? Have you ever thought about documenting those phrases and words you pull from the mass media that surrounds you?

Surely that's a very do-able idea.

Yes, Cathy. It is. And please, stop calling me Shirley.

I'm into vintage after all. Who knew?

2012-02-06T05:00:00-06:00

I like to give a lot of razzing to my good friend Tara, who gets a real thrill in life when on the hunt for all things old and smelly, or what some people like to refer to as vintage.

Okay, maybe it's not all smelly stuff and maybe she's consciously seeking items coated with the ancient epithelial cells of people from the 1900s for reasons other than health code violations. Suffice to say I don't share her love of vintage.

You can't write a book touting clean and simple scrapbook page design and then brag to people about the 600-year-old tea cozy you scored at the Goodwill over the weekend. No one's buying that story in a billion years.

And yet I could have not been more shocked to learn that it turns out I actually am into vintage. And smelly vintage at that. Or at least part of it was smelly.

Meet my Mom's bowling ball.

Shirley MacDonald bowled in a womens' league when I was growing up. She says she wasn't anything to write home about, but hey, she had her own ball and her own bag and her own shoes. In my book, that makes anyone plausibly legit.

When I was going to school at the University of Texas–Arlington in 1986, one of my required courses was Physical Education. Yes, college-level P.E. credits were needed to graduate, and four semesters of them. So I signed up for the activity requiring the least amount of physical exertion on my part—bowling. Afterall, I needed to save my energy for smoking and drinking coffee and writing really awful poetry in the student union.

Her league days long since behind her, my Mom gave me her old brown Brunswick ball and I took it into a pro shop and had the holes redrilled to fit my hand.

Turns out, I was a damned fine bowler. My all time high score? 234. I'm not making that up people. I also aced all of my written finals. You see, I studied not just the game of bowling; no, I also studied the college-level manual. I became a scholar of bowling.

The years came and went without much bowling in my life here in Minnesota. Oh sure, Dan and I would hit the alley from time to time back in the early 90s, back when you could smoke and drink yourself silly all while attending to the tedious task of keeping score by hand. My God, how did we manage?

The years have been peppered with trips to the alley, but to be honest, I sort of forgot about the shiny brown ball in the basement.

A year ago, Dan's brothers and sisters planned a sibling night out. All the sibs and their spouses or significant others would gather in winter for some fellowship and merriment. Our choice? Bowling. It was so much fun that we decided to do a repeat for this winter's family outing.

But this year, I remembered that ball in the basement.

Now I'm not saying I smoked anyone. But the first frame I bowled? A spare. The second? A spare. Compared to last year, where my highest score came out at around 56, I was on a roll. So to speak.

I swear to you, it was the ball.

I bowled a 132 and a 124 respectively. To be sure, nowhere near the glory days of my college years, but part of me said, "Oh baby, you still got it in there somewhere."

It's funny that me, a person who is more or less averse to all things vintage is finding such a happy kinship with this newly rediscovered ball.

But the bag? Holy hell. This thing smells like it belonged to the president of the Crypt Keeper Bowler's League.

I know. It's the coolest looking thing since rub-on alphas, but trust me: it smells like the Civil War.

I'll be ordering a nice modern replacement bag soon. The zipper requires WD-40 just to get the thing open and closed, and the ball base is no longer attached to the bottom of the bag, serving zero purpose as the ball just rolls around in there. And then there's the smell.

But at least I've found a connection to something that's kind of vintage. Maybe Tara's not so nutty afterall.

I mean this old thing has been passed down not from some ancient stranger whose story I'll never know or whose dead skin cells I will need to fear breathing in, but from someone I know and love, my Mom.

And she's a pretty okay vintage thing herself.