What's Up with Me...

Monday, 2 January 2023

Digital Scrapbook - The Good Life Jan/Feb2023

Digital Scrapbook has it's newest The Good Life Jan/Feb2023 collection available today. This will now be a bi-monthly collection.

Check out the DigitalScrapbook.com for lots of freebies and monthly challenges.

Sunday, 1 January 2023

MissFish - Jan Buffet Bundles

For today's Buffet release at Gingerscraps, Juli has two fun mini-bundles containing different template sets. There is the January Blends mini bundle and the January Traditional mini bundle

Blended Clusters 10

Baseline Blocks

Storyline 1

Lotsa Photos 18

Check out the sale on till the 5th at Gingerscraps.

Adrienne Skelton Designs - You Melt My Heart

The New Year is starting with a whole host of scrapping happening....starting today with the Buffet sale at Gingerscraps. Adrienne has a delightful kit available called You Melt My Heart

Check out the buffet sale only on at Gingerscraps.

Happy New Year to you and yours. May the year ahead be one of blessing, fun, laughter, family and adventure. The year always stretches ahead as a blank canvas... let's pick up our box of crayons and colour each day with brightness.

My goals for this year are much the same as they have been for the past few years... more scrapping, more reading and more coffee... I am sure that I can achieve that.

So on the scrapping front there are a few changes for some of my creative teams. Both ninigoesdigi and Rachel Etrog have jumped ship and joined The Lilypad. I am sticking with them and welcoming the change. I am also still on Gina Miller's team and have joined Micheline Lincoln's TLP team for the next three months. My other commitments are to MissFish and Adrienne Skelton at Gingerscraps, Cornelia Designs at The Digital Press and Marissa Lerin at DigitalScrapbook. So I think I will still be fairly busy scrapping with lots of lovely goodies this year.

Along with all the scrapping I foresee coming up, I still plan to spend lots of time reading too. I have set my goal for this year at a conservative 45 books... let's see how we do by the end of the year.

The goal of more coffee just goes without saying.... hehehe... hopefully the drinking of it will also involve a few more visits with friends this year as well as a couple of trips away.

May God go with us into this new year and may we all experience His many blessings, guidance and peace.

Saturday, 31 December 2022

Looking back on 2022

Wow what a year it has been... looking back on it there has been quite a few things that have been accomplished and also some that were missed.

Family News:

We missed out on going on timeshare holidays in May (floods in Natal), June (car accident) and August (getting sick) but Mom and I did get to go to Mtunzini in February (LWM) and to Wyndford in April (LWM retreat) and again in September (Mom's birthday).

As a family we also changed church this year. We joined New Harvest Christian Fellowship and have really grown in our faith journey after a few years of spiritual drought. Aaron has joined the youth group and made some very good friends through that too, they even helped him celebrate his 21st birthday in November. He also started a parttime job in June working at Kumon... loves it! We managed to buy him a car with the insurance payout from our car accident.

Aaron hasn't done as much flying this year but he has written all his exams for his Private Pilot License. On the 16th of December, after numerous weather delays and rescheduling of the flight, Aaron flew his exam flight and passed!! He is now a fully fledged two stripe Private Pilot. I am soooooo proud of him.

Keith retired at the end of October having turned 63 that month... but in November he was offered a contract from his company so he has continued to work until they can find his replacement.

Mom has battled a bit more this year with her vision but she has been blessed with a great Opthamologist who has treated her so well over the past 9 years. He unfortunately has retired, but left her in good hands of the doctor who has taken over his practice. She has made lots of adjustments (sometimes daily) and has kept her very positive outlook on the situation. Each day is a new adventure.

We have had more loadshedding (planned power outages) this year that any other year in the past. Loadshedding actually is the word of 2022... how sad is that! We have learnt to work around the schedule... so long as the municipality stick to the schedule that is! Boiling the kettle and filling a flask is routine now. Thankfully we have a gas hob so I can still make supper. We bought a little generator which helps with being able to have wifi and tv (but it's needing to be fixed now as it hasn't been performing correctly in December). Torch light is great to a point! At least with summer here it is lighter longer.

My news... I am still working mornings only, loving my scrapping and just going on day by day. I got a new laptop on the Black Friday sale in November which has been such a great buy. My scrapping is quicker, downloading stuff is easier and I can use it when the power is out as the battery lasts!

Scrapping:

Having changed to digital scrapping in 2019 I have been doing more and more scrapping each year than at any time when I did paper scrapping. This year I was on 12 teams, some full time and some for just a few months at a time. I scrapped 618 single layouts and 1 double layout which is 620 pages, just over 1.5 pages a day!

I even played with paper and made a few minialbums this month. On one I did the coptic binding technique that I have been wanting to do since 2020, so can cross that off my scrapping bucket list.

Reading:

I set myself a reading goal each year on the GoodReads site and keep track of all the books I've read. This year I made a goal of 52 books but surpassed that in October already. It's been a really good year in fiction for me... I've finished 66 books!! You can see a summary layout of my reading in this post.

And so that winds up this past year. Let's get ready for the adventure that is 2023!

December Challenge Summary

Even with Christmas and all the busyness of this month, I have still managed to do the monthly challenges on a few of the sites I participate on:

Gingerscraps

1 Buffet - The Scrappy Kat Highland Christmas

2 Journalling - MissFish Focus Group Winter

3 Back It Up - The Scrappy Kat Naughty Elves

4 Jumpstart - MissFish This Is Dec

5 Life Chronicled - MissFish Focus Group Winter 2

6 Rewards - MissFish Holiday Big & Little

7 Wordart - MissFish Hexy Hexy

8 Daily Downloads - MissFish Simply Stacked 57-60

9 Template - Adrienne Skelton Snowday

10 Minikit - MissFish Christmas Cuties

The Lilypad

SWL MIS

1. Random - Gina Miller Old Man Winter

2. Template - Gina Miller Peppermint Twist

3. Journal - Gina Miller Mistletoe Stickers

4. Inspiration - Gina Miller Jingle All The Way

5. Photo - Gina Miller Daria

and I did the SWL MBC challenge too using Gina Miller's Winter Wishes

The Digital Press

Template - Rachel Etrog December Vibes

Tis The Season - Cornelia Designs Secret Santa

So that winds up the challenges for 2022. Next year will be just as busy, if not more so.

Friday, 30 December 2022

MissFish - Focus Group Winter

At the beginning of the month Juli released the Focus Group Winter bundle as part of the buffet sale at Gingerscraps. Well today it has now been released at ScrapGirls as separates. As I didn't play with Focus Group Winter 3 earlier, I am doing so today.