AN APPLE A DAY

Yep, a week late and still flaunting it. Here's a look at this week's Malden decoration. I'm starting to think it's time to shift out of my ol' Malden and into a fresh coloured planner. I've been slowly accumulating Kikki K planners and have yet to show them off. I guess we know what my next blog post will be about! But for now, here's a little school themed decoration that made it into my planner this week:

And a little close up;

I managed to get my hands on the washi from Officeworks, with the stickers and stamps all coming from Kaisercraft

WEEK FORTY-THREE IN MY MTN

I'm finally back home and getting through some creative projects that needed to be done. I've posted up week forty-two a week late, but better late than never, no? This week I decided to go with a super simple layout. All I basically 'decorated' were the borders using paper from Heidi Swapp's Wanderlust collection.

I stamped the picture using a stamp set by Ali Edwards called What Today Looked Like. I love how a simple phrase using white ink can make a picture stand out. I used the Archival Brilliance Moonlight White stamp ink on the photo as it dries quickly and doesn't smear.

Here's a little close up of the stamped photo:

That's really about it for this week's spread, so here's another spread I made in 10 minutes in my Midori Traveler's Notebook. Love me some full paged photos!

BLACK AND BLUE

Guess what? I'm working this weekend; however, as I'm on the evening shift, it allows me to bring my laptop in to let my creative moments flow during quiet moments like these. And since I've done my Malden set up for next week, here's a little peek into the theme:

And a little close up:

Have a good weekend, y'all!

CURRENTLY #2

TIME: 5:59pm

LOCATION: Bedroom / craft room / office

FEELING: A lil sad that the weekend is almost over

LOVING: My cheap finds from Typo today

READING: After You by Jojo Moyes

DRINKING: A mix of cranberry, breakfast and orange juice

ANTICIPATING: The job application to my favourite hospital that will be coming out soon!

LISTENING TO: The news my parents are watching downstairs

WATCHING: Marvel's Agents of Shield

PLANNING TO: Get myself a silhouette cameo (I think it's time!)

LOOKING FORWARD TO: Going to the city next weekend with mummy dearest!

CREATING: Part II of my Kaisercraft review for their new journal planner line!

NEED TO FINISH: My uni work -__-

WISHING: I had an extra day off. Always.

MAIN GOAL: Finnish editing my resume!

WEEK FORTY-TWO IN MY MTN

Is it bad that I haven't actually finished my spread for week forty-two? Actually, let me correct myself, I actually have done my spread, I just haven't included the most important bit of my spread: the journaling! Not knowing when I'll get it done, here's a little preview of and a little close up of my work in progress:

(Yes, I'm still very much in love with my roses)

Have a great week ahead, guys!

PINK FLOWERS

I got some new washi this week from Officeworks. It's a Little B thick floral washi and as soon as I got it, I had to plaster it everywhere. And so I did:

I decided to just go with the flow and to make it a little bit more 'chaotic' and colourful, I decided to stamp some flowers I got from Kaisercraft around the page, before adding forgotten Typo owl stickers around the page. Done and done in 15 minutes.

WEEK FORTY-ONE IN MY MTN

I was super busy this weekend (which seems to be almost always the case), so I had to limit my creativity with 'whatever goes'. I used one of my previous layouts for this week, and tweaked it a little to suit.

This week's MTN layout

Items used in my layout:
- Amy Tangerine Finders Keepers paper pad + rub ons
- Kaisercraft stamp + enamel dots
- Sn@p Life Documented stickers
- Kelly Purkey alphabet stamps
- Little B floral washi tape

Here's an up close of the layout:

I'm back in Geelong for work starting last Monday so I'm hoping my photos will be more varied than it was before. I also managed to get my hands on some Ali Edwards stamps which are absolutely lovely, so I can't wait to use it in all of my projects!

CURRENTLY #1

I've seen this floating around in the blog-osphere for a while, and I've been meaning to kick start this trend in my blog to keep it flowing, so here's my first 'currently' list for the week:

TIME: 4:47pm

LOCATION: Bedroom / craft room / office

FEELING: A little chilly from the aircon

LOVING: My typewriter and new stamps from Ali Edwards

READING: The Goldfinch by Donna Tart

DRINKING: A mix of cranberry and Fanta in my favourite cup

ANTICIPATING: My iPhone dying after I accidentally brought it into the MRI room..

LISTENING: Shane Filan - Beautiful to Me (love love love!)

WATCHING: Vampire Diaries' new season!

PLANNING: The tasks I have to get done by this weekend

LOOKING FORWARD: To Tuesday when Monash 3rd Years visit the hospital I'm working at!

CREATING: My contribution to Little Paper Projects' Love Where You Live

NEED TO FINISH: My university assignment before Monday!

WISHING: I had an extra day off

MAIN GOAL: For this weekend - to get my assignments done and dusted, 

BLUE AND GREEN

I had a feeling this week was going to be those weeks where my layout was something I could not share on social media because it was just that bad, but it didn't turn out so bad after all.

I was obsessed with a green and blue washi tape I received from Kaisercraft last week and wanted it plastered everywhere on my weekly spread. So I kinda did just that:

I added a few stamps, some from Kellie Stamps, some from Kelly Purkey and one stamp set I got in Singapore and bam, I was done for the week.

WEEK FORTY IN MY MTN

I'm so glad that Victoria had a public holiday on Friday (even though it was for a ridiculous reason) which allowed me to catch up on some blogging and crafting. This week saw the last days of work at my favourite hospital. This week also marked the halfway point in my MTN journal. So this week needed something special.

I decided to use the Confetti collection from Crate Paper as although I'm absolutely in love with the papers, my love for it has caused me to hoard it. It honestly contains papers which can match together in more ways than one. I decided to do a full page spread this week and did something different with my journaling. Here's how my spread looks like:

Last week's MTN spread

Inspired by Stephanie Bryan's vellum picture, I decided to do something similar, whereby I printed my journaling on vellum. It was quick and easy, and although some words did rub off because I touched it right after printing, it was still the best idea I had for this week. And because I wanted to incorporate more than one picture into the spread, I did a simple flip technique using washi tape to hold it together:

I hope this post will now inspire you to create something using vellum because it is super fun!

KAISERCRAFT JOURNAL PLANNERS: PART I

A week ago, I was contacted by the lovely Kylie from Kaisercraft asking me if I wanted to do a review for one of their newest products: the Kaisercraft Journal Planners. Yes, you read that right, the well known Aussie brand is bringing on the big guns and releasing their very own journal planners. Being a loyal user of their products, I was absolutely ecstatic when I got the email from them. Of course I would love to review it! For one, I love planners, and for another, I love Kaisercraft! What combination could be better? So along with some other goodies, Kylie kindly sent me a big box of yummy new Kaisercraft goodies. When the parcel arrived the next day (yes, next day!), I was not disappointed.

Here's what I received:

To say that I was excited would be an understatement. These were the items I received (most items are not in store as yet, so I've included their arrival dates for future reference!):

1) Journal Planner: available in store November
2) My Year, My Story: these includes the collectables, paper pack and paper pad, and are available in store December
3) Glitter tape: 8 colours in total and are available in store December
4) Printed tape: available now

Glitter and printed tape, Kaisercraft Journal Planner, 6x8" Paper Pad

Here's a better look at the My Year, My Story collection (and of course, the new journal planner):

But now to the most important part of this review, the Journal Planner. We'll start with the basics first: the journal planner comes in 3 different colours: black, blush (pink) and breeze (green). It's a PU leather journal with a magnetic clasp that holds everything together. I was fortunate enough to receive the breeze coloured journal planner (similar to the one on the front cover of the box) as I love green! I did have some troubles photographing the exact colour of the green though as a tad bit of editing makes the colour wash out entirely. Rest assured, it's a nice soft pastel green.

Here's how the inside of the planner looks like:

Inside the Kaisercraft Journal Planner

The inside contains pockets for little bits and bobs. In every pack, there are 5 gloss varnish dividers, 30 plain journal papers, 60 calendar/list papers and 9 clear plastic pocket pages. The papers are made of quality 180gsm or 300gsm cardstock so they'll be great for use with watercolours.

There are 5 different quotes on each divider. Here's a close up of the first divider:

The size of each paper is 21.5 x 17.7cm. They're made to fit the already available Kaisercraft (and other branded) plastic pocket pages, which are 6 x 10" in size. The only problem I found when using this format was the lack of hole punches readily available. I needed to punch each hole separately, using a piece of paper from their pack as a guide. Who knows, maybe Kaisercraft would be able to produce one in the future? *wink wink

When you first start out, here's what you'll see:

Inside Pages

Plain grid pages with the days of the week on one page, and a list page on the back. Looking at the journal planner when I first got it, the amount of ideas buzzing through my head was overwhelming. I could use it as a planner, a pocket page scrapbook; I could make my own pockets, my own dividers from patterned paper, I could use watercolour, I could create my own pages, I could add embellishments such as tags and ribbons and keychains to the rings, I could do just about anything and everything with this planner.

And because I was so excited to reveal this to the whole world, I'm going to show snippets of what I've done with mine. I will feature more layouts and more of my ideas as the weeks go by, but for now, here's a flip through of the many possibilities this new Kaisercraft Journal Planners has to offer!

I started off by creating my own pages from Heidi Swapp's Wanderlust paper pad. I love the vintage colours available and wanted it to be splattered all over my Kaisercraft journal planner. After I cut down my pages to size, I stuck the lime green monthly view from Kaisercraft's My Year My Story paper pack onto it and used their sticker sheet for my month of September. I had a fairly eventful September, filled with love and joy from everyone around me and wanted to document it in every way I can. The monthly grid comes undated so you're free to use it for whichever month you like.

Monthly View

Now, as much as I know that I could write up the dates in less than 5 minutes, I wanted some uniformity over it (here comes my OCD), so I decided to use my manual stamp to create my dates. It probably took me three times them amount of time to do it, but I was mighty happy thereafter. After some decoration to highlight this month's events, I had one completed monthly overview:

And since I know someone will ask, here's a list of the items I used in this monthly overview:

1- Kaisercraft stickers
2- Kellie Stamps
3- Kmart stickers
4- Paper Stone stickers
5- Roller stamps
6- Amy Tangerine stickers
7- Washi tape

As you can see, I even managed to fit some pictures into the grid. It was mostly coincidental that I had a set of small pictures lying around on my table waiting to be used that magically fitted. Hah!

On the back of the monthly overview, you'll come to see this:

When you turn the pocket page, you'll be seeing a Heidi Swapp tag I punched and put in as a page marker. And so I don't forget, I added a picture with a September tag poking out. These were all part of Heidi Swapp's Wanderlust collection which I took advantage of when Spotlight had them on clearance. Hee

When you flip the page marker away, you'll see a full spread of my week in review. As you can probably tell from the original pages, I decided to spruce mine up a little. I made my own sized paper, cut the weekly view up to just the area of interest and stuck it on.

Weekly View

The one thing that's great about this size is the ability to stick more pictures on the side of your weekly overview. Unlike my Midori where the gridded area is solely for journaling, the size of this planner journal is big enough to have a separate column for things like quotes, to-do lists, and in my instance, photos.

I have decorated pages after this, but have yet to fill them up. But to give you an idea of how they look like empty, here are some pictures:

Kaisercraft also provides stickers already sized to their pocket pages so yes, they can go into your journal planners too:

I hope you enjoyed this post and are just excited for its arrival in stores as I was receiving it a week ago! I will provide more inspiration posts using the new Kaisercraft My Year, My Story collection in the weeks to come, so stay tuned! And just a final recap, these journal planners will be available in November so they'll be nice and ready for the new year!

TUTORIAL: MAKING SQUARE PHOTOS

A lot of people have been asking me about the size of photos I use in my MTN spreads and how and what I use to print these photos. There is only so much I can do and describe when replying to people's post without photos, so hopefully, this (picture heavy) tutorial will help explain my process of printing out perfect-sized square photos.

In summary though, here are the deets:

Printing: Canon Selphy CP910, Big W printing kiosks

Apps: Collect Photo, Project Life, Canon iEPP

For those that still has no clue as to what the above details suggest, let me start from the beginning:

When it comes to printing my photos, I use my trusty little Canon Selphy CP910 for a number of reasons. For one, the print quality is surprisingly amazing for the price. And for another, it's portable, small and pretty reliable. This is how it looks like:

The ink and paper comes together in a pack, and the more you buy, the cheaper it is. In Australia, I managed to get 108 printing paper and three ink sets for $44.95 from Ted's Cameras. Not too bad, if you ask me. I got my little printer in May and have only managed to finish 1 ink cartridge for possible 36 over sheets of printing paper. The paper is made especially for the printer and comes in a variety of sizes. Mine is just the usual 6x4" which is versatile enough for me. I can always use Apps to create different sized photos based on a 6x4" grid after all

However, my in-house printing with my Canon Selphy usually only happens when I need to print the odd one or two pictures. When I require much larger scale printing, I use Big W (Australian) printing kiosks. Their prints are always reliable, sharp and glossy. But before we get to the printing, we need to set our pictures up into those cute little tiny squares that fit perfectly in your own traveler's notebook.

We first need to start off by having photos (duh!). Once you've done that, download the Collect Photo app from the Apple store (not too sure if this is available on Android, sorry guys!). To make things a little easier, I've uploaded a screenshot of all my photography editing tools as you can see here:

Once you've got all your apps in order, go ahead and open up the Collect Photo app. You can start uploading your photos in the order of dates and once you've got them all in, you'll see a nice completed month like you do with mine:

I was writing this post up in September, but as you can see, a tonne of work has only made this post available in October. Hah! Anyway, once you've got all your pictures in, you've got to export them. So go to the top right, and where the little box with an arrow coming out of it is, tap on it to see this screen:

Go to Export Photos next and you'll get this:

Select the dates you want to export, and EXPORT! You can choose where you want to export your photos to, but I tend to just export them to my Photo Library so I can upload them into my Canon Selphy app:

You're now all done here. You've got perfect little square photos ready to be printed on your Canon Selphy. Now, the next step involves uploading them onto the Project Life app purely so that I can place two pictures on a 6x4" paper. You can use any collage app you want, but this is how I do what I do.

Once you've got your Project Life app downloaded, you'll get this opening screen:

Select the horizontal 6x4" layout that has been separated into two:

Add your Collect Photo app photos into the grid, download them and boom, now you're ready for the printing!

Now, remember the screenshot of all my photography apps? It's time to refer back to that, because the Canon Selphy app is in fact called Canon iEPP. Click on that to open your app up and you'll see this:

Click on Photo Albums so that you can choose your Project Life photo that was filled with Collect Photo app photos (that was totally not confusing, right?):

Now the next bit is important. In order to print  approx 2 x 2" photos, you'll need to have a BORDERED setting selected. To print approx 3 x 3" photos, you'll need to have UNBORDERED selected. Got it? Great

And of course, lastly, all you have to do next is print! If you're using your Canon Selphy for the first time, you will have to set up your wifi connection with your phone. Read the manual they provide for this because that's just a whole lot of instructions I can't do right now!

And that's it! Hope this somewhat helps those of you curious as to how I get those tiny perfect little square pictures on my Midori spreads!