2016 GOALS

I can't believe 2016 is just around the corner! And just like a million other people prepping for the new year, I'm here to bring you my 2016 goals. But before I get to them, here's a look at how my December goals went, and how much I've accomplished:

• ü Create 5 x digital stamp sets
• ü Send my resume to more hospitals!
• x    Take on another MTN daily month
• ü Blog more often
• ü Spend less, save more
• ü Decide which planners to use for 2016

Not bad, I reckon!

2016 Goals:

• Project Life: I'm going to try to make my Project Life work a physical product for 2016. I managed to keep up with one on the digital app, but I've been itching to use the 29357345 Project Life cards I've accumulated over the years.
• Spend less: I think we make this goal every year, but I have yet to see it actually working. Hah
• Launch my digital stamp collection: They are officially going to be on sale on the 1st of January!
• Create physical stamp sets: This would have to be the very top of my list, but because of the low exchange rate Australia has with the US currently, it is making it impossible for me to do so. Let's just hope 2016 will take a turn for the better!
• Art: I need to make art a habit in my life. Practice makes perfect, and I want to perfect my watercolour and drawing skills. Let's do this in 2016
• Instagram: I plan to incorporate more than just planners and creative works in my Instagram account for 2016. I want to post pictures of places I've been to and beautiful sights worth documenting, and I hope you'll love them too.
• Read: My uncle was visiting at the time I was typing this up and he told me the importance of reading; reading for knowledge and reading for learning. I need to read more books in 2016, especially now that I have finished uni.
• Graduate: This is basically a definite event, but it's still a goal for 2016!
• Get a job: I need one. Badly. I just need someone to hire me!
• Use up my stash: Yep, don't we all

What are your goals for 2016?

January Goals:

• Launch my digital shop
• Get a job
• Document every day in my Hobonichi
• Spend less than $300
• Create 5x digital stamp sets

Let's do this!

PS. I've made a simple January and February PDF calendar which will fit nicely in a regular sized MTN. Feel free to use them but remember, personal use only! Just click here to download the PDF

WEEK FIFTY-TWO IN MY MTN

I can't believe we've finally reached Week 52! This will therefore be my last post for the MTN weekly spreads for now, but a new adventure will be starting in the new year when I take on a day on a page in my brand spankin new A5 Hobonichi. But before we get to that, here's my last spread for the year:

My baby cousin visited us in the last week for a couple of days, so I decided to dedicate a little page to him. He has grown into a fine young man from the crying days (just don't tell him that), and it was actually pretty fun having him as my shopping partner during the Boxing Day sales happening in Australia.

In this spread, I used Crate Paper's Confetti collection for the stickers and patterned paper, and some black and white and glitter washi tape. Generic kraft tags and Kaisercraft stickers were also thrown into the mix.

And so, we've reached the end of the year! It's been a long journey and I'm glad that I've documented my life all in one place. I hope you've all enjoyed my MTN posts, and will be sticking around for some new and different projects that will be coming in the future!

xo

BULLET JOURNAL: PART II

I've been using my MTN for my Bullet Journaling studiously for the past few days and I love it. I'm still experimenting with different ways of documenting things, but I will definitely be sticking with this system in the new year. Here are two spreads I've done so far:

I've been quite fond of doodling this little baby elephant and it will definitely make a comeback in future spreads.

I have more or less settled on a few things that works for me though, such as:
1- 0.3 Micron Pen for the date
2- Blue Black 0.28 Unistyle Fit for the body
3- All text written in caps
4- Red 0.28 Unistyle Fit for tasks completed and for tasks migrated
5- Green 0.28 Unistyle Fit for events
6- Black 0.28 Unistyle Fit for dashes indicating events explanation

I'm also particularly loving how coloured Versamagic stamps are appearing in the mix, together with some washi tape. I've still yet to try out many other formats and mediums though, so stay tuned for the next part of this series!

WEEK FIFTY-ONE IN MY MTN

The week was relatively quiet (in a sense) as most of my days were spent at home. The only day I was out was on Monday when I met my friend in the city, and for me, that's enough, as I managed to get a picture for this week's spread in my MTN.

Week 51 was simple, using Kikki K's Confetti paper pad (which is absolutely gorgeous), washi tape and some Kaisercraft stickers. My layouts are going downhill but you could say I'm just prepping for the upcoming 2016 projects that will be happening. Hah.

CURRENTLY #8

TIME: 2:30pm

LOCATION: Craft room / bedroom

FEELING: Hot

LOVING: My Hook painting - not bad for a first timer watercolour person

READING: Watercolour tutorials

EATING: Cadbury Milk Chocolate Biscuit

ANTICIPATING: The cool change that's meant to take this heat away!

LISTENING: Taylor Swift - Trouble

WATCHING: The Originals - must admit, it's turning out to be a chore to watch it these days..

PLANNING: My art shopping list for tomorrow

LOOKING FORWARD TO: Boxing Day!

CREATING: Watercolour pieces

NEED TO FINISH: for the first time.. I think I don't really have anything pending. Hooray!

WISHING: I had a job. Yep. I'm starting to get restless.

MAIN GOAL: Get 2016 organised.

BULLET JOURNALING

I was getting pretty restless at home with no work and with nothing to document, but I wanted to do something. I wanted to write. I wanted to use my MTN. I wanted to create. So I decided to research Bullet Journaling to see what all the jazz is about. I've heard of it before, but I knew that when it comes down to it, the whole concept is basically just a to-do list system - with fancy icons. Put it simply, Bullet Journaling is basically just a fancy name that someone has given to an already known / mundane task. But, that doesn't make it any less helpful. I guess someone had to lay down the basic 'rules' to make it universal, even though, in the end, Bullet Journaling can basically be anything you want. Everyone has their own way of doing things, and everyone will alter the system to their liking, because what's the point if not useful? But don't get me wrong, I'm not here to bag on Bullet Journaling and its creation, because I'm currently using the idea of it in my MTN, and I'm loving it so far. On the contrary, I'm here to spread the word on Bullet Journaling (even if it doesn't seem like it), and demonstrate my second little project for this year and beyond.

I started my own little Bullet Journaling system in my MTN last weekend after doing some meticulous research online. I love how everyone has customised their Bullet Journal to fit their own lifestyle and I was absorbing every little bit of idea to implement it in mine. The past 4 days of Bullet Journaling has been going great, and I always can't wait to use it because for the first time in ever, I actually have a notebook where I know I'll be able to doodle / write in without feeling guilty that I've ruined a perfect book. The thing is, I still haven't laid down a particular format I like. It's still early days, after all, and I need to experiment a little bit more. So what I've planned for my Bullet Journaling is to document each facing spread differently, that way, I'll be able to find out just the right style for me. This week has been all about monotone colours - black and white and nothing more:

I must admit, black and white does make things look neat, but I do miss colours, therefore, I'm aiming for the next two spreads to contain them. My mission will therefore be the continue altering of page styles until I find my 'just right' format. I will of course, document these pages in batches as I did with my MTN daily November, in the hopes that maybe it will help you future Bullet Journalers know how you'd like to style yours. In order to make things a little more organised, I've included a list of things that I should try out for each facing spread. I'll be adding more ideas to the list as the days go on. Feel free to try it out yourself and chip in with ideas!

Bullet Journal Challenge:

1.       Black and White

2.       Colour

3.       Boxes

4.       Stamps

5.       Photo

6.       Illustration

7.       Quote

8.       Washi tape

9.       Sticky Note

10.   Stickers

11.   Watercolour

12.   Icons

13.   Pie chart

Exciting days are upon us and I hope you'll be able to join me on this journey!

SUNSHINE

I think I start off by saying that I have no idea what I'm doing with my spread more times than I count, but I honestly don't more often than not! However, unlike last year where my decorations in my Malden depended on whatever my hand picks up, my 'inspiration' behind this month and next year's spreads will be coming from Kikki K's different clip arts each week. As this week's clip art was more of a beach theme, that's what my Malden was decorated with. This is how it turned out:

And a little close up:

The summer stickers were remnants from the Soleil collection by Basic Grey. Stamps included those from Ali Edwards, and the Reject Shop. The smaller kawaii stickers were from eBay and are basically included as the day passes.

WEEK FIFTY IN MY MTN

Last week was pretty quiet (in a sense). I didn't really have much going on during the week but on the weekend, I managed to attend my family friend's wedding, which thus became the inspiration behind this spread:

I didn't actually know what to do for it initially, so I went online to check out some wedding layouts. I had some bits and pieces lying around like a silver vellum paper, kraft paper and some embossing folders, so off they went into the spread.

It was nice and simple and together with Kaisercraft's XO stickers, and washi tape from Typo, I managed to put together a spread in no time. I particularly love the embossed kraft paper that I made using Maggie Holmes' Open Book embossing folder. I really should use these things more often!

CURRENTLY #7

TIME: 5:51pm

LOCATION: Craft room / bedroom

FEELING: A little bored, a little determined, and a little anxious

LOVING: Illustrator

READING: Cecelia Ahern - The Year I Met You

DRINKING: Water

ANTICIPATING: Job replies from 3 hospitals

LISTENING: Shane Filan - Worst Kind of Love

WATCHING: The latest episode of Once Upon a Time - my heart is torn once again by it

PLANNING: To go to Spotlight to get the new Heidi Swapp 2016 planners (sshh)

LOOKING FORWARD: To the arrival of my cousin on the 24th of December

CREATING: New digital stamp sets for my upcoming Bigcartel shop!

NEED TO FINISH: Sending off my resumes

WISHING: Someone would just give me a job without the hassle of interviews (lol!)

MAIN GOAL: Apply to all the radiography jobs out there, create new digital stamp sets, buy myself a mouse, and get the new Heidi Swapp Memory Planner from Spotlight!

2016 PLANNERS

It's that time of the year again where we try to find the right planner for the new year. For me, I'm trying to limit it and trust me, I've had to get rid of some just so I don't have empty diaries staring at me. And so, here's the narrowed down list and their uses:

1- Malden Personal Planner:
I think I will always use a planner; my Malden planner, especially. I don't carry it around like I used to. It stays at home now, in my drawer. It still houses the diary for every day to-dos and planning ahead; expenses; and little bits of info regarding myself and the bf. It's simple, but it does the job.

2- A5 Hobonichi
Because the 2016 Midori planners are not going to be sold in Australia this year, the A5 Hobonichi will replace the journaling that used to happen in my Midori. I think I'm looking forward to the change as it will allow me to craft and journal in it without the fear of not having enough space. And as I bought the Avec version whereby the yearly planner is split into two, it won't be weighing a tonne from all the pictures by the end of the year.

3- Midori Traveler's Notebook
Just because my Midori won't be used for journaling, doesn't mean it won't be used! I'm currently looking into the Bullet Journal system and it seems like my Midori will be excellent for it. And if you're wondering why I would need a Bullet Journal when I already have my Malden for to-dos, it's because I love the flexibility of the Bullet Journal system. More often than not, I admit, I still write my to-dos on sticky notes because the list is just too damn long to fit in the little boxes of my personal planner. I need something that I can actually store my to-dos in. And since this baby comes with me everywhere, it'll be handy for shopping lists and mindless doodling as well.

4- Kikki K Sentence a Day
Yep, I'm still using this! I can't wait to start the year over again and compare my answers to the year before.

And that's it really. A far cry from the list I had at the beginning of this year. I think I'll be able to keep on top of things this year. Simplicity is the way to go.

WOODLAND COTTAGE

It's been a while since I've done a planner set up post, I know, but I just didn't feel like making my planner pretty recently. As December is now here, I was able to use thenew 2016 Kikki K inserts that came with my cute watermelon planner. It has cream paper and lines that aren't as pronounced as it was last year. Not to mention, it has cute little designs for each week. I was thinking of keeping it rather simple next year, aka, no decorations, but I must admit, I couldn't resist. So here's a little look into it:

The main embellishments for this spread came from Australia's very own The Reject Shop. It had a great number of embellishments and there were two of each design, which was perfect really. It even had gold foil on some embellishments, and I'm pretty sure I only payed $3 or so for it. Really great value for money. I was stuck after I decorated the edges with flowers, so I decided to throw in other random bits like stamps from Kelly Purkey / Aldi, stickers from Kaisercraft, hand-made cork letters using my Bigshot and bunting washi tape from mt. And that's about it really. I'm sure it'll look a little bit more complete once I add things to it during the week. But for now, this will have to do

WEEK FORTY-NINE IN MY MTN

It seems like my ideas for layouts are dimming, if that can actually happen. I found myself staring at the page for a while before I decided to just get into things. I looked back at my November daily pages, and decided to go with a previous design, with just a bit of tweaking. I must admit, the size of my photos were probably the main cause of my craft-block, but I'm happy with how things worked out in the end:

Here's a close up:

I started the layout by first putting down some washi. The denim style thicker washi was from Little B I got from Officeworks (they were on clearance for just $1 a roll!). The thinner washi was from mt. I put down some paint splatter ink stamps next (they never get old), more washi tape (green and blue washi tape from Kaisercraft) then just added little stickers from Kaisercraft. The cork alphabets were made using my Bigshot machine - no need to buy overpriced alpha cork stickers, just make them yourself!

MTN DAILY NOVEMBER: PART IV

So here comes the last of my daily November MTN posts. I actually can't believe I made it through a whole month, and without falling too much behind! I was planning to go ahead with a December daily MTN but with 99% of my days being spent at home now that I'm off work, I'm thinking the days will be very much dull to document. So I've decided to put my MTN daily aside and keep it for next year's November - it'll be interesting to see how things have changed a year later. Anyway, if you've missed the previous MTN daily November posts, you can check part I here, part II here, and part III here. Now here comes part IV:

21st and 22nd November:

I admit, these two days were the quietest. It was the first weekend I had away from work. I had been working 7 days straight from Saturday to Friday the week after and I just needed a break to do what I wanted. So I did just that. I spent the entire weekend catching up on my MTN pages and just doing crafty stuff, and it was great.

23rd and 24th November:

This week was the start of my last week of internship. It was fairly interesting mentally as I managed to spend some time working with my tutor. It was going to be my last time working at Geelong as well, so when the weather was nice, I went down to the beach for some amazing last shots of it. Sad that the weather wasn't this beautiful when I was staying over there during my evening shifts though! For these two days, I used Amy Tangerine paper and Crate Paper summer stickers as summer really is almost here!

25th and 26th November:

These two days were fairly simple; I let the photos dominate the spreads, and the colours did bring the pages to life. I got some Maccas choc waffle cone during a lunch break on Wednesday as it was a fairly hot day and use more Amy Tangerine paper. My high school best friend visited me in Melbourne on Thursday and it was filled with food food and more food, as you can see..

27th and 28th November:

The last day of my internship was on Friday which also began my new adventure of Adobe Illustrator. As I said in my previous post, Adobe was having a little sale on subscription prices, and since I knew I was going to have quite a lot of free time in December, I knew it was time to buckle down and learn how to use Illustrator. The larger alpha stamps are from Studio Calico and the smaller stamps from Kelly Purkey.

29th and 30th November:

And finally, the last two days of November: I procrastinated over these last two spreads as I've been busy playing with Adobe. I wanted to make it simple, so I used some Heidi Swapp ephemera on one page and stamps from Aldi for the other. It was a nice way to end the month and my month's project!

And that's a wrap for November!

CURRENTLY #6

TIME: 12:25pm

LOCATION: Bedroom / craft room / office

FEELING: Free

LOVING: My new This is Ground Mod Tablet 2

READING: Creative Lettering and Beyond

DRINKING: Water

ANTICIPATING: A job reply (fingers crossed I get the job!)

LISTENING TO: Jealous - Nick Jonas (after all these months, it's still catchy as!)

WATCHING: Maze Runner: Scorch Trials

PLANNING TO: Continue with my stamp making

LOOKING FORWARD TO: Happy Mail from Studio Calico, and BPC!

CREATING: My MTN daily posts

NEED TO FINISH: My 4395873405 blog posts!

WISHING: My parcels would come sooner rather than later

LETTERS IN NOVEMBER: STAMPS

It's funny how I seem to be busier when I'm on my off days than when I'm not. I must admit, I do like these busy days, only because I'm doing the things I love. When my internship ended on the 27th of November, the first thing I did was download the new Adobe Creative Cloud on my Surface Pro. It helped that Black Friday was going on in America then, which meant Adobe was having 20% subscription prices. So in the end, for just $13 a month, I get to have all the apps in the Adobe world, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Light Room, In Design, you name it. It seems a waste that I wouldn't be using 75% of the apps, but I'm not complaining. It's advantageous to still be a student.

Anyway, I've always been fascinated with people who create stamps, digital or physical. To be honest, I've been fascinated with everything graphic design. I've always wondered how it happens - what it takes to create your own designs; does someone use stock images, or are they created from scratch? I assumed the general consensus was that people created their own graphics to prevent copyright, but how? Was it difficult? Where would you start?

I did my own research, and the best app amongst the Adobe world to create stamps seems to be Illustrator, so that was what I started learning first. For two days, I worked at it, learnt the basics, seeked out online video tutorials, and on the third day, I managed to generate my own 4 x 6" stamp set, which I admit, is pretty damn cool.

Which brings me to the point of this post: my current future hope of Letters in November will be the selling of stamps - both in digital and physical form. I know it will take a lot of work, but now that I have a month break before the start of my 'real world' job of being a Radiographer (hopefully), I have time to research what I need and how to do it. Being in Australia, finding an acrylic / photopolymer stamp maker seems to be a little troublesome for me (any Aussie readers out there, if you know any, do let me know!) as there doesn't seem to be many. So my stamps may be available only digitally for the time being. Either way, in order to get the ball rolling, I've decided to show you lovely readers a peek into what the upcoming stamp set will look like:

This is before my stamp set was edited further, as I have decided to make the whole set 6 x 4" instead, but this is the general gist. I'm hoping I'll be seeing some thumbs up from it, and to celebrate this new age, I've decided to include a little free print out below:

All you have to do is right click on the image, open in up in a new window, save it, and boom, you'll be able to print it out and use as you wish (but please, only for personal use!). I'm still learning how to upload and distribute my files properly (pretty sure there was a better way to do it than how I did it!), so please bear with me. I'll welcome any suggestions in the comments below!

Exciting times ahead!

THIS IS GROUND

Recently I purchased a This is Ground Mod Tablet 2 as a graduation present, and I am in love!

I ordered it on Wednesday, and it arrived here in Australia on Tuesday, which is pretty decent, if you ask me, It came in a nice little box and protected by a dust bag. When I first opened it up and felt the leather of it, I was already captured. I must admit, it did not disappoint. It feels a little heavy in the hands, but only because of all the gorgeous leather it's made out of. It scratches the same amount as any brown Midori notebook, but I love that about it. I'm sure it'll age with grace, just as my Midori has. The only 'problem' I have with it currently is how strong the leather chemical smells. I'm sure it'll clear with time but it's probably giving me a headache!

Anyway, here's a little look of the inside all pimped out:

Compared to the first Mod Tablet which had a smaller amount of pockets, this set out is much more practical. It has two card slots, an iPhone 6 compartment (or similar), multiple zippered pockets and pen holders and two notebook holders. It holds my iPad Mini at the back, and I can even fit in my MTN in the middle (just bear in mind that your MTN must only be holding one booklet if you want it to fit the way I made it fit!)

Overall, I love it.

If you use the code 9ROC8G92SQVL, you'll get a $10 credit when you sign up! Hooray! So if you're a leather snob like me, you won't want to miss this opportunity.