I’ve been looking for some crafty, fun ways to be a little greener over the last few months and here is one of my recent projects.

I am super bad about creating and printing Excel documents at work. No matter how careful I am, I frequently insert a bunch of extra rows and columns beyond the area of the spreadsheet I’m actually using so when I print a document it comes out with a bunch of extra pages that only have grid lines on them. I’m working on fixing these ridiculous errors, but recently I printed several copies of a document where I’d royally screwed up and I ended up printing about 200 pages with no actual data on them. Ugh.

I brought the paper home with me and put most of it right onto Wyatt’s coloring shelf so he could use it to create some masterpieces before it got recycled. I reserved a smaller chunk for myself to make a few little notepads. (By the way, I’d like to point out that you don’t have to be an Excel loser to do recycle paper like this — I also bring home other documents that are printed single-sided when I’m tossing stuff from my files at work.)

To make them, I started off by cutting the paper into uniform pieces. The one on the left was 4 x 4 inches. The notepad on the right was made from paper that had been cut into quarters, so it was 4 1/4 x 5 1/2 inches.

I then cut slightly larger pieces of a cardboard package insert to match the size of the printer paper. The package insert I used was from a pack of photo sleeves. I also save the inserts from page protectors, craft supplies, etc. You could even just use a piece of cardboard cut from an Amazon box, cereal box or anything else you can find in your recycling bin that is fairly stiff.

Once I’d cut the cardboard, I decorated it with pretty paper and punches. I kept the one with the boat on it pretty simple because it was for Wyatt and he doesn’t care. I put a little more effort into the the swirly one because it was for my purse.

Once I had everything decorated, I stacked the paper and the covers and put them together with my Bind-It-All machine. Most people won’t have one of those, of course, so other ways you could bind them would be to punch two or three holes through the stack and connect them with binder rings. You could also try threading a string or ribbon through, leaving a little slack and tying very tight knots in them. I bet twist ties would work too and that would be another great way to recycle something.

This photo shows a fanned out version of one of the books looking sort of from the back. You can see the grids lines on the paper.

I keep this notebook in my purse and I use it for making quick grocery lists, mostly. I also whip it out in restaurants and give it to Wyatt to draw on.

Last September I tried to do a photo per day project, but I was thwarted by what I later found out was a case of mono. I’ve wanted to do one ever since, but one thing or another kept me from beginning. But here we are on May 1 and I’m starting again.

Today’s photo is of my latest project: photo organization. I am doing a modified version of a system that Stacy Julian outlines in her latest book Photo Freedom. I’m currently working on sorting my old photos into categories. I bought a really cool four drawer card catalog off Craigslist a few weeks ago and I’m putting them into those drawers separated by tabs. This is my “People” drawer.

This is a good example of one of the reasons I scrapbook:

SouleMama: remembering

I don’t want to forget one single minute of this wonderful, difficult, fantastic life I lead or any of the people who come in and out of it.

Wyatt took a long nap this afternoon, so I had a chance to do some scrapbooking for the first time in a long while. I recently got this Basic Grey Cupcake paper and a pack of rub-ons to match. I don’t usually enjoy scrapbooking birthday photos because they’re often poor quality and there isn’t much to say about them (”We ate cake. We opened presents. We had fun.”), but this paper is so cute that this layout was fun to put together.

Zach and I have been getting kind of sick of the Brault Limonade poster we have hanging over our couch and we’ve been trying to think of something new to do with the space. Since we take so many photos, we’ve decided to hang a bunch of pictures up in a big grouping. We want to intersperse other decorative pieces in with the photos too, so we’ve been taking our time sorting through photos and looking around the house for pieces of art to hang up. I also wanted to make a few things that I can switch out when the seasons change or around the holidays to make our house feel festive.

A few months ago, Ali Edwards showed this butterfly collage over on her blog and it must have stuck pretty firmly in my brain because as I was thinking up something springy to make the other day, I found myself almost exactly duplicating it. I punched the butterflies out of paper from the Wild Saffron line from K&Co and mounted them on dark brown paper. The dark brown wasn’t the best choice I’ve ever made since I was putting the piece in a black frame, but I’ve decided I don’t actually care that much. I really like how this came out, actually. I think it looks like one of those old-timey specimen trays with real butterflies mounted inside. I mean, it’s obvious that these are paper, but it has the same sort of feel.

Anyway, we haven’t finished putting our big photo grouping together, but when we do this will be included. And I’ll be sure to post some photos when the new art is up on the wall.

A few updates to my Christmas journal. I’m not doing a very good job keeping up to date with it, but I’m having fun with the pages that I’m doing.

This one is for prompt #8:

I feel pretty dumb about the way I spelled “Sights” in the title. I didn’t notice until I’d finished the page, photographed it, uploaded it to Flick and it had been sitting around for awhile. I’m so used to writing the word “sites” because I work on web sites all day, that that’s my reflexive spelling now I guess. I also forgot to put my cute little number tag on it. Dang.

This is what the journaling says:

Apparently, our house turns red at Christmas:

• Bell wreath on the inside of our door
• red stockings
• the little tree on the mantle
• cute, festive husband
• Wyatt in red from head to toe (but what else is new?)
• red berry wreath on the front door
• Christmas gifts in pregress
• gingerbread house
• Christmas books up from the basement
• our lone card from the gardeners

This one is for prompt #9, Traditions:

Journaling reads:

• getting together with Zach’s family before leaving for Iowa to exchange gifts and share a meal
• traveling to Iowa for the holiday
• white chili on Christmas Eve
• opening stockings first thing Christmas morning (when I was a kid and even now as an adult)
• one big present from Santa under the tree
• Christmas Eve get-together at Mom and Dad’s with any extended family who are in town
• setting up the tree with Wyatt while Christmas music plays
• one big weekend of holiday cookie baking
• cookies for Santa, corn for his reindeer