A work in progress...

5544 Inches+ later I've finally got all of my delicious blue and brown fabrics sewn together.  Why did I ever think it was a good idea to take on a quilt?! Yea me, the girl who has a hard time finishing a scrapbooking page?! Yea, I'm still trying to figure that one out... although it may have something to do with the delicious blue and brown fabric that called screamed my name the day after Thanksgiving for a terribly hard-to-resist price!

Next step involves one of my least favorite activities, with my super ugly, in desperate need of being recovered ironing board.  Followed by some more cutting, as if cutting 144 strips wasn't enough, there's more cutting, and even more sewing.  All I have to say is that the final project better be spectacular or I will have wasted a large portion of my life! :)

Check out my inspiration here and her blog here.  She's an amazingly talented gal!

Photo Storage Tutorial

If you're anything like me, you have a ton of pictures on your computer...

Well our poor little computer couldn't handle the 1000's of pictures we had on it, so I needed to get them off but wasn't quite sure how to store them. So I thought and thought and thought some more, which took me back to my Rec Therapy days at Tamarack. The school teacher there used this method for storing pictures of the kids. It's simple, but brilliant and cheap...

1st step: Weed through your pictures, deleting any you don't want or need

2nd step: Burn a cd of the photos, sometimes I did 1 month per cd, sometimes more

3rd step: Using your photo program of choice open the cd. I used both Google Picaso (free program... thanks Alisa!) and Adobe Photoshop (not so free, but a great Christmas present... thanks mom!) Photoshop was the best, the thumbnails were smaller and used less paper, Picaso thumbnails were much bigger, needing more paper. Most programs have a choice when printing to print thumbnails or a 'contact sheet.' Select this option and print away! 

4th step: Grab a 3 ring binder and some page protectors, slide your contact sheets into the page protectors, along with your cd and you've got a terrific simple, but brilliant storage method for your photos!