pomaika`i: my work, my thoughts and my reflections. living with aloha

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Are we sick of turkey yet?



Aloha Tuesday,

Well, at least I haven’t really had to cook for three days...more time for scrapping!  My son rebelled tonight and did not want to eat anymore leftovers.  We had top ramen and chicken dogs instead.   Poor thing though, guess what’s for lunch tomorrow...


I had some time over the break to create, my favorite thing to do!


 Advent Star Calendar/Album

I’ve been overdue for an advent calendar.

It will close after the first of December, but it is sure to be a treasure for years to come.


“BIG TOP CIRCUS” Deluxe Planner/photo album

I hope you will take a look at this entertaining album. I had a lot of fun creating it. The 2008 can be removed if you want a different year.


Lunchbox Mini Albums and Cards Set


Purse planner


**Craft Fair Fun**

Kai’s school is having a winter craft fair this weekend.  It’s going to be a great way for little kids to make beautiful gift for someone else.  Although if they are anything like my son at that age (4-7) they will want to keep them all.  We’ll have a little booth there.  I’ve made some card sets.  It was supposed to be Kai making origami and little things, but he would rather read or do other “fun” things.  “Mom, this craft fair thing is too HARD!”  So we’ll just go an have a good time.  I was thinking we could do a make and take with little punchkins that we have.  Kids could put together little paper dolls for ornaments or something...though that would mean punching a hole in their head...hmmm, maybe we’ll just put them in baggies and they can take them home to play with....LOL


Well, take care and have a wonderful week.

Aloha nui.

Don’t forget to check out my Etsy shop for buy it now items.

www.scrapaloha.etsy.com

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Happy Thanksgiving


I can’t believe how this year has flown by.  It seems like just yesterday it was Halloween.  Now it’s only a few weeks until Christmas!  Instead of  feeling rushed, today I will take some time to enjoy the day, it’s beautiful out, the sun is shining (for once LOL) and my son is out of school. 


While counting all my blessings, I would like to thank you for being a part of my scrapbook ‘ohana (family).  To those whom I just met to those of you who have been with me for a long time, here are a few of my wishes for you: 


Warm be the love that surrounds you
Good be your friends and true
Constant be hope and promise,
Useful the work that you do
Close be your family around you
Good health be yours day by day
Long be the life you're living
And full of much joy on the way

                                                           --unknown

                                    

Take care and a hui hou (until we meet again)

Aloha nui (lots of love)

pomaika`i and ‘ohana




Sunday, November 18, 2007

Fashionista Planner


I had a great, but way too short weekend.  For those of you familiar with iMacs, I upgraded to the new OS called Leopard.  My son was so excited he wanted to do all the brand new functions at once.  


Time machine is this way cool back up program that he’s been dying to see on my computer.   We thought that it would be up and running in an hour...  BUT...first, we needed to clear my external hard drive, which means backing up everything that was on there to begin with...that took about 2 days.  THEN we found out that the drive was too small for the amount of information in my computer (mostly pictures).  LOL.  


So now I have to decide if I want to get a bigger external hard drive...I think this is such a metaphor for life...


Anyway, while everyone was busy catching up with technology, I was having fun in my little studio creating.  


I hope you’ll take a look at my items this week.  I have a really fun piece:  fashionista planner on ebay along with my smiles planner at a reduced price. 


I also loaded a brand new purse planner on etsy along with some gift tags and note embellishments for your pages.  


Eventually, I am planning to make more of an exciting blog, but my “time machine” is not working and I have run out of time LOL.  Have a great week.  Happy Happy Thanksgiving enjoy life! 

a hui hou.

pomaika`i

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Grand Opening of Talk Story


Aloha mai! 

Greetings to you!  I hope that this day finds you enjoying life!  I have been busy these last few weeks with the CKC convention and re-designing my website!  I hope that you will take a few moments at your leisure to turn the pages of my site and let me know what you thing.  

The feature I am really excited about is my Blog.  I would love to be able to communicate with you more frequently and more individually than I have been able to in the past.  

On this page, you will have the opportunity to post comments and observations and we can all get to know each other better! 


Have no fear, I will continue to email you with announcements, unless you tell me otherwise.  You can also RSS subscribe to my blog or you can subscribe to email updates.  I hope you will tell your friends about this site and this feature.  


I have a wonderful planner, purse album and a wonderfully embellished set of Christmas cards new onEBay .  You also have another chance to bid on a custom planner for someone you love {yourself?!} as well. 


I have posted new items on Etsy   including a card set all ready for giving with cards, envelopes, folder and gift tag. 

I also have some great new mini tags for your scrapbook pages or for your gift giving needs.  I can combine payment for Etsy and eBay items and save you shipping too!


I hope to make this blog a fun place for you to visit.  I have already posted some archived items for your reading pleasure, and will be adding some fun projects for you to try too! 


I’d love to hear from you, please add a comment in my photo albums or here on this blog!

A hui hou

pomaika`i



 

Monday, November 05, 2007

Little Blessings Book












Years ago, I picked up and used the book “Simple Abundance” by Sarah Brethnacht Ban to bring more gratitude into my life.  I consciously work to incorporate gratitude into my life each day.  Being a scrapbook designer, I read Simple Scrapbooks magazine each month, and have read “Simple Scrapbooks,” the book more times than I can count.  Whenever Stacy Julian is in town, I take her classes, twice in some cases.  Still, until now, I have been unable to incorporate the Simple Scrapbooks philosophy into my scrapping in a personal way.  Well, persistence finally paid off!  This year, everything clicked!  


I am one of those people who started keeping a scrapbook in the days when “archival safe” was a term used only by serious artists.  I do it for the sheer love of creating.  But this past year, I was in a rut.  Maybe it had to do with turning 40.  Whatever the reason, I was tired and overwhelmed, trying to keep up with each important event.  I wanted more.  More meaning, more true to life albums, more joy in creating. 


After CKU-Vancouver, I came home with a beautiful 10 page 6 x 6 album from Stacy’s Simple Joys class.  Although the colors were beautiful, they were not something that I would use for myself.  While staring at this album, I had one of those “aha” moments.  This album would be a beautiful gift!  What a great opportunity to create a simple but meaningful album.  I decided to create a gift album for my mother based on the blessings I received from her during my life. 


My mother and I have a strained relationship.  For many years I have been looking for ways to heal and move forward in my life.  It is not easy for me to say what I feel, but I could always write my feelings down.  What if I wrote my feelings down and illustrated them with images?  Wow, what a powerful story that would be. 


Through this “Little Blessings Book” book, I was able to look at my relationship with my Mother and turn what used to be irritations into true blessings.  The exercise of putting these blessings down on paper was so healing.  I chose to make a copy of the album with different paper for myself, and send the original to my Mother.  Her reaction to the book is not the important thing.  The important point in this case is that I created blessings out of a relationship in which I saw mostly heartache before.  


I loved the process of documenting my blessings so much that I created an album for my son, (Super Kid), and one for my Husband (You Inspire Me), and one about my Father (My Daddy’s Love) who has already passed on.  There is no better way to tell someone how much you love them and why.  {I’ll try to round up some photos for you to see.  Check back later}


I used a 6 x 6 page format, with 10 pages, each listing a blessing I received from the person I was focusing on.  


The project is short.  I did it over a weekend.  I used supplies I already had on hand, and extra photos that didn’t necessarily go with any others.  I loved embellishing each page!  This project is fun and so very meaningful!  You will want to make many of these little treasures!  



Why: 

To increase your feelings of gratitude

To show someone you care

To feel better about your life

To mend relationship

To heal yourself, to let go of the past


Who: 

You, anyone who is blessed 

Single, 

married, 

with children, 

w/o children, 

if you are breathing, you have been blessed. 



Update: 11/05/07

Joy of joys, my Mother came back into my life two years ago.  Unfortunately she has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease.   She is still in the mild stages and we are grateful for each day that we have with her.  Years ago, this little album was a great source of healing and moving forward for me, and I hope for her as well.


The little critter in the photo above is “Almond”.  He keeps me company when I go away without my son.  After my Hula ‘uniki, my family joined me back home in Hawai’i.  In this picture, my Mom, Kai (my son) and I were at a picnic in Kapi’olani Park, and Almond was being adventurous.  


Until next time...A hui hou!

scrap with Aloha!

Thursday, November 01, 2007

Scrapping With Abundance (archive 2003)













I wrote this article for the ScrapAngels website in 2003 when I was a member of their design team.  Since the theme is a timeless one, I thought that I’d post it for your entertainment. 



The Journey To Scrapping with Abundance

Chapter One: A New Year, A New Change

 

The new year, what a great time to start fresh!  Build new habits and get rid of old ones.  It is a great time for forgiveness.  Forgiving ourselves.  I am forgiving myself for buying so much useless scrapping material.  I am forgiving myself for not getting that “Ultimate Disney Album” started.  This new year, I’m on a mission, and that mission is to “Scrap with Abundance.  


What does this mean to me?  This means that I get more pages done.  500 pages is my goal for the year:  41 pages a month, 9 ½ pages a week.  It also means that I get one article written a month and two design projects ready to sell.  It means that I am able to find that wire mesh that I know I bought a month ago to play with, but forgot where I put it.  I have learned the hard way, that you can’t organize clutter.  This is not my phrase.  It was coined by the Fly Lady, who is one of my organization mentors (you can find her at www.flylady.net).  


In my last article I spoke about this being a parallel journey that I am taking.  What is good for my scrap room is good for my house as well.  I have been busy donating and tossing items in my house.  I find it easier for me to throw away that Costco sized bottle of pepper that we bought 10 years ago than I do tossing that ugly piece of cardstock that I’ll never use on any of my pages (what was I thinking when I bought it?)


Here is where guilt and forgiveness comes in.  When I toss items, no matter how old and idle they are.  I remember the time and money I spent in acquiring them in the first place, and feel guilty.  Then the garage sale or Ebay comes to mind.  Maybe I can get some of that precious money and time back when I sell it to some other poor unsuspecting soul on Ebay.  Don’t go there.  It is just more of your precious time to advertise, correspond with and finally mail your junk to someone else.  Toss or donate it and forgive yourself! 


I can do that relatively well with my non-scrapping “junk”.  But I have a ways to go with my sacred scrapping supplies.  I feel like I need to use that glossy, gaudy cardstock that I invested in (because I thought that I would make some money selling scrapping supplies.)  I have to keep that cutting tool even though I don’t use circles and ovals in my scrapbooks anymore.  After all, it was expensive and it still looks great!  Well, this is one area that I have a long way to go to get to “abundance.”  Don’t ask me why, I can’t tell you yet, but I am learning a lot about myself in this process, so humor me and let’s see where this takes me. 


Since I am not ready to donate or toss my scrapping supplies, and I can’t sell them if my life depended on it, the only alternative is to use them.  I made little dent in the mountain this Christmas vacation.  My husband took a week off from work and I had some dedicated scrapping time.  Despite the whole house being laid low with one bug or another, I managed to get 80 pages done in a couple weeks.  I was so proud of myself, getting those memories into albums!  But I have to admit one of the best things was using up some of the supplies that had been lying around for ages!  Can anyone else relate to this…I didn’t need to go to a scrapbook store for any supplies, I had my own inventory.  YIKES!


But what about those other scrapping supplies that you would never ever dream of putting on a layout.  I am talking about paper, stickers, die cuts, and things that you have outgrown in style, or maybe you just bought them because they were 75% off!  Here is an idea for you.  It is very simple, it won’t win any awards from CK Magazine, but it does two things better.  It uses your supplies and it will put a smile on someone’s face.   



{I am trying to track down a photo for you!}

Greeting Cards

I made all of my own Christmas cards this year.  Now it may not seem like such a huge feat for a crafter to do this, but in the past I just never had the time.    


Cut a 8 ½” x 11” cardstock in half so that you have two pieces measuring 5 ½” x 4 ¼”. 

Score each piece down the middle to form a card. Or start with inexpensive pre-cut cards.

Cut one piece of patterned cardstock about 3 ¾” x 5” and one smaller solid piece 2 ½ ” x 3”

Mount the small solid cardstock on the patterned paper and mount the whole thing on to the front of your card. 

Embellish with a stamp or stickers.  


Examples:  Snowman Christmas Card decorated by Kai, age 6.  Thank you card.  (sorry not shown)


I went to the stationary store and bought a box of envelopes.  This way I can use my own cardstock instead of purchasing pre-cut cards.  It is cost effective and uses up more of my mountain of supplies. I use a Fiskars scoring blade in my paper trimmer. 


I keep a box filled with blank cards that I have made.  Whenever I need a card for any occasion, or if I just want to write a note to someone, I look in my box and pull out a card.  I can embellish it with stickers or rubber stamp an appropriate design on to it.  This box has been a great time saver.  “Two birds with one stone”, use up my old supplies and feel good about giving someone something nice that I made.  


Until we meet again, scrap with Aloha