And digiscrappers rally to help by buying these charity kits where proceeds are almost entirely given to the intended beneficiaries. Isn’t that wonderful?

Here’s another one of those, benefiting those affected by the floods in Queensland, Australia.

Click on the preview to go to ScrapbookBytes to purchase this kit. Even if you’re not interested in donating funds, you’re sure to get value for every dollar paid because of all the goodies that fill this kit. So if you think about it, you’re satisfying your shopping urge for kits while you help others. Ten dollars can go a long way when put together with other tens.

From Sweet Shoppe Designs, they have this limited edition collab kit to raise funds for one of their designers who was also devastated by the floods. You can read about Zoe Pearn’s story of the flood here. Brighter Days Ahead is a kit filled with hope that they may pick up the pieces and restart their lives after the flood. It is available for a limited time so go grab it now:

this is just the preview for the papers and there’s so much more to this kit. Check it out by clicking the preview.

Now I wish I had enough funds to buy both charity collabs, as well as the Scrap Matters products I put on my cart this morning. But I’m quite apprehensive about digiscrap shopping too much because they might end up gathering virtual dust while they go unused, much like my jewelry making supplies that are just kept in a box in the garage.. Well I hope not, whether paid kits or freebie downloads, I will use my stash to create beautiful pages this year.

I’ve followed the train and download a whole lot of digital scrapbooking goodness. All for free! Okay, not entirely free, you should say THANKS of course

Start from the Blog Train HQ.

Here are two layouts I made earlier this week:

[Photos are clickable for the credits but please leave comments about the layouts in this post ]

These are still going into the mini-album of my girlfriends’ day out back in August. Hopefully I’ll be done before Christmas! Haha.

Don’t forget to check out the rest of the Scrapbook Saturday gang, starting at Mammadawg’s place. Also checkout my previous SS posts here if you haven’t seem them yet

Oh, it is Digital Scrapbooking Day (DSD) in digital scrapbooking land! Visit digiscrapping sites to get a huge fixing of DSD goodness, there are many links in this page, but not all may have goodies up okay. A good place to start though would be the Sunshine Blog for their Halloween Blog Train.

Halloween Night Ramblings

Last night, I logged on thinking of posting about the Halloween Party we had for the kids in this compound (plus some of their friends).  But no matter how much fun we had at the party – both kids and adults alike – the fun isn’t what’s foremost in my mind to blog about. 

This is the fifth year we’ve done this – a private Halloween party for just the kids in the family. We’ve extended the invitation to only three other kids whose family rented the last door in my grandpa’s three-door apartment; plus to the young boy next door. Since the family of the three kids already moved out, it was just the family kids and the other boy last year. This year, there were unexpected-but-nonetheless-welcome teenage friends of my older nieces.

I grew up having fond experiences of Halloween. There would be community parties or there would just be us friends going out, in parties of four or five, trick-or-treating (unaccompanied by adults) around our quiet neighborhood.

When the next generation (that is to say my nieces and nephews) came into the picture,  Halloween meant me just basically being there to see them in their costumes and maybe accompanying them to trick or treat. These kids have a different Halloween experience. The Sunday School program at Church would organize the trick-or-treat rounds and there would be older kids leading batches of kids to different sections of the community. There would be a program and snacks at the Church Hall after the rounds. Sometimes, if it was raining that year, the older kids would just collect candies and treats from each household and bring them to the Cathedral Hall where all the rest would be playing games. Then the kids would just fall in line and receive the candies in their loot bags – going from one station to another.

It was still fun though. And everyone was sure to get something.

Then in recent years, they scheduled Halloween activities before the actual day. Apparently there were requests from some Church members to reschedule the activities because some go home to the provinces for the All Souls’ Day holidays. They didn’t want their kids to miss Halloween. But that meant that our kids were activity free on October 31, and I just didn’t like that idea. So I drew up plans for our very own private Halloween Party at #99 19th Street!

We started this tradition in 2004, and we’ve had a party every year since. I coordinate most of it, buy most of the prices and get committments for the food and other treats. I take a leave from work and I host the party. They are not my kids, not even my brother’s kids. Why do I put this together, year after year? 

Because though they are my cousins’ children, I love them like my own. And I know that they are growing up in such different circumstances from how we did, and I want to help make sure that there are many happy childhood experiences for them that involves the whole family. 

And we will do it again next year. And every succeeding year as long as we have kids in the family. In fact, I’m already thinking of how we can expand it to having more kids of close family friends included.

A Loss

A friend of my parents’ died yesterday. His kidneys have given up a long time ago and he finally succumbed to it, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, yesterday. He was just supposed to go for routine dialysis.

He had four kids and I am friends with the two girls. The other two are boys younger than me. 

With my parents and many others from our Church community, we were at the funeral last night to pay our respects and just be with the family.

As is the tradition in our Church when there is a funeral, we sang hymns. Odd, but I found singing them comforting. But they always bring back memories of funerals of my beloved aunt and grandmother. Not painful, but comforting.

It is sad that I haven’t been to Church a lot and I haven’t seen many of the faces that I saw there last night for a long time. Sad because it took a funeral for it to happen.

Click on the photo for a larger view and the credits.

Now, though there are a thousand and one words that I would like to write, let me take time to visit the rest of the Scrapbook Saturday gang (a day late, as usual!).

This will go into the same album that I’ve been working on-and-off on for a month now. I can’t wait to finish it so I can move on to the next project(s). 

Credits: Background by MGL Scraps for Love Actually; Silvia Cluster Frame by KimB. Oblation photo by user m_a_r_k_y at Flickr. And Centennial 100 peso bill photo from PhilMoney.

 

Visit other Scrapbook Saturday participants by checking out the SS HQ through the logo, or you may start off by checking out MammaDawg’s halloween pages.

Besides, not having the option to scrap on either of the two laptops will likely force me into action sooner than if I find that I can work on other people’s laptops comfortably. And truly, the sooner that I get new PC parts, the better.

But you all are not here to listen to me rant about my sleeping baby of a computer, are you? Nah, I didn’t think so.

This edition (thank you lord!) of Scrapbook Saturday is the final installment on my Organization series. If you haven’t read them yet, parts one and two are just clicks away.

So what is the organization method that I’ve found to work for me now?

It has to start from the time you download the files. Taking care of your stash then is so much easier, but I am first to admit that I don’t organize them that soon myself. Anyway, when you download your digiscrapping files, you must dedicate a folder for that – it just makes it all easier for them to be in one place.

I named a folder Scrapbooking – this was where my new downloads would go. In that folder, I create a new folder every week – using the start of the week as the date. So I have July 13, June 22, etcetera.

Remember my Digital Scrap Supply Store mega folder? When I’m ready to unzip files, I go to that folder and create a new folder with the same name as the folders I am getting the zipped files from (so I would also have July 13, June 22 and so on).  These “dated” folders are only created as a guide for when I make backups of my files. It’s like a marker to remind me that a certain folder’s contents haven’t been backed up yet.

In the beginning, I organized the files with a folder for each designer – so in my Store you’ll see folders with designer names alongside folders with dates – but it was a nightmare to remember which files have backups already. Specially if you had something new to add to each designer’s folder every week or every couple of days. Now backing up is an entirely different story and I know there’s a more hassle free option for that. But until I decide to spend money on Carbonite, I would have to rely on manually backing up my stuff. I only back up the week’s folder when all the downloads have been unzipped.

Next comes the fun part. As soon as I unzip a download, I open the folder and add it to Windows Live Photo Gallery (my current free software of choice). I’ve used Picasa too and it is also a good one for this next purpose. Once the contents of the freshly unzipped folder show up in Gallery, I start tagging. I batch tag the designer name and kit name onto all the files that came from the same folder. Then I tag the individual files. Remember some of the folder names I came up with from my post number 2? Well most of those I use as tags now.

Samples of tags I’ve used: background, solid, grunge, alpha, acrylic, pink, blue, violet, yellow, christmas, hearts, kids, floral, flower, frame, glitter, doodle

I’ve used so many I’ve lost count. I don’t necessarily have to remember what I used to tag all those stuff because in Windows Live Photo Gallery (unlike in Picasa), your tags are conveniently listed on the menu to the left hand side. So if I needed to pull up only stash from a particular designer, all I need is to key in the name, or click on the tag and the thumbnails will be filtered accordingly. If I want to use predominantly blue for a layout, I key in that color tag.

Having the files zipped in their own folders as the zipped downloads makes it convenient for crediting too. If I use a file, I just right click the thumbnail and choose to open containing folder. I open the TOU file that is likely to be in that folder and take note of designer name/website.

This system is workig for me but it may not work for everyone. I know I’ll tire of this system someday or I may find a better one. You can rest assured I’ll be sharing that with you too.

So how do you organize your digital scrapbooking files?

So instead of speedwriting to make it before Saturday 11:59 PM Manila time last night, I slept. So here I am with a late SS post, and not even the third installment to my Organization series that I thought I’d be writing. Nonetheless, I have something even better! I have a new layout for the mini-album! Take a lookie:

All the photos were taken by my god-daughter Iskra, Chelle’s daughter, the same one with her tongue and kilikili exposed in a previous SS layout .

I can’t wait to finish this project and start scrapping our vacation photos.

Don’t forget to visit Scrapbook Saturday HQ for the Blogroll! Go on and start with MammaDawg!

Edit: I forgot to include a link to the credits. Find them here: http://www.snapandscrap.tv/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=11732&cat=500&ppuser=946