My iPhone saved my life and other stories.

While the title of this blog post seem extreme unlikely, in a sense my upgrade to an iPhone from the wasteland of android hell with an HTC Wildfire, was certainly the catalyst to 6 months of changes in my life.

Back at the beginning of June the long awaited end of my 24 month phone contract arrived and I took the plunge to buy an iPhone 5. I’m not a stranger to Apple. I was probably the only person in the world who owned an iPad and a Macbook Pro, but not an iPhone, so the wealth of apps and functionality wasn’t a revelation in itself, but the subtle difference was all this data and accessibility was happily nestling in my pocket.

At about the same time my good friend Emma and I had a chat about our mutual desire to shed a few pounds and get in shape. I’d been making some effort to eat better and exercise more for a little while and had definitely lost a few pounds, but it was all a bit haphazard. She started a Facebook group to give us a bit of accountability and I invested in something I’d been eyeing up for a little while - A Fitbit One. 

This clever little device is a posh pedometer that you attach to yourself each day. It tracks steps taken, flights of stairs climbed and distance walked and beams all that info straight to your iPhone via Bluetooth. This in itself is a huge motivator to move more. Firing up the accompanying app gives a moment to moment count of your activity that day so far. Meeting your own target for the day becomes hugely important and as if that isn’t reward enough there are virtual badges that your device ‘awards’ you as you achieve certain targets over time! The first few of these come thick and fast to get you motivated straight away!

The other thing this clever little device can do is talk to the second app that has contributed to my life change - My Fitness Pal. Basically speaking MFP is a calorie tracker, but with the added function of allowing you to track your exercise meaning you can adjust your food intake to suit your own personal activity and requirements. You can manually add your work outs, but I mainly leave it to the Fitbit to talk to MFP. Only non-step based exercise like cycling, weight training or swimming need to be added.

First job with MFP is to add your vital statistics... height, weight (gulp!) etc are all dialled in and a modest weekly weight loss target added (no more than two pounds a week and much less if you have less to lose). With all the shocking details recorded and added I had my calorie target for the day. The exercise my Fitbit records means you get to eat back some of those calories, a literal reward for exercising!

I should say that at least initially it definitely helps to weigh and measure your foods, until you get the hang of portion and serving sizes, but once you’re got it nailed it’s super easy to select foods from the database that you eat often for fast and efficient logging of your calorie intake. It turned out that this was definitely my downfall. Pre-MFP I had no idea how much I was really eating despite usually picking what seemed to be fairly healthy options most of the time.

And that was it. Once I started and got into the habit, I was converted. Somehow having all this info at my fingertips made me both super motivated and super organised.

Over the next 6 and a bit months I shed exactly 4 stone. I’ve got plenty more to lose (to date I’ve now lost 61lbs), but I feel fitter, less tired and altogether more determined generally in life. 

While crediting my iPhone with all this might seem a bit flippant, It’s been hard work. So lets just say it was the catalyst to change... that seems fair.

If you've got this far I'll leave you with my then/now shot... 

Remembering Summer Nights

While summer is a memory from what seems a VERY long time ago, it definitely helps to revisit those wonderful long evenings with a spot of scrapbooking.

I broke out one of my favourite Instagram images from a long walk back at the end of the summer and used one of my new favourite collections - the Madame Payraud collection from Papermania. It's a stunning eclectic mix of vintage labels and ephemera with so many gorgeous dimensional embellishments! My favourite bit of the collection has to be these fabulous little alpha stickers! I *literally* can't craft live without them!

Look how cute they looked when you squish the edges into an inkpad - this has to be the easiest way to distress the edges of little things.

 And I shoe-horned them in again for the date inside one of the pretty frames.

Another fun part are the pleated fabric trims - these come nesting on a wonderful wooden bobbin held in place with a cute mini safety pin!

For all the info on making my page check out the docrafts website.

Colour Inspiration #1 - Sunshine on a Rainy Day

I'm often asked about where the best places to get inspiration and the usual answer is all around you. Of course it's not always that easy and sometimes we all need a little helping hand. So today sees my first colour inspiration post. I've used one of my own photographs to pull a fun and complimentary colour palette together which will hopefully be just the nudge you use to try something new where colour is concerned or just to kick start your crafting/decorating/outfit of the day!

This week's picture is on some gorgeous Montbretia in my garden and while it'll be a little while before it's in bloom this splash of colour seems perfect to brighten up a dull January day.

Please do share in the comments if you make or create something using my colour combo! I'd love to come and see what you make of it!

Xpress Delivery!

This week saw us filming a few more episodes of Creativity TV and this time I was lucky to be joined by some lovely friends, namely Becky James, Lou Collins and Sarah Linda. Excitingly we have a lovely new studio with plenty of space to get crafty! It's even got a fun cafe downstairs for a well deserved lunch break! Here's Becky prepping for one of the shows... the eagle eyed among you might spot the focus of this episode!

Yes, we were very excited to be getting to grips with the fabulous new A4 die-cutting machine from Xcut -  the Xpress! I'm pretty lucky to be among the first to play with the awesome bit of kit, and it doesn't disappoint.

My favourite thing is its clever dial that lowers and raises the rollers so you don't need umpteen shims and plates to cut ANY die or to use any embossing folder you care to think of. It also satisfies my love of soft craft as I've not used any machine that cuts felt and other fabrics as well. It's going to be perfect for patchwork! It also looks pretty darn sleek and takes up very little room when it's all folded up - rather surprising for an A4 machine.

There's only about a month or so until it's in the shops so keep an eye out so you can get your hands on one!

An age old problem... tangled headphones.

I mentioned yesterday that I've been doing a little bit of sewing recently, and one of first things I made was this Earphone Tidy. It's one of those projects that uses the teeniest scrap of fabric but is actually a project that you'll use again and again as I bet that you share my frustration of tangled headphones!

I also made a little video that you can watch below - I'd love to hear what you think of it so please do leave me a comment here and on YouTube! If you subscribe to the docrafts channel you'll get notified when I make something new too!

First steps - refashioning.

I've been doing a few bits of 'soft craft' recently. An iPad case here, a camera strap there but when I stumbled across the Refashionista blog I knew what my next endeavour would be. I've binge read the entire blog and while our UK charity shops seem to be nothing on a par with US thrift stores I will find time to get out there and find a few bits! In the meantime I stole this frankly hideous top out of Mother's bag of clothes that she'd earmarked to go to the charity shop and made a pledge to have a go at making SOMETHING out of it.

It looks even worse on... not flattering.

So I laid it out on the floor and set about working out what bits I needed to change to make this top a skirt... before I made much of a start, I did have a bit of a setback... Lola seemed to think It was only fit for making into a dog bed.

Once I'd booted her off, I ruthlessly sliced off the whole top part of the top, down to the bottom of the neckline.

Then simply sewed up both sides to make a skirt shape that fitted my arse. I hemmed the top voila... one skirt! 

It's not perfect, and I won't be winning any prizes for my sewing skills, but here it is! Now I just need to find somewhere to wear it!

Telling my story.

I’m all for personal expression and the thing I love most about scrapbooking is that I’m doing it totally for me and to that end I’m of the school of thought that there are no rules. But plenty of people cite creating memories for future generations as their prime scrapbooking directive. Whichever camp you fall into though there is one aspect that I’m noticing more and more is absent from many layouts. 

The story.

With any photo there is much more to be said about the event, the person, or the place than you can glean from the image itself. If when you show someone your album you tell additional snippets of info and fun anecdotes you are missing a trick. This is just the sort of rich content you should be including on your page. Once you are gone there will be no one left to recount these stories as your descendants flip through the albums you've put your heart and soul into creating. If your only aim is to leave a precious vault of memories for your family but you are not adding the story I’d say you are missing a trick.

This is especially true of scrapbooking about yourself. The only thing that 20 beautiful decorated pages each simply featuring a photo of yourself, but without a story to go alongside, can tell your descendants is that you loved to craft. And aside from that one simple fact that’s no more than a simple cardboard box containing the same 20 photos could tell.

The issue is most evident in many published layouts. (I guess that because those are the ones we all see!) A recent feature that I read had some lovely pages about the designers themselves, but only one featured any sort of journaling  However alongside in the magazine copy each designer had written a short piece about their inspiration behind the layout. This information enriched the page and told me so much more about the story behind the photo, and was exactly the information that future generations would cherish. These were the stories that should have been on the scrapbook page, without it they are just pretty pages.

Of course I’m not innocent in all of this and if pages without words are your ‘bag’ then that’s cool too. There are of course occasions that my journaling is certainly limited or even non-existent, but the wonderful impact of reading others’ stories has galvanized my pledge to ALWAYS include a story (no matter how short) on every page I create. Even if it’s only there to jog my own memory to those fun little facts we forget all too soon. 

Tell me what you views on journaling are... I'd love to hear them.