April Goals, Progress, and Accomplishments

For April:

• make cards for 2peas Spring card exchange (done!)
• continue purging & packing craft room (done!)
• resume month in review notes/photos. March is mostly a lost cause, but I’d like to try to pick it back up for April (done!)

April:

April OLW
Finish Feb Project Life
Print March photos
March Project Life
Figure out a plan for WITL in late April

Goals

1. Get loose pages in an album
2. Start monthly pages for 2023

I got all of my Jan-March PL photos printed out and into the appropriate spreads, including dates for the week, which was my goal for March. This month, I want to keep up with printing, and get Jan-March journaling and so forth done; I have probably done about half of the weeks.

Dd's 2022 section of her pocket page scrapbook album is complete! I was able to get 2020-2022 into one album with a tiny bit of room to spare.

Now to get ds's 2022 section complete.

I think I am going to do 2022 pages before moving on to 2023.

I am still current in my memory planner! ( yay me )

3 of my 5 April cards are made ( 1 mailed already)

I finally chose & bought a pen organizer it comes tomorrow

Goals:
go thru those last 3 boxes to unpack in my studio
Go thru the punch boxes & figure out where to store them
Fix the curtain hems I messed up

I still have my same goals for Jan, Feb, March, and now April. I am trying to get to 120 layouts (one a day). Today I was at a crop and finished EIGHT more. Woot. I have another day tomorrow at the crop and will finish a few more. I think right now I am sitting at 114 layouts (and need 16 more to get caught up to Christmas of 2022).

Hopefully I quoted this correctly. May I ask chinagirl828, how do you go about assessing half used alphas? I might be title-challenged, in fact, I’m sure of it. But I’d love to hear your process if you’re willing to share?

I didn't set any goals this month because I knew it would be busy. And boy was I right. I have taken tons of pictures, though, and I'm looking forward to scrapping them.
One thing I need to do this month is prep for iNSD. I'll be making a mini album for DD. I need to edit and resize pictures because the mini ix 4x4. I already have supplies picked out so I'm good there.

breakfastattiffanys and Linda, maybe she uses a word finder site.

I'm happy to share my process.  My first step is to see how many vowels and other usable letters are left.  I know the words I typically make use more A's and E's so I might have a lot of O's or U's left but it likely won't be very useful to me.  If I'm low on the letters I most often use I consider it a nearly finished alpha.  I'm willing to frankenstein letters, but my self imposed rule is it needs to be in a way that doesn't make it look frankensteined, so I'll cut the tail off a Q to make an O, or the arms off an F to make an I, but I won't try to make a G out of a C, and I won't frankenstein a puffy/chipboard/other alpha where it would be really obvious.  

If I look at a couple of the sets I pulled out over the weekend I've got the following:

Elle's Studio black puffy alpha: 1xA/E/I, 3xO, 2xU.  In terms of other very usable letters I've got a couple of D's and H's, 3 L's, and an M, along with the C/J/K/Q/V/X/Z's I always seem to end up with.  
Architexture rub ons: 1xE, 3xI, 2xO, 3xU.  Other usable letters are a D, a couple of G's, and one R, and then the random letters (like 3xB and 3xF - not very helpful at all!)

My next step is to think about the words I can make.  So the Elle's Studio set has lots of possible words: fall, call, dead, fade, made, lead, load, etc.  As I'm finding words I also consider how likely I am to use them in a title.  So things like fade, dead, load are just not words I see myself using.  I'm sort of thinking about what photos or stories I have to scrap to help narrow down the options.  If I have several that are strong possibilities for making it onto pages I'll write a list on the cardstock backer or a scrap of paper tucked into the packaging.  For this particular alpha my most likely choices are child (one of the nicknames for my cat is monkey child), my, cake, and hello.  If I make the word cake, it removes hello as a possibility as I've only got one E, so I'd cross out hello from my list of possible words.  

The Architexture set has fewer possibilities, but the one that really leapt out at me was bridge.  It might seem random, but I have some photos of Tower Bridge to scrap and I think the font will work well.  If I make bridge there are no other obvious words so I'll toss this alpha once I've made that page.  

Once I've committed to finishing an alpha and have some possible words worked out, I make sure I look at these first when trying to build my title.  I try to give myself a time limit to use the alphas, if they're not used within that period they just get tossed which helps me avoid having a pile of alphas with just one or two words left that never goes away.  After tidying my stash this weekend I've got 10 sets pulled out.  I try to only have one or two at a time, so I'll probably challenge myself to use at least two sets up per month until the pile is gone.  

I have more than enough alphas so I try not to be overly precious about making every possible word out of them, I inevitably reach a point where it becomes more difficult to build a title around the words that are left, which is a good place to consider it well used and get rid of whatever is left.  

Since I was pretty much a failure in March, I didn't set many goals for April. I'm thinking May might be the month I really get with it.
April goals:
1. Finish more than the 4 l/o-s I completed in March.
2. Go through the big box of misc. supplies and sort them in usable categories. Why do I keep putting this off?
3. Work some more on organizing inks & inking supplies in a more workable situation.