Freude im Ausland

My sister, my mother, and their friends are always posting cute scrapbooking/crafty projects on their blogs. Today I finally get the opportunity to post something crafty on my blog.

Maintaining a scrapbooking habit in Germany would be extremely expensive. Scrapbooking is actually an extremely expensive hobby to begin with. But in Germany, you aren’t able to find any of the pretty paper/materials anywhere, so if you want to actually do some scrapbooking you have to import all of your materials (at least as far as I know. If any of my German friends know where to get some cool stuff, please give me a shout out in the comments). I decided to invite some of my friends over tonight to make bookmarks. I bought a laminator a couple of years ago, and it hasn’t seen much use, so I though I would bust it out tonight.

I thought I used my available resources to good advantage. I used basic A4 paper in three different colors. I also used a green gum wrapper which kind of had a metallic feel to it. Then as decorations, I busted out my folder of doodles. It is really hard for me to throw out any doodles, so I always just shove them into a file of drawings (even if they are just stars or something). Some of the doodles actually took me a good amount of time to make though, so I was able to use some of them for my bookmark. On the front, I pasted a little drawing of a fly that I made last year or so and never had the opportunity to use. On the back, I pasted a cool pattern that I drew with metallic gel pens on graph paper last year while I was bored. I was super psyched for the result when tragedy struck. Our bookmarks got stuck in the laminator because they were too thick. We were able to wrench them out, but unfortunately they resembled sun chips. I was able to flatten them out a bit with an iron later, so they are now usable, although definitely not worthy of a museum. Still, I took pictures of the bookmark post ironing, so you can see my  handiwork (and for all you master scrapbookers out there, just imagine your scrapbooks if you had to make all of your decorations yourself).

Here is the front of the bookmark with my fly:

Here is the back:

I made the bookmark just the right size for my bible, so I put part of my favorite verse on the back:

1. Johannes 4:4 Ihr seid aus Gott, Kindlein; und ihr habt sie überwunden, denn größer ist der, der in euch ist, als der, der in der Welt ist. (Deutsch)

1 John 4:4 You are of Got little children; and you have overcome them because greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world. (English)

Sorting through my old sketches made me a little nostalgic, so I decided to go through my box of souvenirs that I have collected during the last couple of years. I thought that maybe I would find something that I could use there as well. I didn’t, but I did pull out my box of non euro coins and there was a zip lock with a bunch of mixed change in it, so I decided to sort through my change (this also gave me the opportunity to remove the remaining U.S. cents still in my wallet). It was at this point that I decided I would take a picture of the coins, but then my cell phone pretty much broke down. There is a very limited amount of built in memory on my phone and I have been trying to move as much to my SD card as possible and trying to delete all unnecessary information. Unfortunately, I must have deleted some information that was necessary, because the whole phone was on the fritz. I had to reset the phone and delete all of my apps. Luckily, my pictures were all backed up on Google (I don’t take that many pictures and none of them are especially private, so I am not extremely worried about that). I don’t save anything very important on my phone. The only thing that I actually lost was my to do list, but luckily I have a to do list saved in my brain as well. Anyway, here is the picture of my pile of euro coins and my cute wooden box filled with all my coins that are not euro coins:

The box on the right is the box with all my souvenirs. I really do want to find some way to scrapbook all of the tickets/maps/receipts/postcards/everything else that I have saved in that box. I will probably eventually fill up the little scrapbook that my mother gave me last summer.

Speaking of my mother, she and my father were just here in Düsseldorf. They came and visited me for about a week. Here is a really cute pic of my mom and dad in the gardens at Benrath Palace:

This evening was quite relaxing. It made me think that this semester isn’t going to all that bad after all. I have probably been waxing a bit too dramatic on Facebook. I have actually been seriously considering attempting NaNoWriMo again this year, so I can’t be under that much pressure. I am working 10-12 hours a week and have 26 hours of lecture, but I’m sure I’ll come out alright. I always get a little stressed right at the start of semester because I have not gotten used to how everything works yet. Work was just a bit more stressful this week because tomorrow I have to go try to apply for my driver’s license tomorrow instead of working.