Final French printables – the ones that started it all

The circle calendar set is the one Opsite loved and the ones that sparked us working together to convert my English language printables to French ones for her followers.  We’ve gone back and forth, and worked through a few versions, to finally arrive at these.  She has approved them so I can now add them for download.

Three pages, four months per page, 3×4 portrait style filler cards.  Grab them HERE

I thought it might be interesting to my English-only readers to see the translations of the French quotes that surround the day blocks.  I found them charming and an insight into another culture. Some, like our April showers bring May flowers or March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb are similar, but some just don’t resonate at all, like Do not whine if there are thunderstorms in July because if there weren’t any that month, there would be war and famine. 

JANUARY

Les douze jours qui vont de Noël aux Rois, donnent le temps des douze mois. 

The twelve days that goes from Christmas day to the day of the three Wise Men give an idea of the weather for the twelve next months. (In France we celebrate on January 6, that is called Epiphanie, the arrival of the three Wise Men and the presents they gave to Jesus. From that day and the rest of January we sometimes eat some sort of a cake with a porcelain object hidden within. The one who find the object is the king of the day and gets to wear a golden paper crown. Needless to say that it is mostly children who tend to find the object in their cake…)

FEBRUARY

Février n’est jamais si dur et si méchant qu’il ne nous fasse don de sept jours de printemps.

February is never that hard and tough that it won’t give us seven days of spring.

MARCH

Soit au début, soit à la fin, Mars nous montre son venin

Either in its beginning or in its end, March shows us its venom.

APRIL

Lorsqu’arrive la Saint-Valérien, l’arbre bourgeonne et les fruits ne sont plus loin

When Saint-Valérien day comes, trees are in buds and fruits are coming.

MAY

Mai frileux: an langoureux. Mai fleuri: an réjoui. Mai venteux: an douteux.

Chilly May : lazy year. Blooming May : happy year. Windy May : anxious year.

JUNE

Pluie de Saint-Jean noie les noisettes, mais beau temps de Saint-Pierre les rachète

Saint-Jean day’s rain clean the nuts but sun on Saint-Pierre day buy them back.

JULY

Ne vous plaignez pas s’il tonne en juillet ; car en ce mois s’il ne tonnait, guerre et famine il y aurait.

Do not whine if there are thunderstorm in July because if there weren’t any that month, there would be war and famine.

AUGUST

Ce que le mois d’Août ne mûrira pas, ce n’est pas Septembre qui le fera.

What August won’t ripe, September won’t ripe it either …

SEPTEMBER

Quand tu entends la grive chanter, cherche la maison pour t’abriter ou du bois pour te chauffer.

When you hear the thrush sing, look for a house to find shelter or for wood to warm you up

OCTOBER

En octobre, il faut que l’homme vite s’habille quand le mûrier se déshabille.

In October, you must get dressed fast when the blackberries tree shed its leaves.

NOVEMBER

Autant d’heures de soleil à la Toussaint, Autant de semaines à souffler dans tes mains.

You will spend as many weeks to blow in your hands as there are sunny hours on Toussaint day. (As I mentioned before, we celebrate a different saint every days. However, November 2d, that is Toussaint day, is the day we celebrate all the saints at once so that the one that did not made it to the calendar can be celebrated as well. It is a Holliday and a day off for everyone. And apparently you don’t want it to be a sunny day otherwise you will have a pretty cold winter)

DECEMBER

En décembre, pour que l’année aille comme il se doit, il convient que les champs s’enneigent par deux fois.

In December, if you want the next year to be nice, it is better that the fields get covered in snow twice.

BT Openreach has said they have not found enough evidence to justify the extensive work involved in replacing the cable but they have done SOMETHING to the line,  a D-side cable replacement that seems to have stabalized the line (not dropping every 5 minutes) and brought the speed back up to a reasonable level.  My router is still showing a lot or errors but so far, touch wood, so good. That MAY mean you see a bit more of me on my blog.  This may be three days in a row, so we shall see….

Valentines Printables

I am a little late getting my printables up for the UKS Project Life Challenge but finally, here they are.  The filler cards have song lyrics, and I think they could be used for anything from a partner to a child, your new phone, a fabulous bag or pair of shoes… 😀 The plain heart ones could work as journaling cards. You might even be able to add a heart punched photo, if that is your thing, to the one big one. Grab the sheet here.

 

Not designed to fit any punch in particular, the sheet has the heart as a shape you can use for a template. Because I am unsure if the A4 sized PDF will print on a US letter sized sheet of paper with the printer enforced margins, the template heart is snugged RIGHT up to the lower card. Usually I can place 5 cards on an A4 sheet so that printing on US letter paper will fit a 10.5 inch length – it is pretty close but I figure even if the tiny tip of the heart gets left off when printing you can still match it close enough. I do try to make things work for both A4 and US letter, and would ALWAYS appreciate a comment to let me know when they don’t, so I can adjust.

New printables, by request

I’ve been told there is experimentation and testing being done on my line, to assess what need to be done, and how cost-effective it is for BT to actually do it.  I am not holding out much hope, but I do have to spare a thought for those people living in a rural location who don’t have a business connection.  If it were just ME, talking to my bog standard ISP, Talk Talk, Plusnet, whatever, I am pretty sure that I would have been told, “live with it or move” but they are still looking at things.

I have seen a comment on some Back To School printables I did, asking for a full sheet of library cards. I had done a set a long time ago, that weren’t blank, but had a book title filled in, and a slightly different arrangement of the details, and I used them as a basis for these.  Combining a bit of both, there is a page of the Borrower-type cards and one of the catalog-type cards.  To my eye the Borrower ones look silly in the landscape orientation.  And the generic book title works, but I have also added a sheet with blank (except the word TITLE) catalog cards as well.

Sorry for the small image but it is fast to upload while I’m connected!

The three-page PDF can be downloaded here!

I have sent the completed French calendar printables to Opsite for approval and will hope to be able to add them soon!

 

Summer Printables (in French)

Still supremely frustrated with the whole internet thing, but at the moment it seems fairly stable and fast enough that I can actually do something.  I am going to add the final French printable, the Summer ones, that are complete.  I have the longer quotes from Opsite for the calendars and promise they will be top of my list.

There are two pages, the only difference being the colours.  The one you see here is lighter, the other the colour is a bit more intense.

Grab them here! And with any luck you will see me again tomorrow, and for WOYWW.

Knitting – lace charts

I had these, ready to post at some point, and I am just going to try uploading them and composing a post over the next hour or so, while I work offline on something else.

What I have been doing during my forced absence from the internet is knitting.  I completed the sweater I was making for DD and started another one, from a Craftsy class.  Not having much luck getting to watch the class – well, not unless I want to watch a minute, have my internet drop, wait, have it reconnect, watch another 5 minutes, etc etc.  – but I did get the class materials downloaded.

I have only ever really done simple knitting.  Socks, for all the fear they seem to cause, are really simple with a good pattern.  Follow it and you will have success.  But things like Cables and Lace, where there is a complex, multi-row or -round pattern?  THAT does my head in.  I started the lace yoke pattern for the Choose Your Own Sweater Adventure class but chart reading has never been my strong suit.  I kept losing my place, getting distracted or having to pick up and put down my knitting for 100s of reasons.  It was making me crazy.  So after frogging back to the cast on maybe 4 or 5 times because I made a stupid error in reading the chart, cause the marks I made didn’t make sense the next day, for example, I took a look at my problem and figured out how to solve it.

The chart looks like this. It’s not a complicated pattern really.  But I still struggle to “read” my knitting – if I lose my place I find it really hard to look at the stitches and figure out what they are.  and if I miss one, and things aren’t lining up right, I am hopeless at tinking back to correct.  I tried making marks, using a Post-it note to keep track of the row I was on, but was still struggling.  I never had this much trouble with crochet!  What I needed was the chart to be bigger and a way to isolate just the row I wanted at ay given time. Easy enough..

The symbols for this chart were easy so I just recreated it in my drawing program.

 

I printed it and cut it up into strips.

 

I made a stack of the rows. So all I had to do was complete the row then fold it back and paper clip it.  Do the next row, fold it back, etc.

 

I also made the legend bigger and easier to read. Was it a bit of work to do?  Yep.  LESS work than ripping out 4 rows of the chart?  Nope.  The good thing is I can store the chart with the pattern and will never have to do it again.

What would have been a quicker way to do it, and what I will do for any more complicated chart, is to scan it in, print it BIG, then use a window cut in a larger piece of card to show only the row I am working on.  Adding a couple of paper clips will make it a lot more secure than a Post-it note and the bigger size will help me a lot.

I don’t ever mind taking a bit of extra time, or doing a bit of work up front in order to make whatever the process is I’m working on easier.  It’s a bit like taking the time to create the monthly calendar blocks.  Sure, I may spend a day getting it all lined up, checking and re-checking the dates, and sizing them, but then, when I want to do a new calendar design,  I only have to do the fun part, the colour and image bit, the font choices, etc.  The hard and boring part is already done.  I just had to remember the lessons learned in calendar making and translate them to knitting to solve the problem.  And the lessons learned from having a kid with a disability, who has to find her own way to do something that is easy for many people, but not for her,  helped me recognize and analyze my limitations (bad eyesight, being scatterbrained and unable to easily grasp charts) and develop a way to overcome them.  Much better than just saying Well, I will never knit lace or cables…ever.

 

Not normal service…yet

I am losing the will to fight on, frankly.  BT claims they have replaced the faulty cable, but my line is still not good.  I have ordered a new router that gives me greater control over the line (due to arrive today)and have yet another engineer to be booked next week.  My ISP says the line is still showing  fault when tested, but needed the weekend to collect more data.  ARGH.  The slower speed is a pain, but the dropping connection more of an issue.

It’s just been too hard to try to upload anything large and all I have at the moment are large files.  I am going to try the smaller of the two cause I feel really bad that no sooner had I started the collaboration with Opsite than all this technical stuff got in the way.  I figure I’ll just let it run in the background and hopefully it will still upload even if the line drops and reconnects 20 times while it’s happening.

This is the French version of the Endless Summer printables. You can download the single page PDF here

I have received the quotes from Opsite for the French version of the calendar so will work on that offline, and still have the French Spring Fling set to upload.  It’s a lot bigger so will take longer.

Don’t give up on me!  I’m still here….

Back to English – 4 x 6 calendar journaling blocks

In my discussions with Estelle (Opsite) we were trying to decide the best way to convert the Circle Quotes CD calendar to a PL size one.  I felt like the 3×4 size might be too small for the quotes to be readable but I had an idea that I thought worked.  Although we have sorted out most of the issues we are stuck at the moment on a couple of things for the French version (me with my bad internet issues and Opsite with finding comparable quotes in French that are long enough to make a circle) so it is taking longer than it would normally for me to get them done and added.  I do have the Summer and Spring printables converted for French readers but as they have image elements that make them BIG and therefore slow to upload on a dodgy connection, they will have to wait.

Silly, but I feel slightly guilty that my poor blog has been neglected.  So I came up with this as a bit of a stop-gap.  98% of the design work was done, it was just a matter of sizing and placement.  All which could be done without going online.  And best of all as it is basically all  “text” elements (even the images are dingbats and the journaling lines rows of …) even at 6 pages it is TINY to upload and download.  Result! Grab it here.

Basically, this the CD calendar fit into a 4 x 6 block, with journaling lines alongside.  I think it could be quote useful for Project Life sleeves.  It would also be possible, as the size is right, to print then cut out the circle and the journaling block, then mount them onto a 4 x 6 block of maybe cardstock or patterned paper, for a more colourful version.  As the circles are 3 inches across in size, although it might mean the text is literally at the very edge of the block, it might even be possible to cut them to get a 3 x 4 card.

This bring up other possible options:

• a true 3 x 4 version
• a true 3 x 4 version with Monday to Sunday circles
• the 4 x 6 size with Monday to Sunday circles
• the 4 x 6 size in portrait orientation, with journaling lines below
• the 4 x 6 size in portrait orientation, with journaling lines below with Monday to Sunday circles

If I thought a bit more I might even come up with a few MORE options LOL! But I am on a mobile connection (the actual BT one seems to have given up the ghost for the moment, once more dropping every 5 minutes or so) and just uploading everything I did offline still took an hour.  I’ll hit submit and watch for comments on what, if anything, you might like of the possible options.  Hope they are useful and will hope to get the French version done soon.