My First Feature....Mindy Mae's Market

I was just featured on

Mindy Mae's Market.

Here's her feature. The theme was old windows.

Monday, July 16, 2012

First Feature...Old Windows!

"Erin over at Kaminski's Creations submitted this incredible old window project. I really love it for two reasons: 1. I LOVE repurposing items. 2. I ADORE crafts that can also be repurposed, updated, re-done, re-arranged...you get the idea. You'd think I had committment issues. 

Erin fashioned this window to serve as a rotation of her scrapbooking. She can put in new pages and put the already showcased pages in a scrapbook. I love that! I love that people will see work that they might not otherwise and I love that it won't be lost after use!

Head over HERE and see the amazing project come to fruition!"

Here was my original post.

Family Window Frame

So remember my the pic of my sneak peak family window project? Well, if you don't here's the sneak peak again. I was inspired by Jacklyn over at 3 Heart Designs.I was so inspired that I shared it with my friend Tricia who is branching out into the crafting world (she's a creative person at heart). So I invited her and my friend Donna over for a craft night (we kept it small this time) to work on our windows and Donna crocheted. As Tricia said, she is the crochet whisperer. She's the one who taught me.

Here's Tricia's window. Super cute!

Here's me working on a layout. Yes, we were in our pj's. The only way to craft.

Tricia became an pro at cutting the paper.

So for mine, here's how I started. I had bought an old frame at Canton that had been updated (she'd cleaned it up, painted it and added wood to act as shutters). I decided it needed to be black so I taped off the windows and spray painted it. I like spray painting better when I'm going to distress something. It sands off better. After is was dry I rubbed it with sandpaper (medium grit).

You can see the distressed part a little below. Then I measured the window panes and cut out posterboard pieces that were slightly bigger than the pane.

Then, I made my layouts (I'd already narrowed down my pics, papers and embellishments).

I just love the Tim Holtz keys and metal medallions!

I found this cool scrapbooking paper that looks like recipe cards and I added a recipe for a happy family. At this point I was still working on the wording so I left it blank.

Here's the back of the window so you can see how the vendor added the pseudo shutters and so you can see the taupe color it was. That would not have shown up at all on our walls at all.

After the layouts were dry and complete, I taped them in with packing tape.

Yep, we're fancy over here. I intend to take these out periodically and update them. When I remove a layout, I'll make a new scrapbook to keep all "discarded" layouts in.

Here's the completed frame. 

It will go above this console table and I'll move my other pics somewhere else.

Once again, thanks Jacklyn for your inspiration! Here's the pic I saw that inspired me.

Recipe for a Happy Family

Mix equal parts giggles, cuddles and smooches.

Add heaping amounts of understanding, forgiveness, love and patience.

Sprinkle with honesty and loyalty.

Fold in consideration, participation and cooperation.

Repeat layers as necessary for a happy family.

Our Christmas Card

Merry Christmas from our family to yours!

Above is our Christmas card that I designed using Photoshop and digital scrapbooking elements. If you haven't ever tried to use Photoshop to create digital scrapbook pages (I usually do it for special gifts that I want multiple copies of, like gifts for the grandparents), check out The Shabby Princess Tutorials. They have video tutorials that you can pause and play as you create your own layouts. And they have free super, cute downloads as well as ones you can purchase. The one above, I purchased.

A Father's Day Present

For Father's Day 2009, I made this digital scrapbook as a present for Russell. The theme was 10 Things We Love About You. I added a forward page that explained that there were too many things to possibly list them all, but these were the top 10 things we loved the most.

I loved using these photomasks on the photos for this page.

Well, there you have it. You've seen all of my ventures into digital scrapbooking. So what scrapbooking projects are you working on? I'd love to hear about them. 

The ABC's of Sophia's First Year

As promised I'm posting pics of one of the scrapbooks I made digitally. I wanted to do this one digitally because I wanted a copy for myself, but also wanted both sets of grandparents to have a copy as a Christmas present.

Basically, I got this idea when she was about 6 months old and so I started making a list of all the things she liked, things she did, people in her life and events etc and kept adding to that list all year long. Then I'd start collecting photos to go with those words.

Here's the cover.

This page is the opening page.

This was my first attempt at digital scrapbooking and I really enjoyed it. But I think that's because I worked on it for about 7 or 8 months. With my most recent attempt at a digital scrapbook, I had a deadline and only had about 2 weeks to work on it. So my advice if you're going to do it is give yourself plenty of time, otherwise it's not enjoyable.

Shhhhh......Don't Tell Russell

Shhhh. Don't tell Russell. You have to promise not to tell. Promise? Okay. True confession time.

Russell bought me this super cool laptop for Christmas/birthday (coming in Feb.) so I could start doing things digitally like scrapbooking. And recently, like today, I finished a free book from Shutterfly for his Valentine's Day present and have come to the conclusion that I'm  thinking I like a "manual" approach better. My wrist is still sore from using the cordless mouse on this project. But  isn't my computer super cute??!! Plus, it supports the Susan G. Koman foundation.

But I thought I would show you my organizational approach just in case this is up your alley.

To start with the book was 20 pages which means page  1 stands alone and the others are double page spreads. Plus, you need a cover. So to start with I made categories of things I loved about Russell. Then I found pics to go along with those titles. Once I found all my pics, I did a rough draft on notebook paper to figure out what should come first. The check marks indicate that I finished that page.

The other printouts you see are tutorials on how to do things in photo shop. I save those in a notebook for later.

On my laptop, while Sophia is watching Caillou or Max and Ruby, I work on my project.

I called this my V book so Russell wouldn't know what it was if he saw what I was working on. I also went to different galleries and got inspiration from other graphic designers. I store all those ideas in my scrapbook ideas folder.

Inside my V book folder, I made up these 4 folders to help organize the process, which is another reason I like "manual" better. It's instant gratification. Once you make it, you're done. However, via digitally, you are not.

While I'm working on layouts, all work gets saved in the layouts section. After that, if I decide to share pages on my blog, I save them to the "for web" section. Once each page is ready to print, I save it in the "for print" section, meaning it's ready to upload to Shutterfly.

This page shows the different categories of pictures I had. Each category was either a page or 2 pages, depending on how many photos I had.

Let me warn you, when working on the cover, make sure everything is towards the center cause it crops a ton  off.

I know it sounds like I'm not a fan of digital scrapbooking, and in many ways, I am NOT, but it is good if you're making multiple copies of the same scrapbook like I did for the grandparents for Christmas Sophia's first year. I made them (and us) a copy of The ABC's of Sophia's First Year. But for my family album, I will stick to "manual" scrapbooking. Just don't tell Russell. :)

I'll post some layouts from my other ventures into digital scrapbooking on  a future post.

My Valentine Book

I recently got a free 8 x 8 book from Shutterfly and couldn't really think of anything to use it for at first. The more I thought about it, the more I thought that I could use it to make a Valentine's gift for Russell. So I went to The Shabby Princess to download a digital kit. 

I'm going with the theme "I'm Wild About You" and then using the pages to tell him why I'm wild about him.

Here's what I have so far.

The Cover

Page 1

 Page 2

 Page 3

 Page 4

 Page 5

 Page 6

 Page 7

It's a 20 page book so I have quite a bit left to create. If you think you might be interested in digital scrapbooking, check out the free tutorials on The Shabby Princess tutorial page. You have to have Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.

Now off to finish those other 13 pages. :)

(Sidenote: Please understand that these pages are still works in progress and I usually back and tweak each page before I print them).



Valentine's Day is On It's Way...

Valentine's Day is on it's way! Are you ready? I just downloaded this cute digital kit from

www.shabbyprincess.com.

I got a free 8 x 8 photobook from www.shutterfly.com and decided that since Valentine's Day is the next major holiday, I'd make a book for Russell. I've started sorting through pics last night. I'm thinking I'm going to go with things I love about you theme and put pics of him cooking with Sophia, playing with Sophia etc. I'm going to use Photoshop to create my layouts. Once I have some complete I'll post them to let you see what I came up with. Of course, if you don't have Photoshop, this could also be done by hand.

So what are you planning on creating for your Valentine?