Christmas

Well, its the day after Christmas and I finally have time to sit down and write something.  (Although, I did find plenty of time for scrapping during the Christmas season.)  I'm getting a little dis-satisfied with just doing the cookbook.  I have so many pictures I want to get scrapped as well.  I just did a great (my best so far, I think) layout of my daughter and her first pair of skis. She got them for Christmas several years ago.  We were at my brother's home and they got a great snowfall overnight.  She and her cousins took her skis and their toboggans over the city park and had a great time going down the little hill there all day long.  This is the layout.  I used papers and the "let it snow" stamp by Katie Pertiet of Designer Digitals.  The snowflakes and the journaling block came from the White Christmas kit by ScrapOrchard. 

I wish I could figure out how to make this blog wrap around the picture!  this is so frustrating. 

My daughter gave me a dummies book on Photoshop Elements.  That should help me get over some of the hurdles I'm running into.  I've decided I really need to learn how to make ribbons and rick-rack in photoshop.  There are some swirly brushes and stamps people use all the time that I need to figure out as well.  When I look at galleries, my layouts all seem so plain compared to theirs.  A lot of them use empty space as a design element as well.  I'm a little afraid to do that, I think.  I'll have to experiment with it. 

Well, I need to stop now.  We have library books due today and we have one gift to exchange.  (Not bad, eh?)  Until next time.   Annie

Having Fun!

Oh, boy! Am I having a blast!  I've learned a lot about photoshop and the wonderful things you can do with it.  I've been so busy scrapping that I have completely and thoroughly filled up the hard drive on my laptop. 

I've had the computer almost 5 years now and it only has a 38 gig hard drive.  Its taken us 5 years to fill it, but since I started scrapping, it didn't take long at all.  I'm going to have to upgrade/or move things to an external hard drive.

I'm also going to have to upgrade my RAM.  Photoshop uses so much and its very slow going with what I have now.  Still I manage to get a page done almost every night.  Sometimes I have to spill over into another day.

I found the most wonderful book!  It is called Scrapbook Page Maps:  Sketches for Creative Layouts by Becky Fleck.  It is full of sketches to help you design your scrapbook layouts.  I was running out of ideas when I got my book the day before Thanksgiving.  I'm still working on my cookbook and I'm seriously running out of ideas.  I mean really. After all, how many different ways can you present a recipe and make it look fresh and new?  Today is the day after Thanksgiving.  I've already made three new pages, but they are also 100% better than what I was doing before.  I'm going to have to take some time off and clear some disk space on my computer.  In the meantime, here's one of my new, improved pages.   I'll post a link to Becky's site and the book as well.

I'm not 100% happy with this yet.  I think it needs something at the top around the "yummy" sticker.  Maybe some more of the flowers?

Credits:  All papers and the recipe card are from the Velma Balint set: Mother's Kitchen, The green ribbon and the lace it is on are from the collection:  Family Ties, by Erica Hite of Scrapgirls.  The "yummy" sticker is from the Cherry Pie collection by Amanda McGee at ScrapGirls, and was color changed. It was originally red and white.The flower, the journaling block, and the orangy ribbon are all mine.

Current Project

What got me started on this new addiction?  We have a family reunion coming up next summer.  Several of my siblings have been asking me for copies of mom's recipes over the years.  It just seemed like a natural step to combine this with a scrapbooking project:  Make a family cookbook to give everyone at the reunion.   I was just typing up the recipes and adding clip art, but that got boring really quickly.  So I started surfing the web to see if I could find new images to use.  and what did I find?  Digital scrapbooking.  I've made a half-dozen or so pages.  Then I got side-tracked experimenting with Photoshop Elements to see what I can do.  I've downloaded nearly a gig's worth of files, some purchased, some freebies.   Below is one of the pages I've done. 

This is one of the early ones.  I hadn't learned about drop shadows yet.  And, as you can see, this is in 12x12 format.  I've decided to do the pages as 8.5x11 so that the finished book will fit easily on a cookbook shelf.  So, I'll be redoing this eventually.  Even so, I'm very pleased with it.

Credits:  All papers and Elements came from the kit:  Lord of the Harvest, by Vicky Day.

wow!

I've discovered a new hobby. It has been consuming me for almost 3 weeks now. I am addicted to digital scrapbooking. I admit it. I'm hooked. For the last few days, I've even been strung out on creating my own papers and elements in photoshop. I'm afraid there's no hope. This is one of the papers I've done recently.  Problem is, I can't remember how I did it!  I'll have to start keeping a journal of some kind to record what I did. 

I'm finding that playing around in photoshop elements is even more fun than the scrapbooking. I've created a dozen or so of my own papers so far. I've been having a lot of fun playing around with overlays and styles. I need to figure out how to make glitter. That looks fun and interesting too. And brushes, I've just started experimenting with them. This could take a couple more weeks just figuring out how to do them.

In any case, this is fun! I'll attach a picture of what I'm working on, assuming I can figure out how.