This Scrapper's Got Talent - Week One

Wow... only a few people have posted their completed layouts so far, but the competition is HARSH! :-) I don't see a single layout that I don't like. I'm not sure how the elimination part of this contest will work, but it is going to be a challenge to keep up with some of these gals. I'll keep my fingers crossed that I move on to Week 2. They will let us know on Wednesday.

This Scrapper's Got Talent

So, I decided it would be fun to enter a contest that Stuff To Scrap is holding. It is called "This Scrapper's Got Talent" and will be held from May 26th - June 30th. It is an elimination contest so each week only some of the contestants move on to the next week. It will be fun to see what it involves.

More School of Life Pages

I got another few pages done for Emerson's School of Life book. I'm stuck with the next chapter now though because I need photos from his Baptism in order to complete the pages and I was a bit busy to take any! I'm hoping my in-laws have some. Maybe I will skip that chapter and move on to the next one for now.

Today was the day that I was supposed to have my Mom's Club people over to make pillowcases but I had to reschedule because Emerson was running a fever yesterday. I don't know if he is sick or just working on some new teeth. No other symptoms, so we'll see.

Snow!

Yesterday was a super rainy, yucky day. Today, it is snowing! Yes, snowing in Victor on April 27th. Blech! Time to drag out the winter coats again in order to run errands this morning. When I posted on my Facebook status that it was snowing, a bunch of people that live fairly close to me posted back that it was clear where they were, so I had to take a picture.

Yesterday, I managed to get a couple more pages done in Emerson's book. These are for chapter 2 - 4-6 months. I'm finding it really healing to get these pages done. This was an incredibly stressful time when he first came home from the hospital between the monitor alarms, all the medications, and all of the doctor visits. I'm so glad to be past all of that now. I found an online calendar creator site that lets you plug in all of your dates and it spits out a calendar in WORD format. So much faster than writing out the individual calendar months by hand like I did for Dutton's first year.

Getting It Done!

Some of you know that over the last month or so, I have been very focused on decluttering, organizing, and cleaning the house. I finally feel like I can dig out from under the craziness left over from Emerson's birth now that the days are getting longer and my S.A.D. has subsided. I started in the back hallway and am slowly making my way through the house. I'm making some great progress, getting rid of lots of things and hopefully making some new (good) habits along the way. To force myself to keep moving forward, I invited my Mom's Club over to work on a sewing service project we are doing. In order to do that, I knew I needed to get my sewing space cleaned up. There is still way too much stuff in the room, but it is clean and I am able to work in there and to have other people over without being embarrassed.

Here are my before pictures of the room:

and here is what it looks like today:



To celebrate getting all of that hard work done, I am allowing myself some time to play and get some of my backlog of projects finished. Today, I finished the rest of the first chapter of Emerson's Early School of Life book. I had done page one and two a few months back and this morning I finished pages 3, 4, and 5. Page 6 will be a pocket page to hold paperwork.

Fun with Dirt

Just had to post this photo I took today. Emerson was having such a great time watching the guys work. I had to laugh when he got it stuck on the front wheels.

Catching Up!

Wow... I just realized I haven't posted anything here since the end of February! Things were a bit crazy last weekend with family in from out-of-town and then this week I feel like I have been playing catch-up all week. I'm a few layouts behind for DYL with no time in sight for catching up.

Here are the layouts I finished since my last post -

This was the second layout for week 9 (lines.) I enjoy these layouts packed full of photos. Makes for a great record of an event.


Here is the first layout for week 10 on Color - the assignment was to pick four colors from the photos in your layout and to use those to create your layout. The heart paper and the ribbon are from the March STS Blog Train kit - French Tulips.

I'm making steady progress with the LOM class. I've been working on tagging the photos in my highlights folders . I'm finding it isn't as easy to retrieve things in the PSE organizer as I would have liked, but it's not *too* bad either. I really want to be able to find a group of photos with only one tag - for example - photos of Emerson by himself but I haven't figured out an easy way to do it yet. I found a tutorial online that explained how to do it, but I couldn't get it to work. Either I'm doing something wrong, or there was an error in the lesson. If anyone can explain to me how the "exclude" feature is supposed to work, I'd appreciate it!

Lines

This week we start the two week discussion of elements - and in particular the line. I can't believe we are in week 9 already. This class will be over before we know it. I really liked sketch one for this week and had fun creating this layout. I had blogged about this event when it happened and it was neat to go back, re-read what I had written, and create a page.

Emerson's monitor was such a huge part of our lives for almost 8 months of his life - the three months he was in the NICU, and then 5 months after at home. It was the monitor that would alert us to any trouble he was having, the monitor that kept one of us tethered to his side, the monitor that gave us a bit of peace of mind so we could sleep at night. We knew when we were all ready to get rid of it though. The alarm wasn't going off any longer for "real" reasons. Emerson learned he could pull the leads off and make it alarm and make us come running. He started rolling over and getting tangled in the cords, and he started teething - on the monitor cords! There were a few sleepless nights when we first turned it off, but soon we could trust that he had really outgrown his tendency to stop breathing and everything was going to be ok.

Emphasis - week two

Well, we are continuing with emphasis this week. I never finished the second layout for last week. I have something started but I'm not sure I like it, so I put it aside and moved on. I'll get back to it at some point, hopefully with a fresh eye.

This week we are looking at using one very large photo as our emphasis - like you might find in a magazine story. Here is my first layout. I scrapped these same photos a few months back as my very first all digital layout, but I wanted to revisit them and see what else I could do with them.



In Library of Memories, this is a break week to allow people time to process the material from the first two weeks and get some of the leg work done on their organizing. This weekend I went out and bought three "storage binders" which are just pocket style photo albums with a three ring binding. The purpose of the storage binders in the system is to have a place to store your printed photos before you scrap them in a way that allows people to easily look at them. The binders are intended to hold just your highlight photos - the best photos you have taken for each quarter.

Since I am scrapping pretty much exclusively digital these days, I really wasn't very excited about printing out photos just to stick them in an album for now. It was suggested to try a digital photo album to basically digitally accomplish the same task. I'm headed to the stores today to see if I can find one I like at a reasonable price to do that.

I did, however, want to try the system as proposed and got myself three binders to hold my older photos that I did already have printed out. Binder one now contains all of my old photos - basically 1965 - 1985 or so. I skipped over my photos from 1987 - 1995 and put them in a storage box to deal with at a time when I felt better equipped emotionally to deal with them. Binder two starts when Colin was born. Many of these photos I have actually already scrapped, but those were the days of purchasing double prints everytime I had film developed, so I have lots of extras. I went through and pulled prints from that time that were my favorites. It was so fun to go back through them and I have started to see the magic in the connections that are made when you do a task like that. I found photos of people I didn't know I had pictures with, photos of people that are no longer with us, photos of funny faces or events, and pictures of Colin doing some of the same things his brothers are doing now.

I know Stacy (the teacher) has plans for us in the next few weeks to do things with some of these photos, and I look forward to seeing what those things are. For now, I'm enjoying just browsing through them and remembering.

School of Life - The Early Years

Back sometime around 1999, I took a class from Stacy Julian at a scrapbook store near Seattle. At the time, she was getting ready to publish her book "Simple Scrapbooks". When it came out, I fell in love with her "School of Life" concept and started a book for Colin. When Dutton came along, I wanted to do something similar for him but I knew it would be many years before he was school aged. I modified the idea slightly and called it "School of Life - The Early Years". Basically, I follow the same 6 page system that Stacy used for each "chapter". For the first year of their life, since they are changing so fast and there are lots of great things to remember, I created multiple "chapters". After that, each year is from one birthday to the next. I plan to do pages for the little guys this way until they are in Preschool and then start a School of Life - The Primary Years book for them.

Page 1 contains an enlargement of a portrait from that time period.
Page 2 contains a group of pictures from an important event (for the first year) or their birthday party (for age 1 and up)
Pages 3 and 4 contain a simple multi-photo layout of the major year events
Page 5 is a pocket page and contains the visit summaries from the doctor visits and any other important papers for that period of time
Page 6 contains calendar highlights for the period - dates for milestones (sitting up, first solid food, teeth coming in, etc.)

Since getting more organized for Library of Memories I have been able to very quickly pound through a bunch of pages for Emerson's book. I sat down and created some templates of some of the different page layouts I have used previously for Colin's and Dutton's books, and created Emerson's pages entirely digitally. So far, I have the page 1 and 2 created for Emerson's first three chapters - his NICU time, 4-6 months, and 7-9 months. His 10-12 month page one and two is almost complete as well but I need to search out some extra photos from his baptism from family members since I was a bit busy to take many.

Here are the completed layouts. It feels good to be checking things off my list!

Emphasis - assignment one

So, I didn't realize it until after I had completed it and posted it, but the layout I did for this assignment matched the one I did a few assignments back perfectly! For whatever reason, I am in a blue and red mood this past week. It helps that I like to dress the boys in those colors and they look really good in them. :-) Again, I wanted to do another "relationship" layout and had these great photos of Jim and Dutton together. I love the way it came out!

DYL - Week Six - Unity - Layout Two

Since we only had one layout assignment this week for LOM, I didn't have to worry about trying to combine assignments for this layout. I had a lot of trouble finding "tooth" embellishments that I liked, and I'm still not sure I'm happy with the one I picked. I really wanted a fun tooth font. I thought there was a great alpha in this digital kit I purchased, but it was only a cute word art that wouldn't work on this layout. I even tried re-working it to change it from saying "tooth" to "teeth"but I couldn't get it to look right, so I gave up on that idea for now. I'm finding that if I let myself, I can get lost in a single detail like that and waste a lot of time.

I am continuing to sort, organize, and delete my digital images for LOM. I'm really enjoying spending the time looking at each and every photo, and I think the boys are enjoying it too. I know I will get faster and better at it as I go on, but for now, choosing the best one or two photos out of a series of a dozen or so nearly identical pictures is a challenge for me. I'm also getting better at allowing myself to delete an image no matter how cute it could have been if it is out of focus. (I may save a FEW of them to use in a creative way, but for the most part, I'm not holding on to them!)

Here is layout two, week six as it stands right now. The background paper is from a kit called Waiting for Spring by Sexy and Hot Mama Scrapper and the little tooth is from a kit called Toothy Smile by LLIELLA.

Combining limited resources!

I have limited time available to me to complete my homework for my classes, and now that I started Library of Memories too, I am really feeling the time crunch - especially when the three year old comes in to the computer room and is tugging on my arm asking me to play with him. I decided to combine two assignments into one and create my layout 1 for week 6 of DYL using the requirements for assignment 1 of LOM. Here is the result. I'm really pleased with how it came out! When I finished doing the inventory of my completed layouts for LOM, I realized that almost all of my layouts are about things/events - this birthday celebration, that Christmas, that
hobby, the first day of school for a given year, etc. What I was sorely missing was layouts that talked about relationships, dreams, and everyday life. Who are we, and why do we do the things we do? As I was sorting my digital images, I came across these photos of the little guys and I knew I had to make a layout celebrating their relationship and putting into words my hopes and dreams for them in the future.

Now, off to buy Emerson some new shoes because he won't stop growing! :-)

Join Me For Some Sweet Talking!

We’re kicking off a month-long challenge at one of my favorite sites today … the Sweet Talk Journaling Challenge at Log Your Memory! {please link to http://logyourmemory.com}

I hope you’ll come on over and check it out today … there will be an entire month of scrapbooking challenges with a focus on “real life” journaling, plus the chance to earn points and prizes along the way! And if you’ve never visited before, you’re in for a treat! We have a wonderful group of friendly, helpful scrapbookers just waiting to say hello and show you around!

Get started by visiting the Log Your Memory Blog HERE and get ready to journal your way to becoming a Log Your Memory Sweet Talker!

(And tell them scrapchris sent you!)

Extra layout!

Ok, I am still behind a few layouts for the first few weeks of class, but I couldn't resist finishing up this one anyway. I had started it when I first was playing with this week's template and I wasn't happy with how it was coming out. When I saw the new kit "It's Not Easy Being Green" by Scraps by Andrea that was released this week, I knew I had to buy it and use it to finish up this layout. I used the diagonal plaid paper in the other layout I made with this same template and really liked the way it framed the central square. I just had to repeat it. I rotated the template because the photos I wanted to use just weren't working in the other direction.

The stitching was from the STS Blog train "Hey Mr Groundhog" and was recolored for this layout.

Deer!

Ok, so it isn't scrapbook related, but I did take some pictures of it. Yesterday evening right at dusk, I happened to look out into the backyard and there was a deer standing at my garden. She was quite cooperative to stand there for a bit as we took some photos, then she turned and jumped over the fence to leave, joining two other deer friends that were waiting for her.
The boys got a big kick out of it and Dutton wants to know when she is coming back again.

Black Space?

So, I took the idea of white space on this layout and turned it into "Black" space in honor of the Halloween photos. I really like the way this one turned out. I was worried that the bright orange would detract from the photos. What do you think?

Week Five - White Space

Design Your Life Week five is all about white space. Some of the white space discussions have gone beyond scrapbooking and are discussing white space in our lives. As I look around me at the clutter everywhere I wish for a bit of "white space"in my life!

I really wanted to create these layouts in a way that helped me catch up with some of the scrapbooking that I feel like I am behind on, but I am finding that trying to fit a specific event into that week's assignment just isn't working well for me. For example - Colin's scrapbooks are all done in the 8.5 x 11 size because that is what I started with back in 1996 when I first started scrapbooking. This week's first layout was a 12x12 size. I may go back and try and re-do this layout into an 8.5x11 size so that I can use it in Colin's album, but for now I just completed the assignment as given.


I am still not sure about the background paper, but I'm going to set it aside for now and see what I think about it after walking away for a while.

In other scrapbooking news, Stacy Julian's Library of Memories class starts Thursday and I am chipping away at the pre-class homework that has been assigned for that as well. I have been a HUGE Stacy fan since the 90's. I took a few classes with her when she was in Seattle and my "School of Life" books for all three boys are her design. I am looking forward to this but I don't know what I have got myself into! The good part about LOM is that you can come back for the next two years as an alumni for no additional charge and the class materials are available forever. So, if I am over my head this go around, I can wait and try again later.

I have also been in touch with one of the local photo shops about getting 12x12 layouts printed. He is in the process of purchasing a new machine that will print that size layout. If I print a quantity of layouts at a time, he is willing to give me a discount. It will still end up costing more than ordering them online, but I would really like to be able to keep my business local in this economy. We'll have to compare quality and see if the extra cost is worth it to me.

Snips N Snails

I was honored to be asked to be a guest on the CT for Jane of Little Red Scraps for the release of her newest kit - Snips N Snails. The colors are great for boy photos and I sure have a lot of those!

It is available exclusively at Stuff to Scrap and the matching cardstock is included free if you purchase it this week! Buy It Here!

Here are the layouts I created:

Amazing what a night's sleep can do!

I struggled with this layout for a good part of the day on Saturday. Finally, I decided to post what I had on the constructive criticism forum and sleep on it. I woke up this morning to a few great suggestions on the forum and played for a while to incorporate some of the suggestions. While fiddling with the sliders trying to change the color of the background paper, I stumbled upon a true "Ah-ha" moment. The golden yellow of my pattern paper forms a triad on the color wheel with a blue-green shade (and a blue-violet shade but I didn't use any of that color) I never would have thought to use that color with the colors I was already using, but it works!

Here is the before and after -

BEFORE:

AFTER: I think I am ready to put it away and move on to the next assignment.

Argh... just noticed I missed cleaning up the red eye. *sigh* I'll have to remember to do that before I print it.

Attempting some designing myself

I have been following the Designer Darling Competition going on right now at Stuff to Scrap. I'm nowhere near the place where I can be doing something like that, but I am having fun watching the women go through the challenges and seeing the comments and questions that are coming out. One of the comment posts after last week's round was that they all needed to be putting more texture into their papers, and there was a neat thread on some ways to do that. I haven't yet taken the time to make any of my own texture overlays, but I do have a few CU textures that I bought so far and I thought I would try them out. There were some great instructions on www.scrappersguide.com on how to make a plaid paper from your photo, and so I combined both technique articles and gave it a try. Here is my result. I love the way it came out and can't wait to try it with other photos.

This was my photo I started with:



and this is the paper I came up with:


Pretty cool, eh?

Desktop Challenge Layout

So, it is the 3rd week of January and I hadn't done a single challenge layout this month since I have been so busy with the classwork. I decided to take a few minutes and do the desktop challenge since I was tired of looking at my December one. Since I missed January already, I went ahead and created my February desktop. The challenge was simple - create a layout about someone or something you love. Of course, I had to use this photo of my boys. We are still in recovery mode around here. A stomach bug attacked our entire household over the last week. Dutton got sick overnight last Thursday, Emerson on Sunday afternoon, me on Monday night, and Colin and Jim Tuesday morning. Let's just say Tuesday wasn't pretty around our house and the two babies basically had the run of the house and didn't understand why the rest of us were so miserable!

Here's the layout. Week Four of Design Your Life will be coming soon...

Repetition - part two

So, despite Pukefest 2010 hitting my house last night, I managed to complete the second layout assignment for this week on Repetition. After looking for a while at some of the layouts in the gallery, I realized the ones that were catching my eye today were the layouts that told a story. I knew just the photos I wanted to use. I found the process of choosing photos to be much easier for me this week than in the first two weeks.

I still need to go back to the "Real World Color" layout from last week and get it wrapped up. I ended up not being able to find the papers I wanted to use on it so I set it aside for now. If anyone knows of a digital scrapbooking blog where the designer has created an entire series of patterned papers one color family at a time, can you let me know where it is? I looked at it a few weeks back when I was first really getting into this and I thought I bookmarked it and now I can't find it again!

Here is my layout 2 for week 3.

Repetition

This week we are learning about repetition in my "Design Your Life" class. I was really excited to see the template for the first assignment because I knew exactly which photos I had to use for it as soon as I saw it. For some of the other assignments so far, I have really struggled with which event to choose. I'm really enjoying the chance to catch up some in Colin's scrapbook. It has been sorely neglected since the babies came along.

Because Cathy switches around in the class what sized pages we are working on, I have been able to choose which scrapbook I am working on for any given assignment based on what size the pages are. All of Colin's pages are 8.5 x 11 because that is what I started with when I first started scrapping. Each boy also has a 12x12 "School of Life" book, and an 8x8 Christmas ornament book. I have a 12x12 album for myself that I have used for photos from a cruise we took for my honeymoon and and an 8.5x11 album of random pages that I have done that don't fit in anyplace else. I'll probably start 12x12 albums for the little guys at some point because I know I won't be satisfied with only the "School of Life" albums for them.

This is assignment one for week three:

I really like Cathy's clean uncluttered design style. It fits very well with the style I had already developed for myself.

I'm also really excited how the main photo turned out. Originally, the photo was entirely in focus but I really wanted to blue out the background elements and focus on Colin's face. I had not used the magic extractor feature on Photoshop Elements before and I found it to work great and to be very easy. I duplicated the photo layer, extracted just Colin onto a blank layer, then blurred the layer with the entire photo left on it. I placed the "Colin" layer on the top, and presto!

Asymmetry

I think I accomplished what I wanted to on this layout. It took a long time to find just the right photos and papers to highlight the changes in Colin in this past year. I'm really proud of him. He completed an incredible self-development class called Lifestream this past weekend. He was by far the youngest student in the class. When we went to his graduation, I lost count of the number of people that came up to me to tell me what a great young man I was raising. He spoke in front of the entire room full of people and received a standing ovation. I look forward to seeing what will come next.

Week 2

So week 2 of Design Your Life is about asymmetry. When I saw this week's templates, I fell in love with the second one and knew right away what I wanted to do with it. Pair that with last week's release of "Do A Good Turn Daily" by Scraps 'N Pieces, and I have a great layout of one of Colin's Pinewood Derby races. (I'm still not sure if I will end up scrapping each one of them, or if I might just highlight that year's race and then do some sort of summary page with photos of all of his cars through the years.


The other major assignments for this week are giving me some trouble. Something about the one page layout isn't working for me, so I am going to play a bit and see what I can do with it.

Assignment 3 - Real World Color

For this assignment, Cathy has given us a color scheme that she found in a carpet ad and has asked us to create a layout based on those colors and a provided template/sketch. I knew when I saw it that I had a photo of Dutton wearing a striped shirt in very similar colors. The hard part for me was to find something to go with it. I'm not sure the circles work exactly, but I wanted to be sure to get the assignment completed before we get the new lesson tomorrow. I can't wait to see what she has in store for us next!
I'm really enjoying this class. I do, however, need to find some balance. I am spending WAY too much time browsing the gallery and reading the forum posts. I think my goal for the end of this week will be to check out the photo printing services available at Sam's Club and see what I think of them. I can't believe how good their prices are - it actually looks like it will balance out to pay for the membership fee since we can get a college membership with Jim's current ID.

Assignment 2

So, I really like all of the feedback that I received on my first layout. It was really helpful. I think I may try creating my own striped paper to replace the bottom strip at some point, but for now I need to move on and focus on assignment 2.

My husband has actually been really helpful on this one. I started the assignment by choosing an event and trying to fit the photos I had into the layout. Needless to say, it wasn't working! I took a step back and spent some time enjoying all of the wonderful layouts that have been posted in the class gallery. While looking at them, I would stop from time to time on a layout and mention to my husband that I really liked this or that about that particular one. After three or four of these, he stopped and walked me through the components of the design I was enjoying and help me to see exactly what it was about it that I liked.

Next, I took a step back and started over. Instead of picking an event and trying to fit it into the layout, I looked through some of the events that needed to be scrapped and tried to find one that I thought might work well in the design I was trying to make. Specifically, I was looking for two really powerful images that would look nice side by side and in a fairly large size. Then I wanted to find three images (or pieces of images) that would work well for the little squares. I found that in order for them to work well for me, they needed to be visually very different so they didn't run into each other when placed directly side by side.

After placing the photos, I started looking at what I wanted to use for background paper and embellishments. Because the photos I chose had a Christmas theme, I first looked through all of my Christmas papers. I knew from my mistakes on my first try of this layout that I didn't want something with a strong pattern, but a basically solid color with a texture. I tried various shades or red and green without finding something I liked. I realized that there were too many comflicting shades of red for a red background to work and there was absolutely no green in my photos, so green wasn't working either.

I saved my partially done layout without any papers added whatsoever and loaded it into a website that shows you the colors that occur the most in your photos. What I found surprised me. Yes, the bright red and the dark red showed up as more frequent, but the next color found was actually a really nice shade of dark navy blue that was found in my son's coat. I went back into Elements and recolored a red paper I loved to be a matching shade of navy and much to my surprise, it worked great! Who would have guessed!!!

So the layout is coming along nicely now. I made the journalling box a slightly lighter shade of the navy by using the eyedropper to pull the lighter color from the background paper. Now, I was off to find the right title font. I was still looking for something that said "Christmas" to my eyes, and found a great free font called Santa's Sleigh.

Here is what I ended up with:

Design Your Life - Week One - Assignment One

Well, I completed my first assignment for the Big Picture Scrapbooking - Design Your Life 2010 class that I am taking and I wasn't thrilled with how it came out. I decided to be the first brave soul to post to the "constructive criticism" forum for the class to see if I could get some suggestions as to what to do differently. There are close to 700 people taking this class, so I very quickly got some great ideas. I'm quite pleased with the improvement! Here is my before and after:

Beginning 2010

I have embarked on a year-long scrapbook project for 2010, and have created this blog to document it as I go. Since D and E were born, I have not been able to keep up with my traditional scrapbooking at all. C's book has been sorely neglected, I started a book for D, and poor E has nothing more than his title page. I am setting a personal goal to catch them all up-to-date in 2010.

To help with that goal, I have switched nearly exclusively to digital scrapbooking. This way I can pop off to the computer room and knock off a page or two without having to drag out all of the supplies and put them all away. I have joined a few different online scrapbook communities - Stuff to Scrap, Jessica Sprague, and Big Picture Scrapbooking. Stuff to Scrap has great monthly challenges to keep me on track, and I am taking a 12 week class at BPS in the principles of design.

At this point, the goal seems achievable - but you know how New Year's goals go. We'll see if life gets in the way. Either way, I should be able to able to get a lot of memories captured!

Welcome to 2010 and a year of capturing memories for the Hood's.

-Christine