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