This summer, perhaps because it feels like my family is about to change abruptly (my oldest daughter is leaving for college soon), I've found myself looking backward at summers past—when all my kids were small. I still have plenty of not-yet-scrapped photos from those years and I've loved revisiting those moments. I think that's part of scrapbooking's appeal: not just that the memory is preserved, but the remembering that happens during the scrapbooking process.
I like to bring new techniques to older photos, and one of my recent favorites is creating a text frame with my Silhouette. It took me a little while to figure out how to do this, so I thought I'd share the steps.
1. Choose the shape of your frame. You can draw a shape, or you can use one that you've purchased. If you're using a purchased shape that is already a frame, ungroup it and then delete the outer edge of the frame (so you just have one solid shape).
2. Select the shape, then right click and choose Offset. This creates a larger copy around the shape. Use the slider to change the distance between the two shapes—this will be the width of the text frame. Choose Round if you want to round the outside edges of your frame, or leave Corner selected if you want it offset exactly.
3. Once the shape's frame is the way you want it, select both the inner and outer shapes by dragging to select them.
4. Click on Object, Modify, Subtract. This makes the inner part of the frame empty so that when you add the text, it will weld properly.
5. Size the frame to the height and width you want.
6. Type your text. It's easiest to type each word as its own shape, especially if you want different text sizes or fonts for each one. Once the text is typed, weld each piece (THIS POST explains how to weld—just scroll down to the last section).
7. Weld the text and frame together. Make sure some part of each word overlaps something else, either the frame or another word (or both). If the lines only barely touch, they won’t weld, but the overlap doesn’t have to be huge, either. Just enough—you want to still be able to recognize the letters. You want at least one part of the text to overlap the frame. Once you're happy with the position of the text within frame, select it all. Then right click and chose Weld.
Here are two examples of layouts with text frames:
For this one, I made the text frames with several tag and label shapes I’d purchased from the Silhouette store online.
I spent some time after cutting everything out, drawing grey lines around the words because I wanted to add a bit more definition to the letters.
For this layout (you know, the one on which I didn't get the quote exactly correct, because I decided to add it after I'd printed the photo with the first part, and really, I'm mostly OK with it not being exactly correct...)
I drew the big rounded-corner frame by using the "Draw a Round Rectangle" button in the Silhouette software. Mixing letters printed on my photo with letters cut from the Silhouette is another new technique I’m loving right now—check back in July for another how-to!
But until then, seriously: whatever phase your life is at—married, single, little kids, big kids, empty-nester—enjoy every single day of your summer because really...it’ll be over before we know it. Happy summer!
