Write. Click. Scrapbook.

Sunday Photo + Words

Saturday Sketch

We are excited to bring you a sketch today. Looking at our November 2009 gallery, we found a lovely layout from Candice. 

 

We used it to create a 8.5x11 layout.

which we also put into a 12x12 scheme as well.

 

Marnie used the sketch to create two layouts. The first is mostly true to the sketch.

 

The second layout switched up the sketch a bit, turning it on its side and rearranging some of the elements.

Thank you for stopping by! We hope you find a minute to make use of the sketch and that you have fun doing so!

scrapbook | this is the good life

Hello lovies!! Let's talk about summer, shall we? I am very delighted that it's finally here. Summer holds so many opportunities for me to experience some of my favorite things: ice cream cones, fireflies, lush green grass, trees and flowers blooming, sunshine on my face, bike rides, pool parties, grilling out, fireworks, sparklers, splashing in the sprinklers....I could go on and on!

Is there anything more reminiscent of childhood summers than splashing in the sprinklers? I don't think so. Last summer, my daughter invited a friend over to play and when they decided to get out the Slip and Slide, I followed them out with my big camera. I ended up getting some shots I truly love so I decided to make a layout with them. (Click to enlarge.)

Despite the recent trend of scrappers using smaller photos, I find myself leaning towards enlargements so I enlarged the best shot of the day to a 5x7 and printed it at home, along with two prints I sized to 4 x 3.5. The primary colors of the photos threw me off a little because I don't generally scrap with this color scheme. I pictured a floral piece of paper in my mind and when I ran across this piece in my drawer (by Imaginisce), I knew it was meant to be! I found the "This Is the Good Life" sticker on a recent Echo Park sticker sheet purchase and after that, the page practically made itself. The design worked so well, I think it will be one of my "tried and true, use again and again" designs. I made it into a sketch, if you'd like to save or pin it. 

The journaling box gave me the perfect area for a cluster of embellishments so I turned again to my trusty sticker stash. I am in love with 12x12 sheets of stickers from Simple Stories and Echo Park. I try to always use a trio of embellishments so I found a square to ground them and three stickers to support my story. To give the layout some visual interest and dimension, I used foam pop dots for the summertime banner, the title sticker and the top right corner cluster.

Have you made a layout with summertime photos yet? If not, today would be a great day to do so! Feel free to use this design and if you do, be sure to link to your layout in the comments below! I would love to see it!

Happy summer to you!

No White Cardstock

Hello everyone it's Cari here! Some weeks ago I was flipping trough my 2015 album and realized ALL my layouts has a white backgrounds. I find a lot easier to star with a white canvas, but after reading a post on the Studio Calico forum I started to feel everything look like the same as well. 

So starting from June I said to myself: Ok, I'm going to keep using my white backgrounds because I love them, but every now and then I'm going to try to use only patterns. through this month I have only used patterned papers and I have to admit It haven't been easy, but in the other hand I love every single page I create.

Some advices I can give you through this "No White Cardstock" journey:

1.- Use backgrounds with a small pattern: Then it will be easier to find other patterns that match your background.

2.- Big photos + Patterns = WIN : Probably because with a big photo you don't need to fill so much space haha.

 

3.- Add contrast: Choose patterns that has contrast between themselves so your layout doesn't look so "heavy"

4.- Use tiny pieces: Collages always look awesome.

5.- Do what you love: Of course, never forget this hobby is to enjoy and if you like using only white, only patterns, only cardstock or whatever, just do it! You have to do what works better for you and I can't help keep loving my white backgrounds!

I hope this few advices cana help you!

Kisses

Scrapbook: Keep it simple

Hello! It's Jennifer Larson with a new page and a mantra: Keep it simple.

I love embellishing, and I love spending a lot of time finding the perfect product, but sometimes it's easier to just grab what's around you and scrap. Here's an example:

I did this page with remnants of a kit. I didn't have much left, so I grabbed a piece of patterned paper I had (not in the kit), added the remaining scraps from the kit, saw what letters I had left for the title, and added some stickers left over plus some sequins I had next to me. Here's some details:

I like to put some elements on the top left and then the bottom right; it draws the eye across the page.

Could I have added more or done more? You betcha. But I think the page captures the moment just with the photo and these few embellishments. So the next time you are scrapbooking with a photo (or photos) you love, challenge your self to keep it simple and use what's lying around you.

Other People's Pictures

Hi, everyone! A funny thing happened to me a couple of weeks ago. Or, rather than funny, it was kind of a scrapbooker's version of Hades. I had a few days off of work. My husband and kids were out of the house for those days. Two of those vacation days were spent cleaning closets and scrubbing floors. While that sounds like the terrible part, I actually liked getting those things done. On my  final day off, I said, "Ahh! Now I have no housework to do, I have the apartment to myself, and a nice open block of time to scrapbook." That is like heaven on earth. But the heavens quickly closed, when no matter how hard I thought about it, I could not think of one tiny, little story to scrapbook. I searched through my photos, and discovered that I haven't taken too many recently. (Those darn teenagers!") What is a woman with a very tidy home to do? 

First, I took a nap.

Then I played a lot of solitaire on my phone. 

Then my husband came home, and I found the solution to my problem! I went to my husband's phone, and I quickly found inspiration for some new stories. 

First, there pictures that I found from my husband's work, featuring my husband, a fez, and some finger puppets. If that doesn't tell a story, I don't know what will:

And then I found some pictures from my husband and children's annual trip to Coney Island. And since it's an annual trip, I have some similar photos going back pretty far. I put them together for this page:

I have photos for a couple of more pages that are still in the works. 

So, the next time you are feeling at a loss for photos and stories, try looking though someone else's photos for some inspiration.

 

 

 

Sunday Photo + Words

Scrapbook: School Summary Layouts

This is Amy Sorensen, and I have a hard and fast rule about scrapbooking in the summer: I don’t get started on any vacation, summer activities, picnic, hiking or other warm-weather layouts until I’ve made a school summary layout for each of my kids. I journal about the major points of their school year: big projects, memorable experiences, unique activities. I try to get down some little details too, like where their locker was or how they got back and forth to school. Also favorites:  teacher, class, friend, lunch item. I wish I could remember those stories from my own school years, but most of the details have blurred together for me. (Although I do have some pretty good stories from junior high, one involving my math teacher sighing and saying, “Amy, are you ever going to be on time?”) Since I can’t remember mine, I make sure to get down my kids'. Since I have teenagers, sometimes it’s a little bit rough to get them to cough up any stories, but with a little prying (not to mention some texting and Snapchatting) I’ve managed to get the details. Or at least the ones they’re willing to tell me!

If I follow my rule and make the layouts first thing after school gets out, the stories are still fresh. It just requires a photo on the last day of school (again…with teenagers this takes a little bit of finagling, and this year I had literally one photo to scrapbook with…but it is worth the stress!) and some time spent talking with your kids about their year.

Here are the school summaries I made this year.

I only have one kid left in grade school:

I realized after I wrote the summary list of 4th-grade details that I still had a little story to tell, so I added a paragraph of text that tells what happened on the last day. A few hours after I finished this layout, I remembered a whole bunch of other stuff I wanted to add to the detail list, like what he learned in art and some funny things he said throughout the school year. I just wrote them down on the back of the layout! 

For my 15-year-old's school summary page, I also needed a list and a paragraph. So I surrounded three sides of the last-day-of-school photo with text:

I will be so sad when I run out of the script alphabet stickers I used to spell "the end." They are some old ones from Webster's Pages, and I bought two sets of every color, but I use them a lot, and they're almost gone. 

My 17-year-old's layout was harder to make, because seriously: eleventh grade was rough. He mostly refused to give me any details because he wanted to forget junior year entirely. (Which made me pause to think: should I even commemorate the year? But I decided to anyway, in the hopes that the memories of the hard parts will make more sense when he is older.) Writing the journaling was tough, because it didn't feel authentic to leave out the more complicated, hard stories from the year, but I also didn't want it to be entirely negative. In the end I started with the hard stuff, transitioned to the better stuff, and then wrote about what I hope he really learned, with an eye for the Jake who might read it in the future:

Yep, same picture. I told you...teenagers are hard to photograph sometimes!

If you want more ideas for making your own school summary layouts, you can also read this post.

And with that to-do item checked off of my scrapbooking list, I'm moving on to some summer layouts. Happy scrapping!

Click: Contrast

It's Jennifer Larson sharing some ideas about photography. 

Whenever I post about photography, I feel compelled to share that I am not a photographer: I use either a point-and-shoot or my phone, and I do little processing of the photos after. (For the next photos, I used my iPhone 6, and I used PicTapGo, primarily Lights On, AutoColor, and Crispity.) Still, there are some things I do to make my photos look a little better.

Every summer I take pictures of my perennial gardens. The photos sustain me during the winter (and it's a lot easier to take photos of my flowers than my boys--they stand still much better!). I spend a lot of time trying to make the composition of the shots look better, and the thing I've been focusing on lately is composition. Here's how I've used contrast within the composition to make the shots more interesting:

Texture

When I take pictures, I look to combine different textures in my shots--in the above photo, the smooth daylily leaves contrast with the intricacies of the columbine blossoms.

Color

Pictures in my garden automatically have contrasting colors--the green of the foliage versus the color of the bloom. Here I captured two floral colors that contrasted sharply--the pale Siberian iris and the lush color of the peony--in addition to the green. (For anyone who has kids that are Pokemon fans like mine, does the central iris look like a Pokeman to you too? It does to me!)

Light

This is a hard one--too strong a contrast will make the image difficult to see. I took this shot of a perennial geranium in my shade bed with more dappled light. The blossom is in full light while the leaves and wood mulch are shaded. This draws more attention to the blossom.

Shape

The contrasts between the smooth, almost linear daylily leaves and the star shaped leaves of the potentilla and the even more intricately star shaped blossoms of the allium make this shot more interesting. The contrasast in shapes invites the viewer to look deeper into the image.

Background

"Background" isn't really a design term, but I thought about it with this shot. I wanted to flowers to be in the foreground,  but it looked much more interesting to capture the rusted birdbath and the pale lamb's ears and the lawn in the background than to just fill the frame with peony blooms.

Thank you for visiting! I hope this gives you ideas to play around with this summer when you are taking pictures.

 

Write. The five senses

Hi! 

When we sign up to blog here on the blog we get to choose from the different topics; write, click and scrapbook. I usally sign up for the two last, but this time I thought I´d challenge myself and take on a write post. You see, journaling is one of my weaknesses in memorykeeping. I love seeing all the layouts and PL spreads with lots of words and stories on them, but I am not good at it at all. 

In the recent months I have been attending a mindfulness class. I deal with anxiety quite a lot and the pratice of being here and now can really help with that. For my post today I did just that, I sat down in my back garden and was mindul of my surroundings and I had a little help from my five senses: sound, sight, taste, touch and scent. I made my layout based on that.

I have a 6x8" personal album and opted to make a pocket page for it. I choose one of the multiple pocket page protectors from Simple Stories that I had on hand and it fit my journaling perfectly since I divided it up for each sense. 

Have you tried this before? Perhaps you can do a sound collage, sit down somewhere and close your eyes and just record the things you hear. It feels great and can make a great jumping point for a little memorykeeping at the same time!

 

Lisa