Still Scrapbooking

Here are a few more completed layouts - from this last Christmas and the one before!

The House Spread

Scrapbook Season

It's scrapbook season again. I'm a year behind, but finally in the mood to put some memories down. I've been thinking about simplifying and putting 4x6's into albums, but then I get excited about story-telling, and go back to my digital pages. Once again, the blog is saving me because I can just copy and paste from there.

scrapbook done!

I finished my scrapbook! It was a ton of work, but really fun to put our images in the words of the proclamation. Yesterday afternoon we took a few maternity shots to put in the book. These are the only pictures I've ever taken of me while this pregnant, so these are also special for that reason. (to see the whole book on Shutterfly, click here.)

Proclamation on the Family

I've been wanting to do a "Proclamation on the Family" scrapbook for awhile, and since I got a code for a free Shutterfly book I've put it into high gear to get it done by the end of the week. It's a fun project. Here are the pages I have done so far. (You can click on any photo to enlarge and see details.)

Scrapbook Class

Last night I taught a digital scrapbook class for our Relief Society group. It was really great because we were able to use Jon's computer lab at school. Everyone had a computer with Photoshop, and we spent the evening dissecting this layout of Emma's fake birthday. As I was putting together this page I was again grateful for my blog - cutting and pasting text I had written the day of the event gave me much better detail than if I would have tried to remember exactly what was happening this day. The class itself was fun, and we hope to get together again in a few weeks and have everyone bring digital photos and papers to make their own pages. By the way, the papers I used in this page came from this cute free digital kit at Two Peas in a Bucket.

Wedding Scrapbook

I've been busy busy busy scrapbooking this last week, trying to finish up my brother's wedding album. There was a bit of a learning curve for me, to figure out how to do full-page uploads to shutterfly - turning off auto crop and color enhancements, and getting things just the right size. It was a lot of fun to do, however, and I only wish I was closer to home so I could see the finished product when it gets shipped! I suppose I'll just have to wait until my mom comes to visit. Here are a few of my favorite spreads. The ones above are the cover and the title page.





I know I was getting a little fancy with all the swirlies, but they were just so pretty I couldn't resist.

Free layout

I love free prints, because it inspires me to get some scrapbooking done. I put together this quick layout tonight to get my free Walgreens 8x10's. I am slowly working my way through all my summer photos. I only have a few more to do... maybe I'll get lucky and get more coupons soon.

Hope's Layout

I was inspired to do a scrapbook layout today, since I got a coupon for a free 8x10 print here. You can click on the image to see it up close.

Mas Summer Scrapbook

Another page to add to my book!

Summer Scrapbook

It's been a lot of fun scrapping our summer photos. I have been wanting to try 8x8 albums for a long time, so these layouts are all 8x8 or 8x16 spreads. I still have a few more to go, but I love preserving these fun memories! You can click on any image to enlarge and see details.

Strawberry Pages

I loved scrapbooking these strawberry pages. The pretty colors were a joy to play with. I used a sketch by Becky Higgins for the layout, and free brushes picked up somewhere. My new favorite font, Freebooter, was used for the title.

Arabian Treasure

I decided to go for the yellow vintage for the big shot, and a color pop for the other pics, to be able to see the green lining of the chest, and Hope's pretty blue eyes.

Camel Milk

We all had our first taste of camel milk. You can click on the images above to see larger and read journaling.

Look Who's Wearing Glasses Now!

Birthday Scrapped

This is a repeat photo of my birthday, but I had to share the cuteness of the scrapped page. I've been wanting to try a digital template since getting this freebie from Creating Keepsakes. Jessica Sprague gives a great tutorial on clipping masks - I had no idea it was so easy! This took no time at all, and was so fun. Love it. This link leads to the free template, and Jessica's tutorial.

BTW, you can click on all the scrapbook pages on my blog to get a bigger version to see details and read journaling!

Digiscrapping

I've had a few questions about my digital scrapbooking - so I thought I'd just share a little about why and how I do it. For me, digiscrapping is first of all, a fun creative release. I love playing with my photos on the computer and seeing the final result on a beautiful scrapped page. I love not having to buy tons of supplies, and not having to store them afterwards. I also love being able to start a page, save it when I need to stop, and come back to it later without hauling papers, glues, photos, and all that extra stuff out every time.

So, what I use is Photoshop CS. Most of my papers and digital stamps are free downloads from the internet. This is how I made my "Terracota Soldiers" layout: I first open all the photos I want to use in Photoshop, and do any photo editing - cropping, color correction, etc. Then I open a new document. I am still scrapping 8.5 x 11 pages, so I create a new file at that size, 300 dpi. I start dragging my photos onto the page, resizing as I go and playing around with page placement. Then I look at the colors in my photos and decide what color scheme I want to use. I liked the green in Cailin's shirt, so using the eyedropper tool, picked out a green from her shirt that I was happy with, and used the paint bucket tool to fill the background with the green I chose. Then I chose some accent pattern papers from a free kit from Shabby Princess. I just cut and paste from these digital papers to my layout. Next I type in my journaling and play with fonts and color. My page was looking like it needed a little something extra, so I browsed through my digital brushes and found those cute circles that I haven't used before. I think I downloaded those from here, but you never know. I pick up brushes all over. These are fun, because they are just like a digital stamp. I can change color, opacity, size and play, play, play. When I'm happy with my pages, I check spelling, make sure everything is lined up, then save my original Photoshop file to my hard drive. I can now make as many copies of my page as I want. One for me, one for grandparents, one for the kids - love it. I have access here to a nice large format printer. I just print on glossy photo paper and slide into a page protector in a big 3 ring album. In the future I plan to use a site like Shutterfly to make custom hard bound books. They are very reasonably priced and have a great reputation. I will only miss the instant gratification of printing my page up the moment I finish!

Terracotta Soldiers

We had a fun day yesterday at the Abu Dhabi Cultural Foundation. Loved these sculptures, had to play with them!

Happy Easter!

Hope everyone has a wonderful Easter!

Camel Races

We've been curious about the camel races since we moved here, and finally made it to the track last week. It wasn't anything like the "My Fair Lady" horse race scenario that I had privately stashed away in my preconceptions. It was hot, it was dirty, and it was wild. We opted to ignore the grandstand, and watched the race from up close. Not the safest vantage point with a gaggle of kids (we were there with a bunch of other moms and kids) in tow, but fascinating to be sure.