Believe

I thought this was such a cute picture of my niece, Jordan, visiting Santa. My sister had emailed it to me, and I had to try to do a layout for it. I lowered the saturation on the picture because I thought it gave it a nice sorta artsy look to it. I also didn't want it to clash with the red on the paper I used. This layout didn't take me as long as some of my previous ones have. I'm sure that's partly or mostly because I'm not making the paper like I was doing over the summer. I still may at times, but I was doing that more to match my pictures better. Anyway, I'm pretty proud of this layout. The red paper was from a set that scrapgirls.com was offering if you made a $10 purchase. It was designed by Melanie Johnson. The two papers on the side are both from Brandy Murray's Christmas Chronicles set. The green edge was recolored from the original brown. The frame/mat was designed by Paula Wright, and the swirl on the top was also in the Scrap Girls bonus set, designed by Carrie Stephens. The word art that says "The wonder of the season" was designed by Ariadna Wiczling.

I knew that I wanted to title it Believe, just because the layout focuses on how Jordan is looking at Santa, and the whole childhood belief in Santa. I was excited, because Scrap Girls had another collection they were offering with a purchase, and I saw that they had a "believe" word art. However, when I got it, it looked too casual with the rest of the layout. I kept doing different things, like changing the colors, or adding paper as a clipping mask, but I didn't like the look of those either. I finally decided to go with a font, and to keep the color gold. This was another Christmas font from theholidayspot.com. I typed it in gold, then duplicated the layer and offset it some to give the letters more depth. The snowflakes looked funny, though, so I deleted them from one of the layers. I added some glow and gave it a dissolve blend, so it would shimmer some. I was finally satisfied with it, so it was done. Yay!

Christmas Card 2009

I wasn't planning to make our Christmas card because my layouts have usually taken me a long time to do. But, we wanted to use the picture of us at the ICE exhibit in Orlando, and none of the predesigned layouts looked good with it, so I decided to try it. I thought it went a lot quicker than I expected, which is good. Maybe I'm getting the hang of this more. I got all of the supplies from scrapgirls.com. I used the Rippled Paper paper template by Brandie Velasquez, the Holiday in Lights paper template by Brandy Murray, and the snowflake is from the Christmas Chronicles, also by Brandy Murray. I got the Merry Christmas font from theholidayspot.com/christmas/fonts. I was proud of this part, because the font did not contain the white, so I put typed Merry Christmas on a white background in Photoshop and then erased the background from between the letters, and anywhere that it wasn't supposed to look like there was snow. I've since discovered the magic wand and polygonal lasso tool, that might have made that part a little quicker, but it wasn't too bad.

Since these went out this week, this technically was the first layout I've printed, although I mentioned in a previous post another layout that I haven't shown yet because it's going to be a gift. But, I received the actual print of that layout in the mail today, and I cannot wait until Christmas so I can give it. It looks sooo good! Just wanted to share that part.

Ice, Ice, Baby.

I haven't written in a while. Thanksgiving was good. It was so nice to be off for the whole week, and I was able to get some things done with my scrapbooking, including organizing some of my files. Poor Jason had to work the Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving, so I just stayed in, which wasn't too bad since it was cold those days. I am not one of those who wake up when it's still dark to get in the crowded stores and malls. Sure, I may get some good deals out of it, but I like my sleep and don't love crowds. It was hard to go back to work, even though it's only for 3 weeks, and then I get another 2 weeks off. That's just going to make it even harder to go back, though!

We went to the ICE exhibit at the Gaylord Palms in Orlando last night with Jason's parents and his brother and his wife. It was fun and very cold! I didn't realize that they'd give us parkas, but it's a good thing they did, even though they weren't that attractive, because the temperature is only 9 degrees. You're not really in there very long, though. I thought there would be a little more to it, but after you go through the exhibit, they have free hot chocolate and there was a little Christmas show. It was a nice little deal to go to, and we got some good pictures from it. Our nephew, Judah, is so cute. He's just learned to walk, so that's fun to watch. It's hard to believe that he's almost 1. They had an ice slide that Jason and Justin slid down. The rest of us decided not to because at that point we were so cold and there was a good line.

This week is going to be a busy week, since I'm singing in Idlewild's Christmas presentations. I think it is fitting that this will be my last offiicial thing with Idlewild, seeing as that was what brought me there 22 years ago. I never look forward to the lack of time during this week, but really, I love the singing and I'll get to hang out with some of my friends :)

I usually have lots of topics to blog about running through my head, so I hope to get on here a little more in the upcoming weeks.

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

I was off all week for Thanksgiving, and I am happy to say that I feel like I got a lot done in the scrapbooking realm. I organized most of my files, even though I still have some more organizing to do. I also got to check out some of the scrapbooking websites more in-depth than I have. I also finished two layouts! One is this pictured one, of last year's Christmas. I had started it sometime over the summer, but hadn't finished it yet. I made my own photo collage, but it wasn't very straight, so I had to use a paintbrush to draw the grid so that it looked straighter. I used the Lights paper template from Brandy Murray, scrapgirls.com as well as the All You Need paper from the All You Need kit by Meredith Fenwick of twopeasinabucket.com. The journaling tag is from the Tied Tags Embellishment template by Paula Wright scrapgirls.com. I had to make three duplicate layers, all of the different colors, and then erase in order to create the multi-colored tag. The font I found on a website, http://www.theholidayspot.com/christmas/fonts/. I think I mentioned this in my last post, but I love that I have found embellishment templates and paper templates. I know there are a lot of tools out there still for me to discover, but I think that my layouts are already looking better.

I said I completed two layouts. I will not be posting the second one until after Christmas, as it is a gift for someone who sometimes sees this blog. I am very proud of that layout, and I can't wait to give it to the person, or to post it. I have posted it on a scrapping website, but I won't give the link for that either.

I have so many ideas running around in my head for layouts, pictures to scrap, and albums. There seems to be two main types of layouts that I see...one that is more focused on telling the story of an event, and one that is more focused on the artistry of the layout. Those kind usually just have one photo, and lots of fancy, artistic details. I'd like to make some layouts like that, but I haven't quite mastered the artistry of it. But I'm seeing others' layouts, that are inspiring me, so I think that I'll be doing it in no time. For now, it's back to work on Monday, so I won't have as much free time as I did this week, but in three weeks, we'll be off again!

Over this last summer, I started working on scrapping my honeymoon. I only completed this 2-page layout of our wedding night. I did everything myself except for the date embellishment, which came from Jennifer Pebbles' free kit at Two Peas in a Bucket website. It's called the skinny date label. I made the paper myself by texturizing the one I chose for a background. I used the floral brush as a corner border. I think I got those from brusheezy.com. I wanted the pages to coordinate, but not necessarily be symmetrical. It was hard to put embellishments on before, because a lot of the freebies I had didn't go well. And I had no idea how to make my own. But now that I've discovered embellishment templates, I will probably put a lot more of them on my pages. And, looking at these, I'll probably tweak this one a bit, since it's the only honeymoon layout I've completed. When I do all of them, I'd like for it to be a book. So, we'll see if a future post contains a (hopefully improved) variation of this layout.

On our wedding night, we stayed at the Marriott Waterside hotel downtown. We had taken a few pictures of our hotel room, and we had a nice view out our balcony. The journaling piece talks about this, plus the fact that we ate the food that had been packed for us at our reception, since we did not get to eat during it. The next morning we were able to see our ship in port from our hotel room. We walked to the port, which was a little more than we had expected, with the suitcases, but it wasn't too bad.

Having been getting more scrapbooking items this week, I'm realizing that I definitely need to reorganize my computer files. I started to organize them with a folder for papers, one for embellishments, and just take them from the kits I downloaded. I did this because I figured that it would be easier to look through all of my papers at once. This may still be the easiest, but then I have to make sure I know about all of the kit information so I can give the proper credit to the designer. That still may be the way to go, but I have a lot of kits that I downloaded and haven't gone through yet. So, that will be helpful, too, in finding other elements to put on my pages. Anyone out there have some good tips for organizing digital files?

It's Christmas! (And Thanksgiving)

I've heard a lot of people complain about the time change and about hearing Christmas music in stores already. I have to say, I love it. Now, I don't particularly like that it gets dark so early, except for the fact that I associate it with the coming holidays, and have since my childhood. Once Christmas has passed, though, I'm ready for the longer day again, but until then, love it.

And hearing Christmas music so early...I'm fine with it. This is my absolute favorite time of the year. I know there's a lot of talk about the commercialism of Christmas, but for me, I just associate it with all the positives of Christmas, the true meaning of Christmas, so I don't mind even that. Now I don't want to skip right over Thanksgiving, either, just enjoy both at the same time, in a way. I guess for some people that seems ridiculous, but not me. I've heard it said before that Christmas time is probably a taste of what heaven will be like. So don't we want this feeling as long as possible? But, show me almost anything related to Christmas, and I love it. I have so many good childhood memories of Christmas, of the anticipation of it, the Christmas musicals I did in children's choir and at school...as I got older, the Christmas presentations at Idlewild became one of my favorite things to do. I actually find it fitting that this will be the last thing I'm officially involved with at Idlewild.

But, like I said, I don't want to skip over Thanksgiving. For the first time ever, Hillsborough County school district is off for the whole week of Thanksgiving. I remember when I was a kid, we just got Thanksgiving Day and the next day off. Some time while I was teaching, they added the day before as a conference day (which we worked on another night in exchange for that day off), so that was always nice. You just had a 2-day week. The last couple of years, I've known people who worked in other counties, and they had the whole week off. I thought it was odd, but I was a little jealous. Now, our county is doing that, and I am so excited! It's like another spring break, then we go back for 3 weeks and get 2 weeks off at Christmas.

I look forward to Thanksgiving day, not just my week off. Of course watching some of the Macy's parade, doing the family thing, and eating. A lot of people on facebook have been posting things that they are thankful for. It's a good practice, and I wouldn't want to ignore the whole purpose for the holiday. I am thankful for my husband, my family, my home, my job, and that God has provided what I need. What things are you thankful for? Make sure you take time out to think of this and thank God for what He's given you.

In The Meantime

I finally bit the bullet and actually spent some money on scrapbooking. Well, I've paid bought a magazine subscription and a couple of issues of a Photoshop magazine that includes a CD of brushes, gradients, textures, and fonts for Photoshop. But I actually have tried to download only free kits and elements from the different websites. There are really so many free things you can get. But the really good stuff, I think you have to pay for. So, I had some extra money (I get reimbursed for my mileage when I have to go to meetings and stuff, and that's mine to do what I want with), so I decided to buy some different digital kits. I just downloaded them all, so I haven't been able to play with them yet, but I plan to this week and next week when I'm off. So hopefully, I'll post some new layouts on here soon!

In the mean time, here are a couple of pictures that I played around with on Photoshop. I will probably use them in a layout one day, but I decided to go ahead and post them here. For this picture of me and  Jason, I applied a gradient, and I played around with the opacity until I liked it.

This other picture of me is one of those where only one element in the picture is colored. I've always liked those pictures. This won't be a technical how-to, but in Photoshop, you duplicate your layer, make the new layer black & white, then create a clipping mask. You then erase the part of the picture that you want colored. Again, I'll probably scrap this one day. I originally was going to use it in the template that I used for My Love (my first layout), but I didn't want the layout to focus only on me, so I chose a picture of me and Jason.

Just an extra tidbit...here are some of my favorite scrapbooking websites: scrapgirls.com, twopeasinabucket.com, and scrapbooksetc.com. I also go to peppermintcreative.com, but I sometimes forget about that one. The things I just bought were from scrapgirls.com. That site has a daily newsletter where they give a free download. They also have what they call a scrap club, with two options, paying either $7 or $10 each month, and getting a good amount of materials in return. I'm thinking about doing that, too. So, check it out if you haven't before. And stay tuned for a new layout soon.