Scrap your freakin’ Heart out!

Look for more info at The-Lilypad for this fun little contest coming soon! A fun contest with no drama, and a way to get some LO’s done!

Quickpages

I started digital scrapbooking in April of 2005. Digital scrapbooking had really just started becoming “known”. It was growing a “following” online. Designers were starting to emerge! It was an exciting time for me! I had just a year earlier had my daughter Braelyn, and so my first digital experience was working on Anna Aspnes’ Baby Daze album. The templates/quickpages really helped me to learn the art of digital scrapbooking without having to worry about the design of your page. I have all three girls 1st years documented in a hardbound Shutterfly book done with that album! Over 5 years later I still love using templates and quickpages. There has definitely been controversy over the years in the digital scrapbooking industry as to whether templates and quickpages are “real” or “art”. I have a real problem with that argument because to me scrapbooking, digital or paper, is all about preserving my families memories. Telling our story. This is not about art to me. Sure…it is art, but that’s not the reason I do it. So I will continue to use templates and quickpages! I just wanted to give a quick little informative post about the differences between templates and quickpages, and how they are each used.

TEMPLATES:

templates are basically a design of a scrapbook page. The basics of the page are all laid out for you. You can take your own papers and elements and “clip” them to the design.

This is an example of a set of templates that you could buy. You will notice the grey boxes on these are general guidelines for where you would put pictures. The flowers are general guidelines for where you would maybe place elements. There are usually places for a title and journaling too. Templates are fun because you can pick all of your own papers/kits and elements to use, and you can also twist turn and rotate the whole LO or just some of the pictures or whatever you want, but I love that it is a design starting point for me! I use a “clipping mask” command in Photoshop to “clip” my photos and papers to the boxes/shapes. There are many tutorials out there for using templates! Here is my page using the template in the upper left LO in that preview:

You will notice that I rotated the template and I also made the whole cluster of things a bit larger than in the original template, by linking all of those layers and enlarging them.

QUICKPAGES:

quickpages are fun as well, and they make creating a scrapbook page even a little quicker! A quickpage is a scrapbook LO (layout) already made for you, papers, elements, the whole thing except for the photos!

Here is a quickpage pack ready to buy and make those back to school layouts. With quickpages you can ADD things on top of the quickpage layer like a title and journaling, but you cannot take things AWAY from the quickpage. Here are the two pages I have made with these quickpages:

Here are a few resources for templates:

The-Lilypad albums and templates section

Shabby Miss Jenn templates

Shabby Miss Jenn Quickpages/albums

Janet Phillips templates

and of course there are SOOOO many more out in the digital scrapbooking community and often you can pick up freebies on people’s blogs and stuff!

Go, explore, and embrace the template/quickpage method of digital scrapbooking! I am sure you will love it, and if nothing else it’s a great way to become a little more familiar with your photoshop program!

MandaKay

Outdoorsy

Just wanted to pop in quick to post a few of my latest LO’s! Seems as though I have been on an outdoorsy LO kick!

(as usual, all of the credits for the digital supplies used to make these LO’s can be found in my galleries – links on the right)!

Just a quick one tonight! Thanks so much for stopping by!

MandaKay

Themed Movie Night

It was a gloomy rainy cold fall day yesterday here, and Kyle was gone for the night, so it was just me and the girls. I decided to throw a little themed movie night! I got the movie Alice in Wonderland, probably against my better judgment. It was a fun movie to do a theme for though! It was a bit dark for my girls, I think the cartoon one would have definitely been better. Here are a few pics of what I did. I basically just made the cute little card guys, which was super easy, and then made the cupcakes and set up a tea party with raspberry ice tea! I set it up while Gracyn and Selah were napping, and Selah came out and her eyes got big and she said “Wow…it’s so pretty”, in the most sweet voice! Made my day!

Braelyn played in her first soccer game yesterday as well! Besides sitting out in the cold rain, we really enjoyed watching her! I wasn’t sure if she would like soccer, but she seems to be enjoying it – even in the cold rain! She did really well too for her first time ever playing!

And we also went apple picking on Fri. night! Nothing like starting all the fun fall activities in one weekend right?!

The first week of school went off without a hitch! Braelyn is now in 1st Grade, so our first year of all day every day! That’s quite an adjustment, but she’s liking it! Our morning routine has been going well, I usually wake up by 7:00 and get my workout in while she usually wakes up about that time as well and gets dressed and eats. Then I pack her lunch and finish up getting her ready so we can be out by the bus stop by 8:10am. Then I can shower and get ready after getting her off on the bus. Selah starts preschool two mornings starting this week, so hopefully that doesn’t throw off our schedule too much. I don’t think it will because I should still have time to shower after bus b/c Selah won’t need to be at school until 9:15. Our Wed. night church activities start up this week too, so that should be fun. Kyle and I are both teaching, so that will make for busy Wed. nights!

Nothing new on the job front. Some days I get really bummed about the fact that my workplace was shut down. I loved that job. I miss that job. I don’t think I will ever find a job so good. I liked the small office, only working for two guys. I liked the flexibility. Just really bums me out. I know it’s going to be really hard to find something I will like as much. I am still keeping my eyes and ears open though, so if anyone local still hears of something let me know. I know Kyle would like me to get a job sooner than later, although I will admit I do enjoy being home with the girls. We have definitely been keeping busy!

Nothing new on the home for sale front either. We’ve had quite a few showings, so that is good. We know we are a bit high for the market, but we aren’t in a hurry, so no big deal. We’ve got no real plans after this if we do sell, so when it happens it happens. Lots to be praying about!

So there is our life in a nutshell right now! Have a great week!

MandaKay