simple scrappin'

Hi everybody, another very very warm Friday is upon us. The girls will definitely be in the pool when they get home from school today! Isn't it Autumn?? What the heck. But I'm not complaining, because I know that once winter hits we will be wishing for swimming weather, once again.

So I have two layouts to share with you today.

The first one I did while scrapping at someone else's house, therefore it was very quick and easy, without a computer/printer, and with really old photos that had been in my 'waiting to scrap' pile for over a year!! I took the photos with me and said, 'they will be scrapped today'.

They were photos that I like, but there was no real story behind them, and I hadn't been able to think of any good journaling to go with them, so the journaling is on the light side. These are the sort of photos I should just 'get over' and put into a normal slip album and be done with it. The quality of the photos are pretty bad, very shadowy, but she's just cute (said in whiney voice). So I scrapped them. I used sassafras pp which is now pretty old, American Crafts thickers and a black journaling pen. Basic basic basic.
If you want a 10 minute layout that uses 2 pics trimmed 4 x 6 photos? Here's one.

The second layout uses 5 photos, and they did all start as 4x6 photos, they were just photos that were able to be heavily trimmed and the subjects were kind of in the distance. The small pics along the bottom were trimmed to just over 5cm wide (2") .

This layout is about some fun times we had at Narooma while we were on our summer holidays in January. I do have lots more unscrapped Narooma photos, but I'm wondering whether I should do the photobook idea for them all. I think I'll stick with the scrapping of them for now, but maybe in a few years I'll do a photo book with Narooma photos from all the past years combined. So anyway, I printed the journaling on the piece of white cardstock first, about 2/3 way down the page, (no measuring) and then trimmed/stuck photos on around the journaling.
These stickers are vinyl thickers by American Crafts.

Time for a new sketch challenge, anyone?? It's been a very long time....

An early start and a photo book

7:00am:

Eldest girl had to be at her school for the buses which are taking her to her very first school camp at 7:00am this morning. She was so so so excited. Separation anxiety is not something that crosses our minds - she just jumped straight on the bus with her friends and then remembering that she hadn't said good bye to her Mum, gave me a very excited wave through the window. She had been writing lists of what to take for days, and I have a layout about her list fetish coming up soon. Her bag had been packed and re-packed several times. All by her, of course, I have no idea what she ended up taking!

The camp naturally fell on the one day of the week that husband goes to work at 6am, so I had to haul my tired carcass out of bed extra early to get her there at 7am. Hello, coffee?

And one more thing on the subject of the girl, why didn't I have hair like that when I was ten??? Hey, why don't I have hair like that now? I have never had hair like that. Grr.

So tonight, husband is away, and eldest is at camp, Greys Anatomy is showing special double episode, and I have some peanut m&m's lying in wait. Oh, I am so there. Happy place.....
Now onto my photobook.

Each year I do a 'yearbook' for my parents and parents-in-law, of all the key photos/events from that year, mostly of all the grandchildren. And most of all my favourite photos of the year are in it too. It's their Christmas present, cause what else do you get parents that really already have what they need?

In past year I have scrapped a 6x6 album, you might remember this from a post I did ages ago, can't find it for the life of me. Anyway, this year I decided to try the photobook concept. I didn't want it to look like a 'scrapbook' with embellishments etc, rather just a real book. Coffee table style. I couldn't get the Harvey Norman website happening on my computer, and found it a little frustrating and weird, and slow. So I ended up going with snapfish.com.au. I emailed them beforehand to check on how the book was bound (stitched) and whether the pages were acid free etc, bright white and what the gsm weight was - learned back in my graphic design days. Snapfish customer service must of thought I was very high maintenance! Anyway they answered all my questions to my satisfaction, and off I went.

Basically, I ran away from all layouts of snapfish's that had patterned, themes, weird angles and chaos in general, and mostly I wanted to use their one photo layout, where the one photo took up the ENTIRE page. I opened photoshop and set up a 'canvas' or image size at 8 x 11, because that was the size of the books pages and I designed my own layouts, leaving lots of white space (or the blank background which you see as the white on the page) in my design. I then saved the whole 8x11 layout as a jpeg, and dropped it into the snapfish book as one big photo that filled the whole page. Some photos were actually full page photos, with a bit of text added in photoshop beforehand, but then on the facing page, I did the 'design my own basic layout and drop it in as a whole photo' thing.

I will show you what I mean.

I made this layout above digitally in photoshop, then dropped the whole page in as one big jpeg photo. As far as snapfish thinks, this is a whole jpeg photo. Are you getting me - am I making any sense?? This block thing, where I have rows of photos and a coloured block in there for a title was a basic layout that I kept fairly constant through out the book. I just saved the layout in photoshop and dropped different photos in, saving each as it's own page as I went. I had lots of event style pages with birthdays, Easter, Christmas etc that all happened throughout the year, so it was good to have my own layout that suited several photos.

And below is an example of a single photo that actually does take up the whole page, with a bit of text added to it. You have to allow about 20mm of outside area where there is no text, in case the book cuts a centimetre or so off. I learned this lesson. :p

I gathered photos from each month, and arranged the layouts that I'd made in photoshop, into the pages in the snapfish book chronologically. First layout or photo was from January 09, and the last layout in the book was from Christmas.

Here's some shots of the finished book. They have a nice picture window on the front cover. You can get different covers, and photos actually on the cover, but this is the most economical hard cover book.

The parents really loved it, and yes, it was bit of a big job with about 50 pages, but it was totally worth it. And I'm starting this years book already, and I'll do a few layouts on photoshop at the end of each month, so the task isn't too big at the end of the year.

By the way, sanpfish does have some very simple decent layouts in their program. It's under the studio/modern book with NO theme!! They are simple and decent, and a few pages of my book were done within the snapfish program. I just didn't have quite the flexibility that I had designing my own pages. But it was hell of a lot easier doing it through the snapfish program. It is a very easy program, and if I can do it, so can you. The page that shows a single photo in the middle, of Lucy holding red-headed baby was a snapfish design. You can add text on most of the snapfish designs. If you're organised, you can design your book ahead of time, save your project on the snapfish site, and get it printed when they have 25%-50% sales on their books. Nice. Hey, I am so not trying to sell you snapfish. There is Harvey Norman, Macbooks, if you have a Mac (I have but I haven't tried the macbooks out yet), and other companies, all doing a similar thing. I just found snapfish economical and easy and good.

My new scrapper friend Robyn, who isn't known for her computer genius (no offense Robby) jumped on and did a complete photo book for her MIL in a few hours using the snapfish designs. MIL loved it!

I am still committed to scrapbooking, cause I'm continuing my affair with Bazzill, but I am so gonna do this for the 'event's' of our life. Like a big holiday where I accidentally took 200 photos, or when the girls were flowergirls and I had 70 favourite photos - there's no way I'll scrap all of them! You run out of things to say with 70 gorgeous photos of the same thing. It would be a great way to compile the photos from a professional photo shoot of the family.

With my parents 'year-book', when I ordered it, I ordered a second one for me at the same time cause they had a second one half price deal happening, and the girls love looking through all the key things from last year. It's a great concise summary of the year, which will complement my scrap albums nicely.

Any questions or comments, leave them in the comments below, and I will answer whatever you ask.

4 hours til Greys....

The return of the prodigal scrapper.

The return of the prodigal scrapper. I just looked up 'prodigal' and it means "to spend recklessly and wastefully" - well that is not me. Consider this the return of the ordinary scrapper. I am a bargain hunter, I pretty much ONLY buy on sale, I am a researcher, and I am very thrifty. So prodigal I am not. Yes, the return of the ordinary scrapper. Or should that be the bad or naughty scrapper. Or just the bad and naughty blogger. Certainly the bad and naughty photographer. I look over at my dust laden camera, which hasn't been USED since my daughter started school. I am horrified at that thought. I'm disgusted at that thought.

Oh well. Deep breath and move on. It's okay. I have to go with what's happening at the time. There are times I won't clean my house, there are times I won't scrapbook, there are times I won't blog, there are times I won't paint well (my work), there are times I won't take any photos. And that's okay. Or is it??

Well, what done is done, or rather, what hasn't been done, hasn't been done. I have done lots of painting the last few weeks. Maybe I'll even share one or two. I have been selling lots of paintings, but I haven't been getting paid for lots of paintings, and that, dear friends, is another story .

I have missed my friends that live in my computer. Sharon sent me a cartoon of a person hugging their computer saying something along the lines of "I love my computer because my friends live there". So true. And I do miss sharing 'stuff' like scrapbooking and layouts and photos. But I don't miss the hours of lost time getting bogged down (or blogged down) in other blogs and on line shops and internet life in general. So much TIME wasted. My lower back has even benefited from not sitting on my crappy dining room chair which is entirely inappropriate for a computer desk.

Anyway, as usual, my life could use more discipline, and more time management and organisation. I have returned, for now, but I will not be spending infinite amounts of time on this box where my friends live, and telling my family to 'be quiet, cause I'm busy' (hardly), and not making dinner because I'm reading a blog from some English speaking person who scrapped once living in a far west small province of China.

So here's a painting or two that I've done recently. They are of beaches from the NSW far south coast. Might need to double click on images to get a decent view. In case you care, they are oil paintings on canvas, each one is about a metre long. Pretty small compared to what I usually paint.

The first two images are two sections of the same painting. They sort of go beside each other. (first one to goes to the left, and the second image is much 'closer up'). Sorry, haven't got a photo of the whole painting. It is of a swimming netted area within an inlet, below a big hill. Every now and then I have fun doing a weird colourful loose piece. So it doesn't look exactly how it really does irl. It's an 'interpretation', okay?

The next one is more traditional and 'real'. I like it, too. Different styles appeal to different people. Different strokes.... (bit like scrapbooking really!)

AND I have done lots of scrapbooking just in the past few days. SO I have heaps to show you, including my photobook which I promised to show before I went AWOL and haven't yet. So bad.

This layout was a random moment layout from a photo taken in January (yeah, I'm way behind now) when all my family would generally show up in my pool at about 3pm on any hot day. I do like it, the fact that they come over uninvited. It's cool. It's quite a bright layout, isn't it. Very 'orange'. Cute orange fish paper though!

So will see you soon, if you are willing to come back and forgive me for my rude absence.

P.S. As always, adore reading your comments, girls. Fran, so great to hear from you on my last post - can't believe you've had another bubba - I tracked down your blog, but found that you have been blog-AWOL too - even worse than me!