Digital Scrapbooking Playing

So I've been playing in Photoshop a bit thanks to Jessica Sprague and the mountain of classes she offers. If you have any interest in digital scrapbooking, I highly recommend her classes. You learn a great deal, get digital supplies, have access to the class forever, you can repeat the class or sections of the class as often as you wish, you can take breaks whenever you wish, and her classes are not expensive. There's also a community forum where you can ask questions and people are happy to help you out. 

There are different levels to each class. They start out very basic and you build on what you've learned and completed. I'm up to the point where I get free play time! I know technically I could play around all I want, but I've been trying to stick to the classes.

One thing Jessica recommends is that you brag about your work. She wants you to feel like you accomplished something and share it. Pretty cool. 

Here's my first brag. I went apple picking a few years ago with my sister-in-law and nephew. I lived in South Carolina at the time and had never gone apple picking with them before. It was a blast. We have some great photos from that day.

You will notice that the faces have been blurred. Honestly, my family does not have blurred faces in real life.I did this because I don't want my family's faces all over the internet. There are far too many freaky people out there. Call me overprotective, but oh well!

My next layout was all me. Jessica gave us a ton of papers and embellishments to work with and said have fun. The photos are of Ashley and Maxx. So strange that there was only two dogs in our lives at that point. Very rare for us to have such a small family.

My final layout is a collage I made of all of our kids. Yup, all of our kids are furry and four legged. The orange cat is Dale named after NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt, Jr., the tabby is Azreaelle named after the cat in the Smurfs spelled a little funky because she's a tad crazy, the grey and cream tiger cat is Tigger who is our oldest kid, Ashley is the Yorkie and she's a bit famous cough cough for being a diva cough cough, and Maxx the Puggle who is the old fart of the gang. Ha I just noticed Ashley is sticking her tongue out a teeny bit. She doesn't have any bottom teeth except for her canines so her tongue sticks out often. Yes, it's common for senior Yorkies to lose their teeth.

Until next time.....have fun creating!

I'm Back!!!!

 I've been working on doing some reorganizing in my studio. Some things just aren't working for me. I also received a Silhouette Cameo for Christmas and that baby needs a home! A few pieces of my furniture went back to their real purpose in life. My armoire went back to my bedroom. It needs a paint job to blend into the nautical bedroom we have. The hutch went to the dining room now that we have the space for it. So that left me with many things needing a new home. Thanks to Home Depot for having some really nice white cheapo bookcases that worked perfectly for this project!

I've been going through many supplies and really considering if I need or want it. Amazing how much I have accumulated over the last 12 years of paper crafting! I have been selling a few things here and there, but I really need to move a lot of stuff. I'm seriously considering having a scrapbook yard sale in the spring. Yup, a tent popped up in my driveway with a bunch of tables kind of scrapbook yard sale. Stay tuned if you happen to be hanging out in the Finger Lakes when the time comes!

All of this cleaning and organizing has made me really want to get photos of my computers and printed so they can go into albums. Here's the problem with traditional and digital scrapbooking. Traditional takes soooooo long and I never feel like I get anywhere. I guess having around 100,000 digital photos will do that. It's been suggested that I stop taking photos by several people. I think they're crazy! I'm too busy traveling to stop taking photos! 

I really do enjoy digital scrapbooking, but I'm still learning and trying to get Photoshop all figured out is time consuming. I just want to get things DONE! And I'm starting to have a hard time remembering where many of my photos were taken. Time to get a move on so I decided to start exploring other options. One included actually printing photos and just putting them in photo albums. I didn't really like that option. And then....

I stumbled onto Project Life. I am not interested in the daily, weekly, or monthly thing. I honestly don't care what I had for dinner on October 3, 2010 nor do I care what the weather was or what clothes I was wearing. It seems like lots of people do care about those things so good for them I say! That aspect just isn't for me. I've already got a zillion photos that need a home.

This brings me to my current project of the week. I started really organizing all of my digital photos. I have them in like 20 million folders on two computers and an external hard drive. Some dated. Most not. It's an incredibly time consuming, but I am making major headway. I've been taking digital photos for 11 years now. Who knew? I sure didn't. While sorting and labeling the photos, I have been uploading all the same folders to Shutterfly for printing! Yay for printing! 

They had a lovely sale a week or so ago where photos were 40% off and the shipping was free because I spent a few dollars. Ok so I printed 1,379 photos. That's barely a dent in what I have. The photos I printed were purposely chosen to bring with me to Crop on the Cape. Why so many? Well, I'm not bringing all of them. I have a weekend crop the following weekend as well. 

So what will I be doing with my mountain of photos? Pocket scrapbooking! Yup, you read that right. What's pocket scrapbooking? It's like Project Life and traditional scrapbooking got together and had a party. You simply take the pocket page protectors and place your photos, filler cards, journaling cards, memorabilia, etc. in the individual pockets. Each page protector has several individual pockets in them. They come in a variety of configurations with different sized pockets for your items to be places vertical or horizontal. 

More about pocket scrapbooking tomorrow!

Digital Scrapbooking...So It Begins

Yup, I took the plunge. I know what you're thinking. Holy cow! She's leaving us. I'm not. Really, I'm not. I've been dabbling in digital scrapbooking for awhile, but was never really impressed with anything I tried. 

I tried Studio J from Close To My Heart when it first came out. I didn't like how everything was pre-formatted for you and you couldn't change papers. I've heard that it has changed since then, but I also didn't like that I had to be online to scrapbook and that I have to purchase the printed layouts or jpeg's from them. I travel a lot and internet access can be tricky at best in many locations. 

I also have tried MDS from Stampin' Up. It's nice. Better than Studio J. It has much more than scrapbook layouts in it. You can make cards and other projects. I am under the impression that you can only use SU products with it. I could be totally wrong. The consultant I asked about it when I purchased it knew absolutely nothing about it. I have purchased additional items from SU for MDS, but I never loaded them into MDS. I keep all the papers, embellishments, and stamps all in folders based on their collection name. I did this so I would have access to them to use them in Photoshop. 

Some of my trees in autumn

I've heard that Photoshop or Photoshop Elements was really the way to go with digital scrapbooking. Problem with that. How the heck do you use Photoshop? Seriously! I own the Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 and don't even know what 98% of the programs included are! I took a Photoshop and Illustrator class at a local college when I lived in South Carolina and felt like I didn't learn squat so I was not at all comfortable using either piece of software. In fact, I HATED Photoshop. I thought Adobe was full of morons. Nope. It wasn't Adobe who was full of morons. Turns out it was my instructor.

Well, last year I purchased a digital scrapbooking class from Jessica Sprague. I talked to a few people who I knew dabbled in digital. I did some research online and pretty much everyone said yes take Jessica's classes. You will learn lots and you will love digital. The class ended up on sale for whatever reason. I purchased it and thought why did I waste that money? Who am I kidding? I HATE Photoshop. 

Fast forward a year. I've got thousands more photos that need scrapbooking. I have been organizing my digital photos. I've got 2 years done! That took almost a month. Yes, I literally have over 100,000 digital photos. No exaggeration. One day at a zoo, I took 495 photos. That was one day! I was only there for about four to five hours. 

So now that I'm in the digital organization mode, I've been wondering how I'm ever going to get all of my photos into completed layouts before I'm 653 years old and still keep taking pictures and travel. Oh and I have other things to make besides layouts. 

I was staring at my MacBook in complete disbelief. Really thinking I'm going to give up sleep and tv and relaxing and working on my house (Who cares if the roof collapses on me. I've got pages to get done!) and bathing and eating....maybe then I'd get it all done. Yeah, most of that was never going to happen. The girl who can't go more than a day without showering or washing her hair at least once a day is never going to give up bathing!

Tigger the Lounge Kitty

I started poking around in Finder to see what other junk...I mean good stuff was collecting dust aka taking up space on my harddrive. What do I find? A whole mess of papers, embellishments, and stamps - all digital - from Jessica Sprague's website. I'm an Echo Park junkie and there's tons of their products. Hmmmm......

I go to her website to see what other cool things she has now since I hadn't been there in like a year. OMG! Color me happy! Bo Bunny. Basic Grey. Fancy Pants Designs. Carta Bella. Echo Park. Cosmo Cricket. Big names in the industry have collections for sale on her website! I log into my account and guess what's there....yup, that class I bought a year ago. Guess what I started working on this week. 

Ooh ooh ooh. Upon further examination. Many of the big industry companies sell lots of their collections digitally on their websites. I've contacted a few who I couldn't find anything from and some responded that they are working on it, a few told me where I could find the digitals, and a couple were like pffft we don't do that. So if you're interested in digital products at all, contact your favorite companies via Facebook or their website and ask them! The more people who ask, the more likely they will sell us what we want.

You're going to get a kick out of this. When I originally bought my digital papers from Jessica, it was to print the 12" x 12" papers at home so I wouldn't have to buy the same kits multiple times or when I ran out of those papers and it was no longer available. As of today, I've never printed any of them out and I have a 13" x 17" printer I purchased especially for that purpose! Good thing it was only clearance at Staples!

I'm almost done with lesson two. My assignment for that lesson is to share what I created in class. While people who've been at this for ages may have better layouts or suggestions on improvements, I'm very happy with my layouts. Could they be better? I don't know. I like them. I probably could sit here and spend 20 hours adding layers and crap to them, but less is more! I have that some problem in traditional scrapbooking. I want to keep adding stuff. Every cat sticker I own doesn't need to be on one layout. 

Maxx being crazy after bathtime

Today I'm sharing with you my completed layouts from class. Hope you like them. I do especially the one of Tigger. 

Oh and one more important thing. This is kinda huge. I don't hate Photoshop anymore. Shhhh....I'm actually kind of enjoying it.