Aloha, all!
I am finally back in control of my Craft Room and I'm finally back crafting! OK, that didn't take long – but it certainly felt like forever! I won't go into the gory details. Just let it be said that, while I confidently touted myself as a non-hoarder, my pulling stuff out of boxes and off shelves in my craft room proved me to be, well, less than truthful. I had no idea! Have you heard the phrase, "This would go so well with…." That is SOOOO deceptive, especially when you put that little something in a drawer or on a shelf and then hide it behind the next "This would go so well with…" object.
Five big black bags of trash and four boxes of stuff to be mailed to friends later I have wrenched myself out of the mountains of stuff I've been saving, "Just in case."
This all started when I got my new Project Life by Stampin' Up! products delivered last week. I could hardly wait to rip that box open to see what I had. Then I went to put the fun new products away and I had no place to put them. I knew that this was going to be something that I was going to be working with and sharing frequently from now on. And not to have a place for all the goodies was NOT acceptable.
But now I have a place to put them and I have made my very first Project Life by Stampin' Up! "page."
If you're a traditional scrapbooker, you may wonder what all the fuss is about. But I am here to tell you that this, my VERY FIRST PROJECT LIFE BY STAMPIN' UP! PAGE took me 30 minutes to make. And I took that long because I still wasn't sure how to get my pictures to print in the 3" x 4" style of the Project Life program. I'm still not quite there, but I will be by tomorrow. And tomorrow I'll have a couple more pages to share from this particular trip that my husband I took to celebrate our wedding anniversary.
The Project Life by Stampin' Up! template that I used I could only find in the Stampin' Up! store. All of the Project Life templates have letters designating the design. So far I do not know the letter designation for this template. But I LIKE IT! It was perfect for this layout. There are two 4" wide x 6" high places for photos (or whatever you wish) to be inserted at the top. There is one such place on the bottom. Between the top two 4" x 6" places at the top there are two 4" x 3" places for inserts. There are two of the same size on the left and right of the 4" x 6" insert on the bottom.
You may wonder how I even got started with this layout. Wonder no more, because this is how I did it.
As you may imagine – and as you probably do yourself – we had far more photos than we would want to place on one page. So I picked the photos that I liked. Then I printed them in draft mode on plain paper as large "thumbnails." Then I pulled out the template I thought I'd use and laid the large thumbnails out on it.
All but one of the photos seemed to work well with the layout. The one in the middle at the bottom would have been a landscape 6" x 4" sized photo. But that spot needed a photo with a portrait orientation. So I cut the photo in half and determined that it would be a portrait 4" x 6" print. Um, that's called, "cropping." Basic Scrapbook stuff!!
Once I had the layout done, I went to my computer to print out the photos. Depending on what software you're using, this is easy or not so easy. I'm currently using Photoshop Elements 11. I added a "new" project the size that I wanted my photos and then dragged my photos onto the "new" shape and resized until I got everthikng where I wanted it.
Then I needed to fill in the "extra" spaces. As I'd decided to use the High Tide Designer Series Paper Set for all my pages from this event, I picked a design that went well with all the photos I was using. I cut the High Tide paper pattern into 3" x 4" pieces, and punched the corners with the new Project Life Corner Punch. I then stamped some dates and images from two new Project Life Stamp Sets – Point and Click and Day to Day. I also used the Geometrical Stamp Set for the "I Love You" stamp onto the High Tide paper. As I still had not figured out how to get my pictures to be 3" x 4", I placed some of the High Tide Designer Series Paper behind those photos. They wil also be behind the photos from the next pages – the photos my husband took of tropical fish in the water!
The final touch for this, my first Project Life page, was the journaling. I was going to hand-write my thoughts from the day. But then I thought, "why not just print it on cardsock?" And so I did. I have a fairly new HP printer, and it does beautifully with colored cardstock! Calypso Coral was my choice, and I just printed away and finished the page!
What a fun project this was! The only thing that took a long time was getting my craft room table up and running so I could do the project! I'll have more done by tomorrow and will share them with you. I'm so excited to have gotten this far!
Here are the products I used today. The Project Life producs are new AND available! So exicted as I've been reading about Project Life for several years and didn't get into it because it wasn't Stampin' Up! Now it is and I'm into in BIG TIME!
