These Hands…

Are Strong and Tough

Yet Gentle and Loving

Work Hard and Rough

and Caress so Softly

Represent Making a Living

and Safety and Security

These Hands are Tough

… Yet Fragile.

We love these hands.

Yesterday, we talked about using StoryBook Creator Plus to scrapbook using the "Power Layout" method.  We started out organizing our photos and deciding which photos went on which pages. 

If you missed yesterday's post, you can read it here.

Now, let's pick up where we left off…We've got our pictures placed on the pages and we're ready to move ahead:

4. Go back and pick paper and embellishments for each page. Now that you have your pictures, you can browse through your content and pick the papers and embellishments you want to use for each page. I have found that when doing digital scrapbooking this is easier if you do the paper and embellishments all at the same time (especially in SBC+) because it is easy to click back and forth between the paper you have selected and the coordinating embellishments.

Again, like we did with the pictures, just drag and drop them on the page. Don't get hung up with placing things here and there or cutting/cropping anything. That comes next.  For right now, focus on picking what color scheme you want, what papers fit the pictures, etc.
Think about what papers/colors will help you tell the story… what will help bring the photos to life?

5. NOW it's time to do your digi-scrapbooking… make your page using the paper, pictures, and embellishments you have chosen.  This is the time to let your creative juices flow… make use of the cool features SBC+ has and recolor elements, add textures, layer things up.  Crop your pictures.  Design your page. And, while you are doing this, consider finding a cool layout in a scrapbook magazine (or one you have done in another scrapbook) and re-create it on your page.

6. Don't forget to save (OFTEN!) I am almost afraid to write this… but I want to warn you…. Save frequently. I have been the unfortunate victim of a cantankerous computer and lost many hours' worth of work before – on so many different things – books, courseware, scrapbook pages, you name it.  I am almost obsessive about saving.  But, the nice thing about saving frequently is that if you do have a crash, you have less work to recover!

7. Tell the story. every story, but I try to capture the basic essence. I want to be sure that when my grandkids are looking at these scrapbook pages waaaay in the future, they will at least have some idea of who was there and what was going on.

8. Walk away. This may sound a bit strange, but when you think you are finished with your page, save it and walk away.  Then, reopen the file a few days later. You may see something you missed before, or have a different perspective than you did the day you started the page.  I find that as my moods shift, so does my perspective on my scrapbook pages. 

So, walking away and coming back often results in some minor modifications to my pages.
However, the trap you have to avoid is never finishing the page.  Which leads me to the final step…

9. Order your page prints! Don't let the finished pages (or StoryBook) wither away on your laptop!  It only takes a few minutes to upload those pages to an online print service and have them printed.  Creative Memories has an awesome service (which I use and love) but there are a lot of others out there as well – Shutterfly, Snapfish, etc. The key point here is to get the finished pages off of the computer and into your albums!!
Well, that's it for now. Next topic: Organizing your digital pictures in MemoryManager (or on your hard drive)

Write about the event. You can do bullet-style journaling, capturing the who, what, where, when.  Or, you can go deeper and capture your own feelings and thoughts about what the photos represent.  But, take a few minutes and write something down.

The old adage of "a picture speaks a thousand words" may be true for some people, but I've found myself wishing I'd asked my grandmother more questions about the photo albums of hers that I am now the keeper of.  I have pictures of her as a young girl, posing next to other young people and I have no idea who they are…. family? friends? And the thing that makes me the most sad is that the story is lost for good.
I may not always tell

I have been a fan of Big Picture Scrapbooking almost from their inception.

The concept is awesome.  Discrete project-based scrapbooking classes delivered over the web that you can work on according to your own schedule. They have live chats, message boards, downloads, templates, you name it. The projects are designed for digital or traditional scrapbookers, with adaptations for either style.

I have recently been attending the "Me: The Abridged Version" class that has been taught by Cathy Zielske.  She has been inspiring and has helped me to think "outside the box" in terms of scrapbooking. 

I have been trying for a year or two to move out of the chronological-style of scrapbooking into capturing more moment-based memories.  But, it's always felt a little awkward to me – and I have secretly felt like I was "cheating" and would eventually have to go back to catch up on the chronological albums.
Me: The Abridged Version has been the first project that hasn't made me feel that way.  I have been excited to work on it and have had fun putting it together. 

The premise is this – put together an album that is a simplified "encyclopedia" about you. (it's based off of the book "Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life" by Amy Krouse Rosenthal)  It has been fun picking words to go with the letters of the alphabet that best describe me and my life.  It has been even more fun trying to figure out what pictures go best with the words. I have been taking pictures of things I never thought to take pictures of before!

As you may already know, I have been learning digital scrapbooking using Creative Memories' StoryBook Creator+ software.  To do this workshop, I decided to create a digital scrapbook. The downloads on Big Picture's website were all based on Photoshop, so this required some ingenuity on my part. I created my own template, eyeballing what had been set up in the PDF handouts and having fun creating my own page.
Once the template had been created, I picked a paper set (in this case Creative Memories' Jewel Power Palette worked for me) and rotated papers each time the letter changed.
It's not finished yet, but I'm having fun working on it. 

Here is a sample of the page template I created.

I will upload some finished pages in the next week or two so that you can see how it looks as it is filled in.
If you think you want to try your hand at this, here's the template I created.  You will need StoryBook Creator+ 3.0. If you already have SBC+ 2.0, the upgrade is only $9.95 through October.

Oh, and the file is zipped, so you will need to download WinZip or some other zip software to unzip the download.