This past Saturday I worked on two layouts with my neighborhood cropping group.




















Sunset features a photo I snapped several years ago somewhere between Cleveland and Cincinnati after visiting my parents. The serendipitous shot underlines the advantage of carrying your camera at all times.

Hair Don’ts is a gallery of my daughter’s hairstyling creations. She used to love giving my husband silly hairdos embellished with ribbons, hair bands and barrettes. You gotta give my husband credit for humoring her, not to mention letting me place these photos on the Internet. His only stipulation was that he remain unnamed.

Hair Don’ts won’t win any design prizes, but it proved a rich learning experience for me. See all those circular photos and frames? The photos were cut with a Creative Memories cutting system I borrowed from a fellow cropper. The photo frames, added at home, were hand cut with the help of household-object templates. Believe me, the Creative Memories system was easier. This product has been around a while, but if you’re not familiar with it, click here to see a podcast demonstration by Noell Hyman. The podcast takes several minutes to load, so you might want to open it on another window or tab.

I created the scallops on the outside of the Hair Don'ts photo frames using a modified version of Catherine Feegel-Erhardt’s scalloped-edge technique on page 61 of Memory Makers' August/September issue. Thank you, Catherine.

Of the two layouts, Sunset is the most attractive, but for all its design flaws, in some ways I like my Hair Don’ts layout better. I love its silliness and the family memories it evokes—and I’m pleased with myself for figuring out how to create a circular, scalloped frame.

Do you have a layout you know isn’t your best but that you still love? Tell us about it and give us a link so we can see it.

Had a jam-packed day checking out new product at CHA today. We'll be sharing a few trends and highlights in Saturday's e-mail ... In the meantime, here are some products that caught my eye:

KI Memories Pop Culture

7gypsies Artist Trading Card Revolving Holder and Tags

Cosmo Cricket Metallic Rub-ons

Maya Road Office Notes and Scallop Ric Rac

Piggy Tales Hide & Seek Flap Book

Urban Lily Secretkeeper Cards

I also really liked Tinkering Ink's Blur line, K&Co.'s Silhouette Kit, Technique Tuesday's Rocket Man acrylic stamps and Sandylion's Licorice Lane collection.

Later in the evening, Courtney Walsh and 2007 Masters Katrina Simeck, Michele Skinner, Catherine Feegel-Erhardt, Lisa Tutman-Oglesby and Crystal Jeffrey Rieger joined our company team for dinner tonight ... lots of laughter and fun. What an awesome group of women! Only wish all of our Masters dcould have been there!

After dinner, Catherine, Michele, Katrina, Lisa, Crystal and I went to the hotel where several of them were staying, and where a horrorfest weekend was being held. The word on the street was that Freddie Krueger (Robert Englund) was there, and sure enough, he was! I managed to catch the back of his head with my camera. My trigger finger was a little slow! Quite the highlight of the evening! (I'd load my photos, but I've crashed this blog three times now, so it looks like it's not meant to be. Grrr. Oh, well.)

Heading to bed now ... hope I don't have Freddie nightmares!

Best,
Beth

The Ohio Lottery has a slogan: If you don’t enter, you can’t win.

I’m not much for lotteries, but I encourage you to enter the 2008 Memory Makers Masters Contest. Do it soon, because the entries must be postmarked no later than July 31, 2007. Click here for rules and other contest information.

As a magazine editor, I’m not eligible to enter, but as the moderator of the Memory Makers Masters Contest forum, I feel the excitement. I'm the one who answers questions that no mere set of rules could ever hope to cover.

Contest entrants occasionally reduce their stress levels by talking to each other about their frustrations or nervousness. As a moderator I don’t have that kind of creative stress--I have what you might call don’t-be-creative stress that comes from making sure I answer questions correctly and consistently so I don’t lead anyone astray. It’s harder than you might think. I sometimes wonder if the contest entrants have gotten together on a different forum somewhere to devise a game of Trip Up the Moderator. “She’ll never be able to answer this one,” they say, or “Let’s see if we can get her to contradict herself.”

I love the MMM Contest entrants. They’re a hardy, hopeful, creative bunch. Ten will become 2008 Masters and the rest will have grown tremendously from the experience. Sure, that’s easy for me to say, but I only say it because it’s what the entrants are telling me and each other on the forum.

If you don’t enter, you can’t win. But, unlike the Ohio lottery, if you do enter, you will win. Maybe you won’t be a Master, but you’ll still win by creating five new layouts, meeting a challenge, boosting your self-esteem and stretching your creativity.

So go to the contest Web pages for the basic rules and visit the forum if you have additional questions or need a bit of moral support. But do it soon. That July 31 postmark due date is just around the bend.

Meet you at the forum,

Holly Davis