So today I thought we could talk about scrapbooking on a budget.  Maybe you have a limited budget.  Or you are just starting and cannot buy everything (though I know you secretly want to).  Or you just hate waste. 

Anyway, whatever the reason, I have a few tips that might help you stretch your scrapbook supplies a bit (or use up some older supplies).  And that is always a good thing!

So first thing.  BUY WHITE.

Huh? 

What I mean is when you go to buy embellishments and you see them offered in 7 different colors and you cannot buy them all - buy them in white.  Why?  Well because white can be altered to any color you want.  This doesn't apply to all embellishments but look at these.

Titles are a big supply eater.  And alphas can be expensive.  Of course we all know you can alter chipboard letters but stickers can be altered too.  Plus they are usually much cheaper.  And if you buy them in white they are easy to alter!

How do you alter them?

Have you thought of acrylic paint?  You know that super cheap stuff you can buy at your local craft store?  Comes in a million colors and you can mix them to make a million more?  Yup, just ordinary acrylic paint will work.

Want to see?  You know you do!

A drop of paint on the package that my stickers came in and I am ready.

Leave the stickers on the sheet to paint (you can cut them out if they are too close). Thin coats of paint work best.  You don't want to seal the letter to sheet.

Depending on the color it sometimes need two thin coats to get even coverage.

Once the paint is dry (it dries pretty quickly) just peal it off and use as normal.  Now some trouble shooting.

Sometimes when you peel the letters you get a jagged edge where the paint has lifted along one edge.  You can either run the tip of a craft knife along the seams before you pull it up or even faster - just run your finger along any jagged edges after you peel it up.  The paint breaks off really easily and your letter will be ready to use.

Now you can use your painted letters on a page just as if they were already red when you bought them.  Almost instantly you have red letters for the title you need while the other white letters remain, ready to be used on another page (as is or altered to another color).

*Side note - Do you know how to make a title perfectly straight?  Line up your letters along a ruler - just adhering them lightly to the edge.  Find your placement on your page and then press the tops of the letters down.  Gently pull out the ruler and stick down the bottoms.  Presto - a perfectly staright title!

So here is the finished page.

Above shows a dye based ink.  Below shows a pigment based ink. 

Don't forget that you can cut out the letters if you are worried about coloring the letters beside.

Now see how it looks kinda streaky?  Easy to solve.  Just take your finger and rub.  Yup, really technical I know but it works.  See...

So I have just spent some time with my emails.  You know, me + emails, all cosy together.  You can picture it, can't you? 

This is what I learned.

Sometimes I love email.  Sometimes I hate it.   We might need to break up. 

I have no idea what is going on with my emails but they are making me nuts!  I have just figured out that I missed some emails from people who needed visual files from past classes and some people have not received emails that I sent out. grr to me, grr to the email system.  I just spent 2 hours going through everything with a fine tooth comb (ok, not really with a comb but I painstakingly went through about 1000 emails to recheck everything). 

So about a million emails later (I have a tendency to exaggerate) I have resent them all.  So if you sent me an email and I never replied then you should have something in your email box now.  If not, try your spam.  And if you still don't have something, well, you are out of luck!  OK, just kidding.

Email me again.  Start a fresh email - don't resend the previous one.  My email is gobbling those.  Let me know how terrible I am for not sending you a reply ;), tell me what you need, wait 10 seconds and send again.  Just kidding on the 10 seconds thing.  If you don't get a reply to the new email by tonight then leave a comment here on the blog and we will try to sort out why my email is mad at your email.

OK, that is it for now.  I am walking away from my computer for awhile.  We need some space.  I might have said some things to my email system that I might later regret.  You know how fights go...

Back later today with some budget scrapping ideas.

So I am back from the land of migraines.  Remember when I said I wanted to curl up in the corner sucking my thumb and calling for my mommy?  Well, I should have actually called my mom.  She came over yesterday and was like - oh you have a migraine?  Well, have you tried X medicine?  I, of course, was completely clueless.  Off we went to the pharmacy, my mom holding my hand all the way (just kidding on the hand part but she did take me to the pharmacy!) and we got said magic pills.  One pill immediately and one before bed and I am a new woman!  I no longer feel as if I have a 2000 lb helmet on my head that is slowly squeezing, tighter and tighter.

Ahhh, got to love moms!!!  No matter how long I have been a mom, my mom always know a little more "mom info" than me.  Man, I love that woman! And not just for the magic pills....:)

So by now you might have read the Drab to Fab color boosting tutorial I have posted.  As with any tutorial it cannot possibly cover every sitution but I want to offer a solution to two hang ups that I have been getting feedback on.

The first hangup?  Not having Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.  If you did not have one of these programs or something similar you felt out of luck, didn't you?  Maybe you only have the software that came with your camera.  I would love to say that you could do the same with the free program you received but those programs are not set up in the same way.  They are meant for one click solutions and if the programing behind it isn't programmed to read you mind then it probably isn't going to do what you want.  :)  So what to do?  Well, if you want you can download this program.  Version 6 is a free image editing software program that works in levels (the same way PS does) and I am pretty sure would give you some more options.  I can, of course, make no guarantees about the program but I can tell you I downloaded it in the past and it didn't mess with my computer.  So the choice is yours.  :)  Now why do I use PS?  Well, simply cause it works really, really well. There is a reason it is so popular.  If you are thinking of getting it and you don't have it - just get the Elements.  It is still really powerful and will do everything the average person wants to do. (and it is way cheaper then the full version!)

So the other hangup?  Not having pasty white kidlets like me.  You may have found that when you followed the tutorial and used my suggested settings on your gorgeous skin tones you might have ended up with a strange look.  Obviously, not everyone glows-in-the-dark like my family and if you are not familiar with PS you might not have found settings that worked for you.  So I played around with this photo and came up with settings that worked with it.

Now this little chicklet's skin tone is still pretty light but hopefully it will help you with the understanding of the adjustments if your skin is darker.

The first change I made was on the opacity of the "screen" layer (step 7).  I found the opacity needed to be much lower than the 50%.  On this particular photo it is set to 24% so I would start around this mark and move it back and forth until you get the look you like.  Now why is it lower?  It is because the screen setting adds a sort of whitish filmy thingy over the whole photo causing everything to lighten.  With it set too high the skin gets washed out too much and makes the whole picture look wonky.  (do you like my technical terms??  lol)  So you must always play with the settings.  The ones I listed worked for my photo but each photo is different (even if I am working with the same subject matter I adjust) so you need to play.  It will come easier once you have edited a few photos (or ten or fifty...lol).

(Oh and on this photo I have the opacity of the soft light layer set at 60%.)

And the other change I made to the settings in the tutorial was on the hue/saturation adjustment level (steps 9-11).  I found that even though on my photos I don't generally edit the reds & magentas (step 11) the skin tones looked better if I adjusted the red here.  In this photo I pumped up the red to +10 and like the results much better.  So if you are not so white you are blue (yes, we as a family "might" have that creepy blue white skin especially in the leg area!) then you will want to adjust the reds (and maybe the magentas) until your skin looks more natural.  Again, you must play around with your photo.  PS is powerful and meant to have human interaction so it will not decide anything for you.  You have to play and learn and get comfortable.

Of course the ultimate test of your editing skills will be when you print the photos.  So before you get too many done, print some adjusted ones and see what you like and don't like about your edits.  Might seem like you are wasting a bit at first but I think in the long run you will be happier with your edits/photos and waste less.

That's it for today.  Any more major hang ups?  Let me know and I will see what I can figure out for you. :)

 

 

 

 

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I felt pretty thrifty after scrapping with just scraps yesterday.  It felt great actually and made me think that maybe next week I might do a bunch of posts about scrapping on a budget - 'cause who doesn't need ways to extend their supplies?

So that will be next week  - budget scrapping :)

Have a great weekend everyone.

And the other thing to consider when you see your final photos is that they are not final. :)  Never under estimate editing and cropping.  Check out this photo.

Love it but it didn't look like this straight out of the camera.  Look at this before and after.

You can see how I changed it from not so great to a much better photo.  All I did was rotate it a bit so she looked like she was standing straight and then I cropped it.

Possibly this might help someone out there who is scrapbooker and wanted to improve their photos.  In a nutshell  - look at some photos by others you like and figure out what it is you like about them, take lots (and lots) of photos at any event and after the fact, see if you can edit any photos to improve them. 

So you might have seen that I am starting to work on a summer album for each of my kidlets, Harper and Magnus.  I started the covers last week but hadn’t decided where I wanted the albums to go yet.  All I knew was I wanted one for each of them and I wanted work on them throughout the summer.

This past weekend I put some more thought into them and came up with a plan.  I decided I was not going to treat them like tradition mini albums that have a cohesive theme and use coordinating product throughout the album.  I am going to treat each page like I treat a scrapbook page – individually.  I have a very general theme that is based on each kidlet & our summer vacation but that is about it.  I plan to add in anything that catches my interest about them throughout the summer break.  It can be big or small, something we do, something that is said or even thought – theirs or mine.  Pretty loose but it leaves a lot of opportunities open.

So I decided to title each album – Harper Was Here & Magnus Was Here.  Very general but captures  the idea of the album – a snapshot of our lives this summer.

I started to work on the covers but was really itching to start on some inside pages.  So I put the covers aside to work on during a time when I don’t have a story to tell and worked on some inside pages. I plan to make a summary page at the beginning but again I will work on that later.

So here is the first page in Harper’s book.  Something big.

I got Harper to add her own writing to make it personal.

And here is the first page in Magnus’ book.  Something small.

Just a funny that Magnus said the other day. 

(Ignore the spelling error in the journaling - it has since been corrected.)