Over this last summer, I started working on scrapping my honeymoon. I only completed this 2-page layout of our wedding night. I did everything myself except for the date embellishment, which came from Jennifer Pebbles' free kit at Two Peas in a Bucket website. It's called the skinny date label. I made the paper myself by texturizing the one I chose for a background. I used the floral brush as a corner border. I think I got those from brusheezy.com. I wanted the pages to coordinate, but not necessarily be symmetrical. It was hard to put embellishments on before, because a lot of the freebies I had didn't go well. And I had no idea how to make my own. But now that I've discovered embellishment templates, I will probably put a lot more of them on my pages. And, looking at these, I'll probably tweak this one a bit, since it's the only honeymoon layout I've completed. When I do all of them, I'd like for it to be a book. So, we'll see if a future post contains a (hopefully improved) variation of this layout.

On our wedding night, we stayed at the Marriott Waterside hotel downtown. We had taken a few pictures of our hotel room, and we had a nice view out our balcony. The journaling piece talks about this, plus the fact that we ate the food that had been packed for us at our reception, since we did not get to eat during it. The next morning we were able to see our ship in port from our hotel room. We walked to the port, which was a little more than we had expected, with the suitcases, but it wasn't too bad.

Having been getting more scrapbooking items this week, I'm realizing that I definitely need to reorganize my computer files. I started to organize them with a folder for papers, one for embellishments, and just take them from the kits I downloaded. I did this because I figured that it would be easier to look through all of my papers at once. This may still be the easiest, but then I have to make sure I know about all of the kit information so I can give the proper credit to the designer. That still may be the way to go, but I have a lot of kits that I downloaded and haven't gone through yet. So, that will be helpful, too, in finding other elements to put on my pages. Anyone out there have some good tips for organizing digital files?

In The Meantime

I finally bit the bullet and actually spent some money on scrapbooking. Well, I've paid bought a magazine subscription and a couple of issues of a Photoshop magazine that includes a CD of brushes, gradients, textures, and fonts for Photoshop. But I actually have tried to download only free kits and elements from the different websites. There are really so many free things you can get. But the really good stuff, I think you have to pay for. So, I had some extra money (I get reimbursed for my mileage when I have to go to meetings and stuff, and that's mine to do what I want with), so I decided to buy some different digital kits. I just downloaded them all, so I haven't been able to play with them yet, but I plan to this week and next week when I'm off. So hopefully, I'll post some new layouts on here soon!

In the mean time, here are a couple of pictures that I played around with on Photoshop. I will probably use them in a layout one day, but I decided to go ahead and post them here. For this picture of me and  Jason, I applied a gradient, and I played around with the opacity until I liked it.

This other picture of me is one of those where only one element in the picture is colored. I've always liked those pictures. This won't be a technical how-to, but in Photoshop, you duplicate your layer, make the new layer black & white, then create a clipping mask. You then erase the part of the picture that you want colored. Again, I'll probably scrap this one day. I originally was going to use it in the template that I used for My Love (my first layout), but I didn't want the layout to focus only on me, so I chose a picture of me and Jason.

Just an extra tidbit...here are some of my favorite scrapbooking websites: scrapgirls.com, twopeasinabucket.com, and scrapbooksetc.com. I also go to peppermintcreative.com, but I sometimes forget about that one. The things I just bought were from scrapgirls.com. That site has a daily newsletter where they give a free download. They also have what they call a scrap club, with two options, paying either $7 or $10 each month, and getting a good amount of materials in return. I'm thinking about doing that, too. So, check it out if you haven't before. And stay tuned for a new layout soon.

My Love

This was my first completed layout, done in December 2008. I had the help of a template from the website twopeasinabucket.com. Templates are very easy to use. I really ought to use them more. I started the layout because it was a contest. You could submit a layout made with the template and win free stuff from the designer's website. So this layout begged for a great big picture, and what better one to use than one from our wedding? I made it black and white, but I wanted to use lavendar for the background. It looked funny to me unless I added a lavendar tint to the picture. (I think that's what I did, it's been so long that I forgot exactly how I did it). The journaling was just inspired by the thought that when you get married, you really don't know what lies ahead, good or tough times, but everything has a purpose. Anyway, it's probably the nicest looking layout that I've done, hence the reason I think I should use more templates.

The template is Scrap Canvas 8 from the Queen of Quirk at twopeasinabucket.com. My background paper is from Cherie Mask's All Twitterpated kit, also from twopeasinabucket. I just changed the color of the background paper.