Author Archives: Heather

Jan11

Photo Printing Resources

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Photo Printing Resources

IMG_4292Now that you have chosen some pictures to print, I thought you might like some ideas about where you can get your photos printed.

As I said earlier this week, I have been using Shutterfly for about three and a half years now. I keep all of my photos at Shutterfly so that they are archived (aka backed up) in some place that’s not my home, and they are all in one place, which makes it easier to keep track of what I have archived and what I haven’t gotten to yet.

Most of the time, I have Shutterfly print and mail photos to me, which takes a little bit of time, but is the cheapest option. I love their print quality. Their photo books are also wonderful. I occasionally have their local affiliates like Target and Walgreens print small batches for me when I want something quickly. The print quality from Target and Walgreens has been variable. Sometimes they are excellent, and sometimes the prints aren’t lined up correctly and have a tiny sliver of white showing on one corner. If you have a local Target, Walgreens or CVS where you love the quality of their printing, this may be a good option for you.

There are some other cool things about Shutterfly. Not only do they give you free photo storage, which makes them a great place to archive your photos, but they also have share sites, which makes it easy to share photos with friends and family who can then choose to print photos for themselves from the share sites. They’ve also got a wide variety of items that you can have your photos printed on; from calendars to mugs to greeting cards.

You don’t have to use Shutterfly just because I do, however. There are some other great photo printing services.

Many scrapbookers love to use Snapfish. It’s got unlimited photo storage as well, but to keep it, you need to place at least one order each year. If you scrapbook at all over the course of a year, you should be able to meet that requirement. 😉

My friend Danielle Taylor from Scrapper On the Street swears by their photo quality, and has used them for calendars and greeting cards with great success. Snapfish also has share sites and photo books and other photo printed items, and has print locally options with Walmart, Walgreens, Meljer, and Duane Reade.

Another well recommended printer is Persnickety Prints. They also have free unlimited online storage, and great print quality, and my friend Monica Bradford of Scrap Inspired says they are one of the fastest online shippers out there. They don’t have as much variety when it comes to photo printed items, but they do print 12×12 photos, which is great news for any digi-scrapper who wants to get their digi pages off the screen and into the real world. They are a great place to print your Instagram photos as well, and are also catering to the Project Life crowd. Additionally, they have a lot of digi-freebies for people who sign up for their services. I will definitely be checking them out. I have a lot of digi pages that I’d like to get printed.

There are also a lot of local options. If you’re lucky there’s still a dedicated photography/camera store where you live. That’s usually the best bet when you’re looking for quality prints. However, there are also places like Costco, Walmart, Walgreens, CVS, and Target that will print for you. (Some might even ship to you.) You will have to check out each store to determine whether their print quality is good enough for you. My local Target used to have excellent print quality, but recently has been very disappointing. I would recommend doing a small batch to check quality before ordering every print from the last five years from one of your local big box stores.

If you’ve got any other printer recommendations, please share! And if you haven’t printed anything yet, what are you waiting for? Pick one, and get printing!

Jan8

Choosing Photos: Printing

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Choosing Photos: Printing

One of the things that can interfere with scrapbooking is choosing which photos to print. If you are like me, you’ve got hundreds (or thousands! yes thousands!) of digital photos to sort through before you can even get to scrapbooking.

I can see you getting overwhelmed just thinking about it. 😉

Take a deep breath, and let’s keep this simple. Pick a set amount of time to work on your photos. Fifteen minutes. Half an hour. Last night, I decided to listen to a podcast while choosing photos to print. (Among other things. My ability to stay on task lately has been abysmal!) Then narrow down what you are going to look through. I chose to narrow my field to photos taken the first quarter of last year, when I realized I hadn’t archived most of the photos from last year. Then I started flagging the particular photos I wanted to upload so I can print or archive them. Here, let me show you:

(Click on the little tiny yellow square in lower right hand side of the video to go full screen)

Did that give you an idea on how to go about choosing photos to print?

I focus on choosing photos that

a: tell at least one story. more is better

b: show personality

c: make my heart go pitter-patter

I do NOT print every photo I take. Did you notice that I have 888 photos in just that quarter alone? I will never ever scrapbook all those photos. Never. And I am okay with that.

I don’t even print every photo I upload. Some of the photos I upload will not make the cut as far as printing, but because Shutterfly has free, unlimited storage, I use them as an additional place to archive the photos I love.

There are lots of other photo printing places out there. Choose one you love, and USE it. You’ll never get any scrapbooking done if you don’t have photos to use!

Don’t give me any excuses. You CAN do this.

 

Jan4

You Are Inspired!

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You Are Inspired!

No matter if you are just starting to scrapbook, or have been scrapbooking for years, there’s one thing you can do to motivate yourself to scrapbook. What is it?

Think about your “Why?”

Why do you want to scrapbook? Do you have a specific project you want to do, like a wedding album or a family history book? Do you like playing with paper and ink, or pixels and brushes? Or do you realize that time flies all too quickly, and that what is normal today, is all too far in the past tomorrow?

This is the most important thing you can think about if you want to keep yourself motivated and excited to scrap. Every single GOOD scrapbooking class I’ve taken has brought in this idea as part of the class material.

Let me show you some of my reasons (and I have many):

100_2424

Class assignment from Cathy Zielske’s Design Your Life class at Big Picture Classes

The following few pages are from the class album I mentioned in my previous post about making mistakes.

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The title page

100_5985

Capturing the everyday

reasons pg 10

Telling my story

reasons pg 9

Sharing family history

This is such a useful process, I often make pages to remind myself about why I scrapbook. A couple more recent pages :

LOAD 211 24 copy

100_7479In short, I scrapbook because there are too many wonderful things, too many everyday things to remember. It’s my creative outlet, my memory saver, and my celebration of life in general (the good AND the bad.)

So if you are stumped, or stuck, or wondering if scrapbooking is really for you, take some time today and think about WHY you want to scrapbook. If you’re feeling really motivated, make a page and share it with me.

I’d love to learn why you want to scrapbook.

 

Dec21

I Make Mistakes. Regularly!

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I Make Mistakes. Regularly!

One of the excuses I frequently hear is “I’m afraid I’m going to ruin ___.” Sometimes it’s a piece of paper. Sometimes it’s a photo. Sometimes it’s even the memory you’re trying to record.

Well, I’m here to tell you, sometimes you will mess it up. And that’s okay. Sometimes you’ll have to start over. Sometimes you’ll be able to turn your mistake into a happy accident. Sometimes you’ll just throw it in the circular file, and never look back.

The thing is, you can’t let a mistake, or the possibility of a mistake, keep you from doing whatever it is you’re trying to do. I’m sure you’ve learned this in other aspects of your life. Now I’m asking you to apply that mindset to scrapbooking.

Let me give you an example from my own experiences:

I have been stamping for a very long time. Luckily, while there wasn’t a local scrapbook store when I first started scrapbooking, there was a local stamp store, whose owner was also a wonderful teacher. I learned a lot by taking her classes. One of the most important things I got from her classes was that by knowing your materials (inks, papers, textures, etc.) you could minimize stamping mistakes. (I’ll have a .pdf and short video about avoiding common stamping mistakes available for anyone who signs up for my mailing list, once I get that up and running.)

I used to teach EK Success’ Scrapbook Design University at my local JoAnn’s. Each week, I’d bring in sample pages, and my album covers were getting ruined by the mess left behind by the Wilton students. No matter how much I cleaned, I still managed to get frosting on my linen albums.

I decided I needed an album dedicated to the class, so my personal albums wouldn’t get ruined. I had a post-bound album I had bought at JoAnn’s, but it was UGLY. I decided I’d stamp on the cover to try to pretty it up. It had a smooth, non-porous surface, so I decided to use staz-on ink, which is permanent and dries quickly, even on non-porous surfaces. I also had a bottle of staz-on stamp cleaner, so I was sure I’d be able to wipe off any mistakes I might make. I also knew that since the cover was smooth and almost slippery, there was a higher than average chance I’d mess up an image, but the album was so ugly I figured I couldn’t make it any worse. 😉

Sure enough, the very first image I stamped, my hand slipped, and I blurred the image. I got out the cleaner to wipe up the mistake, and all it did was smear the image some more.

I wasn’t expecting that!

I sat back, and considered my options. Forget about the whole thing, and use a different album? Keep going and hope I didn’t slip while stamping any more? Or decide that the smear wasn’t a design flaw, but a feature?

Of course I decided to turn my flaw into a feature. I continued with my stamping, and after I stamped each image, I smeared it with some more cleaner.

Here’s the final product:

100_5998Sort of interesting, in a good way, right?

The thought I want you to take with you as you begin your scrapbooking journey is this: You WILL make mistakes, and you CAN find solutions for any mistake you make. Embrace imperfection. It makes life (and your scrapbooks) much more interesting.

 

 

Dec15

Process

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Process

The best place to start when you begin scrapbooking, is with some inspiration. If you really want to scrapbook, it’s usually because you have something specific in mind: a story you want to tell, some photos you want to use, an event you want to document.

I made this video for you to show one process for creating a page. It began with the idea that I wanted to make some pages for my sister’s baby book. The secondary motivation was to make a page for this past October’s Layout a Day challenge using this prompt supplied by Alison Day.

 
Some further notes:

  • There are a lot of photos in that pile. I chose about 50 total to print, out of the hundreds that my brother-in-law has shared since his daughter’s birth. There is no reason to scrapbook every single one of them
  • I did a lot of paper shuffling. I really wanted to add more intense color to the page, which is why I went back to the pile a second time to find additional paper. My sister’s family is not calm and sedate. They are a bright, energetic, live life to the fullest bunch, and I wanted the pages I made for them to reflect that.
  • I don’t know why it took so long for me to come up with the border strip idea.
  • I very rarely mat photos. When I do mat photos, it’s usually to make a focal photo stand out more, or to unify a photo block. These stand out enough already.
  • Titles look better and are easier to read when there’s high contrast. That’s one reason I chose that green alpha for the title. It’s also one of my sister’s favorite colors.
  • If you use tags with pre-punched holes, use a brad or some other small embellishment to make it look like it’s holding the tag on the page.

I hope this helps you picture yourself creating a page, or possibly even make one!

You can do it. You already have everything you need to start.