My instructions are given using Adobe Photoshop, but really I think they can be translated to a wide variety of programs. As long as you can work with layers and do basic things like blending, use an eraser or paintbrush tool, you should be good to go!

I’ll be using some of my favorite textures from my Enchanted Overlay set. I really just love playing with these!

The simplest way to working towards a great edit with a texture is to use the eraser tool on the texture. I often find that a texture is a little too much to handle on someone’s skin in a photo, so I like to decrease the appearance just on their skin.

I achieved the edit above in just a few easy steps. First, place your desired texture over your photo. You might have to scale it a bit to fit how you prefer. Then choose your blending mode for your texture. In this case, I chose overlay. Next, you want to grab your eraser tool, and if your program allows it, decrease the opacity some. How much will all depend on what your tastes are.

Use the eraser to remove some of the texture from their skin as desired. It works best if you have a soft round brush shape selected.

The next step was to do a levels adjustment to add a little extra pop. In my book, there is no going wrong with a little extra pop! I do this by adding an adjustment layer. With the adjustment on a separate layer you can easily turn effects on or off, or even mask off parts of the effect from areas of your image. But that’s a topic for another tutorial I think!

Drag the sliders for the levels adjustment as you see fit. Have fun and experiment! After these few small tweaks, I was done with my photo! See how the texture added some nice coloring to my photo?

The next way I like to play with textures is just as easy. Only this time instead of the eraser, we’ll use the paintbrush tool.

The first thing I did was before I placed my texture over my image, I used the color picker to choose a neutral color that was present in the texture itself. Then I proceeded to bring in the texture over my photo. I changed the blend mode to overlay and decreased the opacity to 80%. However, don’t be afraid to play with different blend modes!

The next step was to choose a soft round paint brush. You can play with the opacity of your brush as well!

With my soft brush selected, I carefully painted over the subject of the photo. This keeps the coloring that comes along with the texture, but smooths out the actual texture on the skin. It makes for a really nice effect.

All I did after that was a levels adjustment again and my photo was done. Super simple right?

I hope this has been helpful and you will be well on your way to becoming a texture pro. You know what else would be fun? Try out some of your awesomely textured digiscrap papers as textures!
But most of all, experiment and have fun. I’ll leave you with some inspiration to help motivate you into playing more with photo textures and overlays!

Here’s a few examples of amazing siggies from the SugarBabes, designers, and talented ladies who hang out here:

I’m going demonstrate by making two siggies for some ladies on the forum, Mary & Rachel. Follow along to make your own. Today, for Part 1 we will see how to make Rachel’s siggie.

Let’s get started. For each siggie I need a digital kit with papers and elements, and an alpha or font.

Open Photoshop or whatever program you use (I am working in Photoshop CS6) and begin by going to file > new to open a new canvas. I type in the size: 500 pixels wide by 300 pixels high at 72 ppi resolution (the resolution here is important because this is an image crafted for viewing on the web, not for print). You can make your siggie any size you want, but I would not exceed 400 pixels high or 600 pixels wide.

I begin Rachel’s siggie by drawing some pennant shapes with the polygonal lasso tool. I will clip some papers to these shapes and shadow them to build an interesting background for her name to be placed on.

Next, I begin placing some interesting elements beneath her name and the paper pennant shapes, making sure to not go too close to the edge of the canvas (think ahead about what direction your shadows will be going and be sure to check that nothing… including shadows or paint splatters… extends off the canvas). The adorable nest card element would be great, but I don’t have room for the whole card. Using the polygonal lasso tool again, I “cut” around the shape roughly.

Now I can layer my cut out nest at an angle (so we can see the cute little eggs) beneath Rachel’s name. I also add some buttons on each side of the top paper piece, and a flower above the alpha… making sure to only overlap parts of the alphabet that won’t cause it to be unreadable. Some stitches, a scatter, washi tape, and some foliage. It feels finished to me now!

But wait… I had to add just a few more touches to make it WOW! I also turned off visibility on the background layer to prepare for saving it as a transparent .png…

Now that the fun scrapping part is over, let’s get this puppy saved and uploaded! You can save for web as a .jpg or .png. A .png will save a siggie with a transparent background, which is nice for forums that have colored backgrounds. I am going to demonstrate how to save a .png.

First, go to File > Save for Web. The window will come up as shown above. Select PNG-24 for siggies (it will be a bigger file, but will display more colors than PNG-8). Check the box for transparency. Then click save!

Next, I saved and closed my layered .psd file that I was working on. I re-opened the .png I just saved. On the one and only layer, right click the thumbnail on the layer palette and click  Select Pixels. Then, while pixels are selected, go to the toolbar and click on the crop icon. It will automatically crop up to the very edge of the pixels without cutting anything off. This makes your image as small as possible. Hit enter to crop and save.

Take this image and upload it to an image hosting site like Photobucket. After uploading, you need to copy the direct url to the image.

Now go to the Sweet Shoppe forum and click User CP on the top left of the gray bar. On the menu under Settings & Options click Edit Signature. It should look something like this below. Type what I did in the field, replacing your image URL with the green highlighted section. Click save & enjoy!

That’s all for today! Thanks for following along!

-Brook

PS: I will bring you a step-by-step through how to make Mary’s siggie in Part 2! Here’s a little peek of hers:

The Custom Shape Tool allows you to create shapes using vectors which gives you clean shapes that can be sized up or down without quality loss. Photoshop comes with a pretty good variety of standard shapes sets. You can also add sets, a web search can find you freebies as well as sets that can be purchased, you can even make your own. (we’ve got a tutorial for that right here )

Once you choose the Custom Shape Tool and choose your shape, all you have to is drag your cursor to create it

You can even stroke a shape as seen above.

Once you have chosen your shape you get to decide how to use it. You can leave it as is, blended like a stamp or brush, as an element with added shadows and/or bevel, as a clipping mask or cut out.

Now let’s see them in action as design elements.

Now that you’ve seem some of what this tool can do for your layouts, it’s your turn to get in shape.

About Maria

I am so excited to be one of the newest members of the Sweet Shoppe Designs creative team! I love all things design-related and when I discovered digital scrapbooking, I quickly became a devotee. I’m also completely obsessed with paper and look foward to all the exciting things going on in our hybrid community.  Mini albums and photo books  are wonderful for big events, but my scrapbook layouts are usually about the little everyday moments.  I live in the Boston area with my boyfriend and the little kids you see in my layouts are my awesome nieces and nephews, whom I never see enough!

My Claim to Fame

I’m always really interested in learning new techniques, so I think my gallery is pretty eclectic. Despite the varied styles, however, I always pay a lot of attention to my lighting and, since I do get asked about my shadowing, I thought I’d go over my general process with you guys.  Lastly, I’m super excited to share a new technique I’ve been using to shadow washi tapes!

Shadows

Oftentimes, I’ll have to rasterize my shadow layer before I can make my final adjustments. When this is the case, I’ll distort my shadows using the transform tool, shape them with the smudge tool, and/ or add a Gaussian blur.

Neighborhood Cafe

Looking at paper scrapbook layouts is a fantastic way to research how shadows behave in various settings because scrapbookers shoot their photos in all sorts of different lighting conditions.  My favorite shadows are those created by natural light.  They’re soft and pretty and they sometimes do the wackiest things. Without a good point of reference, though,  it’s hard to imagine.  For some inspiration, I collect a lot of paper layouts on my Pinterest board.  I also love checking out Rubia’s board too!

So Fairy Pretty

One of my newest shadow tricks involves the wave filter to distort both my drop shadow and outer glow layers.  Jacinda’s awesome tutorial has step by step instructions.  I used this technique to create the paper stack in So Fairy Pretty.  Best of all, I put it together in half the time because I didn’t have to make every adjustment by hand.

When I realized how much I loved this look, I saved a couple shadow settings that worked well for me. Then I recorded an action.  For more about creating an efficient workflow, check out Lydia’s article–I love it!  By saving an action, I cut my editing time in half, yet again, and now I’m way more likely to create layered paper clusters because the shadowing doesn’t seem so tedious.

Finishing Touches

When I’m finished with my composition, I like to bring everything together by applying photo treatments that reinforce the overall mood of my page.  Neighborhood Cafe and So Fairy Pretty, both have a playful, airy feel to them. To achieve this look, I brightened them quite a bit, played with my mid-tones to restore some of the detail I had lost, and saturated certain colors.

To give my dimensional elements more realism, I added some blur and vignetting to the corners.  Usually, I keep both photo treatments pretty subtle, but for more dramatic lighting, I increase my blur quite a bit.  If you look at This Beautiful Life closely, you’ll notice I started the blur just above and below the clustered band in the center, but, I also used a clipping mask to keep certain areas sharp (like the little bird cluster (top left).

This Beautiful Life

Staying Inspired

Challenges are a great way to stay inspired.  When left to my own devices, I have a couple of layout compositions I go back to again and again.  I love large photos and I’ll add embellishments and text on top of the image.  More often, I’ll add some clusters around a single photo.  Or, if I’m getting really crazy, I’ll use some sort of grid with multiple photos.

That’s why I love challenges–they’re a great way to step outside of my comfort zone.  I put together This Beautiful Life for the February SSD Pinterest challenges and I had to use the color Emerald prominently (not a color I ever use). I loved the green floral pattern from Juliana’s La Boheme kit, so I decided to make it my background.  I usually go for something more neutral, so again, I was totally out of my comfort zone and I was fairly certain I was creating a ridiculous layout.  In the end, though, it became one of my favorites.

It was Written in the Stars

Another way I get inspired is by using templates because they help me think of placement in more interesting ways. I would never have created Roadtrip if I hadn’t used Cindy’s template from Set #143.  Even for something very simple like, Time Flies, templates encourage me to go in different directions.

Roadtrip

Time Flies

Quick Tip

Optimizing my work flow, as I mentioned above, is a big part of my creative process, so I wanted to share a washi tape tutorial with you all.  For the longest time, I avoided using washi tapes because I would spend a really long time burning and dodging.  It was just one of those things I really had a problem with and I couldn’t figure out know why!

Recently, I’ve been experimenting with different blending modes and I realized I could substitute burning and dodging with the process outlined below. The best part is, this method is non-destructive–perfect for someone like me who’s always rearranging!

Thanks so much for taking a little time to get to know me–I’m really looking forward to getting to know you all as well!  And please feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions.  I’m going to share a more detailed shadowing tutorial with you all, so if there’s anything in particular you want to see included, definitely let me know!

Step by Step:

1) Select the Font menu either at the top right toolbar or the left hand side toolbar.

2) Type the words that you want to weld together in the font you want.

3) Select the word you want to weld.

4) Select the “Modify Window” in the upper right toolbar, it’s the icon that looks like a gray rectangle with the blue M circled. Your typed word will look like overlapping letters, but you don’t want the cuts that go into the other letters, which is why you want to weld them together into one word.

5. Click on “Weld”, it’s the top icon in the modify window it looks like a gray rectangle and gray circle merged together. After you’ve clicked on “weld” you will either see one box which means the whole word has been welded together into one word and you don’t need to make any further steps… if you see move 2 or more light gray boxes in your selected word it means that there are pieces that aren’t connected and you either need to make adjustments to have them touching so that you can further “weld” your word. If it’s something you don’t want merged, but you want to make sure it still is a part of the word and only have one light gray box, you will need to do one more step…

5a. with all the pieces of the word selected, click on “make” and it will made it into one object that you can move around your page together without the dot being left behind.

Voila, you have your welded script font and it will cut in one piece for you!!! To cut, click on your cut menu and select the media you’re using, make the adjustments needed to your blade, insert your paper on the cutting mat and click “cut” and watch your Silhouette do it’s magic.

If you like creating word art, you can merge together words to make one big cut…

Here are the words that I want to merge together for the bottom of my double rainbow photo in my project life album… After I had created them and moved them to where they were touching, I followed the same steps above to “weld” all the words together into one piece…

See how you can see the 4 light gray boxes around each word selected? Once I hit “weld” it will merge them into one if they are all touching or overlapping another letter.

I hit “make” at the end because the first “h” and “e” aren’t touching or overlapping any other letters so they will cut separately, but I wanted to make them one object so that I could fill my page with other things I wanted to print and cut for my project life album.

Finished Photos:

I ended up “welding” the whole word art to a frame, so it was nice to have the word art as one so that I could easily move it all around and not lose those two letters. Here is a photo of my project life card, as well as a photo of my project life pages… as you can see I also “welded” another word art using a print font in the upper right hand corner with the smoothie mustache photos, and mixed a script font with a print font for the “summer sandals” word art.

fonts used: Bebas and Pacifico

font used: Droid Serif

fonts used: Emily Lime Words and AW Conqueror Sans

Credits:

Flowers After the Rain : Collection by Sugarplum Paperie and Wishing Well Creations
Puddle Jumper by Jenn Barrette and Mari Koegelenberg
Bits & Bytes: 4×6 2013 Weekly Title Cards by Nettio Designs
Fonts: AW Conqueror, Bebas, Droid Serif, Emily Lime Words, Pacifico

additional products:
Becky Higgins Design A Page Protecto, Silhouette Portrait – cut files from Silhouette Online, Sewing Machine and thread, Simple Stories SN@P Typeset Stickers, American Craft Lullaby Thickers, Smash Date Roller, Timber Brown StazOn Ink, Black Sharpie Pen, Tiny Attacher, ATG tape, Rangers Glossy Accents, My Mind’s Eye Enamel Dots, Freckled Fawn and Studio Calico Wood Veneers, The Twinery Baker’s Twine

I hope this has helped you become a little bit familiar with the Silhouette Software and some of the things it can do. I can’t wait to see your projects using fonts and the weld tool.

I’m a 38 year old mother of 2 from way down in the deep South in a tiny little town in Mississippi. My husband is Active Duty National Guard and we’ve been married going on 12 years. I started digital scrapbooking in 2005 shortly after my son was born and it’s been a daily part of my life ever since. This year will mark my 4 years “Babe-iversary” and I still love being a part of the amazing Sweet Shoppe Team!

My Claim to Fame:

I am definitely more of a traditional scrapper. If you look through my gallery you will see the occasional “artsy” “grungy” type layout, but mostly I scrap in a more traditional way. I really try to balance my pages and  use the “rule of thirds” without even really realizing that I’m doing it. I also think I’m fairly good at layering and shadow work. However, if I had to pick my real “claim to fame” I think it’s my photos. For me photos are what the page is all about so I usually try to use really good ones and then my paper and element choices are made to make those photos really shine. I use my dslr quite often but you don’t have to have a fancy camera to take a really good photo and actually in the past year or so many of my layouts use photos I’ve taken with my iphone. I just try to always think of where I am, what the subject of my photo is doing, and what angle will make a really great shot. This is easy with my 7d..a little more difficult with my iphone, but in the end I usually end up with photos that I love. And even if I don’t and it’s a special memory then I scrap it anyway..because that’s what this hobby is all about right?

Once I get ready to scrap my photos, I usually look at the kit I’m going to use first and decide how best my photos will shine using it. I like to match photos to kits as often as I can but if I can’t then a black and white conversion is usually the way I go.

Here are some example of layouts with what I think are awesome photos:

With my kiddo Avery, it’s getting harder as he gets older to get some genuine smiles out of him but in this case he was in a good mood so I took full advantage and ended up with some great photos. I got down on his level and just used the gorgeous fall colors as a backdrop.

In this layout, the unedited photos of my daughter Ella, were kind of blah but once I converted them to black and white and did some tweaking I ended up with this and thought they went amazing with the colors in the kit I used.

This is another photo that was okay, but really popped with the black and white conversion. As you can see it was just a regular day at the park. Avery was sitting on a bench and I just got down at his angle and widened the shot a little. I think the end result of the photo worked great with this layout.

I can’t lie. Having a little girl to photograph is the best! Especially when she loves to be my “model”. This was our Easter photo session last year. Ella was wearing the sweetest dress and again we just went out into our front yard and I shot away. I got some fabulous photos that day and just a little post processing in lightroom really made them perfect.

And here’s and example of how great an iphone pic can turn out. It’s not a perfect photo by any means, but a little processing and I think it really fit with the kit and feel of the layout.

Great photos aren’t always just about people either. My husband and I traveled to Vicksburg a few years ago and stayed in a beautiful B&B and I couldn’t stop taking photos of our gorgeous surroundings. And FYI, buildings and inanimate objects cooperate much better than children do.

I hope this gives you some ideas for when you get ready to take your own photos and remember it’s not always the camera…think about who or what you’re photographing, what you want to capture and the angle that works best and your memory card will fill up with fantastic photos for your layouts!

My love of paper continued into my personal life… my hubby to be was an engineer for a company that made paper machines… and of course being a traditional paper scrapper, I collected paper like it was going out of fashion. I still have crates full of paper in my scrapbook area that I just haven’t found the courage to part.  Today, I am a hybrid digital scrapbooker and have even more pretty patterns at the click of the printer key!! But what paper do I use?

If you have been in an office supply store, looking at the rows of paper, trying to figure out what to buy… copy paper, photo paper, brochure paper, presentation paper, cardstock, textured cardstock, index stock… the list goes on… how to choose? It can be confusing!  This seems to be a big question that many beginner hybrid scrappers ask… and today, I hope to shed some light on this subject.  Now, I’m not going to get into what brand is best… that is like talking religion and politics… haha. Some swear that you need to use the same brand paper as your printer… others like a certain brand over another… I am going to stick my neck out and say it really comes down to personal preference… and trust me, I think I have tried it all!!

Just a very, very small sampling of what in hanging out on the shelf under my printers…

We need to take a minute and break down the information on the package…

Paper weight (lbs)

For hybrid artists who are looking at paper for creating packaging or other decor items where you need a strong thick paper, something that will stand up well to weight or handling…. look for the largest pound (lbs) number that will fit through the printer.

The easiest is when the package says… 20lb or 50lb… the higher the pound weight, the thicker and heavier weight the paper is… 20lb is like copy paper vs 60lb is like card stock.  Do you wonder where these pound weights come from?

Each category of paper (bond, book, text, cover, etc) has their own parent sized paper (or called basis size) that is the base for the paper’s weight… for example:

• If you would take 500 sheets (1 ream of paper) of 17×22 bond paper and it would weight 24lbs.
• So, if you see on a package 24/60… this means that 500 sheets of 17×22 bond paper weights 24 lbs and 500 sheets of 25×38 text paper would weight 60lbs. What does this really mean? That the two type of paper packs, 24# bond paper is the same thickness as 60# text paper.  Did I lose you? haha… I haven’t seen this much outside of sending brochures  to a print shop or buying printer paper for everyday use.  This is just in case you find yourself in a trivia contest, going for the win…

I have seen some brands of paper with just the metric setting… where again, the higher the gsm, the thicker the paper…

• Copy paper at 24lbs will be 90gsm
• Heavy weight Presentation paper at 50 lbs will be 140gsm
• Cardstock at 90lbs will be 162 gsm

Here is a great converter… http://www.desktopsupplies.com/paper-weight-converter.html

Other Things to Think About

• Another debate you will hear is Matte vs. Glossy… this really comes down to a personal preference. One thing to note, depending on your printer, glossy paper may take a bit longer for the ink to dry.
• Now you are probably wondering… what about photo paper? That is certainly an option! Most photo paper is not double sided and many hybrid artists like to be able to print on both sides. However if you are printing a hybrid/digital layout or creating a photo rich project, this might be the route you would like to go. Like glossy, I would let it dry after printing.
• Acid free paper… if you are from the traditional world of scrapping, you are well aware of this phrase. All wood has a chemical compound called Lignin… and I could go all Paper Science 101 on this with you… but I’m afraid I would totally loose you! Lignin is what can cause your paper to yellow and become brittle over time, think back to old newspaper clippings… it can also cause photographs to discolor over time, too.  Today, most commercial paper is Lignin or acid free.
• If you ask in the forums, most of us will say we use double sided, heavy weight presentation paper… there are a few that will use card stock. Again personal preference… some will say that card stock is known to really eat up printer ink and others will say that presentation paper provides a truer color profile.
• With any paper you choose to use, I would strongly recommend reading your printer’s instructional manual. Many printers have special settings for each type of paper to help with ink usage and colors.

Happy printing!

Rebecca aka Mamabee

Erin’s Claim to Fame:

Hey hey sweet shoppers! It’s me, Erin, here to tell you all about the way I finish my pages. If you take a look at my gallery, you’ll often notice that each page has a ton of layers and what I call “a finishing touch.” What’s a finishing touch? Well what I consider a finishing touch would be my title, stitching and paint. For me – I love playing around with all the different alphas, stitching and paint splatters the Sweet Shoppe offers!

Erin’s Favorite Layouts with the “Finishing Touch:”

Finishing a Layout: Step by Step

I thought I would show you all how I finished the following layout using Jenn Barrette’s Everyday is Earth Day. Here’s my finished page:

And here it is without the title, stitching and paint. And while it looks pretty good, adding just a few extra elements will make it stand out.

First up I am going to add some paint. I am using the paint that Jenn included in the kit – but I’ve also used some of the great paint and brushes found in the shoppe on other layouts.

Definitely looking better. But it needs something else. A title. Often times I like to use wordart included in the kits to help me with my title. For this layout, I knew I wanted to use the fun scrabble tiles spelling out Recycle. And of course the alpha included in the kit. You may have noticed that I have a “thing” for putting my title right across a string or a banner. I’m not sure why – it’s just how I like to do things!

Now I could probably call this layout done – but for me it’s feeling very open. The papers could fly right off the page. I need something to keep everything grounded. Help draw my eye to the center of the page. So a nice border stitch is what I’ll add.

And here we are again – my finished page. Paint, title and stitching all included.

I hope you learned a little bit about the way I go about finishing a layout and that the next time you sit down to scrap – you’ll try one – two – or three of these tips yourself!

Right now, I have my Photoshop preferences for Camera Raw set to open up JPEGs (JPGs) in Adobe Camera Raw. That means my preferences are set up as:

With the above setting, your JPGs will open in Adobe Camera RAW (ACR)  just as a RAW file. This editor will do less damage to the quality of your image. Now, once I have chosen my photo, I drag it to Photoshop to open up ACR to begin basic edits. This is the original image is it was taken in-camera.

I can already see several problems that will need to be fixed. The list would include:

• White balance – The colors are off. Notice the white of her shirt sleeves has a green/magenta hue and her skin is disgusting yellow..lol! She is yellow but not that yellow.

• Distractions – Get rid of her dad in the right side of the frame and clean up the blue wall and orange floor.

Now in ACR the first thing I notice is the histogram in the upper right corner. That will determine where I begin. The arrow on the left of the histogram gives me shadow warnings and the arrow on the right gives me highlight warnings. I usually ignore the shadow warning until after I adjust exposure and white balance.

To adjust white balance in ACR, I use the White Balance dropper   in the tools listed in the bar at the top and click on an area of the image that should be white or a neutral gray.

Already, that is a huge improvement. Then, I increase my exposure by +0.25 because her face still looks too dark. As soon as I change the exposure, my shadow warning also disappeared. That is why I wait fix that issue. Next, I bump my contrast up to 5, but you can adjust yours to whichever amount you like. I tend to like deep, rich colors in photos. That is all I would adjust on the Basic panel of ACR. You can play around with the other settings, but that is up to you and it really depends on the photo. The clarity slider will give you a clearer image but it also adds darker edges. That is the one setting I rarely use.

The next tab in ACR is the Tone Curve adjustment. I like to increase the lights, darks and shadows just a bit if there are still shadows on the face of my subject. There is a light shadow over the right side of her face, near her eye and cheek. I will increase the lights to +5, the darks to + 20 and shadows decrease to -8 (to keep her jeans and hair dark).

On the next tab, there is a handle little Noise Reduction tool. I use it very lightly as it will take away a lot of the detail in your photo if over-applied, and possibly, leave you with a plastic-looking child (lol!). Once I am done with all adjustments, I click done to have the photo open in Photoshop. This is what I have so far with just editing the RAW file in ACR:

First thing I would like to do is use the Content-Aware fill to get rid of the dirt on the wall and floor and the sign that is behind her head. I duplicate my background layer and use the square marquee tool to select a small section at a time. Shift + F5 to open the Fill settings and make sure content-aware and 100% are selected, then Enter. If I am using content aware on more than 3 places on an image, I will duplicate the layer again and continue fixing spots. That way if it does something weird, I can delete a layer and now have lost all the fill areas already completed.

For the sign on the wall, I am going to use the content-aware move tool. I selected an area of the wall underneath the sign, moved it to the bottom of the sign and PS will load the fill that matches the wall. I do this 6 to 8 times until the sign is completely covered. Once it is completely gone, I flatten the image.

At this point, I crop out the guy to the right and my clean edit is complete. I add a few finishing touches to get the photo result below. To save my photo for the web, I flatten it, duplicate the layer, and apply Filter -> Sharpen -> Smart Sharpen with the settings:  Amount 80%, Radius 0.6 px and remove lens blur option selected.

I hope you found this to be helpful to see how I achieve a clean edit. Once this part is done, you can have fun adding some creative processing and start scrapping your page!

I live on the south east cost of Ireland, with my husband of 8 years and our two beautiful children, aged 6 and 4. We live just minutes from the beach, but our cold weather prevents us from ever getting to spend a day there, much to the kids dismay (but I’m ok with that, as I hate sand!). I started digital scrapbooking after my youngest was born, as a way to document their early years, and they love looking at their scrapbooks as much as I love creating them!

My Claim To Fame

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure that I actually have a claim to fame! If you look through my gallery, you’ll see that about 85% of my pages are created with templates. But I do feel I work well with templates, and can do a pretty good job of adapting them to suit the photos I want to scrap, or a kit that I want to use. In terms of styles, I’ve tried out many different styles of scrapping, but am definitely most comfortable scrapping with lots of different papers, especially patterns, different shapes and clusters of elements. I tend to scrap lots of everyday moments, so end up with a huge number of photos that I want to scrap, and so I find that templates help me to do this quickly. A lot of the time, I’ll use the template as it is, maybe make several small changes to suit my photos or the kit. But other times, I want to make more noticeable changes – maybe shrink it a lot, or enlarge the photo spots, flip it or rotate it, or embellish a lot more than it is. Here are a few examples of templates that I changed up.

This one uses Lynnette’s Fav-O-Rites 2013 template. I used Shawna’s 20 Questions, and wanted to use the questionnaire strip from the kit, so I removed all of the paper blocks on the right and replaced them with this. I then added some binder rings to make it look like a binder:

This one was made with Cindy’s Builders 2: 6×12. The kit (Penny and Mari’s Nutty Family) really called for two seperate sides of the page to showcase the “he said, she said” cards, so I combined two templates from this set to create this page:

This one was created with Janet’s Collection 107, which is a pretty clean design, so I added the flags at the top of the page, and some element clusters to compliment the photos:

I created this page with Cindy’s Half Pack 62. I had used this template already in its original form, but I really liked the template, so I wanted to use it again. For this page, I rotated it and shrunk it up:

I did this page using Darcy’s template from her 100 Days of Summer collection with Meg. I kept the same basic design, added more paper layers, as well as lots more elements:

This one was created with one of Cindy’s photo focus templates (Half Pack 53), but the photos I wanted to scrap weren’t good enough quality to use in such large photo spots. So I shrunk it down to fit my photos, and added some extra paper layers on the right hand side to fill up the empty space. I also replaced the journal spots with paper blocks (since they were now too small once I shrunk the template, to use for journaling). I was then able to add my title on the right where I had added extra papers, and put my journaling below the whole cluster, on the background paper:

So that’s it! That’s how I use templates, and change them up to suit photos or kits when I need to, or to reuse a template with a different look. I hope this helps to inspire some of you to do the same.