Sweet Shoppe Designs – The Sweetest Digital Scrapbooking Site on the Web

Hi! Jen Tapler here with a super easy hybrid project to share with you today. As Spring Break is quickly approaching for most of us in the U.S. I’ve been thinking about quick and easy projects that can help keep my little one busy during the school holiday. My 4-yr-old son will be out of preschool for the next 2 weeks here in Hawaii, which means he’ll be spending lots of time at my husband’s office or in the clinic where I work part-time as a physical therapist a few days each of those 2 weeks (not to worry – we have lots of fun stuff planned the rest of the break – but we do have to work a few days!). That means I need to come up with a backpack full of things he can use to occupy himself for several hours at a time. I’ve learned that the BEST thing to use for occupying large chunks of my son’s attention span is a pack of markers / crayons and a blank notebook. Being the crafty mom that I am, I can’t have him creating his beautiful masterpieces in any old ratty spiral notebook though! So this past weekend I quickly altered a plain (unlined) composition book that I picked up at my local office supply store for about $1.50 (these are likely cheaper on the mainland) using a digi template and one of my current favorite boyish kits in the shoppe. Take a look:

Cute, yeah? I simply measured the front of the composition book and opened up a new document in Photoshop at the appropriate size. Then I opened up one of the templates from Cindy’s Layered Templates #13 and selected the layers I wanted to use on the cover and dragged them onto my new document, resized things a bit so they’d fit and started adding papers and ellies and such to make it all awesome. I went with Melissa’s Wish Upon a Star kit for the majority of stuff, but there are some photo corners from Dani’s Take Me Away kit thrown on there as well. The font is Darcy’s DJB Tweenybopper. Once I was done designing the cover in Photoshop, I printed the flattened document on matte presentation paper, cut it out and simply adhered it to the front of the composition book! Now my son Dean has an adorable personalized little art book all ready to fill with drawings and doodles and such!

This is such an easy hybrid project, especially for beginners and those wanting to make the transition from digi to hybrid – the project is completely designed in Photoshop before printing and then you just adhere it and you’re done!!