Two digi layouts

Made with the kit I shared yesterday.
Template by Sabrina's Creations (Clean and Simple No. 1). Playful word art by Jennifer Barrette Designs.

Template by Scooty's Designs. I love reading her blog because it's in French and I have a degree in French. Of course, I graduated from college...oh, my...let's not talk about how many years ago (more than ten, fewer than twenty) and haven't really used the language in that time at all. So it's fun to challenge my brain. And I can read it. I was always much better with the language on paper than spoken.

Anyhow, reading her blog makes me feel smart and like I didn't waste four years and thousands of dollars getting a degree I don't use (at least not specifically - I'm much better for my four years at college, even if I don't technically use the knowledge I gained there for a job).

Christy's Kit of the Week

I've fallen in love...with this digital kit (and everything else from these designers):


I've been on a bit of a buying spree. I feel like I've discovered a whole new world of digital scrapbooking. I have loads of kits that I've never been happy with. These? These make my creative soul sing. This is one of the kits I've purchased this week. Simple, elegant, classic. I'm in love.

Today's Pet peeves...

• Digital designers who label elements, papers and templates with generic names like e1 and template. Forces me to go in and rename everything if I actually want to know what it is. It's worst with templates, because I keep my kits together, so it's not a huge hassle. But I put all templates in folders by how many photos they have spaces for and if I buy twice from the same designer, I have to rename every single time.
• Members of my household who know that the dishwasher is broken, know that I've bought a huge assortment of paper products to use when possible and still insist on using real dishes. This is all amplified by said members (funny, they're all male) not actually washing their dirty real dishes themselves. A lot could be forgiven with a little Dawn.
• Milk that was purchased on Sunday already tasting nasty. And it didn't start today. No, it tasted nasty on Tuesday. That's not right.
• Children who, when asked to pick up their toys, will a) literally only touch their own toys and only then if they were playing with them last and b) not get the toys that fell under the sofa (which is apparently a magnet for Barbie shoes).

Lessons learned...

A list of lessons learned upon receipt of my first printed digital scrapbook pages:

• Read the printing services FAQs. I used scrapbooksplease.com's value prints. Bargain, right? As I've learned before, you get what you pay for. The pages arrived this afternoon and all have a white border around the edge (which I was expecting, but it's still a bit wider than I thought it would be) and are basically color laser prints. For $.99 a page, I guess I shouldn't have been expecting more.
• Just because text looks small on the computer screen, doesn't mean it's going to be tiny when printed 12x12 (although this might have been good if I'd gone with 8x8).
• Printed pages really do make it all real. Just scrapping on the computer is a lot of fun (for me, at least. I know several people for whom it would be torture), but it's not a scrapbook until you can leaf through the pages.

So, in summary, I am not 100% satisfied with these pages, but I won't be going back and making the fonts smaller or even having them reprinted on nicer paper without borders (really, once I put them in page protectors, the border was hardly noticeable). But I will take these lessons with me for next time.

Digiscrap...simplified...

But maybe too simple? I can't decide. Maybe if I swapped out that red rectangle with a patterned paper, it would jazz it up enough to not be boring and still have the simplicity I'm embracing.

This pages results from a challenge from me to me. I always hem and haw over which pictures I want to scrap. I have lots I NEED to scrap, but I'm not married to scrapping chronologically or even all that evenly among my kids. I scrap what strikes me at any given Photoshop session. Sometimes, though, I want to scrap something, but I don't know what. So today I challenged myself to go to the oldest picture folder on my hard drive (which - since I got this computer in November - isn't that old) and scrap something from that folder.

Since my youngest doesn't even have a proper scrapbook yet with actual finished pages in it (my first ever digiscrap layout printing should arrive tomorrow), this ended up working perfectly.

My latest page...

I paid attention to which kit I was using! It's Family Ties by Jeni Hopewell from Scrapmatters.

Another week in review...

Well, no burst pipes. That's something, right? Oh, but no, our brand F-ING new dishwasher has just decided to completely not function. As in not a single light comes on. Nothing. Called Maytag and had a repairman out the next day. The thermostat is blown and it fried the control board. The parts will be in later this week.

I have had this dishwasher for SIX WEEKS. The fact that a single thing has broken on it has me really annoyed. If these parts don't fix it, I'm going to be more than annoyed.

I had to chase down three Girl Scout parents to get them to turn in their cookie order. Two of them never did - they both said they'd wait until the second wave of cookies comes out. I can't WAIT for the deadline for money.

I'm designing templates in my own style for digital scrapbooking, just for my own personal use. I like clipping papers to the shape below them. I love to use templates, but most of them are too fussy for my tastes. I don't like embellishments in general, so that's how I'm making my templates. I'd post more of my layouts online, but I'm horrible about keeping track of what I've used and where it came from. I was worse when I paper-scrapped, because at least with digital, I can go to the files and figure it out if I really want to.