Park with Friends

The last week has been a whirlwind of activity which included trips to the swimming pool, waterfights, Jeff's birthday, a bonfire, firecrackers, Twins game, parade, and spending time with family and friends. I'm exhausted. I have so many pages to do from the last week that my head is spinning and now my computer is having some issues which certainly isn't good.

Yesterday we met up with my dear friend who I roomed with in college and her three kids. Our kids are all within weeks of each other so our outings are a lot of fun for everybody. We went to an awesome new park that just opened up in our hometown and it was fun. Here are a few shots from our outing.

Off to the races...

Yes, they all have the same shirts on. Ava and Vivian showed up in their "Irish Girl" shirts from Uncle Jeff and Aunt Ruth and our girls had to run and change so that they would all match.

Maki came across a really big turtle that he thought would be friendly and it turned out to be a snapping turtle. Thank God the turtle didn't get him but Vivian and Quinn were near and Vivian immediately put her arms around Quinn to protect him. It was so precious....I mean Vivian...not the snapping turtle!

Here is the whole crew!

I hope you have all had a great week. Thanks for stopping by.

"Vellum" - Technique Tuesday

Back in the day, when I was a paper scrapper, I loved to use vellum. I just liked the soft touch of layering that it brought to my layouts. The only problem was that it was relatively expensive in terms of paper so I didn't use it all that much. Once I entered the digital world, I found that I enjoyed using vellum as well except now I could create my own "vellum" and it was FREE...love that!

I will often use "vellum" when I want to frame something or if I want to add just a little bit more dimension to my layout. It is very simple technique to use. I use the rectangular marquee tool. I create a box based on the shape that I am trying to frame. I will then lower the opacity of the box until it feels right. The opacity really varies depending on the look that I am trying to achieve especially if I am using it to soften a blended photo.

I included some layouts in which I used my version of "vellum". On "Beauty", you can see that I used two vertical strips of vellum on the edge of the photo. I reduced the opacity to almost zero but then added a shadow to it, to give it a little dimension and frame the focal area of the page. On "Golden", I used the vellum to add dimension and frame in the blended image in the background.

On "My Sweet Love", I used vellum to give my paper a slight contrast in color. I think I could call this the "lazy woman's way of scrapping". Instead of trying to find another sheet of digital paper that was close to my background paper, I just used the vellum overlay to give it that slight variation in color.

On "Wannabe", I again used the vellum to soften the blended image and then I place a stroke around the edge to frame the vellum.

Again, I created more depth on my background photo and papers by framing my son's face.

"Instant Drool" is another example of this technique.

All products are from Designer Digitals.

I hope you found this useful. It is just a simple technique that I have gone to time and time again over the last few years. I hope you give it a try.

A few of you have been kind enough to leave me some comments and "thank you" so much for the feedback. I have received a number of comments from people asking about my blending process. In June, I did a webinar with Debbie Hodge at Masterful Scrapbook Designs. It was a lot of fun. There seemed to be some interest in an additional webinar or series in which people could see my screen and get a peek into my creative process. I would love to share this with you. Debbie and I are working on this and hopefully I will have more information for you soon. Thank you so much for your feedback and interest. I really appreciate it.

I hope you have a wonderful day and thanks for stopping by.

School Project - Second Take

In May, I did a blog post on a project that I embarked on that started with my children's school photos. I never knew what to do with them and they usually just stayed in the envelope. I started the project with the left side of the spreads that can be found below. The left side consisted of my child's school photo for that particular year as well as the highlights from the year. I asked her questions about her year and it was a fun little project to work on together. Then Doris (aka echogirl) decided to follow suit and did a similar project but added additional pages with other school photos. That is one reason I love looking through the gallery...it is so inspirational and it is such a fun way to share ideas. So I started to think if I could take this project one more step and this is what I came up with.

I will do a one page spread for each school year of my children. The page on the left will contain their school photo and little tidbits about their year. The page on the right will include some random photos from their life at school as well as their class picture. I used some simple templates which made this project come together really fast. I will just switch out the photos and colors each year. I think it will be so fun to put all of these in one album and look back on them when my child graduates. It will be such a nice little recap of their school years.

Here are some pages that I did for Ellie. I also created pages for her preschool years but I need to find the photos for the right side of the spread.

Here are the pages for Amelia's preschool years...

All products are from Designer Digitals.

I love to work on projects. They can be time consuming but I am always so glad when the project is complete and I can look back on my work. I know that down the road, my kids are going to love the results of this little project.

Thanks for stopping by and Happy 4th of July weekend!