Tutorial: DIY Personalized iPhone Contact Photos

So excited! The A Beautiful Mess iPhone app came out last night. I'm a huge Elsie and Emma fan, so when I heard they were coming out with a photo app I knew I had to have it!

This app came out last night when I was laying in bed -- too tired to be doing anything else, but not tired enough to actually fall asleep. I started playing around with all the cool features -- borders, text, doodles and thought that these would make the best personalized photos for when people call my phone!

Design your very own contact photos for all your friends using the brand new A Beautiful Mess iPhone app. Designed by Elsie and Emma of A Beautiful Mess blog; this app lets you add awesome text and art to your photos. Modeled after the design style of A Beautiful Mess, the pictures come out both trendy and whimsical at the same time. I can't wait to use these pics in my project life spreads.

Follow the directions below to make your own awesome personalized iPhone contact photos for each of your friends!

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Social Media Butterflies Blog Hop: April Edition

Welcome to the April #SMBiGblog hop! Each month we feature one of our favorite companies, and host a blog hop of inspiration!. This month, we are lucky enough to have the entire Chic Tags team join us for a BLOGAPALOOZA-- over 20 projects to inspire you! Travel along with us, starting at the Chic Tags blog, which is where you should have arrived from and on to Adrienne's blog after mine. Scroll to the bottom for an awesome free printable! 

Along the way, there are prizes and freebie printables & cut files. Hop along each of the blogs to win some of the Road Trip collection from Chic Tags. One GRAND prize winner will win the Road Trip, Everyday Life II & Birthday Wishes collection! 

My post is one of the lucky prize giveaways!! You could win die-cuts, journaling cards, some of the new collections from Chic Tags-- lots of amazing prizes! All you have to do is comment below telling me something about YOUR favorite Road Trip ever! Get extra entries by following me on twitter, instagram, or facebook, leave an extra comment for each of these that you do! Good luck!

I was super inspired by the Chic Tags products and wound up making a bunch of projects to share with you today, including a quick tutorial for my favorite bookmarks. 

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Quick Tips for Embellishing Canvas with Chalk Inks

Today I'm sharing with you  tips for decorating canvas embellishments using chalk inks.

I love the way the little canvas pieces look right out of the package -- soft and very cloth-like.   When using paint on canvas there is a tendency to get a firmer finish, and I really wanted to keep that soft, pliable look. I decided on using chalk inks to achieve my desired look.  After experimenting a bit, I'm really happy with the way they turned out, and I'd love to share a couple of tips with you.

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10 Minute Minibook Tutorial

Today I'm sharing a tutorial for a 10 minute minibook. This book was originally seen on the Freckled Fawn blog.

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Documenting Your Getaway // Part 3: Finishing Up at Home

     

This is the third article in a multi-part series on how to prepare for and document those quick trips away from home. Road Trips, Long Weekends, Festivals, even Stay-cations can get scrapped in record time with lots of detail and fun. Today's topic will cover finishing up your book at home. The first article in this series covered making a kit to take with you and the second article in this series covered taking your kit on the road and how to make the most of your time

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Quick Tips to Better Pictures

This is the first in a series of articles about using the camera in your mobile phone for memory-keeping. These tips were written with a camera-phone in mind; but most of the principals apply to all photography. 

• Composition -- framing your photograph. The easiest way to improve your composition is to understand the rule of thirds. Imagine a tic-tac-toe board or a hashtag (#). The lines and the intersections are the main focal points. Try to place important objects on those lines & intersections. 

I laid a grid over this picture of Navy Pier to indicate the lines and intersections of the rule of thirds. The top left intersection lies directly over the ferris wheel, and the rest of the photo tapers off throughout the middle third. 

• Lines -- lines are your friends. The eye will naturally look at the lines in a photo, so make sure to play them up. Vertical lines, horizontal lines, diagonal lines, they will all draw you in. 

The ferris wheel has these spoke-like lines radiating outward. The varying sizes and the crisscrossing of the lines results in lots of cool shapes. 

• Focus -- Crisp, clear pictures. Make sure your subject is in focus. Too many potentially great photos are ruined because the subject is blurry and not in focus. Play around with both the auto-focus as well as physically moving the camera lens around. Learning to focus on your subject is a key to improving your photography. 
• Zoom -- Just Don't Do It. EVER. Never use the digital zoom function. If your camera does not have a lens that moves, do not use the zoom function. Digital zoom is actually the camera cropping your photograph before you take the picture. You will get the exact same quality photo if you crop it afterwards & this way you still have the whole photo to work with. 

• Lighting -- Be aware of your surroundings. I'm not going to say always do this, or never do that -- because you can't always get the perfect lighting conditions But here are a couple general tips: 
• Don't use your flash. The light doesn't make anyone or anything look better. It gives off a very harsh glare and you're better off just steering clear of the flash totally. 
• Its okay to take pictures in the dark. Play around with the dark photos in an editing app -- increase the fill light, or throw on a cool filter.
• If the light is behind your subject you will get a shadow on your subject. This isn't always a bad thing, you can get great silhouette portraits this way. But if you want your subject to be well-lit, then the lighting source should be behind you. 

This two photos of Jeff & Jill illustrate the difference between the location of your light source (in this case the sun). In the photo on the left, the sun is up in the air and behind them; in the photo on the right, I rotated around and started taking pictures with the sun to my back. 

Quick tips to better pictures is the first in a series of articles about better using the camera in your mobile phone for memory-keeping. Future topics include: using your phone as your primary camera, printing/scrapbooking mobile phone pictures, and more. 

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Misting and Whimsy

Hi Hi Everyone! 

Today I'm sharing this awesome layout I made last week for Basically Bare, and a step-by-step tutorial to go along with it. 

Because my style is generally colorful and graphic -- I tend to be sparse with my bigger/bulkier embellishments; but when I first saw the new faniciful frames, I knew they would make perfect masks to mist with.

 Today I'm going to show you step-by-step how to use basically bare chipboard and/or acrylic to make your own masks for misting.  This technique can be used with any of the chipboard or acrylic embellishments and is a great way to get a bunch of uses out of your product before gluing it down on a final project!

**Warning: VERY photo heavy** 

Post Continues After the Jump

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Project Life: Getting it Done - Step by Step

Getting it Done -- Step by Step 

I recently shared my new method of making Project Life work for me with a single page a week & smaller page sizes. Today I'm going to share my Project Life process from start to finish. This process hasn't changed much over the last six months -- just tweaked here and there to fit my needs for the week. 

The Process

Step One: Organization 

My first step is to make a list. I'm a writer and list-maker at heart and I always feel so much better when everything is written out in front of me. I divide my list into two separate parts: Photos & Events. Under the Photos header I make a list of all the photos I've taken (or might want to use) for the week, and under Events I write down stuff that happened that I definitely want to include. 

To keep track of things that happen during the week, I use the Momento app for the iPhone. I have my facebook and instagram feeds imported into the app, and if I need to supplement, I'll scroll through some text message conversations with Jeff and see if I missed anything. 

Step Two: Choosing/Editing Photos

Once I've picked the photos that I'm going to use I open up photoshop and resize my photos to fit onto 4x6 canvases (a few months back I wrote a tutorial with pre-made photoshop canvases that you can download for free). This way I can get them printed quickly at the Walgreens around the block. I use Walgreens because of the 1-hour printing, its cheap (my PL doesn't need professional photos), and its right around the block -- so I can usually get my prints super fast. 

I generally re-size my photos to to 2x2 or 3x3-ish -- small enough to fit in the PL pockets, with enough room to see the card its mounted on and some embellishing around the photo. I'll go a little bit bigger if I really love the photo and want it to have a prominent place on the page. 

Step Three: Sketching it Out

Once I have my pictures in hand I cut them apart and spread them out on my desk along with my notes from earlier. I then sketch out a basic grid in the shape of the page protector and fill in the boxes with topics/notes/events etc. This makes it easier to go one-by-one when creating each of the pockets. 

I start placing photos, journaling cards, embellishments, scraps of paper, etc on top of the page protector trying to figure out what is going to look good (sorry this picture is so blurry -- it looked much better when I took it). I keep moving things around until I like the way they look, and then I take a picture with my phone (so I can refer back) and clear off the page protector.  

Step Four: Finishing it up

As you can see, my finished page is definitely different from the photo above. I really wanted to use that journaling card that I made, but the colors were not coordinating at all, so I slipped it into the red chevron bag as a hidden journaling card.  

I tend to stick with neutral colored backgrounds (white, kraft, grey, etc) and then pick one or two bolder colors to tie the entire page together. This week's colors -- red and blue -- were chosen because of the Fourth of July. Sometimes a color in a photo will really pop out at me -- or sometimes I really want to use certain products or paper and I let that be my jumping off point. But I've found that neutral backgrounds and a just a few accent colors will almost always give your page a cohesive look.


***The kraft 'T' journaling card is a silhouette cut-file that I created and is available free of charge to anyone who would like to use it (there is one for each day of the week).***


Thank you so much for stopping by. 

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Mini Album Tutorial at Trinity Paper Arts

Hey Everyone! 

I'm sharing a chipboard mini-book tutorial over at the Trinity Paper Arts blog today. 

Check out the entire project here: 
http://trinitypaper.blogspot.com/

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What to Wear? A Layout over at Basically Bare!

Hi hi!

I'm sharing a layout and quick canvas embellishment coloring tutorial over on the Basically Bare blog today! Come check it out.

Check out the entire project here: http://basicallybareonline.com/wordpress/?p=4816

PS -- a little birdie told me that the new Basically Bare summer releases are awesome! Can't wait for everyone to check them out!!!

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2012 Captured // April Guest

Hi Everyone! 

I'm excited to share with you all that Lisa Truesdell (gluestickgirl around the web) asked me to participate in this month's Two Peas Captured class! Captured is a year long class dedicated to Project Life. A new lesson debuts on the 15th on every month. Full details here: 2012 Captured // April. 

I'm a huge fan of Captured, and I love the themes for this month's class -- Washi tape & Catching up when you get behind. Guesting along with me this month was the *amazing* Marcy Penner -- who has one of my favorite Project Life styles. 


Here's the spread I created for Captured. 

I'll be back on Thursday with some more details on using washi tape, and what I do when I'm running behind on my book. 


Until then make sure to check out Captured, 


and if you need even more Project Life Inspiration, please check out my monthly Project Life Inspiration Newsletter -- filled with tons of great tips, tricks, and freebies from around the web. 

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Tutorial: I Love You Mini Envelope Book

I Love You Mini Envelope Book

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Hey! Today I'd like to share with you a really cute little mini book that I made for Jeff for Valentine's Day.

The book is made from 6 little envelopes bound together with washi and artist's tape; and each  envelope holds a tag with a special note inside.

Supplies Used: 

• 6 Envelopes (You can use any envelopes for this project -- I used miniature tiny bag type envelopes for mine).
• Artist Tape (Masking Tape will do)
• Washi Tape
• Binder Clips/Clothespins
• 6 Tags cut to fit inside your envelopes
• Random Stamps & Embellishments for decorating

Step-by-Step:

1. The first step is to stamp/decorate the front and back of all your envelopes. I stamped the day of the week on the front of each of my envelopes; and the red punchinella pattern on the back.

When you're finished decorating your individual envelopes, we'll move on to binding the book together. 

2. Stack all your envelopes together in order.  You are going to be taping the CLOSED side of the envelope (the side across from the opening). Hold your envelopes together and place a strip of artist (or masking) tape binding together the group of envelopes. Don't worry if its not super stuck together just yet, we'll be taping the inside envelopes together in the next step.  

Trim off the excess tape from the top and bottom of the book of envelopes, and grab your washi tape for the next step. 

3. Now we are ready to bind the inside pages together. Open your book up to the first set of pages. Place a strip of washi tape down the center, making sure that you get the tape on both sides. Repeat this step for each of your inside pages. 

Once you trim off the excess washi tape, grab two binder clips (or clothespins) and clamp down your binded edge. This will ensure that your tape sticks as much as possible and that the pages on your book will open easier. Leave on the clips for an hour or two, and then we'll move onto the next step.

4. The last step is to add in the tags and decorate the cover of the book. Grab your stamps, and your stickers, and whatever other embellishments you're in the mood for and go to town. 

  

Stick a tag inside each of the envelopes, decorate the cover and then you're totally done! I added some bling and a little heart to my cover. 

Thanks so much for stopping by! If you like the project, feel free to pin it so that you have easy access to it all the time! 

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The Personal is Political - Step by Step

Happy Monday everyone! I hope your weekend was awesome :)

Today I'm going to share the step-by-step process of my latest layout "The Personal is Political". We are going to look at how to print directly on your layout, and creating fun geometric patterns with simple punches.

**Warning: Photo Heavy**

You can read a little more about the layout, and why it was so special here.

To create the journaling directly on my layout: I started out with a sheet of kraft cardstock which I cut down to 8.5x11. I typed up my journaling in MS word (any word processing program will do). You can pick up that cool typewriter font here.  I used the 'print preview' function to determine if my journaling was going to line up where I wanted it. When I was satisfied, I printed directly on the 8.5x11 sheet of kraft cardstock. I also wanted a slim white border around my layout, so I trimmed the sheet down about 1/4" on all sides and mounted it on white cardstock.

Now on to embellishing! Using simple punches to create fun geometric embellishments is fun and easy. I grabbed two circle punches: 1 3/8" and 1 1/2", and a square punch 1 3/4" (not pictured). 

First we will make the square with the circle inside. Grab your larger punch (1 1/2") and punch a hole in your paper. Try not to punch it too close to the edge of your paper, we need room around the entire circle. 

You should be left with your paper looking like this: 

Now pick up that same sheet of paper, along with your square punch. Slide your paper into your punch so that the circle is lined up evenly in the center of your square punch. 

Once you punch the square, you should be left with a little piece that looks like this: 

Repeat this process as many times as you'd like to create the above shape. Because of the odd shape, I decided that the easiest way to adhere these would be with my Xyron machine, but if you're good with liquid glue or a tape runner you can definitely use those as well. 

Now to lay those shapes out on the layout. I put a sheet of white scrap paper along my layout in order to make sure the shapes were in a straight line, and then lined the outside ones up first. Because the frame was wider than the other squares, I lined up the frame before adhering the center two shapes so that there would be the same amount of space between all four elements. 

And here is what it looked like once those were lined up and adhered down:

To create the inside circles, grab the smaller punch and use it on a coordinating sheet of paper (or a photo in the case of the frame element).  Remember that its much easier to see what you are punching if you flip the punch over so that the opening at the bottom is what you are looking at when you punch. 

Adhere these circles to the inside of your square elements, leaving a little bit of room around each of the circles. Then add whatever other embellishments you're feeling like using, round buttons and brads would definitely go well, along with any other simple geometric pattern.

To finish up the layout, I used thickers for the title, and glued down a little bit of black star confetti to make it feel a little bit more magical. 

Thanks for taking this step-by-step journey with me! 

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