Saturday, May 31, 2008

Wedding Album: The Wedding Party Templates


Getting these uploaded is proving to be more challenging than creating them! I will say that I'm DONE with my book! That's good news for you, because it means you'll get all the pages! :)

I think I've decided not to put "through the years" pages on there... mostly because I don't know that I can find the pictures in time to take advantage of Shutterfly's Father's Day sale. What I was GOING to do is put one picture per year on a total of 3 pages, then our 10 year Anniversary picture on a fourth page. If I can find pictures of each year, I may still do it.... but I'm not sure. I'll get my husband's input, too!

So anyway, I've got a full day, so without further ado, HERE is the link.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Pictures, Paper Detail, and an Update




I hope you were all able to enjoy a wonderful Memorial Day weekend. We feel blessed to be "only" 10 hours from family (we've typically been 17+. So we took a trip "down south" to visit my husband's family for the long weekend. You can see how much my kids and their cousins LOVED the time with each other. These guys are going to be thick as thieves if given the opportunity. And you can also see how much Grandma loves her Grandkids, too. The kidsare oldest age 5, middle age 4 (as of a couple days ago). Then mine are 3 (4 in September), and 1 (2 in June). There's another Granddaughter missing -- she's 1. So in a month, the Grandkids will be 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1! What fun! If you don't recognize them, my little kidlets are the curly blonde and the littlest boy. My daughter and the older boy are 3 months apart.

I wanted to answer a question that I had from a couple of you regarding my background paper from the wedding album. It's actually a freebie paper from Michelle Coleman's "Frosted" kit, found here. It's not that color in the kit -- I added a black background and changed the blending layer from Michelle's kit to get that effect.

How many of you have laptops? I absolutely love mine -- it allowed me to get DONE with my wedding album (I think). I do want to go back in and add some word art to some of the more "plain" pages. But the skeleton of the book is complete. YAY! Now I have to get them converted to templates, previews, and then upload them. Be patient -- I've got a busy week! :) But they ARE coming.

A question for you: I'm debating having photos from each of the 10 years of our marriage to "close" the book. What do you think? I don't know if this should be a strictly wedding album (which it is now), or a "this was then" and "this is now" type look at our marriage. I guess first I should see if I can find 10 years worth of pictures that are good enough for scrapping! :)
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Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Wedding Album: 6 Family Templates



So.... you know all that "time" I had earlier this week to work on my Wedding Album. Well, I got it, and I worked on it late into the night. But then I didn't get any more "time" to actually upload it! So the result is that you get 6 templates in one today.

I know these pages are pretty "plain" with no elements or extra stuff. I really was going for the "clean and classic" look, which I hope you'll find appealing as you use them. I just wish I had more candid wedding shots that would be fun to play with as background. All of our wedding shots are SO traditional. But... even if they aren't the kind of pictures I'd like to have TODAY, they were what we chose THEN. And they're full of wonderful memories, precious family and friends -- some of whom are no longer with us.

As my husband so "lovingly" told his parents (he was joking, of course), "I guess she finally thinks our wedding was important enough to scrap." He was joking in his statement, meant to give me a hard time that I wasn't placing enough significance on it -- but in reality, I think it also indicates that he's really pleased that I'm doing so. Of course, that makes me happy! :) Sometimes I know he resents my hobby, because I can tend to shut out the rest of the world (i.e. him) as I'm focused on it. And I know that I really need to be careful about that and cut back sometimes. So it really makes me happy when I know he's pleased with a particular page or project.

Anyway... enough rambling... HERE are the downloads. ;)

Friday, May 16, 2008

Wedding Album: The Groom Word Art


I had some fun with this one. It may seem "frilly" for masculine LOs, but remember that it's supposed to "match" the rest of the word art and the rest of the album!

My husband and kids are asleep -- allergies are hurting them! And my heart goes out to them, but I'm also happy to have a couple guilt-free hours of scrapping time! So... hopefully by the end of the night I'll have my family's page done in the album. And if things go smoothly, maybe even my husband's family page!

Cross your fingers!

And if you can click with crossed fingers, the word art download is HERE.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Wedding Album: Word Art


Here are the first two pieces (pages?) of word art I've created for the Wedding Album. I tried to do all the same two fonts that I was and will be using in the album page. My thoughts were that I needed to keep the same fonts for the consistent feel. The fonts used are Porcelain (free at dafont.com) and Century Gothic.

For now, I'm just going to do Bible verses for each page. If I can't think of verses, I'll solicit quote ideas later!

The "Our Wedding" Word Art can be downloaded in PNG file HERE. There are 3 Bible Verses included -- the long one I split into two parts for if you want to put it above and below a picture (and I couldn't make it flow nicely if it was one big block of word art).

The "Bride" Word Art can be downloaded in PNG file HERE. There are 5 different Bible Verse included with this one.

Wedding Album: Answering Questions

A couple questions came to me last night via the comments....

1) The font I've used in the frames is called Porcelain, and it's a free download at dafont.com (LOVE that site!)

2) I will be continuing to make my own wedding album pages and sharing them with you as templates -- so you can see how I'm using them! I think my comment about not having all the pages in my own album may have led you to believe I'm not going to continue.... but I am!

Let's see... my next pages will probably be: Our parents together, my family, my husband's family, and then I'll move on to the wedding party.

I think I'm "full" for the week though, so I may not get to them until this weekend.

Be on the look out for some word art! That's easier to do a quick freebie on than a whole page!

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Wedding Album: Page Frames


Well, you guys sure came up with some great ideas for the wedding album pages! I tried to use all my ideas, all your ideas, then brainstorm some more, and I've come up with a list of 65 different pages for the wedding album!

This download has a total of 131 PNG files. There are 65 different pages, and I've done a "right" page and a "left" page. Then I also did a "blank" page for if there's a page title I didn't include. I just know that my wedding will never have all the "things" in it than many other weddings do -- for instance, I had no flower girl or ring bearer. I couldn't even find a picture of me BY MYSELF! In other words -- no getting ready pictures! Not even a good picture of "the dress." So... I hope that these page frames will help you to make a cohesive book, even if I don't provide EXACTLY the page you need!

You can get the PNG files HERE. They're all squared up for an 8x8 page.

Changing Things Up...

Alright... as you all know, I do freebies because I like to, and because I have NO desire to do this on a "for pay" basis. Background story:

In college, I went to school on a choir scholarship. My whole life, I loved music, loved to sing, play piano, listen -- music was my stress relief, my hobby, my enjoyment, my relaxation.

Because I was on scholarship, music basically became my "job" -- I had to do 2 hours of choir rehearsal a day, weekly lessons which obviously required daily practice, yada, yada, yada. In short... I dropped my scholarship my Senior year because I was absolutely burnt out. I hated singing, hated playing piano, hated everything about music.

To this day, though I own a piano, it hasn't been played in a couple years. I was on our church's praise team for about a year -- but that was almost 3 years ago (2 moves ago!). While I do enjoy music again, it's no longer a stress relief, a love, a relaxation... all those things that made it wonderful.

As a summary... my experience with getting paid to do something you love, for me anyway, results in resenting and potentially hating the thing that brings you stress relief and enjoyment. It was a costly but valuable lesson -- and a mistake that I don't want to make for myself with digital scrapping and design.

So... where am I going with all this rambling? As soon as I finish this post, I'm going to go in and remove the links to all the template freebies. I still have all the templates on my computer, so they're still available, just no longer as free downloads.

Why this change?

Well... my husband recently took a job as Executive Director of a non-profit agency. I mentioned it a few posts back. This agency is 100% donor funded -- including his salary! Now obviously, he didn't get into the non-profit world for the money, but being able to feed the family is a nice thing! So.... moving forward, I'll originally offer the kits as freebies, but then convert them to a "for donation" basis. So if you give $1 or more to my husband's organization, I'll give you the link to the kit.

We'll try that for a while and see how it works.... :)

For those of you interested in finding out more, THIS is the organization to which 100% of the donations would go.

Monday, May 12, 2008

Wedding Album Templates - First 3 Pages

********** DIP Users -- Please note. I didn't store the PNG file correctly, so for right now, the DIP file doesn't work. Only the PSD file is currently working. I'll see if I can't figure it out shortly and will let you know when it's fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience!**********

Well... I've had time to play... but I haven't had time to upload! So you're getting 3 for 1 today. I'm really disappointed with the quality of my wedding photos, the lack of digital, and the glaring absense of candid shots. So I'm trying to do "Photoshop Magic" so that I can get the "feel" of the book I want without the type or quality of photos I need to achieve that. So I guess from that regard, I'm glad I waited 10 years to do my wedding album!

Anyway... here are the first 3 pages...

For those of you using DIP, I've included PNG's as well (I hope I did it right). I've designed these specifically to fit into Shutterfly's 8x8 Photo Book. If you haven't used their Photo Book services, I highly recommend them -- they turn out absolutely FABULOUS!








The link is HERE:
http://www.4shared.com/file/47399224/d0449fa1/SS_Wedding-Bride-Groom.html

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Wedding Album Cover


I told you the bug has bit me! I had to come home, figure out where in the world we packed our wedding photos (bingo! Glad my husband pays attention to these things -- he told me right where to look), then start scrapping.

I can't really do a template for you on this one though.... I can, however, tell you how I did it.

1) Select a cool background (if you'd like) -- this one is from Michelle Coleman's "Frosted" kit

2) Write your last name in a nice font -- I chose "Porcelain" (I believe it's a free download at Dafont.com)

3) Write your first names just below it in the same font (or a different one) -- add the date below that.

OK... you're saying, "Duh, Sarah -- that was the easy part!" OK, OK, OK... I know. :)

So for the photo -- find a cool photo that you like.

4) Play with the levels, blur, or easier yet, run a "Virtual Photographer" filter over the photo to get a "dreamy" sort of feel to it. Virtual Photographer is a fabulous free download program that really helps "fix" a lot of less-than-perfect photos. It works especially well when you're working with older photos, scanned in photos, etc. It fixes a world of problems... much better than I can do myself.

5) This one was cool of my husband and I, but the background was pretty busy, so doesn't work well in a normal frame -- it looks much better when we're cut out and "blurred". So I took a fuzzy eraser brush (because I wanted soft edges) and erased around our silhouettes.

And that's it.... really easy peasey, but it's my favorite kind of look for a LO. It took me longer to figure out where to place the words than it did to create the LO!

I'm still thinking on template ideas and the order of the pages.... so stay tuned. As I finish pages of my book, you'll get templates for yours....
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Wedding Album Template?

Alright... with wedding season upon us, I'm getting the "bug" to start designing a wedding album template. It's motivated by selfish thoughts: I want to do a gift for a friend of mine getting married in August, and I also will be celebrating my 10th anniversary and would love to "relive" the day by propperly scrapping it. If only Digital Cameras were the norm back in 1998....

So anyway.... if I were designing YOUR wedding album (which ultimately could be the truth if you wish to DL the freebies), what would be the "must haves for pages?

Here's what I'm thinking are the Must Haves:
*Title
*The Bride
*The Groom
*Brides Family (Parents, Grandparents, Extended)
*Grooms Family (Parents, Grandparents, Extended)
*Bridesmaids
*Groomsmen
*Flower Girl
*Ring Bearer
*The Flowers
*The Vows
*The Rings
*Unity Candle
*The Kiss
*Introducing Mr. & Mrs.
*The "Getaway" Car / Just Married
*The Cake
*Back Cover Page

These are the nice to haves (but not essential):
How We Met
Proposal
Engagement Photos
Showers
Invitation
Rehearsal Dinner
The Church / Location
Ushers
Personal Attendants
Musicians
Minister
Other Honored Guests
Father Giving Away Daughter
Bubbles/Rice/Flowers
Cutting the Cake
First Dance
Toasts / Champagne

Anything missing? And how about verses, quotes, scripture that you'd love to see in a wedding kit album? I'm all ears!