Four Scrapbook Layouts Using Studio J

Posted on May 27, 2014 by Kristie Sloan

Since I was out of town, but wanted to get a scrapbook page done each day for the Layout A Day challenge, I decided to turn to the Studio J free online software from Close to My Heart. I knew I had plenty of digital photos, and Studio J would be easy to access while I was away!

When I get ready to create a scrapbook page, I often look through my photos and find some that I haven’t done anything with, but I want to make sure the story gets told. This week I created a page of my daughter’s graduation, a firetruck ride my grandson took, and my granddaughter’s t-ball experience last summer, and photos of a crashed car and new car of another daughter.

The most recent event was a graduation.

This layout uses the digital kit, Notebook and the layout is 6-photo, Through the Lens.

This layout of a firetruck ride uses the digital kit, Later SK8R, and the 6-photo layout, Golden Section.

This next layout is my granddaughter while playing t-ball during the summer. This is from the digital kit Discovery, using the 7-photo layout Sweet Symphony. I guess my time spent with cameras shows in my journaling, as I spelled “cannon” as “canon,” making it a camera. Luckily I can go back in and fix the mistake before I print the pages!

This final layout shows photos of not only a new car my daughter got, but the reason why. A friend of mine said it was sure a pretty layout for such photos! Might as well make it better looking, right? This layout used the digital kit LaBelle Vie, and the 4-photo layout Leading Lady.

If you’d like to find out more about Studio J and how to use it, please let me know by signing up below and you’ll have access to our live and recorded sessions showing what’s it all about and how to create layouts. During each session, we’ll walk through a specific kit and do a layout! Hope to see you there!

Fast, Easy Digital Scrapbooking with Studio J

Posted on May 8, 2014 by Kristie Sloan

Do you have a digital camera and more photos than you could hope to get into a scrapbook in a lifetime?

Do you wish you could do some digital scrapbooking, but don’t know how; and have no time or maybe desire to learn how?

I want to share a great way to do digital scrapbooking, called Studio J, by Close to My Heart.

There is no software to buy, download or update.
There are no digital kits to buy or keep track of.
There is no need to wonder where you put that digital page on your own computer!

Studio J has:

Pre-selected digital kits to select from, including embellishments
Pre-designed layouts to get you started
Drag, drop, click and color!
Premium printing

You can create pages in literally minutes, or you can swap out colors and papers to your hearts content!

Join me for a Live Studio J session.

I’ll show you how easy and fast it is to create your own pages and get them printed! Leave your name and email to receive your Studio J session link! They are recorded, so don’t worry if you can’t make it live. Plus, by leaving your info you’ll receive info on future sessions! Sign up now to get your first link!

It’s going to be fun!

Scrapbooking Sad Topics

Posted on May 8, 2014 by Kristie Sloan

Not every scrapbook page has to have an entire journaled story. Sometimes it seems rather therapeutic to write down sad stories, and sometimes you just can’t do it. How do you deal with it on a scrapbook page? That depends on how you feel about others reading your journaling. If it is a private scrapbook, you can do what you wish, it’s yours! If it is an album that is primarily for anyone to look at, you have to decide if you are comfortable letting others read your journaling or not. If you don’t want others to read it, you may like to hide your journaling by tucking it behind elements on your page, or tuck it into a little envelope.

The other option you have is to create a layout with very little or no journaling.

This page is of my sister, who died of liver cancer when she was just 14 months old. I don’t have many photos of her, and have never made a layout with any of the photos I have. I was not very old, and my parents pretty much shielded me as much as possible from their grief and sadness.

She was a pretty baby, and I love these photos. To never acknowledge her seems wrong. So here is a page as an example of turning a sad story into a page I don’t mind sharing.

Since the photos all had such different coloring, they were converted to black and white so that they were not so distracting.

What stories have you been holding off telling? Share your comments with us!

Scrapbooking a Story Without an Exact Photo

Posted on May 2, 2014 by Kristie Sloan

In the scheme of telling your own story on scrapbook pages, you may come across stories for which you have no exact photo. What do you do? Should you just forget telling the story? No, no, no! TELL the story anyway.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a paragraph can tell the story with or without the photo. Today, I wanted to tell about my first bedroom that was such a beautiful place for a little girl! I don’t know of a single picture that exists of that room. We moved from that home when I was seven years old, and my next bedrooms looked nothing like it. What to do, what to do.

The room was lavender and white, so I used that as the main color scheme for my page! The story was told, and a picture added from that timeframe of my childhood.

The story includes how my mom was refinishing furniture before it was even trendy! She refinished an iron and brass bed, painting it white. The bed was repainted yellow for my own girls, and then used by my first granddaughter! I’m sure my mom didn’t have any idea how many little girls would use that bed frame!

The story of the bed frame will probably get another visit on future pages, because I know there are pictures of it in the girls’ rooms. Just because I told about the bed once, doesn’t mean I can’t tell it again. After all, it will somebody else’s story!

What ways have used to tell a story without an exact photo for the story?

Layout-A-Day, May 2014

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Kristie Sloan

It’s another month of the challenge from LayoutADay.com to create a scrapbook page each day this month! Whether I complete the challenge or not, I’ll have more pages done than I would normally have. Participating is always fun because we post photos of our pages in a group on Flickr.

During these challenges, I have created many pages about my own life. If I don’t tell my story, who will? The daily prompts of LOAD inspire stories that I would probably not have thought about on my own. All of the members different pages are so diverse and it is always fun to see the different stories created from the same prompt of the day.

Today, I went WAY back in my story — the year I was born! With the internet, it is fairly easy to come up with all kinds of facts for a page like this. dMarie.com has a great feature called “Time Capsule.” All you do is just pop in the date and it pull together all kinds of facts about headlines, songs, prices of day-to-day items and more. Here’s a look at my page.

Artful Adventures

Ideas for scrapbooking, art journaling, mixed media, card making and stamping projects.

Tag Archives: scrapbooking