Year at a Glance – 2015 Floral Calendar

Posted on November 24, 2014 by Kristie Sloan

Welcome to Make It Monday blog hop! If you’ve come Gina’s site at GinaZee.com, you are in the right place!

Now it’s my turn to show you an idea! If you’ve been following along lately, you know that today is the day that the Creative Christmas Bundle goes on sale! 15 Crafters/Designers – 15 products – 1 low price – for 1 week only!

My contribution to this special bundle is an online Art Journaling Basics class! You can find out about it here, but don’t order from that page, because for a few dollars more you can get the entire Creative Christmas Bundle!

Today, I want to show you a project using Karen Fitting’s contribution to the bundle. Karen takes photos of flowers through the whole year, and then finds her favorites to create a calendar. She has put one each month of the year on a separate photo and save them all as 4×6″ .jpg images. That way, we can use them however we want to!

I decided that I would like to make an at-a-glance type calendar in a 12″x12″ size. I created a digital template with twelve 3″x4″ segments. Since the the original images are in a 4″x6″ size they don’t size down without losing part of the image, or changing the proportions. I chose to size them down as much as possible and then just leaving off a bit of the image. That way the photo and calendar remain proportional.

Images from Karen Fitting’s contribution to the Creative Christmas bundle.

After I got all the images on, I linked them all together and sized the entire block of images to about an 11″x11″ square, and changed my background to black.

I added the “2015” text so I’d know the calendar year. Pretty smart, right? Save it all in a single image and it’s ready to print!

Right now, during the month of November, you can print two 12″x12″ layouts from Close to My Heart’s Studio J, for $5.00. This may be a good time to get some of your photos onto pages, or just print your calendar. You could print the calendar on both sides of the double layout, and you’ll have a calendar to give and one to keep!

Watch how to create the calendar page in Studio J.

CTMH #Z2016

CTMH Item #Z2015

Now, hurry over and check out how Beth Soler from Scrapping Wonders is using the Bundle to prep for her December Daily album! If you’re not sure what that even is, it’s an album to capture all the memories of December in one great place, urging you to capture bits of each and every day in December!

Don’t miss out on the Creative Christmas Bundle!

Cheers to YOUR Artful Adventures!

Mojo Monday at My Kreative Pursuits

Posted on August 18, 2014 by Kristie Sloan

I was honored when Lisa Harris from MyKreativePursuits.com asked me to participate in her Mojo Monday, where she provides a variety of inspiration pieces as a jump start.

The piece I finally chose was a color inspiration featuring a pomegranate. The color combination is not something I would normally use, and felt it would be a good stretch.

Pomegranate Color Inspiration

While just coming back from out of town, I had a lot to catch up on. Then something exciting happened – my daughter knocked my coffee cup over on my laptop. (I didn’t say it was good excitement!) I immediately grabbed it up and held it upside down. After spending a lot of time trying a variety of things to help dry out any moisture, I still have several keys that are doing odd things, or nothing. However, plugging in my old keyboard to find I could actually get ALL the letters and numbers, made feel a litter better. What does that have to do with my project? Well, I wasn’t feeling very creative or happy after all that, so I decided to go digital!

I decided to use Close To My Heart’s Studio J online software. I realized Jubilee was a kit that I could make work with this color inspiration. In the original papers, I only loved one piece of paper, from the kit, and it wasn’t going to work with this color scheme. Going digital, I could tweak colors and papers to do what I wanted! Since Jubilee has a country feel, I decided to look for some photos taken at my parent’s, which is in a rural area. I found five photos I hadn’t scrapped of myself and my girls riding horses, and I chose the Top Hat pattern for five photos. Next, I selected Kit Mix 3 to start. I don’t really spend much time on the Kit Mix choice, because I know I can do whatever I want to personalize the papers and colors.

Two of my photos were of me and were black and white, while the other three were of my three girls and had less than lovely, old photo coloring. The layout featured two photos on the right page and I thought about just leaving them there. However, that really messed with my timeline feeling, so I just clicked the little arrows at the top between the pages in Studio J to swap their places. Voila! My pages were instantly swapped, and in the end here’s what I ended up with!

Horseback riding with four generations.

I hope you will periodically try new color schemes, as you may be surprised with the results. I think the colors of these older photos look fine with this color scheme, and I had never really tried to scrap them all together. There is really more of this story that should be told, and since this is a digital layout, I may go back and add a journaling block at the bottom of the right page to tell a bit more.

If you haven’t tried digital scrapbooking, you may like to see Studio J in action on this video I made.

Be sure and visit Lisa for Mojo Monday!

Cheers to YOUR creativity,

School Theme Scrapbook Layout

Posted on June 12, 2014 by Kristie Sloan

Although this site is about much more than scrapbooking, I do talk about it often! If you come to my site for other ideas, I hope you will see the value in the variety of things offered here. My hope is that you find things that inspire you or prompt you to want to try something new. Even if you don’t scrapbook, you can find something about a scrapbook layout that may inspire you in other ways. For instance:

You may look at a color scheme in a new way and use it in your next creation.
A layout may give you an idea for a smaller version to translate to a card layout.
The embellishments may remind you of stamps you could use in a new way.
The combination of papers, embellishments, quotes or word art may spark an idea for a mixed media or art journal page.

It’s all about the journey and having FUN! So if you see several posts about one thing or another, I urge to check back, because we’ll be on to something else soon.

Here is a 2-page layout with a back to school theme. You could even use this as a beginning and end of the school year layout, or anything in between. It was created with Studio J, using:

Kit: (School/Friends) Class Act
Pattern: (4-photo) Backstage
Kit Mix: 6

Join us for Studio J Live! to see pages done right before your eyes! Here is how this page was created.

Get started on your own digital layouts now!

Until next time!

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!

Artful Adventures

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

Tag Archives: Studio J