Home of ScraPicts

So I have finally decided on a business name: ScraPicts!  I have been toying with the idea of starting a very small scrap-for-hire business for a while now and I played around with names until I settled on something that indicates that my business is about scrapping pictures, rather than, say, scrap fabrics or scrap metal. The photo of the babies are my twin sons, Jack and Greyson at about a week old.  Our good friends Moe and Melissa Chen took this photo in our little baby photoshoot at our house the day after we brought them home. You can see they even still have their hospital bracelets on. Moe is a great landscape photograper and here is is gallery.

My Facebook banner that I will turn into business cards

I knew that to design my logo and my facebook banner, I would need some commercial use (CU) products because as a new "designer" I would not want anyone to steal my copyright so I wanted to do everything correctly. For elements, I bought several packs from  Digital Scrapbooking Studio, including this Grab Bag by Veronica Spriggs which included a couple of cool crumpled paper overlays.

And this collab kit which was actually free with a 5$ purchase but I used a bunch of the flowers and the heart locket

I also purchased this hand brushed alpha by Digilicious Designs which I love because you can recolor it to anything you need. That is what is pretty nice about a lot of the CU (commercial use) products is that they are pretty versatile. You can make them into what you need for your individual purpose and many are even rated for making other scrapping products.

In addition I have to give a huge shout-out to Kevin and Amanda at KevinandAmanda Fonts for Peas. They are font designers that will take your handwriting and make it into a font and then provide it to the scrapbooking community for free.  For commercial use, you have to agree to post one or more of their buttons on your webpage which I have done (see top right corner of my blog). In my logo, I used this cool font Pea Stitchasaurus Rex

and this one, Baby Boston,which I am IN LOVE WITH!!!

So as far as getting the business started, well, that won't actually happen for a while. I want to get some more designing under my belt and I also am planning on donating my services in a Silent Auction for the Sadlleback Mothers of Multiples group (which I am a member of) in April. I figure at that point I will start running on word of mouth so that I don't get too overwhelmed and also I have no idea if this type of service will even be something that people will pay for.  I have to start thinking about my business model and some very small advertising but I don't want to spend too much money up front to do any of that.  I also am SO grateful to the many designers out there that allow S4H (scrap for hire) with their products (that you Danielle at The Urban Fairy and MANY others!) without having to purchase any sort of separate commercial license. Unfortunately, some of my favorite designers and design houses (including almost everyone at Scrapgirls and Design House Digital) that I have used do not allow S4H or even scrapping for non-profits with their products and I have had to separate them out of my stash so I don't accidently use something I am not allowed to.  And I also won't be buying any more of their products :(  

Thanks for reading!!  

Jen