Layout I worked on this week...

Hey all.   I worked this layout which is a  Ribbon Board (aka French Board) for a friend's new baby.  Here is what I came up with:

The credits for this layout are: Pixels and Co: CS and RW (In Good Company Collab), Juliana Kneipp (My Sunshine), Ponytails (Love Me Do), Melissa Bennett (Cops and Robbers), Veronica Spriggs (Vintage envelopes), The Urban Fairy (Just Love), Jady Day (Greatful Hearts), AnitaDesigns and BelisaeDesigns (An Innocent Heart Collection), Libby Pritchett (A Spoon full of Sugar).

I thought this came out pretty cute but boy are there a lot of layers!  Each ribbon, its drop shadow, each button has its own layer and that is just to construct the ribbon board. It can also be tricky "slipping" pictures and elements under the ribbons because if you move one ribbon up a layer, it could create the wrong illusion for another element.  Almost everything on here has its own drop shadow which gives a more realistic feel. The other tricky part is getting the grid to look perfect.  Mine is way crooked (see how the buttons horizontally don't line up?) because I started adding stuff to it and then later tried to fix it but that was way too complicated with all the layers.  My advice to anyone who attempts this is to make the ribbon board first and make sure the ribbon grid is as perfect as you want it. Also merge down the shadow layers to the ribbons so if you do move the ribbons around, you will have the shadow along with it.

Well that's it for this week. Next week, I hope to have a new Urban Fairy kit to play with and I might even get to complete my layout for my husband's Tough Mudder that he took part in at the beginning of February.

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

My first real live Product page with my Creative Team Layouts

Today is the day!  The first kit that I have submitted my "Creative Team" layouts for went live for purchase today at the Digital Scrapbooking Studio. The mini kit is called Blooming Love. I used a few older (ie from the summer) picts that I took of my good friend Sarah's twin girls, Ainsley and Noelle.  I used the SoftGlow function for the picture of Ainsley to give it that ethereal feel and I really like how the layout turned out, although I probably could have gotten a tad more creative with the stacked layers, maybe adding rounded corners or drop shadows.  For the pict of the two girls, I wanted to keep it simple so I didn't use a ton of embellishments.  I am so excited to be part of a creative team and I even feel like scrapping about my scrapping (is that a tad crazy? lol).

Ainsley

Noelle and Ainsley

Here is a pict of the product page with its link below:

You can buy it here

If you care you can also check out The Urban Fairy's blog post with link for a couple of freebies!!

What do you think?  Thanks for reading!

Jen

I joined the Creative Team at The Urban Fairy!!

Well my job interview fell through so I was pretty bummed the other day. Not going to get into details but I was feeling pretty down and then I remembered that a friend of mine had told me about a CT call (aka Creative Team call) for new members of The Urban Fairy layout team. I submitted my email to Danielle S and lo and behold she accepted me onto the team. So now I will be designing layouts using all of the fabulous TUF (The Urban Fairy) designs and elements which I am stoked about. It will be a challenge for sure because as you know I have two little down and dirty boys and TUF stuff is very butterfly/fairy/glitter oriented but I'llmake it work.  So here is my first ever TUF layout.  This is my sister Laura and her fiance Fili. They are getting married on Friday (feb 15th). Amore is an ode to Fili, in that he is Italian.  Ormai la frittata è fatta. Auguroni!

This layout was created with the Just Love kit found here at The Digital Scrapbooking Studio store.  I especially like the embossed labels in this kit (sucker for labels!)