Mouse Course 2011 Scrapbook Pages

I'd made the first two pages a year ago and then lost steam with scrapbooking more or less completely.  Now that I've found my groove a little bit, I thought I'd finish this set up.  I originally planned to have more pages but I think I'm going to leave it at three for now and maybe revisit adding more pages at a later date.  If I added another page, it would be of everyone wearing mouse t-shirts and some scavenger hunt pictures.  Next up will likely be Ferret Visits Portland!

Max's First Birthday Party Scrapbook Pages

Papers and Elements from Persnickety Prints and Shabby Princess

It's been ages and ages since I last scrapped but I was inspired by Persnickety Print's Fall Freebie (Birds of a Feather), which seemed perfect for Max's First Birthday.  One of his favorite things to say is "Buh" or Bird so this kit was especially apt.  So nice to get back into scrapping again!  As usual, my pages are collage-y and I tried to fit in as many pictures as possible.  Super hard choosing between pictures but it had to be done.  I initially wanted to mirror the pages for Jess's Baby Shower but it didn't really work out.  I kept the side banners and used the same blue paper to frame the pictures but that was about it.  After I finished these pages I realized that my color scheme mirrored the colors in Jess's dress.  Score!

Scrapbook Page: Arch Cape

I think I still need to go around and add a few elements (pins and staples or stitching) but I quite liked how this one turned out.  I was still on a scrapbooking high and cranked this one out very fast.  And I realized that it's kind of great just having a very simple page sometimes!  I was constrained by the photo sizes because several of these photos were from a friend's facebook album so the resolution was small.  But it was so much fun looking at these photos again; that's one of the best aspects about scrapbooking I think - reliving happy memories.

Scrapbook Pages: Mommy and Jiyi Visit Portland

Papers and elements downloaded from Shabby Princess

It's been an embarrassing age since I last made pages for my album but nothing like an important work deadline to bring out all of my procrastinating inclinations.  Fortunately, I met my deadline with time to spare and finished my layout to boot.  And I love it!  My aunt (jiyi means second aunt in Taiwanese) has been visiting the US because of the baby and she and my mom took a two week trip to see me.  They both marveled so much at the Fall foliage that I thought these colors would be especially suitable.  As usual, I am leaning heavily toward squeezing in as many photos are possible, but I really like the effect.  I do wish I had more space for journaling though, it's so tough to pare down my words so much just to make it all fit.  However, a picture is supposed to be a thousand words so...enjoy!

Scrapbook Page: Mouse Course 2011 Page 2

I think I need to shift everything over to the right a tad, but it's good for now.  One thing I've noticed is that I tend to be drawn to the same elements over and over again.  For example, staples, the rusty pin and stitches.  Buttons are always attractive to me.  These things just seem like simple realistic little elements that add interest to my collage-ish pages.  I think at some point I'll try to do one of those very layered and clustered layouts with a single photo as a focal point, but "Mouse Course" isn't so suited to that.  I just have so many pictures and it's so hard to decide which ones to leave out.  It'll be interesting to see how I end up adjusting these paper components over the next several pages so that the look is still cohesive but not repetitive.  I also think I might do a page that is just journaling, because I always have more to write than will fit within photos.

Scrapbook Page: Mouse Course 2011

The Cold Spring Harbor Mouse Course I took this year was one of the best things I've ever done.  I had a great time and learned a lot, although I think I'm forgetting a lot of it now, which is pretty unfortunate.  Since it was three weeks long and took every minute of my waking life during those three weeks, I imagine I will need to make quite a few pages to encompass it all.  Fortunately, not only do I have the pictures I took, but I have pictures from other people as well.  The combinations of colors for this cover page is sort of a departure from my usual inclinations, but I wanted something bright and summery while also recalling a classroom vibe.  Not sure how successful I was, but I do rather like it.  It's so great to be able to scrapbook again!

Scrapbook Page: ORS 2011 (Revised)

Paper and Elements from Shabby Princess

I'm not going to lie, this will never be one of my favorite pages but...so much better now!  Even though that red/gold combo was better than my first version, I still really did not like to look at it.  There was something about it that felt high school sports team or college graduation to me.  This isn't the most exciting combination, but the dark blue goes with the dark blues and reds in the pictures and the cream paper lightens things up while still matching.  Staples and pushpins are pretty much my favorite things ever.  I wanted to put a button in too, but since it was a conference I figured the bullseye looked more fitting (less cute).

Scrapbook Page: Garden Notes

Papers from Shabby Princess, Elements from Shabby Princess and Persnickety Prints

Ok well, I guess I spoke too soon.  Sometimes a girl needs a break and this particular girl likes to fall back on her hobbies in those times.  Since many of my layouts are multi-page, I needed some single page non-event layouts sprinkled throughout to fill in gaps.  I love taking pictures and have many interests so this should not be too difficult.  "Garden Notes" will be a regular gap filler as well as "Tony the Cat" "New Recipes" "Portland Living" and various craft-related things.  These are things I want to include in the scrapbook anyway so it's great they will have another useful purpose.  For my 2011 cover page, I'm currently thinking about making a giant composite of all my farmer's market produce pictures.  The PSU market ends mid-December so by the end of the year I should have a whole bunch and it'll be one cohesive topic.

For this Garden Notes, I learned how to make rounded corners in my photos.  I used a great tutorial from Matt Thommes and it couldn't be easier.  I really like the vintage-y, slightly faded  look of the papers and would like to find more little elements.  I'll have to look around a bit and see if I can find some pushpin/nail/thumb-tack elements because they would look great here (Update: found 'em!). 

Scrapbook Pages: Jess's Baby Shower (revised)

Papers and Elements from Shabby Princess and Persnickety Prints

The ability to easily revise and readjust is my favorite thing about digital scrapbooking.  After getting a little practice in, I started to find my original layout for the Bunny's baby shower extremely drab.  It wasn't exactly as easy as a few clicks of the mouse, but I'm positive these revisions would have been impossibly laborious by hand.  I'm quite happy with the changes I made, although I can see making a few more little tweaks before sending this off to be printed.

This will be my last scrapbooking post for a while as I suddenly realized that I have an important deadline coming up.  I spent today writing writing writing and am daunted by how much is still left to do.  I deluded myself into revising these pages because I thought "these pages are already made, they won't take much time!" Haha, at least it was a nice break from the computer! (oh wait, it wasn't)

Scrapbook Pages: Mommy Visits Portland

Papers from Shabby Princess, Elements from Shabby Princess and Persnickety Prints 

Much better!  Having decent pictures to use really makes all the difference.  Everything looks so much brighter.  Unfortunately, I took the food images in a dark restaurant so they ended up rather blurry.  I'm hoping at the smaller size it won't be so easy to tell...

One nice byproduct of this new hobby is getting more comfortable with Photoshop.  I learned how to use the pen tool today to cut out that sign of Multnomah Falls.  I'm also starting to slip in more elements here and there.  I think the staples and stitching are cute without being overly cluttered.  The best part of this is revisiting happy memories; now that I'm done with 2011 (until more stuff happens) I will start scrapping 2010.  That will be a hard year to revisit in some ways, I had many very happy times and some not so great times.  It was a year of extremes...

Scrapbook Page: ORS 2011

Papers and Element from Shabby Princess

I feel pretty bleh about this one.  I had very few good pictures from this trip because a lot of the picture taking happened in dark places/night so many of the pictures turned out grainy and strange (and often blurry).  And as I am now learning, there is only so much you can do to fix this.  I tried some green/gold paper combinations at first, but since the pictures were so dark with many reddish tones, they clashed rather miserably.  So this Hogwarts combo is what I ended up with.  It would be more fitting if we were dressed as Harry Potter characters, but that might have drawn some negative attention at the conference...  So far, I think "Jess and Ryan Visit Portland" are my favorite pages to date.

Scrapbook Pages: Jess and Ryan Visit Portland

Papers from Persnickety Print and Shabby Princess, Element from Persnickety Prints

Ok that's it!  I am removing myself from this computer and going to do something that involves more movement than finger clicking on mouse.  My self-imposed ban from earlier was only partially effective as you can see.  I'm quite happy with how these pages turned out though since I had a hard time figuring out paper combinations that looked decent together.  Many of the pictures above were taken by the Bunny which is why they look so nice.  It's crazy how addicting this project is.  My goal right now is to get the major events of 2010 and 2011 documented.

Scrapbook Pages: Israel

Papers downloaded from Persnickety Print, Element from Shabby Princess

Here are the pages for my recent trip to Israel.  I am now officially banning myself from Photoshop for the rest of the day, unless it's work-related.  At least, until I finish everything on my to do list.  It's remarkable how quickly time passes when all you're really doing is aligning and resizing images.  I thought the mustard-ish papers from Persnickety Print's 'memories of you' kit looked desert-like and would be a good fit for my Israel pictures.  I am really enjoying all of this though, because it is nice to revisit these memories.  Naturally, the journaling aspect also holds immense appeal for me.  And again, the people who do this by hand get much props from me, I have no idea how you do it!

My First Scrapbook Pages

Paper and elements downloaded from Persnickety Print

I know I know I know.  The last thing in the world I need these days is another hobby.  The thing with my hobbies though, is that I tend to pursue them cyclically.  For example, I've taken a break from knitting because that is largely a winter hobby and I haven't made soap in a while because I have quite a great deal of soap stored up at the moment.  Don't ask me about sewing because I really meant to finish that quilt before summer but at this rate we're looking at Summer 2015.  The balcony garden however, is doing well and of course I cook year round because I get hungry.

Scrapbooking never held much appeal for me because it seemed way too laborious and finicky.  Not to mention, the thought of taking scissors to pictures makes my heart sink.  And who even has prints these days?  So it wasn't until J at work told me about digital scrapbooking that my interest was at all raised (see her scrapbooking layouts here).  These first two pages took me a ridiculous amount of time, but I'm rather happy with how they turned out.  I don't think I'll ever be able to manage complicated layering of patterns so I anticipate that my pages will be consistently "collage-like" and basic.  But that's ok because I like looking at pictures best anyway.  Perhaps with more practice I'll get better at this.