So far just one post for January – John Oliver. Of course there was also Back to the Island in January – but that’s going to take some time to scrap so expect it in a couple of months (or so… there’s still Disney scrapping to be done!)
Scrapbook Crafter is an app for Macs from Pearl Mountain Technology. I have reviewed several of their apps in the past and have been quite impressed and I feel the same way about Scrapbook Crafter. The app is easy to use for all level of scrapbookers. If you’ve never done any pages before, you’ll have no problem using this program from the moment you open it. It is “WYSIWYG” (what you see is what you get) and you can preview everything you’re doing in real time so have fun moving the elements all around the page until you find the perfect place for them!
You can pick out templates depending on what you are trying to scrapbook. I was scrapping pages from my trip to Tulsa, so I chose travel. There are 60+ professional kits included with 240+ pages to help you make albums quickly. They are designed for various holidays and occasions – Christmas, Easter, Halloween, Travel, Baby, etc.
There was a set of 4 premade travel pages which I used as templates but I removed the elements that didn’t work on my pages (like the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty) I was able to go through a bunch of other embellishments and add in more things that worked like guitars and generic luggage. I also went through and added different frames to the photo as well as made the photos into different shapes – all of which are features of this app. Overall, it took me almost no time to put *4* pages together. This may make me consider more strongly switching from traditional scrapbooking to digital – or at the very least using it a bit more if not switching over completely! To do these 4 pages out by hand traditionally would probably have taken me 2 weekends and wouldn’t have come out anywhere near as nice looking!
When you are done, you can export your pages to PDF, JPG, PNG, TFF, BMP or PSD. You can also print the pages directly if you would like. Or save the images and share them via email with friends or post online to share 🙂
I received a free app in order to write this review. I was not otherwise compensated.
December has Justin Timberlake (so you can see what I ended up doing with the peek a boo window for the ticket), All Star Christmas which was my first attempt at creating my own overlay, and Scotty McCreery
For this week’s Try It Tuesday I decided to try the “nesting” feature in the Silhouette Cameo Studio software. This is helpful if you are trying to cut out a lot of things at once and have things of the same color and you want to best get them to fit on a page so that you’re not wasting a lot of paper. You will need to have just the one color on the page though or this won’t work, so if you are someone who has other colors off of the cutting mat you’ll need to change how you do things in order to use this feature. The “nesting” button is the one that looks like an N in between Replicate and Modify on the task bar at the top of the program. Click “Use Cut Area” so that it will fit them in on your page and pick how many rotations and how much padding you want. The less of the padding, the less space there will be between everything but I found that sometimes that leads to things shifting around when cutting.
You can see below I was working on a calendar page (shamrock), some banner titles for a setlist I am working on and a palm tree top. One photo shows how I couldn’t get them to fit and then the other shows what the nesting tool did. I will say that things did go a little crazy (I am convinced my cameo doesn’t like the color green as I always have trouble with that color for some reason) and all the pieces on top of each other in the bottom left didn’t cut properly because things were shifting around so I did have to cut a few things out a second time. Next time I’ll be more mindful of the padding and consider doing 2 pages worth of cuts (since that is what ended up happening anyway!)
Everything but the shamrock you should be seeing in action on some future scrapbook saturday posts!
Just one post for September (so far) – Kris Allen. Funny story – went to make this post and realized I didn’t have a picture of the layout. I looked in the holders I usually keep the pages in over and over thinking maybe it got stuck to another page. Nope. Finally found it buried under some Winnie the Pooh paper on my scrapbook desk. Speaking of Winnie the Pooh – the rest of September is Disney posts which are coming, but probably not until next month (and it may even extend longer than that)
The PixScan mat is a new mat that can be used with the Silhouette Cameo. If you have a page of embellishments that need to be cut out, for instance, you can put them on the mat, take a picture with your phone and import it into the Silhouette Studio software and then trace the embellishments to get a perfect cut around the edges without having to do it yourself with scissors or an x-acto knife. I recently decided to give the pixscan mat a try for a different reason. The Justin Timberlake VIP concert I went to came with a commemorative ticket which is double sided. I decided i would do a peek-a-boo window for the layout but last time I tried to cut it out myself I failed miserably. So I placed the Justin ticket on the PixScan mat, imported it into studio, traced it and then offset it ever so slightly. I used that offset to cut out a window in the sheet of paper I was going to use for the layout. (The extra ticket shaped piece I also used for a setlist on one of my O-Town pages) It was quick and couldn’t be easier and it came out looking 10x better than the one that I did by hand.
The final product will end up posted one of these days in a Scrapbook Saturday post! (Probably next month or later)
About Me
Hi, I'm Katie! This is my blog.