To answer your requests, this edition of Paperclipping shows you two different ways to achieve a circular journaling affect. Look back to my previous post to read about the design concepts of the layout you will see in Episode 6.

This episode is in the archives. To learn how to access the archives, please visit the membership information page.

It’s always helpful to see what goes on in the minds of other scrapbookers while they play; to learn how they get from A-to-Z when putting together a layout.

Do you remember this page, which I did for an Ali Edwards challenge? A few of you asked me to share my thoughts on the design principles, as well the technique for achieving the circular journaling.

In this post I will take you through the steps and design principles that transformed a concept on inner beauty to a completed scrapbook layout. You can watch episode 6 of the Paperclipping Video Podcast to see two different techniques for forming your journaling into a circle.

The Thought Process and Design Principles That Led To This Layout:
It started with a concept and two stamps. I had purchased Ali Edwards’ recent kit, which contained a stamp of the word, “Beautiful,” and another circular one with the words, “find beauty everyday.” Ali’s challenge was to create a layout on the concept of everyday beauty. We were to list things about ourselves that we find beautiful.

I pulled out a photo of myself that I had not yet scrapped and wrote my journaling into paragraphs in a notebook.

The Basic Grey paper with paisleys and birds was an easy choice. I had been wanting to use it for a while. It had pink to match the blossoms in the photo, and I have a personal connection with paisleys, which remind me of the trendy umbrella my mother had when I was a child.

Because this is a layout about my inner self, I wanted it to have an up-close feel. Cutting the paper around the paisleys and adhering them over the photo was my first solution for achieving that. Overlapping the word, “Beautiful,” with the photo matte was the second one. These are visual cues that create intimate feeling.

To direct the eye from the photo to the title, I placed the circular stamp around the title’s first letter. Adding this stamp created the need for some balance. To do this, I formed a visual triangle by stamping two more times around the sides of the layout. I also adhered the cut-out paisley and bird to balance the patterned paper in the upper left corner.

The last step was to add the journaling. This is where I got stuck. My journaling was a long narrow block and I could not visualize it on my layout without it looking blocky, off-balance, or distracting. After staring at my page for an uncomfortable period of time (do we all do that?), the word-circle stamp jumped off the page and the idea to use repetition inspired circular-shaped journaling.

Repetition in art and design is a way to create a feeling of cohesion, rhythm, and movement.

To balance out the weight of all the circles, I added a little more journaling in a rectangular block, repeating the block-shape of the photo and of the layout itself. Writing two more lines of journaling to the very bottom (just right of the circular stamp) created a triangle of horizontal rectangles (from the photo, to the block of journaling on the left, to the two lines at the bottom) that made the layout feel complete.

If you’d like to see two simple techniques for shaping your journaling into a circle, be sure to watch the Paperclipping Video Podcast, Episode 6. And don’t forget to let me know if you decide to give it a try!

Have you seen Flight Of The Conchords on HBO? Watch and enjoy.

I have never seen minibooks like the ones Dedra Long creates.

Photos don’t quite demonstrate the dimensionality, the unique items, or the stunning details that characterize her books. The one you see here appeared in the book, Mini Albums II, from Scrapbook Trends.

I was fortunate enough to see and touch some of Dedra’s minibooks and altered books in person. I realized later that evening that I had a zillion questions running through my mind on how she did what she did. This is why I was so excited to interview her this week and ask all my burning questions!

I hope you enjoy the listening to the audio podcast interview as you look at the photos below of one of Dedra’s fabulous books.

Follow the link to listen to the interview of Dedra Long.

Scrapbooking In America 2007 Survey:

Every three years, industry leaders in the scrapbook market conduct a comprehensive survey among scrapbookers. The results of this study are used by the national media like The Today Show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, the Associated Press and others as background data when they produce scrapbook-related features. In addition, scrapbook companies around the world use this study to make important decisions related to producing and selling their products.

The more of us who take the survey, the better the industry will be at meeting our needs.

It takes about 20 minutes to participate in the survey and you will may enter the drawing for $500 in scrapbooking products. You can choose whether you want to take the long or short version. Or, if you’re extremely thorough and like to make your statement, you can even do both.

Version One: 45 questions
Version Two: 62 questions

WorldWide Stamping Weekend
For challenges, prizes, and fresh ideas on using your stamps, clear yourself some time to join stampers this coming weekend at the stamping forum on 2 Peas In A Bucket.

Follow the link to see the schedule for the various challenges. And if you’ve never registered to be a 2 Peas user, remember to do that ahead of time so you can start right away. To be eligible for prizes, you’ll need to upload photos of your layouts or projects to the 2 Peas gallery.

In the beginning of the modern scrapbooking movement, a burden of obligation somehow seeped into the minds of its new enthusiasts. Even acid-free picture albums dropped to the lower rungs of what we considered to be inferior photo displays.

For many of us, it was no longer acceptable to display photos without scrapbook industry items; that would be inferior
to what had become the moral mecca of motherhood: The 12×12 scrapbook.

The positive result of this guilt-inducing mentality is a giant industry that has grown in products and sophistication. The other result, however, is the scrapbooker who creates unloved pages out of obligation.

For example, yesterday a friend explained to me, “I am so behind…I’m still working on 2004, so I’m just whipping them out as fast as I can. They may not look good, but they’re getting done.”

How many of us are as enthusiastic about pictures from 2004 as we are enthusiastic to play with photos from last month? I am sure, though, that if I suggested my friend put the last three year’s worth of photos into archival-quality photo albums, at least for now, and start working on current photos and stories, she would consider me a scrapbooking traitor.

What would you rather have twenty years down the road? One album featuring your favorite stories and photos from the last two decades; layouts you enjoyed creating because something in the photos inspired you? Or twenty albums for every picture of each year; layouts you sped through but are boring and lacking in real story content?

Of course, many of us have the time to make more than just one high-quality scrapbook. But if my time really did limit me to those two options, I’d choose the one high-quality album and leave the rest of my photos in a plain display book.

This is why some of us choose to scrap out of order. We are choosing to scrap only what we want to scrap; not what we think we should scrap. Who imposed that “should” on us anyway?

Some of us only create the pages that excite us. And we love almost all (if not all) of our pages.

This is why it surprises me when I still hear periodic statements of, “I am so behind!”

Even worse is when an overwhelmed scrapbooker gives up altogether. One poor mom told me last month, “I stopped scrapbooking because I just couldn’t keep up. I really want to do it but the idea of catching up on the last three years is overwhelming.”

Why should any of us do a single page that we don’t feel like doing? We can still display our photos. There is nothing inferior about an un-scrapped photo album.

Thanks to Stacy Julian’s brazen decision to scrap out of order, and her desire to share that with others, I now put all my newly printed photos in the album you see in the picture above. That’s right. It is a photo display album. It’s not a scrapbook.

Then, when I want photos to play with, I look through my album and choose what inspires me. If I never get back to scrapbooking again (that’s not going to happen), my family and I can all still enjoy the rest of our wonderful memories, even without the fabulous striped paper and the intricate rub-on embellishments.

If all I am able to create in the future is twenty wonderful, story-rich layouts that I enjoyed doing, then I will have something far more valuable than 100 pages I “got done” because I “should.”

What do you use as your digital photo-manager and editor? I’ve used iphoto, Photoshop, and Adobe Bridge and there were a number of things that I didn’t care for about all three of them, together and separate.

Do you remember when I announced that my brilliant husband bought me Apple’s Aperture? I am using it with Photoshop. I still have a lot to learn about Aperture’s capabilities, but so far I am in love. Let me tell you my current top ten reasons Aperture has already proven itself amazing. I’m sure with time, I’ll have a whole new set of ten to add.

1. I can do everything from one page. I can scroll through my thumbnails in the manager and edit the photos on the same screen. With other systems you have to select a photo and open it to an editing page or, worse, wait for your external editor (such as Photoshop) to load. Being able to edit on the same page that contains the thumbnails means I can edit many photos in the amount of time I used to only be able to edit one. It’s fast.

2. I can do everything from one page. Okay, I know I just said that. But there’s a more specific reason this feature helps me. Oftentimes, I’m not sure whether some photos are keepers or not until I’ve had a chance to increase exposure, crop, or fiddle around a bit. When I am trying to make a quick sweep through a new set of photos in order to choose which ones I’ll delete, or which I’ll post to the blog, I can make some quick initial adjustments in order to make a decision. What used to take me an entire sitting, I can now accomplish in a few minutes.

3. Aperture saves your work for you. As in, it saves as you go. You don’t have to decide whether to save each photo as a TIFF, PSD, or JPEG. You don’t have to pick out a name for the photos (although you can). You don’t have to wait for the computer to save what you’ve done. And you don’t have to worry about losing your work in case the computer shuts down or gets stuck.

4. No matter how much or how many times you edit a photo, you never lose the original RAW version. When you are editing a photo, you are only editing a version of the RAW photo, not the original. With the click of a button, Aperture will produce another version of the original RAW photo at any time.

In addition to the obvious benefits of never losing your original photo, this feature allows you to play around with as many edited versions of a photo that you want. You can make a black and white version, a maxed-out hyper-saturated one, and a traditional one. You could crop ten different ways and create as many versions of one photo that you want. You never have to worry about losing your original.

5. Aperture allows you to “stack” photos in order to free up space in your manager. Making numerous versions of a photo could really take up a lot of room, decreasing the number of thumbnails in your viewfinder. No worries. You can stack all those versions together. Five versions can take up the space of one thumbnail. Unstack them with one click to see them again.

You can also stack sets of photos. For example, stack all your Easter ‘07 photos together, all your Mother’s Day ‘07 photos together, and the ten you took of little Jimmy taking a bath. That way, each thumbnail in your manager can represent an entire event. Right now I have all of mine visible, but I because it is halfway through the year and my 2007 library is getting large, I plan to stack by event pretty soon.

6. Aperture provides foolproof cropping. Do you ever crop a photo, only to decide weeks later that you’re not happy with it? In Aperture, all I have to do is click on the crop button and it shows me the entire photo again, with my cropped version lit up. I can pull the corners out or push them in. What I don’t have to do is try to find the original, if it’s even still there. Of course, an original version is all always one click away.

7. Aperture can read the metadata off photos from a cd that someone else burned for you. My mother sent me a cd of pictures from Christmas that she burned at Sam’s Club. Even though I didn’t upload the photos into Aperture directly from her camera, Aperture recorded all the metadata: the dates she took the photos, the camera settings, etc.

8. Aperture automatically arranges those photos by when they were taken. The software I used before ordered them by the date that I uploaded them. The Christmas photos from my mother would have shown up in March when I finally uploaded them. Since Aperture reads and records the metadata, even from a cd, it arranges the photos by the actual photo date.

This comes in handy when I am scrapbooking and want to know the date of a particular event. Aperture takes care of recording the dates for me.

9. Aperture is a great editor for everyday photos. I wasn’t satisfied with iPhoto as an editor, so I only used it to manage my photos when I uploaded them. Then I opened almost every single shot in Photoshop to edit them. After that I saved them to be stored in Adobe Bridge. I had photos in separate places and it was a very slow process to edit each photo in Photoshop.

Admittedly, Aperture is not as good at editing as Photoshop is, but it is good enough for 99% of my photos. I really like its editing capabilities with a few exceptions (Photoshop makes up for those). In fact, I only use Photoshop now for a rare shot that needs special attention, or if I want to add text or save in unusual sizes. I wish I could tell you how much time this saves me!

10. I prefer using Aperture with Photoshop than using Adobe Bridge with Photoshop. I know that Adobe designed Photoshop and Bridge to work together. But I find using Aperture with Bridge is a much smoother process.

When you click on a photo in Aperture and request it to open in Photoshop, Aperture opens a second version of that photo for you to work on. After making all your adjustments in Photoshop, all you have to do is hit SAVE (not SAVE AS) and it will automatically adjust the version in Aperture. This means you can go back in the future and readjust in Photoshop as often as you want. It also saves a lot of time and space to not have to save with a new name and designate its type (such as, TIFF or JPEG).

The only limitation I have found is when I create a new canvas and drag one or more photos into the new canvas. In this case, it seems I have to save it in Photoshop and then add it to Aperture manually as a new photo. It’s not a bad deal when I consider all the other benefits.

After switching my system around a few times and never feeling completely satisfied with iPhoto, Photoshop, and Adobe Bridge, I cannot believe I am so happy with Aperture. It’s hard to believe a system can run so smoothly. And then I wonder why all the other systems do run this way!

If you will be shopping for a new editor or manager in the future, Aperture is the one to get.

The last thing you’d want me to be is your accountant. I make a lot of math errors. Now that I think of it, you wouldn’t want me designing your new home, either. I’m just not good with measurements. And I’m just not patient enough to measure twice.

That is why I prefer to “eye ball” the placement of various elements on my layouts. Fortunately, it fits with my personal scrapbooking style to have a little messiness on my pages.

When Precision Is Key:
Error-prone or not, there is a time when I want to be very precise; so much so that I can force myself to get out that ruler, dig deep for some patience, and double-check my measurements. The time to be precise is when creating margins. Scrapbookers create margins every time we lay down a block of something. We create the most margins when gathering a group of photos like the one above.

By laying down the block of photos, i created margins on the two outsides. Those are the obvious margins. I usually do okay if I eye-ball these types. But by taking the extra time to measure, it makes a bigger impact. You will have a greater feeling of cohesion when looking at it.

The more difficult margins are the ones in between and around the outside of the grouping of photos. I often see (and have created) groupings where the margins are not quite perfect. Such imperfections usually don’t draw a lot of attention, so they are acceptable.

But the difference between a layout with perfect margins and a layout with imperfect ones is equal to the difference between a car manufactured by a Japanese company and car by an American one. The Japanese are just more precise. The specs may be exactly the same, but the Japanese will do it better every time.

Slightly off margins may be acceptable. Precise margins will deliver impact.

When To Relax:
Once you’ve knotted up your stomach and finished measuring and adhering the elements that create margins, you can let out a breath of air, get your hands dirty, and relax on all the other elements of your design.

Of course, your overall style may be elegant or precise, in which case, you are choosing to use precision with all of the elements. But that is your choice. It isn’t necessary. If precision is your style, you probably like taking the time to measure anyway.

Notice the word strips that line up as part of the background of my layout. I could have lined them up with a ruler like I did my block of photos. Instead, I gave my page a touch of my own personality by eye-balling them instead. Because they do not create important or identifiable margins, it is okay to do that. And while I often pay more attention to perfection when I use formal letter stickers on a title, I relax when I am using stamps and ink or paint. This is because ink and paint lend to a messier style. It works.

Expend your energy where it makes the greatest difference. If you don’t like to measure, just do it where it counts: when you are adding an element that creates a margin. Then relax and have fun with the rest of the page! Relaxing where you can will give your scrapbooking personality. Being precise where it is important will create impact.

We haven’t run the Layout Of The Week feature in a while and I can’t wait to bring it back with a layout and technique by Nic Howard!

Nic has had an enormous amount of scrapbook pages published in various magazines and is a 2005 Memory Maker’s Master. Her newest accomplishment is the release of her very own book, That’s Life: Finding Scrapbook Inspiration In The Everyday.

Yesterday, while taking a look at the most recent layouts in the Two Peas In A Bucket gallery, Nic’s page, Simply Said, pulled my attention. The intricate decoration at the corner of the photo reminded me of the stitching on some of my daughter’s pants; exactly what Paperclipping reader, Marlies, and I have both wanted to recreate in our layouts.

I love all the layering on Nic’s page. She cut three different flowers from patterned paper, raising some with pop dots. Underneath two of the flowers are beaded flourishes, and underneath that are what look like rub-on flowers.

I knew I had to learn the beading technique, and fortunately, Nic has agreed to provide us with step-by-step instructions, which she originally created for the Queen and Co. blog.

Step 1.
Apply a line of dimensional magic or Papier glass finish where you would like the beads to go.

Step 2. Tip your beads into a tray. Place the tip of a sharp pencil into the hole of the bead.

Step 3. Touch the bead (which is on the end of the pencil) on to your line of dimensional magic. Do not press hard, just touch gently, and the dimensional magic will ‘pull’ it off.

Step 4. Complete your creation by repeating the above steps. What looks like a very complex creation is really an easy task! Enjoy your Queen & Co beadifuls, available in 13 different themed colors.

If you would like to see more of Nic’s work, follow the link to her gallery on Two Peas In A Bucket.

I love saving containers that I can clean out and turn into cute gift boxes. I expect I’ll use those lavender-colored vanilla powder containers as Christmas cookie boxes.

I reclaim and reuse containers for most of my kids’ party favors on their birthdays as well. I’ve used tins from tea, and clear plastic containers from locally-made dried fruits.

I also save the brown paper that sometimes fill the packages I receive in the mail. It worked perfect for my son’s Harry Potter party favors.

This is a wooden box that once held Brie cheese. I decorated the lid, filled it with small scrap goodies, and sent it to a friend.

Yesterday I discovered a new idea for reclaiming and reusing items. Follow the link to Tia Bennet’s “Clam Shell Cards,” featured on Two Peas In A Bucket.

They are more than just cards. They’re little containers you can fill with candy (or chocolate-covered espresso beans; a personal small-gift favorite). They are so fun and cute! She gave step-by-step directions (through photos), so make sure you take a good look!