A few months ago, I won a giveaway for some Cosmo Cricket scrapbooking supplies at the Ella Publishing blog. The box came in the mail on Friday, and I was super excited to sit down and make some pages with the paper inside. Cosmo Cricket is my favorite paper company and I hadn’t even seen this line of paper yet. On Saturday — for the first time in ages — I made time to do some scrapbooking. I’ve really been wanting to do some pages about Augie since our photo albums have so few pictures of him in them yet. This paper pack is family themed so it was a great place to start.
The page is a selection of photos of us together that I pulled from a big stack. I took most of these myself with the stick out your arm and click method. Very sophisticated!
The journaling reads:
My dear little Augie — you are so special to me! I’ve been so piviledged to spend two years at home with you. I have loved being there for all your firsts — first steps, first words, first slobbery kisses. I know you so well and I love all the things about you that make you who your are. You’re my boy!
I’m very excited upon reading this over to discover that I misspelled the word “privileged” for posterity. Yay!
This weekend I was struck by the desire to do a fun and totally easy scrapbook project. I’m still obsessing over the Hipstamatic app on my iPhone and over the last couple of weeks I’ve collected a fine assortment of photos that I really like. These photos have very little in common thematically besides the fact that they were taken with the Hipstamatic, but I decided that was a strong enough thread to tie them all together and put them into a small album.
For those of you who are not into scrapbooking as a concept — or who have preconceived notions about what scrapbooking is — you can think of this as a “photography project” if that terminology makes you more comfortable. But you should do this because there couldn’t be an easier way than this to get your photos off your phone and show them off.
Gather Your Materials
Start off by gathering your materials. I had decided to make my little album because that way I’d get exactly what I wanted for an end result. I also am the sort of person who enjoys making little albums and I have lots of scrapbook supplies and tools on hand. If you aren’t that sort of person, you can use a purchased album.
You will need:
A pile of Hipstamatic prints — I just printed mine at home. If you print them with a service, be careful that they don’t try to crop off the cool borders because they’re one of the best parts of the images.
A paper cutter or a pair of scissors
If you’re making your album:
Several sheets of black 12 x 12 inch cardstock (or the color of your choice)
2 6 x 6 inch pieces of chipboard for the cover (this is optional, but will make your album more sturdy)
Some way of binding your album. I used a Bind-it-all system, but you could also use:
staples
a hole punch and binder rings or ribbon or string
a needle and thread to sew it together
If you’re not making your album, you’ll need:
a small album
Make Your Album (or not)
To make your album, cut each sheet of paper into 4 6 x 6 inch squares. Then fasten them together using the method of your choice. I really like the 6 inch size because when you trim down the Hipstamatic prints they’ll be 4 x 4 inches and that will leave a 1 inch border of black all around the photos. The one inch border really puts the focus on the photos and it makes them look hella cool.
Make an Intro Page (or not)
I decided that I wanted to make an intro page for my album to give the photos a little context. To do this, I took a photo of a blank wall using my Hipstamatic. I then typed the word “Hipstamatic” with a grungy font and added a paragraph about my Hipstamatic obsession on top of the image using Photoshop Elements. I printed this intro page out along with my other photos. I also took a similar photo of my kitchen table using a different film/lens combo, added a title to that and used that on the front cover of the album.
I liked how these pages turned out so much that I went completely nuts and took a whole bunch of photos of my walls, couch and kitchen table using all sorts of film/lens combos. Then I went even crazier and I added the word Hipstamatic to some of them so they can be used as title or intro pages. Then, I uploaded them all to Flickr so that anyone who wants to make their own version of this album could download them and print them or add stuff to them in a graphics program or what have you:
Click the mosaic to go to a Flickr set with all of these images in them. You can download them from there. These are all licensed under a CC non-commercial license so follow those rules if you plan to use them, please.
Put It All Together
Alrighty then! Now it’s time to put everything together. Trim all your 4 x 6 prints down to 4 x 4. Then stick them in your album using the adhesive of your choice. I like using a tape runner, but you could also use a glue stick or any other dry adhesive you like. I wouldn’t use a wet glue on this project because it will cause the paper to buckle.
Add captions to the photos. I used a white pen, but you could also use a silver pen or a gel pen to show up on the black paper.
Keep the captions simple because this is a simple project. You don’t need to write a book.
Show off your Hipstamatic album to all your Hipsta-friends!
(Please excuse the extra-rambly nature of these instructions. I have a terrible head cold and my brain is all scrambled up. Let me know in the comments if something isn’t clear and I’ll try to expand or completely rewrite it so it’s coherent.)
As if it weren’t crazy enough that I’ve taken on two huge challenges for myself this year (photo a day and my 73 goals), I decided to go completely nutso and I signed up for Lain Ehmann’s Layout a Day Scrapbooking Challenge for the month of February. Actually, one of the main reasons I signed up for this project is to help me accomplish Goal #21: Make at least 30 scrapbook layouts. So far I’ve managed my one layout per day which would make me happy even if that’s all I did for the month. I think I made around 4 or 5 layouts in all of 2009 so I’ve already tripled my output in comparison to last year. Here are some of the pages I’ve made so far:
I had chance to do some scrapbooking yesterday and I made this page about my geographic heritage. This page was a bit of a departure from what I normally do. For starters, it was about me, not the kids. Then, I started with the story I wanted to tell and found photos to support it, rather than the other way around. I actually couldn’t find any photos of Iowa in my photo file so I chose a recent-ish photo of myself and scrounged up some Creative Commons photos from Flickr to add to the page. I love Flickr.
The page topic was inspired by the ebook 20 Simple Secrets of Happy Scrapbookers from Ella Publishing. One of the “secrets” is something along the lines of “remember where you came from” and when I read that, it got my mental wheels spinning.
The journaling is hidden behind the state cut-out. It reads:
I am from Iowa.
I spent my first 18 years in Cedar Rapids and I loved it. I loved my elementary school. I loved the park near my house. I loved swimming all day in the summer and catching lightning bugs on the front lawn as the sun set. I loved sitting on the porch reading a book until it was too dark to see the words on the page. I loved the snowy winters and the ridiculous amount of clothing I had to wear to even venture outside. I loved shoveling the sidewalk (up to a point). I loved pork tenderloin sandwiches, corn on the cob and home grown tomatoes. I loved having a Dairy Queen within walking distance of my house. I loved the farmers in their John Deere caps and the commercials for Lorsban that played during the evening news. I loved how every person who’d ever even considered running for president descended on the state every fourth year. I loved going to fast food restaurants, driving up and down First Avenue and sneaking into the parks after they were closed to run whooping through the woods with my friends because there was nothing else for teenagers to do.
As of this year, I have now spent more of my life in California than I did in Iowa. Every election I’ve ever voted in was in California. Every home I’ve paid to live in was in California. Every real job I’ve had has been here. I pay taxes here. I got married here. My children were born here. By pretty much any standard, I’m a Californian.
So why do I still feel like an Iowan? Why is it that when I see someone in a Hawkeye sweat shirt I stop them to talk to them? Why do I first look to see what Iowa did on USA Today infographics? Why am I so proud to see Tom Harkin and so ashamed to see Chuck Grassley in the news? Why is it that I like sweet corn so much? I think Iowa is ingrained on me because my experiences as a kid in Iowa shaped so much of who I am as an adult. I guess what they say is true: you can take the girl out of Iowa, but you can’t take the Iowa out of the girl.
Gah! I didn’t record the URL for the photo of the cornfield and now I can’t find it again. If anyone recognizes it please let me know so I can give proper attribution.
For the first time in — I don’t know, FOREVER? — I had some spare time and the desire to scrapbook. I checked and the last time I blogged about scrapbooking on here was around a year and a half ago. Crazy! I bet most of you didn’t even know that I scrapbook.
Just because I haven’t been scrapbooking though doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about it. The whole reason I’m doing my Project 365 is so I can put together a book chronicling our year come next January. I still subscribe to and read 3 scrapbook magazines. I follow the blogs. And, of course, I’ve amassed a 6 inch stack of patterned paper in the months since I made my last page.
So here’s what I made:
I of course had to start off with a page about Augie. I think I have only two pages about him and baby photos are so dang fun to scrapbook. The journaling reads:
I suppose it’s theoretically possible that there’s a happier baby than Augie out there, but I certainly haven’t met him!
The next batch of photos that spoke to me were these ones of Wyatt and his backpack. I got to use some of my “boy” paper on this one. The journaling is from this blog post back in February.
I still had some more time, so I started digging through my photo file to find some more pictures to work with. I had intended to do another page about Augie, but I got distracted and started looking at photos in the tabbed section of my files and I found a bunch of pictures of Zach and I together. I think these are almost all of the photos of the two of us together that have ever been taken and they’re nearly all from before we were married. What’s up with that? We’re going to need to fix that situation, stat! The journaling on this one is kind of schmaltzy, but these pictures made me feel romantical so I suppose that’s to be expected. It reads:
Us.
Me and you.
You and me.
Zach and Wendy.
Wendy and Zach.
The Copleys.
The Cybersteins.
12 years together.
7 years married.
Many more years to come.
5 homes.
2 kids.
9 jobs between us.
Long hair, short hair, no hair.
Sunshine.
Rain.
Snow.
Gardening projects.
Long trips.
Short trips.
No trips.
Building a home together.
Building a life.
I’m so glad we chose each other.
I’ve been looking for some crafty, fun ways to be a little greener over the last few months and here is one of my recent projects.
I am super bad about creating and printing Excel documents at work. No matter how careful I am, I frequently insert a bunch of extra rows and columns beyond the area of the spreadsheet I’m actually using so when I print a document it comes out with a bunch of extra pages that only have grid lines on them. I’m working on fixing these ridiculous errors, but recently I printed several copies of a document where I’d royally screwed up and I ended up printing about 200 pages with no actual data on them. Ugh.
I brought the paper home with me and put most of it right onto Wyatt’s coloring shelf so he could use it to create some masterpieces before it got recycled. I reserved a smaller chunk for myself to make a few little notepads. (By the way, I’d like to point out that you don’t have to be an Excel loser to do recycle paper like this — I also bring home other documents that are printed single-sided when I’m tossing stuff from my files at work.)
To make them, I started off by cutting the paper into uniform pieces. The one on the left was 4 x 4 inches. The notepad on the right was made from paper that had been cut into quarters, so it was 4 1/4 x 5 1/2 inches.
I then cut slightly larger pieces of a cardboard package insert to match the size of the printer paper. The package insert I used was from a pack of photo sleeves. I also save the inserts from page protectors, craft supplies, etc. You could even just use a piece of cardboard cut from an Amazon box, cereal box or anything else you can find in your recycling bin that is fairly stiff.
Once I’d cut the cardboard, I decorated it with pretty paper and punches. I kept the one with the boat on it pretty simple because it was for Wyatt and he doesn’t care. I put a little more effort into the the swirly one because it was for my purse.
Once I had everything decorated, I stacked the paper and the covers and put them together with my Bind-It-All machine. Most people won’t have one of those, of course, so other ways you could bind them would be to punch two or three holes through the stack and connect them with binder rings. You could also try threading a string or ribbon through, leaving a little slack and tying very tight knots in them. I bet twist ties would work too and that would be another great way to recycle something.
This photo shows a fanned out version of one of the books looking sort of from the back. You can see the grids lines on the paper.
I keep this notebook in my purse and I use it for making quick grocery lists, mostly. I also whip it out in restaurants and give it to Wyatt to draw on.
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