I’ve Got Some Stories to Tell

Welcome to my stop on the June 2019 Pixel Scrapper “Storytelling” blog train! This month I have some really fun layout templates for you, created especially to help you tell your stories. The templates are in “Traveler’s Notebook” format, which is a tall, skinny format based on the proportions of a type of paper notebook (which is called a Traveler’s Notebook, of course). I’ve got four adorable story- and photo-focused templates as freebies for you here, and a large coordinating set with more templates over at Pixel Scrapper.

My partner and I recently went on our first camping trip together (featuring a surprise rainstorm!) and I used these templates to put together an album about our trip as soon as we came home. Before making this template set, I had never worked with the traveler’s notebook format before, and I’m in total awe of how fast my album came together. The TN format was a natural fit for breaking up the overarching story, which had tons of photos and stories I wanted to record, into these little brochure-sized snippets that were super fast and easy to put together. I have to admit, I went quickly from “hmm, why is everyone so into this Traveler’s Notebook thing? to “This is great, I’m a little addicted!”

From working with this format, I’ve discovered that Traveler’s Notebook format is amazing for storytelling. Each skinny page has much less real estate to fill than a big square 12×12 layout, so with many fewer decisions to make I was able to make my pages much more quickly. Each TN layout usually features just 0-2 photos per page and so ends up with a more dedicated focus than a pocket page, which makes this format perfect for a storytelling album.

The Stories to Tell TN templates are a fun assortment of templates that go together as an album to tell a story. Of course you can use them individually, as well, or mix and match. In the journaling spots on the templates, instead of just putting “lorem ipsum” filler text, I’ve included journaling prompts to help you tell your story at a richer, more detailed level. I know journaling is sometimes the hardest part, so I hope the questions and suggestions in these templates will help make it easier to scrap your stories!

I was excited to scrap in the TN format, but I also had no idea how I would print my pages. After a lot of back and forth, I decided to print them as pages in one of my photobooks. For photobooks I scrap 12×12 and then usually print an 11×11 photobook. I thought other 12×12 scrappers might want to play with the TN format, too, so I created a special “extra large” TN format. It has the exact same proportions as the standard size TN, but is sized up so that two of these XL pages look good on a 12×12 page (standard TN pages would look tiny). Here are two examples of a pair of XL templates put together onto a square 12×12 page.

For the blog train I have a set of 4 templates that coordinate with the rest of the Stories to Tell album. I love these “The Best Parts” and “The Worst Parts” pages – the camping trip I was scrapping ended up being pretty hard, thanks to the unexpected week-long rainstorm, and it was great to have a place to record all the funny and hard stuff as well as the highlights. I hope you enjoy these and, as always, I would love to see what you make! Download links are below the preview.

Both download links are for the SAME materials, you only need to choose one. I provide the Mediafire one just in case the direct download Dropbox link is not available due to high traffic.

Direct download link (may not be available due to bandwidth overage):
DOWNLOAD “STORIES TO TELL” TEMPLATES
Mediafire link:
DOWNLOAD “STORIES TO TELL” TEMPLATES

If you’d like to make a full album, like I did for my camping trip, you can find Volume I of the Stories To Tell template set at Pixel Scrapper:

Be sure to check out the rest of the Pixel Scrapper “Storytelling” blog train, for more great templates, kits, and designs using this dreamy color palette and great theme!

Cozy Kitchen Blog Train

Welcome to my stop on the Pixel Scrapper September 2018 “Cozy Kitchen” blog train! The previews I’ve seen of the blog train look great, we’re all going to have plenty of material to scrap our food and cooking stories for a long time to come. I’ve made a minikit for you today, as well as a coordinating bundle available on Pixel Scrapper. I just loved these colors, they were so delightful to design with!

Cozy Kitchen is in many ways an homage to my first ever blog train, which was the first time I created scrap designs to share with others. That month, February 2013, the Pixel Scrapper blog train theme was Retro Kitchen. I was only doing Project Life/pocket scrapping at the time, so I made a ton of different journal cards – all card designs that I wanted to use in my personal scrapping – and a bunch of papers. I had such a magical time creating for that blog train, inspired by the color and theme, bursting with ideas, and very supported as a budding designer by Marisa’s generous Pixel Scrapper terms of use and all the tutorials and CU paper templates and textures she shared on the site. The phenomenal vintage graphics site Graphics Fairy was another amazing resource, and for that blog train many of us ended up using the same adorable retro kitchen graphics in our creations.

Those Retro Kitchen journal cards and paper packs are still one my most downloaded freebies. The rounded corners on the cards look dated to me now and I’m not sure how useful they’d be for modern scrapping, so I’ve wanted to do a square-corner update for a while (you can always make square JC corners round by clipping to a template, but you can’t add back square corners to round cards!).

As tends to happen when I fall in love with a color palette, and as tends to happen even more when we’re throwing anything vintage or shabby or retro into the mix, designs just started fountaining out of me! What started as a little update turned into a full-blown bundle, referencing most of those journal cards and papers from the original but then adding more papers, more cards, and, now that I actually scrap traditional layouts as well as pocket pages, a ton of elements and word art for scrapping any sort of page. I ended up deciding to offer a minikit for the blog train, with a little bit of everything.

Blog train freebie links only stay up for the month of the blog train (though you can still find older blog train goodies if you explore the blog). My Cozy Kitchen Minikit is no longer available here on the blog – you can now find it at Pixel Scrapper.

I think the minikit stands alone beautifully (seriously how yummy are these colors??) and it also serves as part of a larger bundle stuffed to the gills with pocket cards and fun kitchen-related elements and word art. I’m a little in love with the cozy little oven mitts, aren’t they sweet? The bundle includes the mini, a full traditional scrapbooking kit with papers and elements, a big pack of shabby patterned papers (I love having lots of extra papers to play with), and several packs of journal cards. There are journal cards in both white and kraft, and both go beautifully with the kit colors.

And here’s a bit of inspiration from my fantastic creative team!

Be sure to check out the rest of the Pixel Scrapper blog train to see all the wonderful offerings. You’ll be covered for kitchen layouts for years to come!

Happy iNSD, Freebie, & Die Cut Fun

Hello to all you scrappers, I wish you all a very happy interNational Scrapbooking Day!

International Scrapbooking Day, or iNSD, is one of two annual scrapbooking celebrations (the other is Digital Scrapbooking Day in the fall). One thing I enjoy about iNSD is that it’s a day to celebrate both digital and paper scrapbooking, so for me it’s a fun reminder to check out what my fellow scrappers are up to over in the land of paper scraps. I got my start with paper scrapbooking, but I only did pocket scrapping back then. I feel so inspired when I see the magical creations people make out of real physical paper, and get all, “How did they do that? And all with no ‘undo’ button? Look, real shadows, wow!” And then I want to go figure out how to make it digitally, which is sometimes easier and sometimes much more complicated.

Recently I’ve been coming across some gorgeous paper layouts online featuring elaborate die cut backgrounds, often combined with a “paper pieced” look using patterned papers behind the die cut shape. I love this bold, geometric look, and thought it would be fun for us digital scrappers to get in on the action! Creating these geometric patterns requires some math and plenty of attention to detail – luckily that stuff is fun for me (I’m a nerd, what can I say?) so I felt inspired to whip up a few templates so we can have our own “digital die cuts.” These Die Cut Templates released on Pixel Scrapper today. I’ve been having so much playing with them, and I can’t wait to see what you guys make with them!

I also have a digital die cut gift for you today, a fun little freebie to celebrate the holiday and our shared love of scrapbooking. Use these die cut pocket cards to commemorate the day – perhaps along with a screenshot of an overstuffed and heavily discounted shopping cart at your favorite online scrap shop? Click the preview to download.

Something I love about these die cut templates is that they have a kind of magic to them that feels different than the average template. The die cutting process sometimes has the look of something revealed (like in the Scrap Scrap Scrap card above – wouldn’t it be pretty with glitter or foil behind the cut-outs?), and sometimes has a look reminiscent of paper-piecing in quilt making (like my layout below, using the Scales template). Die cut templates can be a way to feature a bunch of beautiful papers without things looking too busy or out of control.

Here’s some delicious die cut inspiration from the Scrumptiously creative team!

Great News & a Fresh Start

I have a fun announcement to make! Today the Scrumptiously Creative Team welcomes a new member, scrapper extraordinaire Bina Greene.

Welcome, Bina!!! We’re so excited to have you join us!

February was Winter Layout Madness month at Pixel Scrapper. All month long Pixel Scrappers completed challenges and made layout after layout. I sponsored a challenge using my designs (folks could use designs from the site or use freebies from this blog) and had such a great time seeing all their creative uses for Scrumptiously kits. There’s really nothing that brings me more pleasure than to see people scrapping with my designs. It was also great to see people getting caught up on their scrapping, being super productive, experimenting with challenges that took them out of their comfort zone, and getting back into scrapping again after a long time away.

“Hello” by Bina Greene made using my new Fresh Start kit

One of the prizes for participating in my challenge was a spot on the Scrumptiously Creative Team, and Bina was the winner! I’ve admired her layouts in the Pixel Scrapper gallery for a long time, so I was thrilled to invite her to the team. Bina scraps both pocket and traditional layouts, so she’s a fantastic fit for my design style. She’s also a master of the clean & simple, lots-of-white-space style I’ve been drawn to lately and I plan to learn a lot from her. I hope this will be the start of a beautiful creative partnership!

Speaking of clean & simple, minimalist style, I have a new Spring kit, Fresh Start, and it’s my first foray (as a designer) into a more minimalist look. Fresh Start was created as part of the Pixel Scrapper designer Pick Your Pixels collaboration for March, which has the overall theme of Fresh. Fresh Start is full of lovely light springtime colors, plenty of white space, and an overall peaceful yet playful vibe.

Fresh Start has elements, patterned papers, cardstock papers, and a set of journal cards that come in multiple colorways and orientations. The journal cards were made using my Pocket Basics 2 Minimalist Journal Card Templates and are a great example of how journal card templates can be used again and again to make unique, fresh-looking (pun intended!) journal card sets for different kits.

Here are a couple more lovely layouts from other creative team members – a tale about a bee from Paddy and an adorable pocket page from Emily.

 

Resistance = Love

Welcome to my stop on the March 2018 Pixel Scrapper “Love Knows No Borders” blog train! As soon as I saw this month’s theme and palette I knew exactly what I wanted to create. I had a vision of a collection of people, created using the wonderful soft colors of the blog train palette, all holding signs with words of love and resistance.

As a scrapbooker, as a designer, and as a human, I feel like I am currently living in two parallel worlds. I feel drawn to making art that is fun and uplifts me, or art that feels poignant and expresses something about my experience in the world whether that is happy or wistful or thoughtful or complex. What I don’t want to do right now is make art about how worried I am, how often that worry slips into terror, or, sometimes even worse, into numbness. I can’t make art about how my heart is breaking seeing my communities devastated in a dozen ways, about how my brain is breaking under all the lies and misdirects, how helpless I feel when a mass shooting, something that once made the whole country reverberate for months and years with shock and mourning, now happens every other day.

I remember the grief I felt after Columbine, after Charleston, after Orlando. I remember how I walked around for days in a haze of shock and pain and disbelief. If I allowed myself to feel that now after every shooting I would be completely non-functional; I would be in a puddle on the floor.

So I scrap about making sushi and hanging out with my family, about celebrating birthdays and my 10 favorite things from the month. I scrap about my best friend and his wonderful boyfriend and how happy I am for them to be getting married soon, not about the tides of hate surging around women, queer people, disabled people, immigrants, and people of color. I scrap about getting older and the unexpected gifts it brings, not about being disabled and in constant dread that I’m about to lose health insurance and life will go back to how things were for me before Obamacare, when for a decade I was brutally ill with zero access to insurance, only this time around I’ll be ten years older…

I think it’s ok that for now my art lives in a separate place. I think it’s ok that, with a few exceptions, a future historian looking back at my memory keeping from this time would have no idea what was going on in the country, or the churn of fear and anxiety going on inside me. It’s good for me to have an outlet that brings me joy and commemorates the sweet parts of life that continue even now. (In fact, wanting to intentionally document moments of sweetness during the hardest of times is how I got into scrapbooking in the first place, back in the years when I was so sick with no health insurance.)

I also think it’s ok that my work as a designer exists in this parallel world. Not everyone who scraps with Scrumptiously designs is living in the middle of a social and political meltdown, and not everyone who lives in the same country I do feels the way I do about what’s happening. I’ve never encountered any scrapbooker who wasn’t a compassionate and open-hearted person, whatever their worldview, and I want my designs to be there to facilitate self-expression for anyone and everyone who wants to use them. (With the obvious exception that I would be sad if someone created something I perceived as hateful using my designs, but, as I said, I’ve never yet met a scrapbooker who didn’t have a huge and kind heart, so that seems pretty inconceivable.)

And, with all that being said, sometimes these two worlds do come together in a way that feels natural and good, and that’s what happened for me when this blog train theme and palette bloomed in my brain. And so I present to you my blog train offering, Resistance = Love. [Download links are down below the second preview.]

This mini-kit comes with seven people, ready to go out and change the world. Each person comes holding a blank sign, and then there’s a pack of 16 sign messages in two fonts each so you can choose what the sign says (and of course you can put your own words on the sign just as easily). There’s even a separate pack of the same messages that come tilted for the person with the scarf and tilted sign. All but one of the seven people also comes in a version without a sign, so these figures can be used for other types of layouts as well. (You’ll notice there are only six people in the previews – there are so many more people I want to make, with different bodies and gender presentations and so on, that I keep working on more, and I finished one more in time to include here. She’s in a wheelchair with shoulder-length light-colored hair, wearing a pink knit hat, shorts, a tank top, and sneakers.) Each figure’s clothing and hair is made using blended art papers, and I am including those papers in this kit as well. Figures and papers are together in one download.

Both download links are for the SAME materials, you only need to choose one. I provide the Mediafire one just in case the direct download Dropbox link is not available due to high traffic.

Direct download link (may not be available due to bandwidth overage):
DOWNLOAD RESISTANCE = LOVE
Mediafire link:
DOWNLOAD RESISTANCE = LOVE

I hope that you will find a use for this heartfelt offering. I created it to inspire myself, and saw that my art and my worries can intersect, but that sometimes in that intersection I will find hope and strength and resilience.  I share it with you in case it speaks to you, as a way to express some part of your experience right now, or as a set of pretty, dreamy figures and papers for making pretty art about anything.

Be sure to check in with the rest of the stops on the “Love Knows No Borders” blog train, it looks like there are some fantastic treats to be found along the way!

Pocket Basics 2 – Pocket Scrapping Foundations

I’ve been expanding my scrapbooking horizons these days and have been trying out all kinds of layout styles. But pocket scrapping was my first foray into scrapbooking, and I still love it dearly. I love how you can create an overview of a period of time, like a week or a month, on a single page, and I love how you can tell an individual story illustrated with many photos.

A few years back I made a bundle for Pixel Scrapper of “Pocket Basics.” I intended it to be a starter-kit for people new to pocket scrapping and a foundations toolkit for any and all pocket scrappers. I filled it with the kinds of things I liked to use in my own pocket scrapping – round-cornered pocket page templates, photo overlays and frames, neutral papers and journal cards to work with any kit, date stamps, all-purpose alphas, and kraft journal cards (which I call “the little black dress” of journal cards).  I called it Pocket Basics Volume 1 because I had many more ideas for foundational tools I wanted to add.

Since then I’ve been slowly creating designs to include in the next bundle, Pocket Basics 2, which is finally ready to go out into the world! Pocket Basics 2 contains basic building blocks for fun, creative pocket pages. I created it using a combination of neutral colors and a palette of blues from our Build Your Basics palette, with everything in easy-to-recolor formats like .abr brushes, PNG overlays, and layered PSD templates so each piece can be custom recolored to match photos or a kit.

There are a TON of goodies in this bundle, so I won’t go into detail here about each part, but I wanted to highlight a few favorites. The main thing I always want, with any pocket scrapping kit, are color-coordinated labels. I just can’t get enough of them! Labels are my favorite way to add captions and dates to photos, and to make a bit of journaling stand out on a card. Pocket Basics 2 has a set of crisply bordered labels, in all different shapes and sizes, that come in easy to use layered template form, so you can customize the color of the label border and even the label itself.

The winds of fashion have changed direction since the release of Pocket Basics Vol. 1, and rounded pocket corners have given way to squared ones as the preferred look. I frequently get requests for square-cornered versions of the pocket page templates in Pocket Basics Vol. 1, so Pocket Basics 2 contains a full set, as well as stitching overlays perfectly sized to fit the new templates. The stitching overlays are so great for adding a little pop of contrast or definition to the page. In the layout below, which uses one of the square-corner page templates from Pocket Basics 2, you can see how I used the pink stitching to give the photos, which mostly have backgrounds of dark blue sky, some subtle definition against the dark blue background paper.

One of the most often-requested items on the site is more card templates, and I was happy to oblige. The journal card templates in Pocket Basics 2 allow you to take any kit and make coordinating journal cards to match the kit colors, which will means you can adapt any traditional scrapbooking kit to use for pocket layouts. Now you have the power! Pocket scrap the wooooooorld!! Pocket Basics 2 contains template sets for three different styles of journal cards – bold and graphical, classic and elegant, and minimalist/clean & simple. I love how Paddy used the minimalist card templates (as well as items from the Labels, Photo Overlay Frames, and Industrial Alphas kits) in her layout, “Jump.”

In addition to what I’ve shown you above, the Pocket Basics 2 bundle has 25 square-cornered pocket page templates with stitching overlays to match, two all-purpose alphas, six styles of journal strip templates for turning any paper or filler card into a journal card, a giant pack of pocket titles in sticker and stamp form, and two packs of photo overlays and photo frame overlays for stamping over your photos for captions and decoration. The photo overlays are super neat because by changing colors and adding styles you have an infinite variety of options for decorating your pages.

Also, big news! I sometimes get requests for pocket page templates in PAGE format (a file format for using with the Artisan and Storybook Creator softwares), and this bundle is the first time I am able to offer every template in PAGE format! The template packs actually include each pocket scrapping template in layered TIF and PSD formats as well as PNG format for software that does not support layered files and PAGE format for SBC & Artisan users. I suggest using the layered TIFs if your program supports them because the file size is smallest; whatever you choose, you can delete the versions you won’t be using. Save that hard drive space!

 

So, wow, 2017.

2017 is over! A new year can begin. There’s a Cuban New Years tradition where you take a bucket of dirty water and throw it into the street as a way of tossing out the bad stuff from the past year so the new year can start clean. We’re lining up the buckets over at my place.

Last year I made the very jarringly themed (for many Americans, and I’m sure for many others besides, for their own reasons) “The Best Is Yet To Come” digital scrapbooking bundle, to be used for scrapping New Years layouts (um, is it New Year’s or New Years?) and 2017 album covers. I had already created it before everything went sideways. (I think the general consensus regardless of political affiliation is that very few Americans got what they’d hoped for from 2017).

But then I ended up feeling like the theme actually brought some hope with it, and in particular connected me with my favorite quote and personal guiding mantra, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” King’s quote grounds me back into faith and patience.

In that spirit, I’ve updated The Best Is Yet To Come 2017 with a 2018 supplement. I hope the theme will do its little part to support us as we work to create a more just world, which I believe we can move towards in part by listening to each other from a place of deep compassion and open-heartedness. In 2018 I want to do less talking and more listening, as much as possible to voices that don’t often get to be heard.

I’m still kind of flummoxed by making previews and couldn’t find a way to fit all the pieces of this supplemental kit in without messing with the elegance of the metallics, on the one hand, or not really displaying the yummy blues and purples. So I copped out and made several previews. That’s ok, right?

One of my favorite things in this 2018 update is a rad triangle template, perfect for year in review layouts (there are 12 rectangles, so you could put a photo from each month in one half of the triangle pairing and a paper or journal card in the other) and 2018 album covers. I used it to make my 2018 album cover. I’m really happy about how many people are such a part of my day-to-day life that I feel like they’re integral to my story and belong on my album cover. I’ve intentionally cultivated close relationships outside of my partner and family, which I love because different parts of me are fed by connection with different people. Seeing all these smiling beloved faces brings me a lot of joy.

I’ve made a little gift for you guys, to wish you all a happy new year filled with peace, enjoyment, and movement towards a more just world. The textured version shown above of my “The arc of the universe…” journal card can be found in the BIYTC 2018 Supplement kit. But I wanted to make these words available to scrappers who may not be pocket scrappers, crafters who may not be scrappers, and people who may not do any digital crafting at all. The freebie download includes an untextured 4in x 6in version of the card on a plain white background, perfect for printing and framing, and a transparent PNG version so you can put it on whatever background you like.

Because this is a blog freebie I’m releasing it under a Personal Use only license, so please don’t use the imagery for any commercial purpose. The one possible exception is if you want to use it in some way related to funding a good cause, in which case send me an email and let’s talk that over.

DOWNLOAD 2018 JUSTICE FREEBIE

In the Pocket – Pocket Scrapping Sampler Blog Train Freebie

Did you know I was originally brought on to Pixel Scrapper to be the pocket scrapping designer? True story. It was pretty much the only type of scrapping I did, and my first-ever design offering, for the Pixel Scrapper February 2013 “Retro Kitchen” blog train, was a huge batch of  journal cards and papers. Marisa, the site owner and main designer at Pixel Scrapper, wanted to expand into offering pocket scrapping/project life designs and after we’d known each other a while from my participation in a bunch of blog trains and as a student in her Designer Basics course, she asked me to come on board.

My first kit for Pixel Scrapper, Bright Days, was completely designed for people doing pocket scrapping. It was the pocket scrapping kit I would have wanted to scrap with. Bright Days had title cards, journal cards, and filler cards. It had papers (for pocket page backgrounds and coordinated DIY pocket cards), alphas, flair, stamps, washi tape, and a ton of labels. When I sent it to my creative team to work with, I asked them if there was anything else they’d like to see in the kit. They said it would be helpful to have a little more dimension added to the kit, stuff like wood veneer items (stars, hearts, arrows, numbers), sequins, glitter spills, buttons, staples, etc. So I added a small element pack to the kit (and went right up to the limits of my ability, at the time, to design dimensional items). 

My next kit was Pocket Basics, Vol. 1. This was a big bundle of stuff for pocket scrappers; again, it was the sort of stuff I myself wanted to have on hand for my pocket pages. Tons of templates (with the then-in-vogue rounded corners on the pocket spots), photo overlays with days of the week and frames for captioning, date stamps, and a set of alphas, papers, and journal cards in neutral colors to coordinate with any page.

Around this time, I started to notice there were very few people doing pocket scrapping in the Pixel Scrapper gallery. My original creative team even stopped pocket scrapping! So then things got a little weird in my brain. Part of me was still designing for myself, the pocket scrapper. And part of me wanted to design for the Pixel Scrapper community, to make designs people would want to scrap with.  Even though I knew that one of the points of bringing in a pocket scrapping designer was to attract new pocket scrappers to the site with more offerings to interest them, I couldn’t seem to keep myself from visualizing my audience as the current PS members. (Interestingly, around this time Marisa actually started her pocket scrapping project that she has now done successfully for the past several years, and created many wonderful pocket scrapping resources along the way.)

Trends were also changing in the pocket scrapping world. Back in the early days of Project Life, most pocket scrappers would get one kit and scrap their whole year with it. Back when I started there only was one Project Life kit to choose from! Then PL started publishing more and more kits, and people started to mix it up more, maybe using one kit for a few months, then switching to another. Now there are more Project Life and pocket scrapping kits than I can count. Rather than a single kit with enough cards in that palette and theme to scrap a whole year, most people mix and match from a variety of kits, or use a kit to do just one pocket-page spread. Pocket layouts have gotten more elaborate and layered over time as well.

My next kit, Already There, reflected my having a foot in both worlds. While making the kit, I taught myself tons of new techniques and grew my skill in the dimensional-elements department. Already There has four packs of journal/filler/title cards, but I think it’s also much more flexible in terms of being suitable for both pocket pages and traditional layouts. It even has stuff like word art that, given its size and proportions, is clearly intended to go on a 12×12 page rather than in a pocket.

Hmm… you know, I started this post feeling like I’ve drifted away from designing for pocket scrappers, but as I review my contributions to Pixel Scrapper perhaps that is not as true as I think. My favorite Project Life-brand kit of all time is Rain by Nisa Fiin, and when I hold my work against this example I am clearly spending a lot of time designing non-pocket-specific items. Rain consists of papers and title cards, filler cards, and journal cards with lots of room for actual journaling, in 3×4 and 4×6 sizes. That’s it, nothing else. It was created back when PL kits contained enough variety to use throughout the whole year.

However, when I look at what I’ve created since I started designing for Pixel Scrapper, I see I haven’t actually strayed that far from my roots. My most recent kit, The Best Is Yet to Come, contains loads of papers and elements for traditional scrapping, but it also has 80 pocket cards. My contribution to the recent Cozy Day designer collaboration was three sets of pocket cards, with every card design offered in three sizes. In fact, all my collaboration contributions have included pocket cards and other items intended for pocket scrapping, like these date tags from the Good Day collaboration.

So here we are now at In the Pocket, our first pocket scrapping-specific blog train! One of my New Years resolutions this year was “no more design projects with deadlines.” Every time I have a design project with a deadline, I run myself ragged right at the end doing all the preview-making, uploading, etc. I don’t know how other designers aren’t burdened by this, I know it means I must be doing something the hard way, but it takes me HOURS and I usually end up staying up very very late. So for 2017 I decided to take a break from blog trains, not require myself to contribute to each designer collaboration, and not create any other themed works like The Best Is Yet to Come that really did need to be released on time at New Years. A bunch of 2017 title page cards would not make sense in April, you know?

So I didn’t even know until last night that we were doing a pocket scrapping neutrals-focused blog train this month! When I realized it I was super excited and knew I had to participate. What would have been AWESOME was if my next bundle, Pocket Basics 2, which is sooooo close to being finished [UPDATE: It’s finished!], had been ready to release in time for the blog train. I could have showered you guys with pocket scrapping supplies! But as I mentioned before it takes me ten million hours to actually get my designs from the “finished being designed” stage to the “ready to release on the site stage.” Plus, nothing has been QC’d yet, and that would have been a little sketchy. 😉 So…. instead I stayed up until 3 AM making you something new! I decided that since the whole Pocket Basics 2 bundle isn’t ready to release, I’d make you a sampler of the kinds of things that will be in it. Download is linked below preview (you only need to choose one) and you can read on for more detailed information about what’s inside.

Direct download link (may not be available due to bandwidth overage):
DOWNLOAD IN THE POCKET SAMPLER
Mediafire link:
DOWNLOAD IN THE POCKET SAMPLER

Like Volume 1, Pocket Basics 2  is a big bundle of supplies created to support pocket scrappers. The trends have changed in pocket scrapping, and rounded corners have given way to square corners, so PB2 contains a ton of crisp square-corner pocket page templates like the one in the top left of the sampler preview. There are lots more photo overlays, some like the phrases and glitter swirls shown in the sampler which make cute stamps when put over a photo, and some the type you can use to put a frame or caption over your photo.

One of the most often-requested items on the site is more card templates (I guess people are pocket scrapping after all? Or they use them for traditional or hybrid scrapping?). The journal card templates in Pocket Basics 2 allow you to take any kit and make coordinating journal cards to match the kit colors, which will means you can adapt traditional scrapbooking kits for pocket layouts. I’ve included a card template in this sampler, a fun “Current Faves” card. The card template is a fully editable layered file, which means you can change the colors, clip different papers to it, even download the free font I used (link included) and edit the text, if you have different favorites you want to document. (The text is also included as image layers, so there’s no need to download the font if you just want to use the wording as-is.)

Remember earlier I was mentioning the Project Life Rain kit, and how it has everything I would want in a pocket scrapping kit? Well, that’s not quite true… the main thing I always want, with any pocket scrapping kit, are color-coordinated labels. I just can’t get enough of them! Labels are my favorite way to add captions and dates to photos, and to make a bit of journaling stand out on a card. Pocket Basics 2 has all kinds of labels, in all different shapes and sizes, and they’re in easy to use layered template form, so you can customize the color of the label border and even the label itself. I’ve given you two here in this sampler to play with. Try them out and perhaps you’ll agree with me about how satisfying it is to have labels perfectly matched to every kit. (By the way, just FYI, these labels and all the sampler designs are newly created for this blog train, there are no repeats in Pocket Basics 2.)

I get the impression from reading the in-progress thread for this blog train that many people participating have not yet tried pocket scrapping. I hope this blog train will inspire you to give it a try and see how it feels! I decided for this sampler to provide the same layout template in three different pocket scrapping styles. Like all Documentarian templates, these three layout templates are deliberately arranged with more intuitive layer ordering than most similar templates – I find them much more usable than typical pocket scrapping templates which often have the pockets in no particular order in the layers palette. This template pack includes each pocket scrapping template in both layered TIF and PSD formats. I suggest using the layered TIFs if your program supports them because the file size is smaller; either way you can delete whichever version you won’t be using. Save that hard drive space!

The round-cornered one in tans and browns is in the style of the templates in Pocket Basics Vol. 1. The square-cornered one is an example of the style used in the layout templates Pocket Basics 2. (In other fun template news for Pocket Basics 2, it is my first template kit with the option of .PAGE format! If you’d like any of the sampler templates in .PAGE format, please let me know in the comments below.)

The grey and white one with the colored borders is in the style of one of my favorite project life scrappers, Kimberly Kalil. I love how colorful and fun her pages are, and for me they strike the perfect balance of layering, ornamentation, and font variety, which makes her pages look “interestingly busy” rather than “overwhelmingly chaotic.” I think the colored borders add great definition and interest to the the page. I have a couple of Kimberly-style templates already on Pixel Scrapper as well. Here’s a Kimberly-style layout of mine using my beloved Rain kit.

Well fifty trillion words later, that’s it from me. Maybe I could get my kits done faster if I spent less time writing blog posts! But you know I love it 🙂 I hope you enjoy this sampler and please let me know what you think!

Question for you: Given that my task is to focus towards making pocket scrapping kits, what would you like to see from me? Are you a traditional or hybrid scrapper who might find some particular types of pocket scrapping designs useful? If you’re a pocket scrapper, what are you looking for? Anything you want to share with me (in the comments here or you can email me directly) would be super appreciated. I really would like my designs to be useful for you. Otherwise I suppose I’ll just keep on making stuff I like and hope you like it, too!

The Best Is Yet To Come 2017 Layouts

I recently released a sparkly celebratory new digital scrapbooking bundle, called The Best Is Yet To Come. You can read more about the kit’s meaning and creation at this post here. My lovely creative team as well as other Pixel Scrapper scrapbookers have already made some fantastic layouts using the kit, which I wanted to share with you here.

Creative Team member Paddy asks “Is it possible to fall in love with yourself?” with her layout Bday.

Pixel Scrapper member Melanie makes great use of the bokeh overlay in the Best Is Yet To Come 2017 Elements Kit in her layout Resolutions 2017.

Creative Team member Emily has used the kit to document weeks 3 and 4 of January pocket-page style.

Pixel Scrapper member Marti created a title page for her 2017 album and lays out some very beautiful goals, wishes, hopes and dreams for the new year in her layout 2017 – Start Again.

I created a title page layout for my 2017 Project Life album with the frame cards and monograms in the kit, which I used to create a page featuring the whole family.

Paddy created an energetic layout about her best girlfriends in her layout My Girls.

Emily created a playful page using all kinds of shapes with her The Best Is Yet To Come Recipe layout.

There were so many fun options for 2017 album title/cover pages to make with this kit that I ended up making four! I haven’t decided yet if these will all be title pages for different albums or if I’ll put them all into the same album. Why not, right? Who says you only get one title page per album!

 

2017 – The Best Is Yet To Come

“The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.

Here we are at the start of a new year. A new opportunity to reflect upon and dedicate ourselves to what we hold most dear. My wish for myself, for my family and friends, for you my dear digital scrapbooking community, for my country, and for the world is that in this year to come we bend ourselves towards kindness, towards empathy, and towards compassion. I hope that by the end of 2017 we’ll have found a way to leave the world a better place than we found it.

2016 was a year filled with blessings for me, and there has also been a lot of really hard stuff. More even than it being a hard year for me, it’s been hard for individuals and communities that I care about. It feels disingenuous to release this “Best Is Yet To Come” kit (which takes its colors and theme from on an older blog train kit I made several years ago, and which I started working on way back in September) without acknowledging that this past year has been hard and that I’m not actually sure what is coming next. I believe the best is indeed yet to come but, like the MLK quote above implies so beautifully, that highest manifestation of goodness may not come in this next year, or even in my lifetime.

For now I hope you will use The Best Is Yet To Come 2017 scrapbooking bundle to create layouts about your own hopes, dreams, wishes, and celebrations of the new year, as well as for your 2017 album title pages that will set the tone for how you document the year to come. I hope that if things become harder and murkier in the months to come that we can all be shining beacons in the darkness, keepers of hope, and share generously with our communities of our strength and wisdom.

The Best Is Yet To Come 2017 bundle was created to include everything you need to start documenting your 2017. This bright and shimmering bundle of kits offers plenty of flexibility and variety. If you’re taking on a Project Life, P365, P52, or other pocket scrapping project, you’ll find plenty to fill your pockets with 80 journal, title, and filler cards and a wide variety of page decorations specially sized to fit into pockets. If you lean towards more traditional layouts, The Best Is Yet To Come 2017 bundle contains nearly 100 papers, 170 elements, and four eye-catching alphas to bring your 2017 pages to life.

The Best Is Yet To Come 2017 is part of my Documentarian series, the cornerstone of my mission to support people however I can in creatively and easefully documenting their lives. Documentarian is a collection of digital designs created with both pocket scrapping and traditional scrapbooking in mind. With an abundance of coordinated journal cards and other digital pocket scrapping essentials like stickers, labels, stamps, and tape, Documentarian has everything you need to record your life in style. Traditional scrapbooking elements like flairs, veneer, scatters, and alphas mix and match with a multitude of papers for beautiful layouts that let your creativity shine.

Bundle Includes: (97) papers * (80) title, filler & journal cards * (26) washi tapes * (14) flairs * (11) frame cards * (19) ribbons, borders, and trims * (2) 12×12 overlays * (24) labels * (18) word art * (2) frames * (6) stitches * (8) glitter geotags * (7) glitter dots * (43) additional elements * (4) alphas in upper case, numbers, and additional characters * ~~ Not all items are shown in previews ~~