Pixel Scrapper May Blog Train ~ Hello!

Another blog train, hurray! I haven’t felt inspired by the colors for Pixel Scrapper blog trains lately (which is for the best since I’m in a perpetual state of “swamped & in over my head” these days), but this month’s palette felt fun and bold and bright, just the thing to inspire some springtime designing.

I was heavily influenced this time around by my enduring love of my new(ish) Silhouette, which I continue to adore although I’ve had only a handful of chances to play with it since school started up again in January. Something about this palette and my beginning forays into print-and-cut just called out to me for flat, textureless hybrid-ready designs. Me! The Texture Queen! Who once wrote the sentence, “If papers look ‘flat’ in the preview, just like squares of digital pixels, I probably won’t download.” Just goes to show how things change!

That’s actually one of the fun things for me about scrapbooking. I’m not a trend-follower in general, or even exposed enough to popular culture that I know what most of the trends are. But scrapbooking (and digital designing) has been for me a novel experience of seeing other people’s designs, both commercial and personal, and having those influence my own tastes and ideas. Once I got the Silhouette and decided to do Project Life in paper form this year (SIGH, the update on that process is a post for another day) I started delving into the world of hybrid scrapping, and now bright colors with no texture look awesome to me!

Both the colors and the theme – Hello! – felt playful and cheerful, so I thought some lighthearted stickers and rubber elements (hello trend!) would be just the thing. I also have been wanting to do some interview-type pages in my Project Life album, where I ask the kids in my life to fill out cards about their interests and favorite things right now. I looked around and didn’t see what I wanted, which was fun journal-card sized cards on a variety of “All About Me” topics, so I decided to make my own. When I realized I was going to be using several designs from my new Miss Tiina Everyday card templates, which are okay for commercial use, I figured why not make my interview cards in blog train colors so I can share them with all of you!

These cards were my first time doing print and cut with Project Life cards, and it was very satisfying to see my designs come to life in three dimensions! I used special fancy paper (Epson Premium Presentation Matte paper) and the print quality is beautiful, much nicer than I expected (the color is truer than it looks in the photo up above). The kids had been involved some with choosing the topics and weighing in on the designs, and so it was fun once the cards were printed to see how they interpreted the cards and filled them out.

Without further ado, here’s what I have for you this month…

First up are those interview cards. I made these because I couldn’t find quite what I was looking for anywhere else. They’ll be great for “All About Me” pages about you, your kids, or anyone you want to commemorate in your pages. Some are open to interpretation (A “Celebrate” card for documenting favorite holidays; the kids decided to title the what-I’m-good-at card, “Talent Show!”). There are two cards with a spot for a QR code linked to a video, one for “My Signature Move” and one for “My Signature Phrase.” I made little videos of the kids doing their moves/saying their phrases and will paste the QR codes for the videos onto those cards. **For all you Silhouette owners out there, this card set comes with Silhouette studio files ready to print and cut!** There is also a printable PDF of all the cards, with both squared and rounded corners (digital folks get to round their own corners – I figure they’re likely getting clipped to a template). The versions that are for printing (PDF & Studio files) are sized to actually fit into Project Life page protectors, so they are slightly smaller than 3×4. And as a secret bonus, this pack of 25 cards also comes with 4 hybrid-ready papers, just for fun! [Click preview to download.]

Next up is an adorable set of rubber elements. They’re very thin rubber (I mean, they’re not any kind of rubber, they’re pixels, but you know what I mean) so that you can shadow them however you like, having them be more like puffy stickers or more like thicker pieces of rubber. I’ve really been enjoying this particular look lately, and used a fantastic style set by Mommyish to make these for you. Little rubber name tag just kills me for some reason! [Click preview to download.]

Finally I have a sticker set for you, inspired by these cool digital/printable sticker sets by Amy Jaz, who is one of my favorite designers. I had so much fun with these – as I said above, for me the color palette just cries out for stickers! The stickers come as individual PNGs and also on a PDF or JPG printable sheet (just print it out on a sheet of label paper and you can cut out your own stickers), and I’ve included Silhouette studio print and cut files. Can you tell I’m a little obsessed right now? 🙂 [Click preview to download.]

Don’t forget to keep hopping along on the rest of the blog train – there are over 40 contributors this time! You can find previews and links at this Pixel Scrapper thread.