A very special freebie!

So, I’ve been silent for a few weeks. No worries though, I kept scrapping. Just a lot of work and life getting in the way of blogging. But tonight I’m back with a bang (if I may say so myself).

Have I told you about my bridesmaid Sine? “No”, you might say and wonder what this has to do with a freebie. Well, a few years ago I met Sine online. Long before she introduced me to my fiancé and had me promise to make her a bridemaid should we ever get married. Because she wasn’t a professional matchmaker, but a digital template designers at Scrap Orchard.  I got onto her creative team and we became good friends. We enjoyed working together and brainstorming new ideas, so when she resigned from classic template design, we became “Creative Eyes Designs”. Together we created a few photo book templates we sell at a book printing site.

One day Sine showed me a post in a digi scrapping forum, where a photographer asked why so few of the designers would create good and affordable products to use in small photography businesses. Especially album templates and storyboards. “Wouldn’t it be fun to do that?” we said. “We are doing something close enough anyway.” We noted down a few ideas, Sine designed some beautiful papers for us to use, we actually had someone help us set up a little shop… and then we changed jobs, kept busy away from the computer and never really got around doing those new book templates.

Guess that’s a pretty common story. But this weekend I suddenly felt restless with my normal scrapping and inspired to finally use those papers and ideas. I bet you see where this is going now. Yep, I created a photo book template set. Meet “Sunny”:

This is a set of psd templates to create photo books for yourself or your customers. Included are 22 different page designs, a cover and a back cover. Two of the page designs have also been altered into two bonus pages with a spot for journaling. The size for each page is 12,25 inch in 300dpi resolution. Please keep in mind, that your pages will get trimmed at the edges. I have added a “bleed indicator” file. It’s a png file, that you can layer over your pages and it will show you what gets cut-off at a 0.25 inch trim and a 0.5 inch trim. Your photo book printer will usually be able to tell you how much they trim off.

Here are examples of some page designs:

Now, before we come to the download links I’d like to ask you for a few things: While we DO allow a limited commercial use, please read our terms of use first! If you want to share these, please share a link to this blog instead of sharing the files.

Ok, here we go. The set is spilt into 5 downloads plus an additional downloads for preview and TOU. Click on the text to download and enjoy!

Preview and TOU

Sunny Part 1

Sunny Part2

Sunny Part 3

Sunny Part 4

Sunny Part 5

BTW we would love to hear your thoughts and see examples of the books you create. Feel free to leave a comment below or email us at info(@)creativeeyesdesigns.(com) (please remove the ( )’s manually).

And in case you feel challenged how to use them, a tutorial is in the making. And maybe a little storyboard add-on, but I need to see how much time I’ll have.

Get over it! Just start!

Hey you, yes you. I know you’re out there. Sitting between all your gorgeous paper supplies or staring at your digi kits. All those pretties you bought in high spirit to start your Project Life.

You were sooo exited to use them! You couldn’t wait for the new year to start so you could begin your album. You researched, you looked around, pinned inspiration and shopped. You were all set. And then…nothing. You were sick, the kids were cranky, the weather was bad and your house a mess. You actually didn’t like the trainer of your Zumba class (a new year’s resolution!) and the shops were so stuffed with people, that you didn’t go out to buy that killer outfit for your new you.

It’s all overwhelming and everyone’s pages look intimidatingly good. You have no photos. You missed the first two weeks. Oh my God, you’re behind already. What a failure! You’re rethinking your system, style and choice of products. Maybe it’s because you bought the wrong stuff, had the wrong strategy and that’s why you’re not exited enough and struggling? There’s this nagging suspicion, that if you don’t start strong, you’ll never catch up. Especially, because you have no photos. Except that boring one of the view out of the front door on 01.01.2013, that you thought was such a great idea to do every month from now on. There, you screwed it before January is half over!

The good news: It’s not the products, it’s not your approach!

All is fine, you got everything you need. You just build up this exitement and then the expected perfect experience never happened. You were not happily crafting gorgeous pages in your organised craft space, sun streaming in through the windows while you work with top photos of your smiling kids. Nope, you were exhausted after the christmas rush and your  family was less than exited to have their pictures taken.

Yep, that is called reality and most of us live there (I can’t say all of us, because somehow we all know someone, who clearly doesn’t). And my message is: Get over it! Just start! Ok, so your album won’t start with week one, but week two or three. It’ll be ok. Or you throw together just one page about the first days using the wrongly exposed out-the-door shot and add a few photos you take now of those new tech toys, the kids are so exited about using them everyday since christmas. And the movie posters, you snatched online from the stuff you kept watching on Netflix, while you felt you should have been scrapping.

When I look back on a journal I did 10 years ago about a three-week holiday, I’m still so upset it starts at week two. I can’t even look at it, the missing week makes me so mad, that the whole thing is useless to me now. Oh wait! I never felt that way. I love that journal. Go figure! Maybe, just maybe you’ll love a PL album with two weeks missing, too. That has a first page, that isn’t yet perfect. But that is there. Because even feeling inadequate or overwhelmed or uncreative or whatever: You just started!

Project Life – My approach for documenting the holidays

It’s done! I scrapped my last pictures of 2012 and can now catch up with the first two weeks of 2013. As this is my first time doing Project Life, it was also the first I had to tackle scrapping the holidays in that format. Unless you belong to these people, who amazingly did a whole December Daily album and have already enthusiaticly scrapped all chrismas photos, then holiday scrapping is a bit of a challenge. Work and/or school are over and we usually take more pictures and there are lots of activities going on. Today I will show you, how I did my christmas PL pages and share the way I approached this. Be warned, this is going to be a long post!

We were not in Germany over the holidays. Instead we visited my fiance’s family in Nothern Ireland and travelled around quite a bit. However, as my man got pretty sick, we stayed in the hotels a lot, too, and I took less photos than I thought. Coming back he passed that *beep* cold onto me and again I did take pictures occasionally, but failed to do to in other situations.

Right. So I definitely had way too many photos for a normal two page spread, yet they were all over the place with huge chunks missing. I could have attempted to use tiny photo templates and load each card with several of them. But I also had too many little stories I wanted to tell.

Next idea was to do a normal spread plus an insert. Hmpf! My pictures as explained were a collection of a few events, but for those I each had several nice photos. Somehow I couldn’t see that working either. Enter my final solution: Doing themed pages. As many as I needed. To date them in the PL album, I decided to add the following line of text to every title card: Documenting the holidays 24.12.2012-01.01.2013

This helped me to bring them into the chronological context of my album. Then I went through the images and planned what pages I wanted to do. In the beginning of the holidays we spent one night at the coast in Warrenpoint, because we didn’t get a hotel room nearer to Newry. We were both still happy and healthy and I remembered to take pictures. So first up was a double page spread about this experience.

Seriously, isn’t that hotel suite gorgeous? Btw, see that QR code? It links to a youtube video I posted. It shows the birds flying low over the sea that morning. I got this idea to incorporate videos that way from an awesome tutorial by Traci Reed. You can read all about it here on her blog.

Next in the timeline were they days we spent in Belfast. Only I was really bad at photographing those. I had a panorama about the beautiful waterfront at night, but not much more. Yet, there were some stories linked to those days and I felt bad leaving it all out. Therefore, I went with a single page and took photos of the items, that were linked to the memories. I do that quite often. If I have something material, that tells the story I forgot to photograoph, I will take a picture later and add that. In this case it was a bronze plate with an Irish blessing (his family gave it to us as an engagement gift and I was very touched) and cosmetics, that perfectly represented my shopping day.

The last two days in Nothern Ireland were mostly travelling, watching TV with my sick and tired love and I had abandoned my camera completely. This was the time to simply accept, that I will never document EVERYTHING in my Project Life album and move on. Instead I wanted to incorporate the christmas cards we got from friends and family. They are such a traditional part of the holiday feeling and I love them. To my delight they fit perfectly onto one page.

I kept it very simple, created a white journal tag and added it to every card with the name of the sender(s). This is how the second spread looked like now:

Back home I only took photos of one more activity. And that was a family walk, when we just needed some fresh air and movement after all the christmas days. So I put those all on another page.

The title card is a weird mixture of German and English. I started creating it an then realised, I had done the main title in German. I did it mostly because it’s the name of an area around here and we use it like a set phrase. Again I stayed true to my fuss-free PL motto and shrugged it off. Our life is often a crazy mixture of both cultures, so why should the album be any different?

Last up: New Year’s Eve. I so didn’t feel like bringing the camera, fighting a massive cold and all that. So I thought, I would just do a nice filler page in the sense of “Welcome 2013″ with all the pretty scrapbooking goodies popping up everywhere for PL title pages. Of course I started regretting that decision as soon as the fireworks begun. However, there were some friends with mobile phones snapping away. And so I did something, I’m usually very very bad at. I remembered to ask and remind people to send me those pictures. This is the result:

Ok, they were night time phone pictures. But then again, I didn’t want to print a big poster, I just wanted to add them to a page. With a bit of editing, the result was really not that bad. I’m glad, I was able to wrap up my holiday scrapping with the first moments of the new year.

And that’s it. I ended up with 6 themed pages in total and I must say, I’m happy with the result. They actually show our holidays quite well and I was able to scrap them all in a few days. Now I’m curious. What did you do to document your holidays in PL? Leave me a comment and link me up with your pages!

Project Life Week 51

Just a short post to give you an update on PL with my week 51 layouts. I’m slowly wrapping up 2012. I will probably do a few pages for the holiday week. I will also enjoy paper scrapping as my kit and a few basics I ordered are here. Yay! So tomorrow I will get my hands “dirty”. Tonight is reserved for digi though. Listening to “You Make My Dreams” by Hall&Oates and scrapping christmas.

Ok, here it is, week 51.

Click on the single layout images to be taken to my gallery and see the full credits.

Project Life – Weeks 49 and 50

Still catching up, but I’ve slowly entered the last weeks of 2012. It’s so nice, that now with the new year PL conversations are going on everywhere. I missed out on that starting in fall. Here are my pages for weeks 49 and 50:

For full credits please click the single layouts. That will take you to my gallery with all product credits.

Christmas crafting in review

We are back from visiting my fiance’s family in Nothern Ireland. So I have time to look back on the christmas crafting I did and how it worked out.

Coming up with gifts for everyone is hard enough. Coming up with a pack of gifts you can pack into your luggage without breaking it or filling up your entire suitcase added to the challenge. It was pretty clear, most adults would get gift vouchers. And thanks to Amazon UK letting me print out gift codes in Germany, that itself was not a problem. Then again, it does feel a bit lame to just hand over a printed gift certificate.

Thankfully, I found very cute examples for christmas gift tags at “In a cretaive bubble”. So I thought, I’d copy that idea and then just add the gift code to the back of each tag. I did half a dozen of them in different designs. Was lots of fun!

I put them into little paper bags and attached a string of baker’s twine for pulling them out. I used these digital supllies and printed at home onto semi-gloss photo paper.

The reactions were very positive. Especially my mom liked getting something crafty. But most importantly, I felt better giving them out. I could give people something, that required a personal effort from me. That let’s them know I took the time to prepare their gifts.

However, my other half told me an online voucher would not be a good idea for his grandmother. And that he thinks, she might rather like a photo or one of those mini books. This sent me into a slight panic. While I had prepared and bought everything for the tags, a whole mini book is a different level and there was very little time left. I tried to find something else, suggested various products only to get very doubtful faces from my love.  Grr! How was I meant to pull this off? I understood, that it would be a nice idea to give his granny an idea how he’s living over here, but still.

Then I remembered something. I bought an empty accordion photo book some years back. You know, those very simple ones, just a fabric cover and black cardboard pages inside. I had never done the project it was meant for and it was patiently waiting to be used. I looked at it and realised I can do this, I just need to overcome my stupid pride. As scrapbookers we hone our abilities, we are proud of our hobby and our creations. We want to be good at it and only share the really nice work. I didn’t have the time to edit the hell out of snapshot photos, I didn’t have the time to design cute pages and embellish a lot. But I did have time to print out a few pictures and put them into that album.

Which was exactely what I did. They were snapshots. Each quick-edited in a few seconds. Printed, cut and glued in. I wrote onto the first page, what this album was about and some christmas greetings. Then all I added to each photo was a bare, white label sticker to write a short caption about the picture. Slapped a title onto the cover with alpha stickers and that was it. And of course she loved it! She thanked me several times for the “lovely photos” and how she liked getting a little album about our life in Germany. And I did not tell her, that I had little time because of my work and usually would do something nicer. No need to. I did something for her and she liked it.

I think we all tend to forget, that most people don’t look at our scrapping projects the way we do. They just see pictures of their family and memories and a nice gift. It definitely has reminded me to do these things more often. To share easy projects with my family. No big efforts, no fancy stuff. Just remembering to print out a couple photos once in a while and give them to someone.

Seafoam is here and Dani Peuss kit suscription

Tis the season… to treat myself! And this christmas I generously gave myself the Seafoam digital collection for Project Life and a kit suscription from Dani Peuss.

Oh, I was waiting for this to become available. Elise Blaha Cripe was one of the scrappers, who made Project Life interesting for me. Her shared pages made me overcome my “Why is nobody showing layouts anymore and why is EVERYBODY showing plastic pockets?” thinking. The announcement of her designing this collection and the sneak peeks were the last push to make me try it. So I happily purchased the entire collection today and it’s right up my alley!

The other thing I have been eyeing are the monthly kits by the German online scrap shop http://www.danipeuss.de/

I’m not the greatest paper scrapper and only stared a while ago, long after I started digi scrapping, but man, I love pretty supplies! And while I feel I so found “my thing” with digital Project Life at the moment, the thought of not doing anything themed on the side seemed a bit boring. PL is fantastic, but there was still my love for mini books. Plus, I realised one thing I don’t want anymore: Layouts, that are just filed away in a computer. I did a super simple mini book about a holiday for my sister a good bit back. And guess what? They have it permantently displayed on their living room shelf. Everybody loves it, asks permission to read it and even I look at it often, when I’m there. This is what I’d like to do more.

So I finally jumped in and suscribed for 6 months. Currently my plan for 2013 is:

- Continue the main project life album about everything happening in our lifes

- Do either a mini a month or a fun paper project like tags/gifts with the Dani Peuss kit (also really nice to do something away from the screen)

- Use the PL templates to get one or two photo books done I have been struggling with

So, what are your scrapping plans and have you already treated yourself with scrappy gifts?