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Since I started taking care of my 2 girls this summer, I decided to record the whole thing and make a mini, as I go. I decided that I was going to make preparations easy each time I sat down to add to it, so, since I already belong to my local lab’s photo club, I wanted to get all of my pictures printed there in the same size, then it would be uniform at least in that sense. The photos that I have added so far that have been from my iPod, from PocketBooth, Instagram, and Camera+, are all printed at the biggest size possible with the highest resolution. After I decided I was going to make the mini album as a focus on just summer, I started pulling any and all summery photos from my stash, and of course I checked out my LSS. I noticed the other day that the patterns I chose are about 85% Echo Park Paper Co. All of their papers have AWESOME patterns and their colors are fun and bright, perfect for any summer photos. Right now they are my favorite paper company. I’m adding all sorts of craziness and love into this mini album. This is the first time that I have attempted something of this magnitude and to top it all off, I don’t have a plan. And to me that makes it amazing. I’m always surprised by my pages and I love that. So anyways, here’s a peek into the insane already 2 inch thick not so mini, mini.
As you can see, I have used tons of little pieces of pattern paper, from my stash and what has been left over from a recent project that is this hanging out around my workspace. I’ve been customizing it a lot with stamps and letters. So far, I’m happy with it. Satisfied with myself and it makes me want to create one of these for each of the coming season. Mostly to see what changes, not product wise, but how I create it. I’ve loved this process, but I feel like when Fall Semester starts that I will have WAY less time to work, so this type of album would be awesome. Get stuff and photos put somewhere, get the memories and stories down without all of the work with full layout creation.
I figure I would also share some collages of my summery photos that I’m including in the book and some I didn’t have room for, but happened at the same time as others. Most of those will end up in my regular, 12x12 album. I still love it, and I still give it plenty of love too!
Memorial Day family cookout. Our family has a cookout for every holiday in the summer. I love it. This is my new family. I married into it. It is completely different from my bio-family. This family is SO HUGE! Tons of kids everywhere. {in my family, before I got married, there were 4 kids, including myself, for most of my life}. We always end up playing softball, watching the kids play in the pool, eating tons of food, and having some awesome conversation with some of the greatest people I have ever met.
We started Summer with a glow here. we had an awesome time staying up late going out after dark and using some glow sticks to make some fun photos. We literally played like this for over an hour. I probably ended up with 100+ photos. I can’t wait to do it again with sparklers left over from the 4th.
Playing in the creek at Serenbe. This was Steph and Sue’s first time walking out to the waterfall. It was a long walk for them, plus it was HOT, so we sat down had a small snack and played in the water a bit. We loved it. Definitely have to do this again before the summer ends.
This is probably Sue’s most favorite thing to do. Which is crazy to me, because we have Season Passes to Six Flags and White Water. Old Fashion Sprinklers. I love it.
This was their first just us girls day out. We went to Sweet Memories, did some scrapbooking, ate some junk food, got some ice cream, went for pizza and got exhausted. They sure did love it.
Ryan’s Birthday. I made him Butterbeer Cupcakes. Yes we are Harry Potter Geeks. Admittedly.
Stephanie went home early one week, she felt homesick and kinda grouchy because of it. So we got to have a whole day with just me, Ryan, and Sueboo. We ended up eating Pizza, drinking Starbucks, and losing a tooth {definitely Sue, & not us adults}.
4th of July. Enough said.
What I’ve missed here: photos from Six Flags, random iPod photos, White Water. I do have some photos. Just didn’t get a chance to make a cool collage. I hope you enjoyed a look into my summer. More to come. I promise.
First off, I want to say, no I don’t have kids of my own. But I do have 2 little girls in my life that are practically my little sisters, {no, I don’t have sisters either, I’m an only child}. But anyways, these 2 little girls light up our, Ryan and I, lives. They can drive us CRAZY, but when they aren’t around I admit that I miss them. This summer they have spent every single week with us and go home on the weekends. This has been an experience for both Ryan and I, because I haven’t ever been around little kids for such long periods of time since I was a kid and Ryan has lots of nephews that he spends a lot of time with, but these are girls and he hasn’t ever spent nearly this amount of time with his nieces. We’ve been trying to do fun stuff with them, keep them occupied, but it’s harder than it sounds. This has definitely been kid training for the far-far-future. 
Okay, I’ll get to the point. Here are the girls and little bit about each of them.
This is Stephanie.
She’s 9, loves Justin Bieber {what 9 yr old girl doesn’t right now?}, loves to play video games, her favorite food is Mac&Cheese and color is blue, not much of an animal person, total jokester, wants to be a skateboarder when she grows up, she loves the movie Cars 2, and is a total tomboy. I was 14 years old when she was born, and before her I was the baby of the family.
This is Sue.
If there was an opposite to Stephanie, it’s Sue. She love animals, wants to be a veterinarian, her favorite food is cheese pizza and color is hot pink, her favorite singer is Katy Perry, she LOVES the Pirates of the Caribbean Series and her favorite is At World’s End, and she’s working on reading all of the Captain Underpants books, she's goofy, quirky, girly, sweet, clumsy.
They are sisters and they fight like crazy, but I know they love each other.
Soon to come: Update on our summer.
I am obsessed with Pinterest. I admit it. Every time I see something online that I LOVE, must have, find inspirational, want to try out… I pin it. I have been pinning things from various websites that I bookmarked in my web browser, so that I know exactly why I bookmarked it in the first place. The visual bookmarking is perfect for me. I see the photo of whatever it was that I found and I instantly remember why I pinned it. Plus getting to categorize my bookmarks is also very helpful.
So I have a few boards that I know I will use strictly for inspiration, one is For the Home, another is Pretty Paper, and lastly Words to Live By. Each of these boards inspire me in different ways. I get ideas for my decorating, paper crafting, cards, etc. from each one of these. At first I was wondering, if I would actually use the many visual inspirations I have been pinning in any craft. Well I challenged myself to create something that was inspired by my pinterest boards. From the moment I saw one of my pins, I knew I wanted to use this pattern in my home decorating and scrapbooking. It’s a perfect pattern in my opinion.
So here is the pin I’m going on about:
I absolutely love the quatrefoil pattern. It’s symmetrical, interesting, and looks GREAT repeated.
So I decided to use this pattern as inspiration for a layout. Here it is:
I not only took inspiration from the pattern but the pairing of the white and grey, as well. To get the quatrefoil pattern, I used Photoshop Elements to create a single quatrefoil image, then in my Silhouette Studio Software I repeated the pattern in even rows and columns, then welded the image together. I didn’t want my photo to take over the bulk of the design, so instead of using a standard size print, I had some 2.5” square photos printed at my local Wolf Camera, using the tutorial before this post. Then I added the photo to my Lawn Fawn Say Cheese polaroid stamp.
I’m hoping that Pinterest continues to inspire me and others. It’s such a great idea, I can’t wait to see others using their pins to inspire crafting of all sorts.
Okay so, every time I print custom sized photos I am always asked, “how did you get that size printed”… well it’s hard to explain to someone right then and there. So, I thought I would give everyone a quick tutorial on how I do it.
Currently I am using Photoshop Elements {PSE} 6.0 as my photo editing software. There are newer versions of PSE out there, but I am totally in tune with this particular program & it does everything I currently need it to do.
Okay let’s start this tutorial!
Here’s what my window looks like as soon as I open my program:
First thing I’m going to do is choose my photograph that I want to edit and print at a custom size… I’m going to use this photo of my husband chowing down on his VERY FIRST po-boy in NOLA:
Before I edit any photos I make sure to save a new COPY of the photo, so that I don’t lose my original photo!! This is VERY IMPORTANT!
Now it’s time to edit it. I get all of my FREE PSE Actions from Pioneer Woman*, I use both Set 1 & 2 often, the actions are beautiful and they print so amazingly.
*{You can go to her website to download the actions and for the link to the tutorial on how to install them on your computer!}
First I’m going to show you my Palette Bin, this is where you keep track of all the editing you do to your photos.
*click on the photo to see it larger
I love for my photos to have a slightly vintage feel, especially the photos form our trip to NOLA. So the 2 actions I chose to use were:
1. Dim the Lights @ 45% opacity
2. Seventies @ 62% opacity
Here’s what the Layers Palette looks like when you have actions on you photo:
*notice how I change the opacity for Dim the Lights to 45%
The order you do your actions in will change the way your photo looks as well. I preferred having Dim the Lights before my Seventies action.
{also if you don’t like the way an action makes your photo look you do not have to completely scrap your project, just drag the action into the trash bin just over the layers in the Layers Palette}
In order to crop the photo properly you must merge all the layers together. To do this all you have to do is Right-Click on any of the layers and a little menu pops up, choose Merge all visible layers and ta-da you have 1 layer again with all of your edits on it!
Next we are going to use the crop tool in order to crop our photo from the original our of camera size to the custom size we want to print!
Here’s a looksy at the tool bar on my left:
I’m going to be using the Crop Tool in order to crop my photo to a custom size.
This is what the top Tool Bar looks like when you have the Crop Tool open.
As you can tell from the photo, I have my Aspect Ration set to custom and I put in the values I want to for the Width & Height of my photo. In this example I am cropping my photo to 3X4, this size photo will fit great on a 4X6 canvas which we will get to later!
The important thing here is that your Resolution is set to 300 Pixels/Inch! This is a great printing resolution.
Okay, so once you have decided on your size, you just need to draw a box on your photo.
In this photo you can see that I have a Marquee Box inside of my photo. This is showing me where my photo will be cropped. You can drag the corners and move it around from the center to get it positioned just right. After you are happy with where your photo will crop, click the green check mark.
Now in order to print this custom print at a local lab or an online photo printer you need to put your custom sized photo on a standard sized canvas. Standard sizes being, 4X6, 5X7, 8X10, etc.
My photo will fit on a 4X6 canvas, so that is what size I’m going to work with.
First you need to create a new canvas, by clicking File, New, Blank File. A window will pop up that looks like this:
Choose the size of your canvas by typing in the Width & Height, and make sure that the Resolution is again at 300 P/I.
Once it opens double click on your photo in the project bin just below where you work. Then drag your photo to the new canvas within the Project Bin and it will copy it right into the center.
This what mine looks like. Now all you have to do is save it. I usually save inside a separate Photo Folder that I call Prints. This keeps all the custom sized photos in one place and I know right where to look when I’m ready to send them to my local lab.
Make sure when you save that your File Type is a Jpeg and not a PSD, local labs cannot print PSD files.
That’s pretty much it. This works so good for square photos as well, here’s an example of my finished print file of some square photos:
Here my photos are 1.5X1.5, perfect for a mini book page with lots of photos!
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If there is anything that you would like for me to show you, leave me a comment!
