As I searched for new techniques and ideas, I came across a magazine called Simple Scrapbooks. One of the writers for this magazine, Cathy Zielske, often referred to her book in her columns. I liked her columns, so I ordered the book Clean & Simple Scrapbooking. Her focus was on graphic design principles, but she wrote about all kinds of things - color combinations, lay outs, computer fonts, etc. I fell in love with scrapbooking all over again.
So, out of guilt for the many unused photos in my life, I decided to try making a chronological album of our life in 2005, and I was determined to use many of the ideas from Cathy's book. This is an album I truly treasure now because it shows what our married life was like BEFORE KIDS, DOGS, CARS, MORTGAGES, etc. We lead a simple life in our tiny apartment, riding bicycles every where, or gasp, walking! We drank, we ate junkfood, we stayed up all night watching movies, we slept late...oh, was that really us? Anyway, back to the topic at hand.
10 2005 Chrono - Dinks and Moms
Wow, see the difference Cathy made in my life? Good color combo, even margins, printing directly on cardstock...I will never be the same.
11 2005 Chrono - Bonds
Designing a page with only ONE photo. That was a new one for me. Who wastes an entire page on just one photo? Turns out it was trendy at the time. I still love this photo and journaling, and color combo.
12 2005 Chrono - Tokyo Disneyland
Taking photos of details...that was new to me as well. Using the little square punch tool to crop details out of photos was a great way to make borders or just have fun with lay outs. Putting photos next to each other rather than spacing them around the page. Leaving photos in their original square or rectangle form. Look, Ma, no circles!
Also, you can't tell from my samples, but I was experimenting with title treatment in this album, so I sometimes painted my titles with acrylic paints, stamped them, wrote them by hand, etc.
I was on a roll now. Searching for more album projects I could do and wanting to put my photos in albums rather than leaving them in shoeboxes (Amy!), I decided to do an album of my trips home to the USA. Each trip is given 6 pages (2 double spreads, a section page at the beginning and end). It's a great way to summarize the trip and show what was important.
13 Magazine style - Trips Home
Notice the photos flush against each other. Notice the varying sizes of photos. I was now ordering my photos from an online developer (Scrapbookpictures.com) and was doing the cropping online. Cathy's influence came also in the form of using one large photo as the focus of the page and then smaller ones to show details or other events.
Also, the beautiful, clever magazine style Journaling. I still look at these pages and laugh when I read them. Cathy has a way of journaling about the most mundane things, but she makes them seem so funny. I also need to credit my great friend Kirsten Woest (scrapbook supplier and advisor also) who helped me design the titles with the red and black ink, overlaying words. Very clever, Kirsten.
14 Magazine style - Trips Home
Another example just to show how fun this album is and a great treasure for anyone involved in these trips. My family loves to see the updates. The section end page always has a journaling box highlighting all the things that went wrong on the trip, so I can remember what NOT to do next time!
My next big project, after making an entire album about my pregnancy...yes, you read that correctly...my pregnancy with Ailin, I went about making an album to commemorate her first year. This stretched into two thick 12x12 albums. Overkill? Yes, I would agree with you on that!
15 Ailin's First Year - Daily Routines
My big focus here was in album planning and lay outs. After scouring magazines and books about scrapbooking, I chose about 20 lay outs that I really liked and sketched them in my notebook. To keep things simple, I basically designed pages based only on those 20 lay outs. It worked well, and it allowed me to make the pages quickly. I kept embellishing to a minimum, and only used stickers here and there. I handwrote all the journaling so that I could write even while nursing Ailin.
16 Ailin's First Year - First Trip to Wisconsin
Had to include this here since some of my readers will see their own photos up here. It also shows an example of a double page spread using large and small photos. I very rarely cropped photos to circles for this album, just to keep things extremely simple, but this is one where I did have to use a compass to cut such a large circle from an 8x10 photo.
Next up: My foray into the Chronological World
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