Thursday, April 21, 2011

Play Fair Minibook



i proudly present my first design team project. the challenging thing about this was getting a box of paper and embellishments. period. now you would think that having an open field would make it easy but no! faced with wide open choices, it took me some time to settle down and choose a project - minibook. then i needed to find a cohesive theme - i'm very high concept and firmly believe that everything should tell a good story not just be pretty things lumped together.

so here it is, the "play fair" minibook. made of the glitz "love games" paper line and many of their embelishments, it has lots of little special features. zipper ribbon flowers and a secret heart made from maya road's zipper ribbon. fold outs, hidded pages and a minibook in the minibook. flowers made from paper, acrylic, crepe paper and zippers. a custom charm and spinner game! so many details!















Monday, April 18, 2011

computer - paper - scissors

i recently read an article about digital scrapbooking and why it's better than paper scrapping. the article raised good basic points we all know - cost, space, being able to crop at starbucks with only a laptop. but then the author started talking about how "lumpy" her pages would get, and how her albums were just so much neater when they were bound in neat book-like volumes of digital output and i thought - "well then what's the point of that???"

i mean let's face it. we all started cropping to satisfy that secret crafty craving. inking, sanding, tearing, gluing, glittering - come on! it's a grown up version of preschool! it's our excuse to get messy fingers, smudgy faces and mysterious marks on our clothes.

i've always laughed at the digital scrapbook embellishments. all that effort to make a digital button look like an actual button. just use a button! while i do see the environmental side of not using papers and plastics, the flip side is the use of chemicals and dyes to output and bind the digitally created albums. what's the lifespan of that CD used to archive your digital scrapbook, not to mention the chemical processes used to make the CD in the first place? the bottom line is everything we create impacts the environment in some way, it's just a matter of which way you can justify to yourself.

so for me, as much as i enjoy the cyber world of untouchable art, when it comes to my creative outlets i'm a paper junky at heart - the feel of it, that new paper smell, the sparkle of embedded glitter that a computer just can't reproduce. and don't forget the embellishments - buttons, flowers, brads, bling, and bits and pieces of memorabilia that tell a story by themselves. yes you can have all of those in a digital layout, but you can't touch it. it's only a picture of the real thing, missing the spirit of the thing itself.

Saturday, April 9, 2011

if a picture's worth 1,000 words...

ok, i'll confess. i am not a huge journaler. i remember things visually and so when i lay out my scrapbook pages they are chuck full of photos, colors, textures and blingage. and then maybe a comment written very small, tucked under a photo.

my crop friends always seem to have so much to say on their pages. they write a full 4x6 card full of beautiful script, or nifty printing. i'm always amazed. how do they know what to say? how do they write so much without repeating?

i always catch myself trying to "fill out" my journaling, and it ends up sounding like the narration in one of those boring high school science movies. "here are the preschoolers in their native habitat, eating sugar-based treats and engaging in vocalizing..." bleck!

so gypsies, here is the question of the day. if a picture is worth a thousand words, how much is good journaling worth?