Photobook templates! Use them!

Hello everyone!  Today I am catching up on some pages for my Wednesday night kids photo album. I am the leader for a group of preschool and kindergarten kids at our church on Wednesday night.  They really enjoy seeing the pages and later in the year when we look through the book, they remember some of the lessons we learned.  I have a newer girl in class and she realized that she was not in many of the pages so I thought I would catch up on some resent days so she is in there : )    One of the things I love to do is look through my pre-made templates to see if there is anything that would work well.  Stampin' Up! has professionals who design them, and I bought them, so I better use them right?

You can open a new project and choose a template, or if you have a project already started you can click on "insert" at the top of your design center and then choose "Add other template pages".  You will then get a box that looks like this.  You can scroll though your template options here.  Remember that if you get to a photobook, you will only see one page of the photobook, so you will need to select it to then preview the whole book in the box to the right.  Also keep in mind that you can resize a template, so don't limit yourself to only looking in the 12 by 12 or whatever size you are using.

I opened the "Keep this Memory" photobook and then scrolled thought it to see if there were any pages I thought might work.  I decided to use a few of them, so I clicked "next"

 Now I have this huge preview of all the pages in the album.  I didn't want them all so I clicked through the pages and hit the "remove" button on the ones I didn't want.  When you have all the template pages you want go ahead and click next and then it will start to add the pages, click finish to go back to your project.

Here is the page I used to create my page at the top of the post.  As you can see I left it pretty much alone.  I changed the bird color, and I removed the butterfly.  I also switched the line of tickets to a ribbon, and omitted the large ticked embellishment in the center. 

Here is another page I made from this photobook.  I added a forth photo box to the bottom and omitted the arrows.  I also added a tag for journaling.   Super simple and two pages finished!
Thanks for stopping by!  I hope that you will look through your templates and see if you can use them more in your projects!  And guess what?  I even used it on the page with the Irish Dancers last week!  I used a template, but changed EVERYTHING about the page except the photo boxes.  I just loved the layout.

MDS Monday #104

Hello Everyone!  We have a new sketch at MDS Monday this week.  This is a really fun whimsical sketch and I thought it paired nicely with this photo of my Daughter Jillian in her art class. Her teacher sent the photo to me, isn't that nice?  I love when I get photos of my children when I can't be there.
Head on over to the MDS Monday site to see what the rest of the team has come up with.  We hope that you will give the sketch a try and show us what you can do with MDS!

Here is the sketch.  If you need to make one of the paper boxes into a photo box that's ok, use the sketch as a jumping off point.  Have fun with it.

Be Yourself May Kit - Digital Download

$9.95

Mds Download - Digital Download

$19.95

Vintage Faceted Buttons - Digital Download

$1.95

Designer Threads - Digital Download

$1.95

Table by StampinBuddy. Try it FREE.

Lucky You ~ A St. Patrick's Day Download!

Hello!  I thought I would share a page I made with this weeks Digital download deal.  Did you know that each week Stampin' Up! releases a past download at a discount?  Well they do!  And this week it is a St. Patrick's Day download.  Yea! I used it to make a page last year.  I was helping out at my daughter's school on St. Patrick's Day and the teacher said they were going to an assembly. I was so glad to find that it was a troop of Irish Dancers from Trinity Irish Dance Academy.  They have won awards and were really very good.   And, Lucky me, because I was helping the preschoolers, I had a front row seat!  



This download is meant for party decor, but the elements can be used for a page as I did here.  The pennants were meant to be big banners for your party, but they can be resized because they are digital! yea!  one thing to I wanted to point out is that the patterns do not have a backing, because they were meant to be printed onto white paper.  So, to use them on top of another pattern, you have to add a back. Here are some photos to better explain what I mean...

here is what the pennant stamp looks like, you can see right through it.




I added a pennant punch and made it white, and placed it behind the stamp.

I did that with each of the pennants.



I also wanted to add shamrocks to my page but the shamrock stamps all had words with them.  That is where the crop tool comes in.  I added the stamp and clicked the "crop" button.  A new editing box will open and you can highlight the area you want.

Check out the digital deal each week to see what download is on sale!

Thanks for stopping by!

MDS Monday #103

We have a new sketch today at MDS Monday!  This time Yapha is our hostess and she has a fun 3 photo layout.  I decided to use these fun photos of David and his cousins at the park last fall.  He was relaxing on the tire swing when the girls came up behind him and started swinging him around and around.  They really got him going fast!  I kept my page super simple.  I almost added more several times but then took it all off and kept just the simple ribbon and bow as my embellishments.  I think we have to gives ourselves permission to keep it simple sometimes.

Here is the sketch.  We hope that you will give it a try and play along with us.  Head on over to the main MDS Monday blog to see the samples made by the rest of the team.  Some of us added many fun embellishments and some kept our pages simple.  I think it is always interesting to see how different the pages all look from the same sketch!

Mds Download - Digital Download

$19.95

Floral District Designer Series Paper - Digital Download

$4.95

Chevron Ribbon - Digital Download

$5.95

Table by StampinBuddy. Try it FREE.

The Earth Without Art is just "EH"

Hello Everyone!  Hope you had a fabulous weekend.  It's Monday again, and that means MDS Monday!  We are celebrating our 100th sketch at MDS Monday! WOW!  For this occasion we are running our sketch challenge for two weeks, and We are giving out prizes!! To celebrate 100 sketches we are letting you choose one of the past 100 sketches to use for your project.  There is a tab on our home page with some past sketches, and there is also a Pinterest page with all of the past 99 sketches!  click here to see the Pinterest Page.







For my page I decided to go back to the very first sketch I made for MDS Monday.  I joined the team at sketch #15 and here is my original sketch.  I had meant for the top to be one BIG photo, with smaller photos underneath.  For the page I made this week I decided to make the top one big focal point, and then the smaller photos co-ordinate with the theme of the main image.

 Do you have tons of artwork from your children that you are not quite sure what to do with? Or some of your favorites are starting to see the wear and tear of time?   That was the thinking behind this page.  My children take art classes and create so many things, there isn't possibly enough wall space for all of it.  I do hang things for a long time, but I have to shuffle them sometimes to give equal time to all three.  In case some get misplaced or damages in storage, I thought I would photograph them as well.  I will add this page to my Jillian scrapbook so she can see her art progress as she grows.  I used papers from  "Sunny Day" download, as well as various fonts.






I used a poster from Stampin' Up! as my inspiration.  I know the quote is not original but I am not sure who it comes from.

Here is my page from May 2013.








I hope you will join in on our two week challenge!  you could win a free Stampin' Up! digital download or a fun MDS Monday key chain made with MDS of course!   Click here to see the main challenge page for all the details!

The MDS Monday design team is linking our blogs this week so that you can see all the fun pages we made and also read a bit about how we created them.  Next up on the hop is Cindy Shuster.

Family Tree

Nov. 2015 update.   This has been discontinued by Stampin' Up!  See this post for update on where to get template. http://bethsdigitalcuts.blogspot.com/2015/10/family-tree-template.html





Isn't that a cute Family Tree?  I think so.  I plan to make it the first page of my children's scrapbooks.  Since I made it digitally, all I have to do is change the text box in the oval frame to the next child's name, re-save, and I'm done!  This page is actually a "frameable Designer Template" from Stampin' Up! so  I can't take credit for the cuteness.  And, even better, Its on sale for only $3.42 now through September 14th, 2012, when you purchase through a demonstrator.  Hey, I'm a demonstrator : )   Check out all the sale downloads here.   This template is all made out for you, but that doesn't mean that you can only use it as it is here.  Each element also comes separately too.  The little brackets can be used on so many projects as labels and tags.  The little birds are super cute for many uses, so are the heart flowers.  And the tree is cute too!  The grass at the bottom is from a separate download, you could leave that off, add some cute patterned paper, or buy the other download too :)  (celebrate any day download #127757 $9.95)

Here is a card I made using the template.  Cute right.  Good for an anniversary or Valentine's Day.   You could put apples in the tree or flowers.  Change the leaves to fall colors.  Lots of possibilities.





Click here to go to the Stampin' Up store to see the download.








Thanks for stopping by!  Check out the other On Sale Downloads at my Stampin' Up! Website.  Click the Shop Tab under my blog header.