No Matter What

The words on the page are the lyrics to “No Matter What” by Kerrie Roberts.

As I watched this video I felt like the girl could be me.I’ve felt those feelings, acted that way, and then had to open the door, and my heart, and walk down the stairs to be with my kids, when really, what I felt like inside was throwing myself back on my bed trying to sink into oblivion.

I didn’t want to bottle up my pain, because I know that I NEEDED to feel the pain to be able to heal, but I also could TRUST Heavenly Father and know that “No MATTER WHAT” he was there for me.

I made this scrapbook page and discovered this song shortly after Holly’s funeral, and it has been hanging up in my kitchen where I glance at it daily. Today I took the time to read the words again and allow myself to briefly feel the pain again that I felt at the time of her funeral. At that time I was barely holding on the the promises.

As time has passed the pain has lessened. I still hold onto the promises but I am functioning well in daily life and no longer have the intense need to curl up in ball, although at times it would be nice. It is nice to have a visual reminder of where I have been and how far I’ve come in the past couple of months.

Getting Started with Digi Scrapping

It is a overwhelming task to begin organizing a lifetime of photos, letters, and other memorabilia. It isn't a project to take lightly, and sometimes it is hard to get started because you aren't sure where to start, how to organize or what you want the finished project to look like.

I've been working on my Grandma's history for over 15 years now, having started and stopped many times over the years, and technology has grown exponentially over the years, so I can understand the overwhelming feeling, but I can also personally testify to the excitement of finding a new picture that I don't ever remember seeing, or even just finding a picture that all of the sudden is a treasure, because I now understand it's importance.

This undertaking is so worthwhile that I'm going to offer a few tips for getting started.


Timeline
Beginning with a simple timeline is a great place to begin to understand how everything else that you discover all ties together. I suggest a spreadsheet format, with the years listed down the left-hand side, and several columns with different headings. There are several things that you can include on a timeline, and you might want a combined timeline for a couple, with a column, or several columns for each of them.

Important/Special Dates - birth, baptism, graduations, wedding, birth of children, deaths, etc
Homes - what places did you live (this really helps with organizing pictures)
Jobs -
Medical Issues

Final Format
What is the final format of your project going to look like, there are many many options today, and will probably be more in the future. You can do a traditional scrapbook in either a 12 x 12, 8 x 8, 8.5 x 11, or 11 x 8.5 format. All of these sizes can be done digitally as well. You can also plan on creating a DVD with either a slide show, or an interactive DVD where you can click on links to learn more, hear music, watch video snippets, etc. Really, the sky's the limit as to what you can do, limited only by time, money, and expertise.

I choose years ago to design my pages in a 11 x 8.5 format because it fit nicely into a page protector in an inexpensive binder, the binders fit nicely on my book shelves, I could print them easily on any printer, and computer screens are in a landscape format so they are easy to design and view on a computer screen. I continue to design this way for many of the same reasons, but also because I want uniformity with the 1000 plus pages I have already designed.


However, there are now many places where you can get scrapbooks printed in a wide variety of sizes either as a bound book, or as single pages that you can slip into traditional scrapbook pages protectors and integrated with your paper scrapping pages.

The important thing is to make a decision as to what size you want to design in and for what reason. This does not limit you from occasionally making a different size ( for instance you may want to make a small 8 x 8 album of special family reunion) these pages could be re-sized for a larger album, 2 of them could be put on 1 pages, 4 on a page, etc with a new background layer to tie them together.

Scrapbooking Programs

I'm often asked what programs I use for scrapbooking, so here's a quick overview.

For years, since about 1997 I have used Microsoft's Picture It. I still use it for simple and quick little projects. It is simple to use - my 9 and 10 year old daughters have been using it for at least a year. However, Microsoft is no longer making this product. I have found two alternative products that are similar.

Creating Keepsakes Scrapbook Designer is a great product and I have found a great deal for you. DJ Inkers sells it for about $10. It is great for scrapbooking but you can also make cards, invitations, posters, and more. It comes with a lot of clip art, but allows you to also use clipart and more importantly scrapbooking elements from other sources.

Scrapbook Max is another great program that I have found. The wonderful thing about this program is you can download a trial version and use it for 1 month before buying it. The purchase price is fantastic, only $40 and it comes with a large selection of scrapbooking kits. You can purchase more kits from Scrapbook Max, or use kits found on any other scrapbooking website. They also have a wide range of products such as books, calendars, puzzles, etc that they can print and the prices look compatible with many other printing websites that I have found.

Adobe's Photoshop Elements is my program of choice (it has a higher learning curve) but you can do so much more. You have control over virtually every aspect of the page and although I have been using it on and off for years I understand only the most basic aspects of the program. This is a simplified version of Adobe's Photoshop that is a professional use program, but I couldn't tell you what the differences are. Adobe also offers a free trial version of Elements. Costco is currently selling it for $79.99 with a bonus Learn Digital Scrapbooking CD by Linda Sattgast. I've learned a lot from Linda's tutorials on her website The Scrapper's Guide.

There are many other programs that you can use effectively for digital scrapbooking. If you are interested in finding out if you already have one that you can use try Top Ten Reviews Website for a review of other scrapbooking programs.

Each program has it's strengths and weaknesses and you need to choose one that will work best with your scrapbooking style. Another important thing to remember is to save each page in two formats, the format that your program uses, and in a JPG for sharing.

Good Luck finding your scrapbooking style.

Simple Scrapbook Tutorials

Hurrah! I finally found some basic scrapbooking tutorials. I was beginning to think I was going to have to write them myself, but Stacy Carlson of Gotta Pixel is now writing digital scrapbooking tutorials on Ann The Gran in her new blog titled, Digital Scrapbooking - No Glue Required.

Although Stacy is writing tutorials for Photoshop Elements, her tutorials will help you to understand other scrapbooking programs as well.

Here are links to her first 5 blogs with some great beginner tutorials.
Jump Right in, the water is warm
Patiences and Desire, The Basics of Digital Scrapbooking
How to use a Digital Scrapbook Brag Book Template
How to use a Digital Scrapbook Quick Page
How to Create a Basic Digital Scrapbook Layout

To check out the newest post to Stacy's blog click here

Thanks Stacy for your guidance and encouragement in the Digi Scrapping World.

Digital Photo Organization

I learned something new about photo organization since I gave my class on Digital Scrapbooking. I am now in the process of re-doing my organization to make it even better. I was trying to help out a friend and teach her how to organize her photos and her camera automatically names the directories when it downloads photos like this "2008-11-06" This file name is read like this, "year-month-date" or 6th of November 2008. I am going one step further and labeling my directories like this "2008-11-06 Homeschool Choir". By labeling the file folders this way I can see at a glance what they contain and quickly look through the list to find Kevin's birthday party, or valentines day, but even better they are automatically put in chronological order.

This is improved over my previous organization method in that I don't have to open so many file folders (nesting file folders can get annoying) and each file folder contains the complete date information.

Another great thing is that Picasa 3 beta is out. I have been using this new and improved version and it is so much better. They've added a few more bells and whistles that I probably won't use, but they now support PNG's which are so vital to scrap bookers. Hurrah!

Photo Programs

I've been doing some more studying on labeling photos and have found some neat programs.

I was concerned because I read an article that said Picasa didn't support IPTC, but it was an old article, this article explains the Picasa upgrade. It also led me in search of some other programs.

Foto Tagger is a neat little program that allows you to identify individual elements in your photos. Take a look.


These programs are not for the feint of heart - I'm mostly including them here for future reference.

PixVue

Photo Freeware.net

PixViewer

Labeling Photos with Picasa

I was so excited when I finally found this website All About Digital Photos and found out that I could label my photos digitally. YEA! Just like labeling the back of snapshots, your photos can now be captioned for posterity's sake.

Picasa is a FREE program that you can download from picasa.google.com and is most useful for adding captions to your photos and and for its ability to search. It is important to know that when you add the captions in Picasa they are saved as an IPTC standard caption, and are now part of the file.

Installing Picasa
· Double Click Picasa Icon
· Click Run
· Click I Agree
· Click INSTALL
· Click Finish
o This step may take awhile – Choose Only scan My Documents, My Pictures, and the Desktop the first time so you can learn to use the program. Later, you can set it up to scan more files. This may take awhile.




Click this button to set to Folder Tree Structure.
By clicking the arrows next to the folder names you can see what is inside of the folders.

Adding Captions
Double click on a picture.
Underneath the large view of the picture it says, “Make a Caption.” Click there and type your caption.
Remember, these captions will now stay with your picture, they are saved as part of the picture file.

If you can't see where is says, "Make a Caption" you may need to click on the icon that the arrow is pointing at.

Searching for more pictures.
Click on Tools – Then Folder Manager.
Using the tree structure choose which folders on your computer you would like to have Picasa scan. If you choose "scan always" Picasa will update when you save new pictures or projects to your computer.
Beware, you don’t want it to scan all of your computer, just where you save your photos, and your projects. This may take a really long time – depending on how many pictures you have, mine took at least an hour.

Picasa is indexing your pictures and making it so that you can search through your pictures ( well, eventually.)

Picasa searches file names, directory names, and captions. You may need to spend some time organizing your photos and adding captions before it is very helpful in searching.

Digital Scrapbooking: Preserving History in the Digital Age

I taught a class this week on Digi Scrapping to a couple of women from church. I had a lot of fun putting together the presentation and I also learned a lot of new things. One of the very first questions that I was asked was, "How did you learn all this." Honestly, I don't remember not knowing how to use a computer. We got our first computer, a 8088 in 1988 I think, I was about 12 years old. My Dad and I spend a lot of time working together on that computer, learning how it worked, and ever since I've become more and more dependent, and independent on a computer.

I think that digital scrapbooking is one of the amazing reasons that computers have been invented. You can read my other posts about Digi Scrapping here and here. Preserving our heritage is so important and I'm so glad that I've been able to use the computer to tie these two loves of mine together. I want many more people to be able to learn to save their history, on the computer, and from the computer, so I'm offering to teach anyone that wants to learn more about the computer, and how to save their family history for future generations.

You can request the handouts by posting a comment.

I scrapped yesterday's pictures already!

Digi Scrapping Part 2

It's been almost 4 months since I wrote my first blog article about digi scrapping - you can find it here.

Since that time I've been scrapping like crazy, except of course for the last week. I have been so busy trying to regain control of my house and getting prepared for the coming homeschool year. I'm guess I'm going through a withdrawal, and even now when I could scrap for a little while I'm having a creativity block. It been a whole week, and it's like I've lost my momentum, and I don't know where to start. I knew the time would come that the pace that I had set at almost a page a day for 3 months couldn't last forever. Besides, MaryAnn is to big to nurse while using the computer.

I did get to share my excitement this weekend with my cousin, I thought that since I knew she was good with Photoshop she would have already been into digi scrapping, but it turns out she was a paper scrapper. She is probably hooked now though. I've also addicted my sister to digi scrapping and I've been able to teach her how over the telephone and lots of emails. The digi scrapping thing is spreading, and it is so wonderful.

My Dad sent me an email today - and I thought this quote fit perfectly with the scrapbooking craze.

A Birth Certificate shows that we were born
A Death Certificate shows that we died
Pictures show that we lived!

It just so true, a picture can really make the story come to life. I've been working on my Grandma's life history for years, but since I discovered her photos in June I've really been "on fire" and my love for her and my retention of her stories has increased. Take this picture of her cheerleaders group. Grandma and her friends formed a cheerleader group, just because. Don't they look like they are having so much fun! You tend to forget that your parents and grandparents were young once.

I promised to get back to you on scanning. The best way to scan newer pictures is with a commercial scanner. I looked up lots of places online to mail my pictures off to to have them scanned, and the prices were high, and they wanted to send my precious photos across the ocean to be scanned in India or some other country. However, I was lucky enough to find out that my local Heritage Makers' consultant had access to a comercial scanner. I got about 800 pictures scanned in a weekend, for apx 25 cents a picture. It was wonderful, now I have so many more pictures of my kids in the pre-digital era to scrapbook.

However, when I discovered Grandma and Grandpa's boxes of photos I new that a the speedy commercial scanner wasn't going to work (it works with a sheet feeder). I found this program, VueScan . It has an automatic scan feature that allows you to scan a lot of pictures in a fairly short amount of time, and it automatically saves them to a file. I was putting about 5 -8 pictures on the scanbed at a time and scanning about every 10 seconds and it worked great. I was able to scan the picture in and keep them from deteriorating even further much faster than I will ever be able to process them, identify them, and scrapbook them. I found that it is easier to scan them in and the print them out to take to my Grandparents to identify them. That way they can write on the front of the picture, and I can read off the front of the picture when I process them on the computer. It is easy to get confused, so come up with a system before you get to overwhelmed with photos. If you want more info on my system, just email me throught the contact form.

Once I started getting captions for the photos I had to figure out how to save the caption with the picture, no matter where the picture was or who I emailed it to. I found several great programs, and although Picasa doesn't have all the features, it had a great price, FREE, from Google. Picasa will allow you to edit your photos, to add captions, and to search photos based on the captions, the directory names, and the file name. WOW! Important Note: Add captions, not keywords. If you add captions then email the photo to you family the captions will go with the photo, it is saved as part of the file name. If You use keywords it is only saved in the database on your computer. You can get Picasa here from Google for free.

Picasa has many neat features, it allows you to add photos to your blogger blog, you can create web albums to share with friends and family, you can easily send photos as email, and many more features.

Here's another great page by Nancy!
Till next time - remember, Pictures show that we lived!

Digi Scrapping

I have entered a new world, that I didn't know existed, but that I knew should exist. Somehow, I closed my eyes for a few years and it grew up and has flourished and I just now discovered it.

In early 1998 I started digi scrapbooking, however, I don't think that it even had a name back then. This is one of the first layouts I created. I remember decided long ago that I would create my pages in landscape format because they made better desktops and screen savers, and they fit in binders with pages protectors. I was a poor college student and now with 5 kids cheap is still good. Here is one of the first pages I created in Microsoft Picture IT.

On and off through the intervening years I have continued to create pages of my kids as time permitted. In college I learned to use Adobe Photoshop, just enough to want to take the class again. I still mostly used Picture IT, because I owned it and Photoshop was prohibitly expensive. I was excited to purchase Photoshop Elements when it first came out, however, I still used my newer version of Microsoft Picture IT Platinum 6. In 2006 my husband bought me a new scrapbooking program for my birthday, Creating Keepsakes Scrapbook Designer Deluxe, which took me a long to learn to like. However, this is what launched me full force into becoming a digiscrapper. I created this layout shortly after my 5th child was born.

I got such rave reviews from everyone that was lucky enough to receive my emails. Several people asked me how I made it, so I did a search to find where they could purchase the program that I was using. However, as I did my search, I found so much more. DigiScrapping! I was amazed - however, not surprised. I've thought for years that it was easier and made much more sense to create on the computer. I just didn't know that people were finally designing for the computer. Amazing and Wonderful!!

Raspberry Road Designs was one of the very first websites that I found - http://www.raspberryroaddesigns.blogspot.com/ . Susan Darter has created some amazing scrapbooking kits, just like what you might find in any paper scrapbooking store, but even better, you can use the papers and elements over and over. Susan has been creating since at least 2005 and has many of her kits on her website that you can download for free. They are amazing and the backbone of my scrapbooking collection right now.

I also happened onto GOTTA PIXEL http://www.gottapixel.net/ - This website hosts a store, forums, challenges, and an online scrapbooking community. I have enjoyed the challenges, and learning new ways to scrapbook as I look at other peoples pages. I have done more scrapbooking in the last 15 days than I have probably done in the last year, and I have had so much fun. I'm very lucky that I can digiscrap one handed, because I've also done a lot of nursing my 6 week old baby while scrapping. I highly recommend joining a digiscrapping community - the best way to learn and grow in any area is to join with others who are working together to praise, encourage and challenge each other while working hard together.

Some frequently asked questions might be - how do I get my photos onto the computer, especially old photos? What program should I use to digi scrap? How do I get my pages off the computer and into my scrapbook? How do I learn to digi scrap?

I'll give you just a couple of links, but remember, these are just the very tip of the iceberg, and I've not used these companies, I'm just letting you know that they are out there, as I find more I will come and add them to the list and maybe someday I'll have a recommendation.

Scrapbook Programs
These are the first programs that I was recommending - however, I would now have to say that if you want the best quality you might do some more research. These however, would probably be really easy to use and great for getting started or for kids. My children ages 7 - 10 all know how to use Microsoft Picture it and could also probably use anyone of these programs with just a little bit of help.
http://scrapbooking-software-review.toptenreviews.com/

I recommend this one mainly because it is a free trial download. I love trial versions. My kids have used this one and I would recommend it for the price, the full version is only $40. My sister in law - who has never digi scrapped until last week purchased this one and is hooked already. http://www.scrapbookmax.com/

I am using Adobe Photoshop Elements, which I purchased around 2000. It is a harder program to learn how to use, but very powerful. There are many newer versions, I'd have to research to find out the cost. I highly recommend adobe products if you can afford them.

Printing
http://www.sbtoshare.com/ - this website allows you to get your digital scrapbooks printed, or get copies made of paper scrapbooks. It looks like it has a great service.

Scanning - I'll have to get back to this section, my information is on the other computer right now.

How - the quick answer is tutorials. Most of the website devoted to digiscraping offer tutorials and there are also people you can ask for help in the forums.

This is where I have to get on my soapbox about the internet. You may have to be careful surfing the web because there are bad things out there, but the internet community is an amazing place to find intelligent and generous people. I am always amazed that so many people will take the time to create tutorials, digiscrapping kits, podcasts, educational games, etc and then give them away for the taking. It's a big big world out there in cyberspace, but it is a wonderful amazing place full of the most caring and generous people. Find a community, stay awhile, and make some new friends.

There is so much more out there once you start looking you may get lost, I know that I've spent many hours just on these few website in the last two weeks and occasionally I find myself sidetracked onto other websites. I suggest you find one and stay with it for a few weeks so you don't get overwhelmed. Build a community, connect with the other people, learn from them.

Oh yea, I almost forgot to show you some of my newest scrapbook creations.

Credits
Font - Primary Print

Background - Best Friends Boys Project 253 - http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/PrintLab/pl_projectDetail.jsp?BV_UseBVCookie=yes&catOID=-13781&objOID=96964

Alphas - World Tour Alpha - Raspberry Road Designs http://raspberryroaddesigns.blogspot.com/search/label/Freebies

Nancy