How To Video │ Adding Bold White Borders

Hello everyone, I wanted to share that I have uploaded a new video to my You Tube Channel. This is probably the most requested and most asked question I get on Instagram so I finally sat down and created a tutorial. It is a live screen cast of me editing and cropping my photos to achieve the nice bold white border. I hope this is helpful and if you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask either here or within the YouTube comments.

Thanks for watching.

Featuring Kelly Purkey Shop │ February 2018 Shop Release

Hello everyone, the latest shop release is live at Kelly Purkey Shop and I wanted to share with you what I made. This shop release was huge this month. The normal two kits plus a mini kit and then four additional stamp sets. Kelly has also added some fun new items to the shop that I'll share below.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which means I receive a small commission if you make a purchase using the links below. There is no additional cost to you if you use these links.

My first project is a pocket page spread using the Lucky Ones main kit. The stamp set in this kit has some of the best sentiments on it that gave me all the feels. It ended up being perfect for a spread about my recent birthday. It was one that I wasn't really looking forward to but I had some of my amazing friends over to help me celebrate so the sentiments really helped tell the story of how I was feeling.

I used quite a few of the cards digitally to manipulate them and layer them and I love being able to do that. For the title of my card I used the Chelsea alpha stamp set and stamped out the text using a gold ink pad from Ali Edwards. I love how the added shimmer picks up the gold from my party decorations and the stars I added throughout the spread.

The best way to add in a ton of photos to a spread is make collages. I love seeing all these smiling faces and I love that years from now I can look back and remember who was here.

I used a few pieces from the Carpe Diem mini kit designed by LifeLovePaper as basses for my stamping and I really love the soft watercolor cards that she included in the kit.

My second project was a Travelers Notebook spread using the Take A Hike stamp set. I love anything that deals with the outdoors and this stamp set will get used time and time again since we love to visit our National Parks.

I used the line of trees stamp as the base for the right side of my page. I used a ombre ink pad so that it would have some subtle color variations. I paired it with an olive green stamp pad to stamp out the main sentiment. I stamped it on a index card and then fussy cut around the edge. The circle icon is one of my favorite stamps in the set and left it white so it would pop against the background.

On the left side I used one of the cards from the You Got This travelers notebook kit as my base. I love the idea of Instax prints but sometimes I want my images to be super bright and clear so instead of using my Instax printer here I created a template the same size as an Instax print so I could achieve the same look but have bright and clear images. I cut apart one of the stamps from the Carpe Diem mini kit so that I could stamp each word separately on each of my photos. I stapled the photos down to the paper prior to sticking it into the book just to add some additional dimension and texture to the page to keep it from looking too flat.

Kelly has also added some exciting new products to the shop this month. The first is something I'm super excited about, a set of plain grid cards. I love using index cards and plain journaling cards as bases for my stamping so these will come in handy. There are also a new style of alpha stickers and a 6x8 sheet of label stickers.

There is one stamp set that I haven't used yet but I'm super excited about, its called Wearing & Loving and it was designed by LifeLovePaper. Its like grown up paper dolls and I just love it.

I hope you enjoy this shop release, its definitely a big one and a great one! 

Thanks for being here and I'll see you soon!

2018 Pocket Pages │ January

Hello and happy Friday! I'm here today to share my first pocket page spreads for 2018. I'm continuing with the 9x12 format this year. I've come to really love this size for this project. The album I'm using is from A Beautiful Mess, I stocked up on my favorite grey album before they closed their scrapbooking shop and I'm using protectors from Studio Calico. Studio Calico is currently the only company making this size album and protectors and I'm really happy that they have kept it in their line up.

I really love the pocket page scrapbooking concept and I've been doing this type of scrapbooking since it all started back in 2010. That's a really long time, and for quite awhile I did the project weekly. I got a bit burned out over the past two years and didn't always complete my albums. I started working on my 2017 albums fairly late last year and its still a work in progress but I'm totally okay with that. One thing I realized when I sat down to make spreads for that album was that I really had no desire to make weekly layouts anymore. This is a completely personal decision and one that each individual needs to make for themselves but for me it boiled down to a) I was bored, b) I didn't want to just fill pockets because I had to, and c) I wanted to take the pressure off of myself that I had to do it a certain way.

That all being said, my plan for the year is to sit down at the end of each month go thru my photos and pull out any that I think I might want to use. I copy those photos to a separate file on my computer and start to plan. I use planning sheets to map out what will go where just so I can see it visually before I start. For example, I pulled 36 photos for January but I ended up using just 25 of them this month over two spreads. I feel like that's a pretty high number for two spreads especially for 9x12 but I maximized a few by using collages and at the end of the day I will always choose a photo over a filler card.

I'm not setting any parameters for the year, I'm going purely on what speaks to me and what photos and events I feel summed up our month the most. If we travel and I have more to include then I will, no rules.

Before I share the spreads I do want to mention that I have not done a title page yet. I did my 2017 title page really late in the year and found that I loved including photos of us from the year. So my plan is to set aside favorite photos as the year goes and make it when I have enough to do so, probably some time in the fall.

Here is the first spread of the month, it encompasses photos from the first thru the sixteenth I believe. I dated some journaling but for the most part I don't date each photo. I'm not too worried about specifics unless I think its important to include.  These two spreads have a lot of pink in them which is totally okay for me. I mixed in a little bit of this and that and tried to add in the newsworthy/pop culture references that I have always loved to include.

One thing I noticed as I was putting these pages together was that I'm using a lot of the saved Insta Stories I have posted. I love how these looked and I love how they have text and captions built right in so I don't have to do a lot of typing on photos like I have in the past. I made sure to fit in longer stories where they were required but simple captions are okay for most of the photos.

I'm not too worried about the title cards being super consistent but I do like the simplicity of this one. It also allows me to use up my large stash of alpha thickers so I may keep it going this year.

The second spread covers the twentieth to the end of the month. I always love adding in some of what I'm reading, watching and seeing so I will continue to make sure these get into the spreads.

Collages really saved the day for me and since I don't typically take horizontal photos, it was a much easier way to fill the 4x6 slots with vertical photos and it allowed me to get a few more photos in.

I used quite a few digitals from Paislee Press on this spread and two journaling cards from In A Creative Bubble as well. The rest are form Studio Calico from some current and past kits.

So January is done. I look forward to keeping up on this a bit better than the past few years and I think the more simplified approach will definitely help with that.

Thanks as always for being here!