Scraps Of Mind

Scotch Brand Most Gifted Wrapper Contest

How would you like to win $10,000 for wrapping some presents?

Sound good?   Read on . . .

The 3M Company who own Scotch Brand are holding their 14^th annual gift wrapping contest in December this year. Entries close 18^th October 2010 and the winner of the Scotch Brand Most Gifted Wrapper walks away with $10,000.00.

Now that would buy a whooole lot of scrapbooking supplies.

So if you’re someone who extends their passion for scrapbooking to off-the-page gift wrapping projects, or if you know someone who does, then click over to the competition website and find out more about it.

Scotch Brand Most Gifted Wrapper for 2009

To enter all you need to do is complete a form telling the organizers why you or someone you’re nominating, are a gift wrapping guru and share your best gift wrapping tips. You can upload a couple of photos if you like, but that’s not mandatory.

And you’ll need to tell them whether the nominee is a professional or an amateur gift wrapper. I’ll be honest, I didn’t realize there was such a thing as a professional gift wrapper, but apparently a professional is someone who has earned an income as a gift wrapper at a department store. Hmmm . . . I once worked in a garden nursery and we used to gift wrap the potted plants. Does that make me a professional gift wrapper? I don’t think so.

Anyhoo, even if you’re not so great in the gift wrapping department yourself if you’re the person who nominates the winner you get $1000 for just putting in the nomination.

So check out  the competition website This might be the opportunity for you or a friend to actually get a cash windfall from your papercraft creativity.

And wouldn’t that be very satisfying to point out to your significant other?

5 Tips for making a Great Mini-Album

It was my daughter’s 30^th birthday yesterday.

Naturally I required some intensive therapy to come to terms with this. But once I had gotten over my “where did the last 30 years go” shock I decided that I had to make something a bit special for her in the way of a card. Last year I made a pretty spiffy concertina card which she loved and said “Oooh, my first ‘book’ card!” That made me realise that I had never made an album just for her to keep before.

So I decided to make a mini album covering her last 30 years.

Now when I make a mini-album I like to do it from the ground up; making the pages and cover rather than buying a pre-made chipboard album. I gave myself plenty of time, as I usually do. And I managed to blow most of it away leaving me with a last minute rush, as I usually do. But I was quite pleased with the finished result.

Click on image to see the pages inside

 Making a mini album is a really fun thing to do. It’s great to create a whole album in one project and the smaller size helps to make the project less daunting.  If you have never made one why not give it a go? You don’t have to make the whole thing from scratch like me. You can buy premade chipboard albums that you can cover and embellish to make a fabulous album.  They make wonderful and really appreciated gifts for the special people in your life. Here are a few tips to get you started. 

5 tips for making great mini-albums

1.  Find a theme to link your pages together. This can be a color scheme, a scrapbooking style, a specific topic or anything that gives a sense of continuity through the pages and helps the album to tell a story. Using a combination of theme ideas will also help to reinforce the continuity. In this album I used papers from the Papermania Chatsworth Collection to maintain a color scheme. I used the same font and style for the titles on all the pages and I themed all the titles by making them follow a similar pattern for my Seona Days album: Early Days, Dress-up Days, School Days, BirthDays, HoliDays.

2.  Choose smaller, simple patterns or plains for your background papers. Now I have to admit that I didn’t strictly follow this rule. Several of the patterns in the paper pack I had chosen were a bit on the largish side. So I chose mainly simple pastels with dots for my pages and interspersed them with a few patterned papers in muted tones so they don’t overpower the photos.

3.  Add texture and dimension. Following on from the last tip you can make up for the lack of pattern in your papers by adding texture. The papers I chose for Seona’s album had a sort of a linen texture that I really loved. But you can add your own texture by putting your papers through an embossing machine such as a CuttleBug. And a bit of lumpy bumpy doesn’t hurt either. Generally your mini-album will only have a small number of pages. So you can probably afford to add a bit of height to your embellishing. Foam tape is my best friend. If you’re doing a digital album then try out some interesting drop shadows and bevels.

4.  Go easy on the embellishments. Because your mini–album pages are so much smaller than your regular scrapbook pages you need to be careful that you don’t over clutter them with embellishments. Try to pick smaller embellishments that won’t overpower the page. And I also like to reinforce the continuity by repeating the same embellishments throughout the album if possible.

5.  And most of all, put your love into it. Mini-albums (especially ones you do for other people) are usually a sort of capsule for an idea or an event or, like Seona’s album, a life story. That makes them a bit extra special. Let that feeling shine through in the journaling you write and the themes you choose.

As usual for me, this album was a hybrid scrapbooking project where I combined digital scrapbooking techniques with paper scrapbooking elements. One of the great benefits of this approach is that I can manipulate my photos and digital embellishments to perfectly fit my smaller pages and coordinate with my color scheme. I couldn’t decide on just 3 or 4 photos for the BirthDays page so I created the photo collage digitally, scanned in a background  from my paper pack and mounted the collage on it so I could keep all the fuzzy edges and just cut around the paper matt.

And yes, Seona loved it.

Canon PIXMA MP990 Review

One of the cool things about writing Scraps of Mind is that every now and then I get contacted to try out different products.  And so when Canon Australia asked me if I’d be interested in trying out their PIXMA MP990 printer/scanner and all round multi function device I said I’d be delighted.

Let’s just make a couple of things clear at this point:

• Canon are not paying me, either in money or in product;
• There is no requirement for me to write nice things about them or about the PIXMA PM990;
• In fact, there is no requirement for me to write anything at all if I don’t want to.

So having got that off my chest, let’s take a closer look at the Canon MP990.

This beast is not just a printer it’s also a scanner, a fax machine and a photocopier. In fact if I looked hard enough I’d probably find a kitchen sink in there somewhere!

My main interest is in its printing and scanning functions. I tried out the photocopier but I don’t really have a use for a fax machine so that is not covered in this review.

First up I have to say this is a large beast, or at least it felt like that in my current restricted space environment. I guess that’s inevitable with all the different functions it provides. But with a paper in-tray at the back and the paper out-tray at the front it takes up a lot more space on my bench top than I like. It’s dimensions are 7.9 x 18.5 x 15.2 inches but that’s without the extension of the two paper trays. If space is a major consideration for you then this might be an issue for you.

Setting up the PIXMA MP990 whilst not difficult was very time consuming. There seemed to be a hundred different bits to install and configure. Having said that, the Getting Started Guide did provide very clear and well illustrated steps to guide me through it so I’m very grateful for that.  Plus it was written in a way that techno-dunces like myself can understand.

Ink cartridges are always of interest to the printer buying consumer; because that’s usually where the ongoing expense lies. The Canon PIXMA MP990 uses a separate cartridge for each color. I much prefer this system to printers that use a single cartridge containing all the different colors in separate compartments. At least with this system if you tend to use more of some colors than of others you only have replace the relevant cartridges. And that usually translates into a saving in the long term. I always hated throwing away a cartridge when I knew there was plenty of ink still in some of the colors.

So how does the Canon PIXMA MP990 perform?

As a Printer

I found the printer to be significantly quicker and quieter than my own printer.

The output was crisp and clean with good quality color. And the good news is that it seemed to be paper agnostic. By that I mean that you don’t need to exclusively use Canon photo paper to get the best results. I printed out oll of the digital scrapbook layouts from my Step By Step Digital Scrapbook tutorials on both the Canon paper supplied and also on some Kodak photo paper and I was very happy with the results on both. This is an improvement on my HP printer as it tends to reserve its best performance for HP paper.

I tried printing on ordinary plain paper and whilst not as good as the print quality on high resolution photo paper (only to be expected) the quality was still very good. Let’s face it, you’re likely to be doing most of your printing on ordinary paper, rather than more expensive paper so this is pretty important.

As a Scanner

Once again I found the scanning function of the Canon PIXMA MP990 was significantly quicker than my own scanner (which is also a Canon). The scanning control panel which comes up on your computer monitor includes some very handy features under the Advanced tab which let you adjust the quality of your image before you scan it. This is especially useful with old photos which have grown dark with age. If you adjust the lighting on the image before you scan it you will bring out a heap of detail in the photo. That means you don’t lose this detail in the scan and you can then refine this more in your photo editing software.

As a Photocopier

I’ve never really bothered about a photocopier before as I have always just used my scanner. But it can be a handy device to have. If you’re intending to make a print out of a hard copy page it’s much quicker to use the photocopier function than to scan and then print. And even quicker if you need multiple copies.

I must confess, working out how to use the photocopier function was more challenging than I expected. However once I discovered the instructions on the back page of the Getting Started Guide it all worked out happily. Photocopying was quick and quiet and the output was clear and crisp. That pretty much covers it for photocopying.

In a Nutshell

So taking everything into consideration I would have to recommend the Canon PIXMA MP990 as a good buy for a multi-function device for the home. As long as you have the surface space for a chunky sized home printer it’s a great machine. And of course it does come with all the other functions as well.

It’s a bit of a time consuming and fiddly exercise to set it up but once that’s done you can enjoy excellent quality output and a quick and quiet operation.

Having each colored ink in its own separate cartridge I saw as a distinct bonus and I was particularly impressed with the quality of printing on non-Canon papers.

So if you’re out there looking to upgrade or replace your current printer and you want a machine that can do more functions than just print — and can do them well – then you really should take a good long look at the Canon PIXMA MP990.