Welcome back to Kylie of My Digital Life. and another episode in this fantastic series on How to Scrapbook Your Life Story. If you missed the previous episodes, the links are just below. Once again, Kylie has a special freebie to help you on your journey. See below for the link.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 |

Have you ever felt that life gets so busy sometimes that we forget to take stock and appreciate the little things? I know for me that has been a huge issue lately, I have so many things to do, can’t seem to focus on any of them, and then not get anything done. Then, on top of all that, I neglect my family!

As I was thinking about all of this, it led me to think about the Life Story Scrapping research that I have been doing. The research that led me to write these articles for you in fact.

It is all well and good to record your memories, your thoughts and things about your life for your children and grandchildren to hold on to, but what about the creation of these memories?

Computers, the internet, mobile phones are all wonderful means of communication with the outside world. They bring us together. But sometimes I think they also tear us apart.

Sometimes I find myself checking the computer many many times a day. Just to check for an email, who is online, who has said hi! So I have made some decisions to step away from the computer, not even turning it on early in the morning like I used to.

So how is this related to Lifestory Scrapping I hear you ask? Well, let me explain ..

Involving your Family

You have started the journey on your lifestory. You have started interviewing the older generation and gathering all sorts of wonderful history to enhance and embellish that album that will be treasured by all who read it.

Now, why don’t you get other members of your family to do their bit?

Not just in talking to them, but get them creating. For example, we recently went to the National Zoo and Aquarium for my youngest son’s birthday. I have edited the photos, even posted some on my blog, shared them with family and will eventually get around to creating some pages for my various albums.

But what I also did was encourage my son to tell me his story. And together we have made a little mini album where I have typed his words. It’s a mini-book now which he takes everywhere, but I will use his words in my family album as well.

My eldest son, has just started digi-scrapping on his own (they all paper-scrap). So I tell him that I would love to hear what he has to say about our interstate move to the ATC (Australian Capital Territory) earlier this year. I will place this page next to my own in our Lifestory, because his voice is just as important, if not more so, than my own in this part of our lives.

Now your family’s contributions do not have to be a Digital Scrapbooking, or Traditional Scrapbooking page. They could be words that they have written for you, a verse or short story maybe. They could be thank-you cards, birthday cards, letters they have written. All of these will add quality to your life story, as it introduces those people in your life.

So get your family involved, and I would love to see what they create!

Click here to pick you your free List Papers

Please Note: This is last week’s freebie. Kylie has been totally swamped with end-of-year- Uni assignments so she has not been able to prepare one for this week’s article.

You can catch up on Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | of this series here.

You can read more of Kylie’s work and check out her designs at My Digital Life. Stay tuned for the next episode next week.

Want to give Digital Scrapbooking a try? Then click over to Step by Step Digital Scrapbook where you’ll find everything you need to know to get yourself started.

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Welcome to this week’s episode in this fantastic series on How to Scrapbook Your Life Story from Kylie Moore of My Digital Life. Enjoy this segment and if you missed the previous episodes, the links are just below. Once again, Kylie has a special freebie to help you on your journey. See below for the link.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 |

I hope your story writing skills have gotten a work-out this week, and you have started down your trail of writing Narratives.

Once you get started it is a lot of fun trying to remember the fine details of events and activities. Trying to make your story come alive with detail, and to walk your reader along in your shoes.

As promised here are a few more prompters to assist you in developing your Narrative.

• The Good and The Bad – Think about events in your life that may have started out disappointing, but in the end turned out to be a positive experience. Remember to think about the details and to give them life.
• Personal Goals – Has there been a time that you achieved a goal? Think about what led you to set your goal, any difficulties/challenges met in reaching this goal, and finally the feelings associated with achieving it.
• Favourite childhood place – think about those special places you played in as children. It might have been the big old tree in the backyard, the local playground, or like us the drain system at the end of our street. Did you make up fantastical games, or did you just hide and chat. Maybe bring to life the games you played, make a story out of the games. When I think about this prompter, I think about the book ‘Drac and Gremlin’ by Allan Baille and illustrated by Jane Tanner. It is a gorgeous book that depicts children’s dramatic play.
• Your best friends – share some of the details of your intimate relationships, these could be your childhood friendships, and those that have formed as you entered adulthood. Have you any friendships that have stood the test of time?

As you can see there are many ways to use a Narrative style for telling your stories. You are giving your lifestory more colour, moving beyond the standard journaling of using dates, times and places.

If you aren’t feeling confident with writing narratives, you could start with writing lists. This will give you the detail you need, which is sometimes the hardest part of getting started. 

Some of the lists you could make include:

• Funny things that have happened to you, as a child, at school, at work, with your friends
• Your favourite places, small intimate places around your home, magical islands and places you want to visit
• Things that you have achieved that you are most proud of

Making lists is a fantastic way to trigger those memories. You can keep adding to them over days, weeks or months. Store your lists in your album, stick them on a pin up board, keep them in your diary, or even scrap your lists. By ensuring they are close at hand you can easily add to them.

Click here to pick you your free List Papers

For this weeks freebie I have a collection of note papers, perfect for making lists. I hope you like them.

You can catch up on Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | of this series here.

You can read more of Kylie’s work and check out her designs at My Digital Life. Stay tuned for the next episode next week.

Want to give Digital Scrapbooking a try? Then click over to Step by Step Digital Scrapbook where you’ll find everything you need to know to get yourself started.

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Welcome to this week’s episode in this fantastic series on How to Scrapbook Your Life Story from Kylie Moore of KylieM Designs. Enjoy this segment and if you missed the previous episodes, the links are just below. Once again, Kylie has a free QuickPage to help you get started. See below for the link.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 |

So I hope that you have started thinking about who you can interview to obtain those all too important oral histories. It could be your Parents or even Grandparents, maybe an Aunt or Uncle, or that long time family friend who always seems to have been there. It doesn’t really matter who it is, they all have a snippet to add to your family’s story.

One final thing to remember when listening to those stories is to remember to be sensitive. It can be very emotional talking about the past and those long lost relatives. I remember finding out that my Grandmother was actually engaged to someone else before she met my Grandfather, but he had been killed in the war. Even after 50 years, and a very happy life with my Grandfather she was still very emotional about it, she had lost someone whom she had loved very dearly, in traumatic circumstances.

We would love to hear your stories, or how you went collecting them. Don’t forget to let us know!

Another fantastic way to build your lifestory is to write narrative stories.

These are real memories that are written like a story book, maybe even like a picture book. If you get really clever you could even turn some of these stories into picture books for your children to enjoy over and over again.

Scrapbooking lends itself to this process so well. Pages are colourful and attractive and the story can drag you in. Small mini albums, 4 x 6 brag books for example, are a fantastic and inexpensive way to turn these books into a reality.

So where do you start?

Well how about I give you some prompters and you can see what you come up with.

• Special moments – we have all had a special moments of one type or another in our lives. It could be anything so long as it was special to you. A visit to the circus, or an amazing adventure playground, meeting overseas relatives and friends for the first time, special birthdays or parties, camping trips or adventures. Write about this special moment, remember as many details as you can and remember to say what made it so special for you.
• Teaching moments – I am sure there has been a time when you have taught someone something, it can be as simple as teaching younger siblings to tie their shoelaces, ride a bike or even pour a glass of milk. It can obviously be more complex, maybe you have a career in teaching and you remember those first days in the classroom. All of these can be so rewarding. Think about something you have taught someone else, however minor it may seem to you. If you were proud then your readers would love to hear about it. Try to remember the details of the process you used, and then tell us your story.

So there are a couple of narrative prompters to get you started!

Don’t worry I have plenty more and will share some more of those for you next week! Your freebie this week is a little different, probably more for bloggers. It is a frame for 6 photos, so that a series of them can be shown on your blog, although I have left it A4 size for you so that it could easily be printed or included in your albums. Enjoy!

Click here to pick you your free Frame Set

You can catch up on Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | of this series here.

You can read more of Kylie’s work and check out her designs at KylieM Designs. Stay tuned for Part Four next week.

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Welcome to this week’s episode in this fantastic series on How to Scrapbook Your Life Story from Kylie Moore of KylieM Designs. Enjoy this segment and if you missed the previous episodes, the links are just below. Once again, Kylie has a free QuickPage to help you get started. See below for the link.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Welcome to week five of Scrapping Your Life Story.

Welcome to the next part of our series on ‘Scrapping Your Life Story’. Over the first three weeks I gave you a number of pointers or starters, for scrapping pages with information that you may not have thought to include. Dating stories, reminiscing about that first job, and thinking about the relationships in your family.

Well this week we are going to start looking at Oral Histories, and their importance in opening up the past.

I remember as a child, sitting down and listening to my Great-Grandmother tell us of her memories. It amazes me the changes in our world that our Great Grandparents and Grandparents have lived through, and learning about their perspectives is a valuable addition to your lifestory. We want to make sure that we don’t lose these stories, they are so important and much more important in many ways than the official history books.

So here are a few tips to get you started on tracking down those fantastic stories as part of your family history.

• Find out as much as you can about the relationship of the older people in your ‘family’ that you wish to interview. They may not be direct family members, but second cousins, even neighbours and family friends that have been part of your lives. If you can find out the lineage, where they fit in your family, beforehand it can help you know what questions to ask.
• Establish a rapport, if the person you are interviewing is not someone you know well it may take one or two visits or phone calls before they are happy to start sharing intimate details of their lives. It is important to give plenty of advanced warning about what you want to do and why.
• If possible, have some old photos as starters. I know I have plenty of old photos that have my Dad, or other family members in, but I really do not know any details. Recently a visit with an older Aunt gave me so many more details of what was happening in the photos, silly things that may have slipped my Dad’s memory.

For example:

The photo above was taken in London, obviously. But before it was taken my Auntie had taken my Dad to the London Zoo and lined up for hours to catch a glimpse Chi Chi the panda. They had finally reached their turn, and my dad said “seen it, now what”. I love this, all this from a photo that had nothing to do with Panda’s, but added such richness to the story.

• Have some pre-prepared interview questions, have them written and organized in subject area, and chronological order. It will help you keep on track, and also see where maybe you missed things. Multiple visits are very likely to be needed.
• Make sure your questions are open-ended, ask about relationships, or what they remember about events.
• Don’t feel you need to fill quiet moments with chatter, your interviewee could just be thinking back. Chatting, or trying to fill those moments could break that train of thought and you may miss something.
• Find out about family treasures, ask to see them, ask to photograph them. Make sure you record all the details, all the who, what, how, where when details.
• And lastly enjoy it, savour the details you are gathering. I find there is nothing more enjoyable than taking in all those wonderful stories that have helped to shape our family.

Click here to pick you your free Quickpage

You can catch up on Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 of this series here.

You can read more of Kylie’s work and check out her designs at KylieM Designs. Stay tuned for Part Four next week.

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Welcome to Part 4 in this fantastic series on How to Scrapbook Your Life Story from Kylie Moore of KylieM Designs. Enjoy this segment and if you missed the previous episodes, the links are just below. This week is a bit of a time out segment, for you to recap on what you’ve covered so far and perhaps bring yourself up to date. Once again, Kylie has a free QuickPage to help you get started. See below for the link.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Welcome to week four of Scrapping your Lifestory.

I was hoping to have the next installment of this series all prepared and ready for you this week, but I am in Adelaide for Uni and it has ended up being way more busy than I anticipated! I did put together another Quickpage to help you on your way.

But let’s take this week to catch our breath and recap on what we have covered so far. I hope you have all been thinking about those first jobs that you had, remembering some of the funny stories. I know for myself I have spent lots of time giggling as I think back to the things I got up to!

And how did you go with scrapping the story of how you and your partner first met? This might be a difficult layout to scrap if you’re talking about an ex-partner but remember, it’s all part of your life story so it’s worthwhile trying to include it in your album.

And then of course there’s our relationships with the various members of our extended family. Although this is not a topic that’s often explored, you can guarantee that it will be of interest to your children and grandchildren in years to come as they try to navigate their family tree.

Please let us know how your journey is going, and I will be on board again next week with the next part of the series!

Click here to pick you your free journaling papers

You can catch up on Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of this series here.

You can read more of Kylie’s work and check out her designs at KylieM Designs. Stay tuned for Part Four next week.

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Welcome to Part 3 in this fantastic series on How to Scrapbook Your Life Story from Kylie Moore of KylieM Designs. Enjoy this segment and if you missed the first two parts, the links are just below. Once again, Kylie has a free QuickPage to help you get started. See below for the link.

Part 1 | Part 2

What we don’t think to scrap

I hope you have made a good start on your life story, thinking back to when you met your partner and what those early days were like. Then thinking about your family and the relationships you have with them. Brothers, sisters, uncles, cousins .. every family has different interactions with their family members, it is a good idea to share how your family interacts in your life story, you never know when it may become important.

Well this week I said we were going to look at those weird little things that you wouldn’t think about scrapping. I can assure you though; these will be fun things that your children and grandchildren will love to have a giggle over in years to come. With this weeks topic you may not have any photos that are completely relevant, and that is OK. Whoever said you needed to scrap with pictures all the time?

Firstly think about the very first job you had, possibly as a teenager. Did you go down the local newspaper route, delivering pamphlets, working at the local fast food joint or did you baby-sit for the neighborhoods’ children?

Here are some questions to get you started …

• What did you think of your first boss, did you like them, did they give you a hard time?
• What were you first group of workmates like? Did you hang out together outside of work. Did you form a social sports team like social netball or basketball? Did any become lifelong friends?
• How did you end your first job? Were you fired? Did you quit? Did you move on to bigger and better things?
• Did you hold down a job whilst finishing school? How hard was that?

Remember to not only date when the events occurred, but also when you did your journaling and created your layout.

Your children are going to go through all of these things, and chances are there are times that it is going to be tough. Being able to look back and see that their parents went through the same things may just help to make it that little bit easier.

Next week I will give you some hints and tips on oral history interviews. Talking to Grandparents, Great Uncles & Aunties, even old friends of the family can give fantastic insights and can I help you make sure you don’t miss anything.

Your freebie for this week is some journaling papers, and you can nab them on my new blog.

Click here to pick you your free journaling papers

You can catch up on Part 1 and Part 2 of this series here.

You can read more of Kylie’s work and check out her designs at KylieM Designs. Stay tuned for Part Four next week.

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Welcome to Part 2 in this fantastic series on How to Scrapbook Your Life Story from Kylie Moore of KylieM Designs. Enjoy Part 2 and if you missed the first part, the link is just below. Once again, Kylie has a free QuickPage to help you get started. See below for the link.

Part 1

Family Relationships

So how did you go this week? Did you look back on those ancient memories? The ones when love was new, and you were swept away by it all, and then maybe the harder memories as well, what it was like to start your lives together and some of the challenges you had along the way.

Something to remember when scrapping your life story, is to have journaling.

If you are like me, a lot of your scrapping has little or no journaling, although I am getting much better. You have great photos that mean so much to you, and you think they say it all. But then look back on those old photos that you have tucked away. Have the memories started to fade? Or maybe you really do not know what is going on in the photo at all.

Some of the basics to remember: date your layouts, but not just the date of the photo, but the date of the journaling as well. You have dug up an old photo of a camping trip you went on with mates, it is obviously important to know when that was, but when writing your story about that photo your perception now is going to be different so it is also important to date when you did your journaling.

Then when you do your journaling, include thoughts and feelings, the place, the activity. It doesn’t have to be deep, but it is useful to be meaningful. That is not to say that all your layouts now need to include tons of journaling, of course not, this is for your life story, because remember, we are telling a story.

So what path are we following this week?

We looked at how your relationship with your partner started last week, what your new lives were like together. This week, let’s take a step back from that and look at your family relationships. All families are different, I know my family relationships are very perplexing to my husband, whose family is quite close. They have weekly dinners, whereas with my family we might catch up on birthdays! This isn’t for any particular reason, other than that is just the way our lives have gone, but I feel the need to share this with my children. They have never seemed to bothered with the differences in our families, but I am sure that later in life they will notice the differences in our relationships.

• Do you have brothers and sisters, uncles and aunties, cousins, family friends, distant relations?
• What were your relationships like, did you have regular family dinners, or were you lucky to talk once a month?
• Are there any other quirky family traditions that would be valuable to have explained?

Click here for your free Life Story QuickPage

Next week we will look at topics that you may not have thought to scrap at all, but truly add to your lifestory!

You can catch up on Part 1 of this series here.

You can read more of Kylie’s work and check out her designs at KylieM Designs. And don’t forget to pick up the free QuickPage that she’s created especially for this series. Stay tuned for Part Three next week.

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Today we start a fantastic new series which will guide you through how to scrapbook your own life story. If you have tried creating a Book of Me then you will know that it is one of the hardest albums you can make. Kylie Moore from KylieM Designs will be guiding you through your own scrapbooking journey in this brilliant series of articles, and she has a free QuickPage to help you get started. See below for the link.

Kylie’s Journey

We all know how popular Book of Me’s are. In fact I signed up to an online course and did one myself a couple of years back. It was fantastic to scrap focusing on me, as normally, like many scrappers, the focus is on my children.

But lately I have looked at it, and yes it is a valuable memory keeper, but did it really document the history of my life? Well, not really. There were pages that documented the things I was grateful for in my life at the time; my favourite music, my favourite colour and the special people in my life. All wonderful markers of what my life was like at the time, but not really documenting my life and history.

I then put this aside. I am a busy person and I figured that it didn’t really matter. My children will love looking at my albums all the same! But in moving to Canberra and leaving our family behind I realised that I want to leave a more complete story of my life for my children, and hopefully my grandchildren. I have many photos of my father as a child, and as much as they are wonderful there is no story with them. I am managing to piece together some things, but it doesn’t go further back than my Dad.

So, being me, I dug my heels in and started researching. And I have found many wonderful resources, hints, ideas and clues about documenting a meaningful life story. With these resources, and my creativity I believe that I will be able to create something that will carry my history, and my family’s history long into the future. Well at least I am giving it a shot.

Here at Scraps of Mind, I have been given the wonderful opportunity to share what I have found and give you some hints on creating your life history in a scrapbooking format. The tasks I have for you all can be transferred to traditional scrapbooking, digital scrapbooking, hybrid, or just plain journal keeping. I will be sharing with you resources, digital elements and tools, and templates.

So, do you want to get started?

I know I do, so why don’t we hit the floor running? For the next couple of weeks we are going to look at the things your children will want to know about your life, the nitty gritty stuff, the stuff that happened in your day to day lives …

First up let’s talk about how you and your partner met. I know for some, if you have been divorced or separated, this is often hard to talk about especially if there is bitterness. But my parents divorced when I was six years old and I desperately wanted to know the good part of their lives. There must have been one sometime. Finally as an adult, my mother shared some of those good times with me. So even though the divorce that my parents went through wasn’t the best, she was able to recall and share those good memories. It helped piece together a bit of my life.

Click here for your free Life Story QuickPage

So if you are up to it … here are a few starters …

• What was your dating story? How/where did you meet?
• Did you ever argue as newly weds, what was it about?
• Did you struggle financially when you first starting your lives together?

And here are some references that I found useful

Family History Jumpstart by Michael Boyter of FamilyHistoryPublications.com

How to write your Life Story by Karen McDonald & Greg McLure

I hope to see you back next week!

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Today we’re going to look at how you can ensure that you receive the email newsletters that you sign up for.

Have you ever signed up to receive a newsletter and then found that nothing happens?

Well you might have typed in your email address incorrectly, and that’s a whole other story. But if you did type your email address correctly then chances are it’s because your email system think that it is unsolicited, unwanted advertising email and in its efforts to protect you, it has tossed your newsletter confirmation email in the junk mail. Let’s face it most of us never think to regularly check our junk mail, so there it will sit until your junk box does its regular clean out.

And all the time you’re thinking “What a dodgy newsletter that was. They didn’t even bother sending me one copy.”

Frustration for you and frustration for the newsletter producer. And I speak from personal experience here. I could weep when I see all the would be subscribers to my Word Art Newsletter who are listed as Unconfirmed because my email to them requesting confirmation of their subscription has been considered spam by their email system.

So here’s a tip if you sign up for anything and you want to receive their emails:

White List the email addresses of the Newsletters you want to receive.

What does that mean?

Well most email systems have a way that you can identify an email address as a ‘good guy’ so that they will allow emails from that address to get through.

First add the email address that you want to White List to your address book. For example,

karooch(at)scrapsofmind(dot)com if you want to receive the Weekly Word Art Newsletter.

Unfortunately all email systems are different (wouldn’t you know it?) so it might take a bit of checking in your menu bar to find the way it works for yours. But here are some instructions for some of the more popular ones.

Yahoo

• Open your Yahoo mailbox.

• Click Mail Options.

• Click Filters.

• Next, click Add Filter.

• In the top row, labeled From header: make sure contains is selected in the pull-down menu.

• Click in the text box next to that pull-down menu, then enter the address in the “From” line of the most recent email from the site you want to white list.

• At the bottom, where it says Move the message to:, select Inbox from the pull-down menu.

• Click the Add Filter button again.

Hotmail

• Click the Options tab.

• Select Safe List. (It’s under the heading Mail Handling.)

• In the space provided, enter the address in the “From” line of the most recent email from the site you want to white list.

• Click Add.

• When you see the address you entered in the Safe List box, click OK.

Gmail

• Add the email address of the site you want to white list to your contacts list by choosing Add Contact from the list of options on the left.

AOL

• Go to Keyword Mail Controls.

• Select the screen name that your emails are being sent to.

• Click Customize Mail Controls For This Screen Name.

For AOL version 9.0: You need to add the sending address to your “People I Know” list.

• Open your latest email from from the site you wish to white list.

• Click the Add Address button (over on the right) to add
  to your “People I Know” list.

AOL version8.0: Select Allow email from all AOL members, email addresses and domains.

• Click Next until the Save button shows up at the bottom.

• Click Save.

For AOL version7.0: In the section for “exclusion and inclusion parameters”, include the site you wish to white list.

So I hope that has helped some of you who might be feeling a bit annoyed with newsletters that never arrive.

And if you’re someone who has signed up to the Scraps of Mind Word Art Newsletter and not received one, then please try again and white list my email address to I can break thought your email protection shield.

Other Articles you Might Enjoy:

Using Word Art in real life

Let your Blog Stumble – it won’t hurt.

Make a Transparent Scrapbook Layout

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We have a new Guest Writer on Scraps of Mind this week.
June is a traditional and hybrid scrapbooker who enjoys sharing tips and techniques with her readers on her blog Scrapping by Design where she makes some cool scrapbooking videos to demonstrate her projects. So when you’ve finished reading her article, why not click over and check out June’s blog?
Don’t forget, you too can join the Journalist Team at Scraps of Mind and showcase your work to other Scrapbookers by writing a Guest Post and getting published on Scraps of Mind.

Many of us use our scanners to digitize photographs, greeting cards and other paper products. And certainly, these scanned images are great enhancements to digital, hybrid and traditional paper scrapbooking layouts.

However, with a little imagination, you can expand the use of your scanner to incorporate various other items into your projects.

If it’s flat enough to fit in your scanner, you can digitize a picture of it. Simply place the item face down in the scanner and scan.

You might experiment a bit to see if covering it with a sheet of white printer paper improves the quality. In some cases, it will make a difference. In other cases, it may not.

In the picture shown, I have incorporated scanned images of a piece of lace, a spray of artificial flowers, a leaf from a house plant and a gold elephant shaped brooch with a black cord.

Other possible items that come to mind include earrings, pearls, buttons, candy bar wrappers, decorative wrapping paper, book covers, ribbon, coasters, seashells, twigs, flat rocks and pebbles, flat food like cookies, gum, tea bags, dried fruit or mushrooms or even small items of clothing like gloves, baby bootees or bibs.

These scanned images can play several roles in your scrapbooking activities.

Scanned Items as Mementoes

If the item you scanned played a role in the memory you’re scrapbooking about, why not include it as a picture?

If it’s a baby shower layout, scan in the booties that you knitted for the new addition.

If it’s a gardening theme, scan in some leaves and flowers picked from your garden.

Spent a day at the beach? Scan in a seashell that you collected.

Scanned Items as Buttons, Borders and Backgrounds

Your scanned images have multiple uses beyond displaying the pictures in your layouts. If you have photo editing software, you can edit or combine your images in any number of ways to create custom borders, backgrounds, buttons and embellishments.

Software applications vary in terms of features. I used Adobe Photoshop CS to make the button shown, but you could do it with Adobe Photoshop Elements and probably many other applications as well.

To make the button,

• I selected a square of the scanned lace, then copied it and pasted it into a new file.
• Next, I used the Magnetic Lasso Tool to select the elephant from the elephant pin picture.
• Once selected, I copied and pasted it into a new layer in the new button file, and moved the layer so the elephant is centered.
• Lastly I used a filter to create the 3D button effect.

That’s just one example of the myriad possibilities that open up when you’re working digitally.

Getting the Resolution Right

When working with scanned images, resolution plays an important role.

If you are planning to print your images, you need a resolution of at least 300 dpi, or dots per inch.

Set the scanner to scan at the highest resolution possible if printing is your goal.

If you plan on displaying the image on a computer or web site only, then the resolution requirements are much less. 72 dpi is considered the ideal resolution for Web viewing.

Remember that a 72 dpi image will look great on the computer – but if you print it, it will be blurry and lack definition. What you see is definitely not what you get when we are talking about digital images and printing.

Why not give this a try?

Post a comment and let us know how you incorporate scanned objects into your scrapbooking or paper craft projects.

Other Related Articles:

Learn How to Digital Scrapbook

Madison Avenue Scrapbooking

Hybrid Scrapbooking – the Best of Both Worlds

Learn how to digital scrapbook so you too can make cool projects like this?

Then click over to Step by Step Digital Scrapbook where you’ll find everything you need to know to get yourself started.

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