Archive for the ‘scrapbooking’ Category
Keeping Holiday Memories: Flag Frame Tutorial
I am a scrapbooker, so all our holidays are dilligently scrapped into massive books. All the photos, brochures, tickets etc. are stored, displayed and all the stories are told. Luke and I really love our scrapbooks, and we invest a reasonable amount of money into recording these memories for ourselves, our children, and all the generations after us. It’s like a personalised inheritence we can give to the people we love. Hopefully these will be the people who will care about us enough to take care of them, and treasure them.
Scrapbooking is great, but when it comes to displaying photos of travels it’s not always the most practical thing. Scrapbooks need to be opened, and can’t really be looked at briefly. They require time. So a few weeks ago Luke and I started brainstorming about how we could display our travel photos in a way that was easy for people coming over to our house to see. We ended up with the idea of a photo wall.
The idea of the photo wall is that you display a selection of your travel photos in a big collage on the wall. We’re framing our photos, and to make it clearer which country a photo was from, we’re painting them into flags!
Here’s a tutorial on doing a simple flag (France). The principles are the same for a more complicated flag (Australia, UK etc).
You Will Need:
Frames (We used frames from IKEA- they’re 3 for $3)
Paint in the appropriate colour for your flag
Paint brush
Clean water in a bowl
Small bowl for making a watery paint
Lead pencil and ruler
Process:
Step One: Take the plastic/glass and backing out of your frame. Prepare your area (perhaps cover it with newspaper etc)
The french flag is three even sections of colour, so we measured the frame and divided it into 3. With a lead pencil and a ruler, lightly mark each third.
Step Two: Prepare your paints. Put some blue paint in the small bowl, and add smidges of water until you end up with a watery paint. Test it on the back of the frame to check that you can see the wood grain under it. It’s important that your paint isn’t TOO watery, or else it will bleed on the frame.
Put some of the regular, thick, paint onto your paint brush and paint a thin line to the left of the first third (do both the top section, and the bottom). Make sure you paint down each side of the line, not just the top.
Quickly take some of your watered down paint, and paint the left section. Paint up to the line of regular paint.
Step Three: While both your paints are still wet, take your brush and brush over the line of regular paint, and down into the watery paint. Imagine you are ‘rubbing out’ the line, and blending it into the rest of the paint.
Step Four: Once you’ve done the blue section, repeat the process for the red section.
Step Five: In the middle section we use a technique which is applicable any time you are painting up to a section that has already used the ‘thick paint line’ technique.
In this white section you can just paint using your watered down paint, up the blue and red lines. Be as neat as possible, going TO the line, but not over it.
I waited until both my blue and red sections were completely dry before I started on the white, this meant that I could hold onto those sides, and not risk smudging anything, or getting colours mixed.
Step Six: Let your frame dry competely. In the mean time, have your photo printed. If it’s an IKEA frame, or something similar, then you’ll need to take the protective plastic off the ‘glass’ plastic. 
Step Seven: Put your photo in with the glass and backing, and it’s ready to display!
I haven’t finshed my wall yet, so I can’t show you them all together, but I’ll let you know when it’s done!
Thanks for visiting my site again! keep checking back for more updates!
Visiting…
Today’s I’m posting over at We Heart Life, care to join me…? I’m talking about ways to preserve memories. 
Tags: guest, guestpost, weheartlife
Digital Scrapbooking
So I’ve had my first try at ‘real’ digital scrapbooking. In looking at the page now I realise that I don’t actually have a title, so while I know that this is a page about my Uni friends, you have no idea unless I tell you here! I guess that’s a good thing about digital scrapbooking- I can edit it and print it out again!!
In the past I’ve resized photos, printed them and then scraped them (this is a story for another tim), but I hadn’t like them printed on my inkjet colour printer. I’ve been hesitant to really give digital scrapbooking a proper go because A) I like texture, and B) My attempts always come out pretty crap-tastic.
When I saw Ali Edwards’ Scrapbooking With Your Computer series come up in my reader I thought, Hmm… maybe I should give this another go whilst learning from an expert! I did this page using a tempate from the series, and I’m really happy with it. It was basic, but I learnt some neat photoshop tricks, and had a good base to start with. (You can still get the template here if you want to give it a try).
With this fully digial page I got it printed at work on the colour lazer printer, and it came out beautifully.
I guess I’m not 100% sold on the digital scrapbooking- I love the neatness, professionalism, and the cute things you can’t get in ‘real life’, but there is still the missing texture. You can’t touch it or feel those staples. Somehow it’s… fake.
What do you think?
P.S In the first image of the scrapbooking page, I’m on the left in the bottom photo.
