I used papers and elements from Vicki’s new kit, Blue Jeans. Check it out on her blog, here. The alpha I used for the title is a favorite, also by Vicki, but this time from her Cherry Cheesecake Kit.
The journalling at the top is something I made using freebie Glitter styles by Flergs. Wow me. Haha 🙂
My PSP crashed just when I was adding the title (beads) and journalling to this page. The catch is, I hadn’t saved my work! So I started again from scratch but because I knew what I used and how I used them, the second time around was faster to make 🙂
By the way, I resized all of the stuff I used here because this page will go into my mini-album too.
This evening , I attempted to fuse plastic. The first one wasn’t good – some parts did not fuse at all.
I stopped, then checked out the tutorial at EtsyLabs again (that I already looked at several times about two months ago). By the looks of it, and as I recalled the video tutorial I also watched last week, I did what the tutorials called for.
An hour later, I tried it again but with just six layers and more flimsy plastic bags. I also turned up the temperature of the iron. This time, it actually looked like it was fusing well, but the iron may have been a little too hot. There were holes, and I actually saw the thing shrink. I managed to cut a piece of it that will be usable for what I intend to make, but on its own I think the material is not as sturdy as what I would have wanted.
That really got me frustrated. I was looking forward to making something this weekend and I really thought it would just be simple.  I’ll leave the third, and hopefully successful attempt for tomorrow.
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Did you see the Olympics’ closing ceremony? It was amazing!
In nearly all digiscrapping sites and forums, you will find talk about organizing the digi-stash. With designers coming out with multiple new kits every couple of days, and freebies galore, the newbie digiscrapper easily finds herself not only out of hard drive space, but also at a loss as to which paper or element to use first!
If you’re just starting out with this hobby, then there’s no better time to start organizing your stash than now. Take it from me, I must have been in acquiring and organizing mode for a long time it actually took up the time I could have spent on actual scrapbooking.
For this edition of Scrapbook Saturday, I’d like to talk about Organizing our Photos
For me, the photos are still the star of any layout. Unless of course there is no actual photo to scrap.
We always had photos of special occassions in the family, all of which went to our numerous photo albums. There was a time though, that we didn’t have rolls of film developed. For some reason, we just put them in a shelf and we all seemed to have forgot about them.
In the days pre-digi, one could be budget conscious and would only take a few precious shots because there’s only one or two rolls of film. Sharing prints was also difficult because of the costs. Most of the time, we’d only print once and then share the negatives to those who would like to have reprints.
With digital cameras, we are now only limited to the size of storage we carry. Sharing is a snap too.
Photos are the number one digiscrapping ingredient that needs to be organized properly.
The My Pictures folder in my PC serves as my main dumping ground for photos. In the past, I never really thought about organizing photos. Each time I import photos from the camera to the PC, it just goes to one folder which I later rename (or not).
With my computer having crashed and reloaded several times through the years, I have lost some pictures (and videos) of important milestones. When I bought an external hard drive (EHD) and started organizing the files that I was to dump in there for safekeeping, I realized that I had so many picture folders all over the place. I had a hard time keeping track of them all!
From the scattered folders in the EHD, I used the My Pictures folder on my secondary drive as the root directory for all my photos. The ones I could easily group and identify, I placed in sub-folders with the event and year as titles.
There’s also a folder for my nephew Esban, within it are sub-folders depending on the occasions the pictures were taken.
Now, for newer photos, I have folders for each month. In them are sub-folders for each batch of photos taken.
Though we still have one more week in August, I already have a folder filled with this month’s photos – August 2008. It’s sub folders include Mama’s North Trip and Trinoma-UP friends; on the main folder itself are a number of random photos I’ve taken of our pets, the kids, and whatever else caught my fancy.
If you thought I’d actually have a tip here or a structure you could follow for organizing your photos, I’m sorry to disappoint. Ultimately, you gotta go with what will work for you.
I’ve been using Google’s Picasa for some time now but the last time I imported photos, I was disappointed with it. I am seriously considering finally using Windows Live Photo Gallery at home. I mentioned these two applications because they are both free, and have a functionality that will make even the least organized person, have organized photos.
TAGS
It doesn’t matter in which folder you saved your photos, if you tag them properly, it will be easy to track them down.
Tags are keywords or categories you can attach to your photos to easily identify them. These are saved on the photo’s metadata. In Picasa, or WLPG, you can run a search for specific tags, and the photos bearing them will be shown to you.
Say for example that I wanted to scrap a layout of each kid in our family opening their Christmas presents. I can run a search on my software for the following tags: Christmas, gifts, kids, plus the name of one kid. After I pick the photo, I can change the name in my string, run the search, and choose another.
Tagging will also help us organize the rest of the contents our digi-stash. More on that next time. 🙂
EDITED:
Here are the pages I’ve made so far for my mini-album:
Daughter of Fortune is great material for a telenovela. It’s a story that spans the life of Eliza Sommers who grew up in Valparaiso, Chile not knowing who her real parents are. She was brought up to be a lady fit to be wed to a man of good stock and good money. But it was not to be her fortune.
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Allende did a fine job in painting a picture of 19th century Valparaiso: the sights, the sounds, the smells. Even the social climate. No surprise there.
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What was even more captivating was her illustration of the same: sights, sounds, smell, and sociology, but this time of two other cultures: Chinese and the California Gold Rush.
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I couldn’t help but feel as if I were reading a history book. The difference is that this one was actually a joy to read.
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I envy Eliza, not because she experienced a great love; I envy the many adventures she found herself having throughout the years that she was following the ghost of that love.
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She is fortunate in some ways, but you’ve got to give her credit for surviving those years too. Yes, she was a stupid teenage girl who ran away from home. She was insane to have gone on that boat. But after the ordeal in the darkness of the ship’s hold, she emerged as a budding woman – ready to take on the rest of the world. It is ironic that it was while she was pretending to be a boy that she showed her many strengths as a woman.
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On the other hand, I was empathizing with Miss Rose while all that was happening and I felt her world collapse around her even before I read Allende’s words describing how changed she was due to Eliza’s disappearance. I also never suspected that there was a deeper secret than that of Rose’s one true love.
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The times when Eliza was wondering that Miss Rose wouldn’t approve of her conditions in California, I disagreed. She may not have grown up to be a traditional English lady, but she was exactly like Miss Rose: strong willed, passionate, a lady ahead of her time.
It is no news that I maintain a digiscrapping blogroll. This is mostly of designer/scrapper blogs that often offer freebies. I have it setup in Blogrolling.com and I just copy/paste the code to any site I want it placed. Instead of text links, some of my favorite freebie digs are represented by their blinkies.
To save time when blog hopping, I used the blogroll feature to have a distinction for blogs that were updated within the last 24 hours. Those blogs have this symbol next to their name/blinkie: *
The blogroll itself seems to work just fine and I’ve never really had a problem with it. Until now.
I put up a separate page on this blog for the roll: http://verabear.net/digital-scrapbooking-links/. Problem is, when I go to that page, the blinkies are all missing! Thinking that it may be a server issue for blogrolling, I open my old blog to check that the blinkies are not showing their either. The thing is, the blinkies are showing up just fine :s
Here are the photos of the same blogroll setup on two different pages but using the exact same code and coming from the exact same source:
Blogroll in the new page
Blogroll in Blogspot
Where could it be going whacko? Is my blog blocking the blinkies from my Picasa Web uploads?
Aside from the missing blinkies, I also have missing avatars.
When I’m in my Admin Dashboard going through the comments, I can see the MonsterID avatar next to the commenters. But reading the comments as a blog reader, I don’t see them! Do you?
So I don’t know what to do about that.
Next, and the most annoying of all. I can’t seem to get the subscribe to comments pluginto work!
I’ve tested it several times but the subscriber is not getting any email notifications.
