LOM Clipboards

Here is a photo of my Library of Memories (LOM) Clipboard. I made the large one last year to hold my LOM assignments. I made the small one this year and it holds my Digital Work Flow for LOM.

This is the checklist I am using for my Digital Work Flow for LOM. I’ve tested it a couple of times and it seemed to work. Yesterday I tried to test it on some recent pictures and it failed in the second step. Although I’ve been dragging and dropping my new pictures to a DVD RW with no problem, suddenly Windows 7 doesn’t want to do it anymore. First claiming that I was out of space (I had a couple of gigabytes left), then claiming that the DVD was bad. So possibly the RW DVD is a bad idea. My daughter says I should have bought a MAC and I’m starting to realize that my daughter is smart! I sort of threw my hands up and haven’t proceeded with the steps on my latest photos.

The other thing I’m working on in Library of Memories are my category drawers. I finally gave in and am in the process of taking out my non acid free Mead dividers and putting in my acid free dividers that I bought from Archival Methods. A time consuming step but one I will be happy with in fifty years when my pictures have not been ruined. Of course I won’t be around then and not sure which of my descendents will care. But I am doing the right thing. Right???

Here is my People we love category drawer. Note the red dividers are for the main categories and they match my red album which matches the red ribbon on the handle. I am starting to love color…thank you Stacy Julian!

I had a lot more pictures of category drawers to share but the SD card was not in the camera when I took the pictures so…lesson learned!

I am Adhesive Challenged...

I am going to the Sacramento Scrapbook Expo in October with Liz, a friend I met at the DSP Adobe Laptop Crop in July. I am signed up for a few classes and in looking at the supplies list what I notice most is adhesive, adhesive, adhesive!

I like the adhesive tape runners but for some reason they don't like me. I have tape in the darned thing but it doesn't come out...too much tape comes out but it is not on my papers it is just hanging out all over the table...the tape comes off but the left over piece doesn't feed back in and it is hanging all over the table..."easy to replace refills"...easy for who...engineers? I finally get on a roll and run out of tape and have no more refills. I tried the darned purple glue that dries clear...well explain to me why I have dried purple goop on my layout? I am apparently adhesive challenged.

I was thinking about what to bring to the Expo in October. I did a little research and I have come upon the decision to try something new. Ta-Da...it is the ATG tape gun...I know it looks big but the posts I have read indicate that it is light and easy to use. And it holds something like 36 yards of tape. Also for little ole challenged me, there is a loading instruction and video at Framing Supplies dot Com, the site I purchased it from. And just for a little insurance, I bought the refill tape also. Yes there is an upfront cost. But apparently if you do the math you will start recouping the costs in a short time. Of course that would depend on how often you scrap. Although I am an accountant by trade, I didn't bother doing any math here. I just looked at the shiny red gun and said....ooohhhh I like....and clicked on the add to cart button and the rest is history. I can't wait until it arrives. I will check it out and report back if adhesive challenged me could use it with ease.



You can Google this as it is sold at various sites. I bought mine from Framing Supplies dot com. $41.69 for the gun and $3.30 for the refill. I read in some posts that you can get the refills for $2.00. I don't know if that is an old price or if they are available somewhere for that price. I just decided to buy the refill with the gun since I was already paying for the shipping.

Photo Freedom aka Getting Photos Organized

I have been reading Stacy Julian's books on her photo and layout organization. Stacy has given me a new way of looking at how to organize everything. What I like about her style is that she presents what she does and explains how and why she does it. Having this information enables you to adapt the system to meet your own needs.

Stacy is a paper scrapper so her system starts with a printed photo. Since I am a paper and a digital scrapper, I am going to adapt her system to bridge my paper/digital organization. At the present time my paper system is one mish-mash-mess and my digital system is actually fairly organized. My plan is to organize my printed photos and layouts "loosely" based on Stacy's method. I say "loosley" because Stacy is right brained and I am left brained. So, our systems will naturally be slightly different.

For my digital photos and layouts I only need to make a few modifications and my digital photos and layouts will be organized exactly how my paper ones are organized. What a concept! I will have an All About Us 3-ring album and I will have an All About Us digital album. The albums will not necessarily have the same layouts in them because I don't print all my digital layouts and I don't scan my paper layouts. But the systems will be similar so finding things should be a lot easier. I am so super-de-duper excited about this. Organization makes me HAPPY!

The Big Picture was Stacy's first book. It talks more about her layouts and how you can set up a system to NOT scrap chronologically so you never feel like you are behind.

Photo Freedom is Stacy's latest book. It goes in depth about her actual system for photos and layouts. She explains what tools she uses and exactly how she uses them. She provides the details of the tools that she uses but encourages you to start with what you have on hand and not to go out and necessarily purchase everything that she uses. That way you can understand the nuts and bolts of the system before you add in the bells and whistles.

She explains the process that a photo takes. From printing it off the computer, where it gets filed, how it will get scrapped etc. It is very obvious that Stacy practices what she preaches and her ideas have certainly opened the floodgates of ideas and possibilities for my own process.

Let's talk font organizing...

Many digi scrappers are total font freaks. I mean how many fonts does one need? Well frankly we need ALOT. And since we need a lot of fonts we need a way to organize them. For the last few years I used a free program called The Font Thing. It was a great program with a great price. But unfortunately the program hasn't been updated and it does not recognize the new Open Type of fonts. I embarked on a search to find a current program that would replace The Font Thing and I came upon Main Type by High-Logic. At first I was dismayed by the $49 cost. But in thinking it over, I realized that I spend many, many hours in my digi scrapping hobby and $49 is just a drop in the bucket in the total scheme of things. (Think $$$ for Photoshop, Actions, Kits, Classes, etc.) So I decided to purchase it and spent the whole weekend organizing my fonts. Taking Stacey's Typography class over at Digital Scrapbooking Artisian Guild certainly helped me get in the mindset of how to organize my fonts to enhance my titles and journaling of my layouts. I was in total shock as to how many "groups" I ended up having. No longer am I just separating between Serif, Sans Serif and Decorative. To give you an idea...here is a list of my font groups:

All Caps-Decorative

All Caps-San Serif

All Caps-Serif

Alpha Dings

Alpha dings-baby and children

Alpha dings-beach_summer

Alpha Dings-floral

Alpha Dings-hearts

Alpha Dings-school

Bar Codes

Brush

Caligraphy

Chunky-Decorative

Chunky-Sans Serif

Chunky-Serif

ClickArt Handwritten Fonts

Clogged

Decorative-Double Lined

Decorative-Flourish-Curlicues

Decorative-Fun

Decorative-Journaling

Decorative-Mix and Match

Dingbats

Dross

Grunge

Handwritten

Handwritten-Pea fonts

Historical-Gothic-Oldstyle

Holiday-Christmas

Holiday-Easter

Holiday-Halloween

Holiday-patriotic

Holiday-StPatricksDay

Holiday-Thanksgiving

Holiday-Winter

Keyboard

Outline fonts

Sans Serif

Sci-Fi and alien

Script

Serif

Shapes

Stencil

Stitching Fonts

Stylish-Streamlined and Elegant

Typewriter Styles

My final category is called ZZ-Foundries. In here I have copies of CK Fonts, 2 Peas Fonts, PC Fonts, Blue Vinyl Fonts, etc.

Just knowing that all my fonts are organized and easy to be found when I need them just makes me smile. I can't wait to see if this organization makes a difference in my scrapbooking!

Must have utility...

In addition to your graphic or scrapping program, what is your must have utility. Mine would be Unziplify.

From their site: "Unziplify provides an easy one-click method of extracting an entire folder full of ZIP, RAR, and ACE files. Simply right-click on a folder or drive in Windows Explorer and select 'unziplify'. Every archive found in that folder will be extracted at once. It's the most painless way to extract archives yet!"

I have to say that they are right. I use unziplify everyday. I put all my downloads in one folder. Then I right click on the folder and chose "Unziplify" and voilà everything is unzipped. Unziplify has options so you can set the default configuration to your liking. I have each zip file unzip to its own file. This does cause a file within a file situation sometimes but I just manually fix those. You can also chose to unzip to a single subfolder or to the archive folder if you want.

The BEST part of waking up is Folger's in your cup! oops...got carried away there...The BEST part of Unziplify is that it is free! Yep, you read that right. I have been using this little program for a few years and have had no problems with the download or the program. So if you are finding that unzipping your downloads is a pain, I definitely recommend Unziplify!

Maxtor® Personal Storage 3200 External USB 2.0 Hard Drive, 320GB

I had a wonderful weekend moving all my digi files from my "E" drive, my "C" drive, and my CD disks to my new external hard drive. I have over 60 gigabytes of stuff so I still have plenty of room for any new goodies I may acquire. Maybe I'll move some of my older photos over also. One thing I am extremely grateful for is that I was able to relocate all my key words and categories in IMatch, the image managment program I use. Now when I find a goodie I want to use, instead of having to find the right drive or CD that it is on, everything is in the same place. This should make my scrapping time much more effecient. And just to be on the safe side...I purchased a separate identical drive and made a duplicate. I've noticed the drives are on sale. Maybe because Seagate acquired Maxtor they are being discounted. Anyway a mere $99.99 at Circuit City or $119.99 at Office Depot.

It was sort of interesting that my hubby was totally all for me buying the two drives. Sort of makes me wonder...what does he want?????

Using Labels in Blogspot

Don't you feel goofy sometimes when you discover something really neat, and when you proceed to tell people about it everyone else already seems to know about it????? Well I just discovered the label feature in Blogspot. Pretty cool. At the end of each post there is a label. If you click on the label all posts with that label on it will show up. Pretty nifty little feature. So you probably already knew about this...makes me wonder what other fun little features are hiding in blogspot!!!!!

I'm not sure if anyone will use them but so far I have two labels set up. Bible for all my bible reading spiritual layouts and Freebies for the scrapping elements that I share.

ETA: and look at the side bar...right under the dictionary look up box...I added my labels and it shows how many posts there are for each label.