Project Life 2015 – Week 16

Subtitle: Using a template YOUR way

Here is my two-page spread for Week 16 of my 2015 Project Life/pocket page album:

main kit used: Raine, the monthly Storyteller for April by Just Jaimee (If you buy a monthly subscription to these kits, you’ll save about 50% and get a bunch of free goodies.)

  

Here is a closer look at the left side of Week 15:

And here is a closer look at the right side of Week 15:

Note the upper left spot where I included four photos related to the wedding mentioned on the left page.

Here is a closer look at those photos:

In my earlier days of digital scrapbooking I cropped photos before I added them to a page. So, I would have cropped these four photos before adding them to upper left spot. And if they had ended up being the wrong shape/size to fit, I would have recropped them (while thanking God for prompting me to go digital, which makes cropping and recropping a lot easier).

Then I discovered templates. Oh happy day! No more painstakingly cropping and resizing photos repeatedly. It’s all done on the masks on the templates.

My templates files are organized first by the size of the templates, such as 3"x4", 4"x6", 5"x7", 6"x8", etc. Here's how those files look in my ACDSee program:

Then within each of these folders the templates are divided by the number of photos they hold, such as one-photo templates (1p), two-photo templates (2p), etc. For example, this shows the subfolders inside the 4x6 folder above:

For the upper left spot on the right page I needed a template for the four vertical photos shown above. But if I'd used a 4x6 template for four vertical photos, the photos would have ended up very small. So I chose this four-photo template with two vertical and two horizontal spots, hoping I could crop two of the photos horizontally:

I tried cropping two of the photos horizontally and moving the smaller, horizontal rectangles to the middle of the template. See:

That didn’t work. The proportions of the photos were way off. (Compare the little people in the top center photo with the giant baby in the photo on the right.) Also, the photos were out of order. The bottom center photo was the last of the four chronologically.

So, I fiddled [Southern expression] with the template. You can do that! You can drag the sides in and out as you wish to fit your photos. Here’s the final result:

The size of the people is better, and the photos are in order. There is even room for journaling.

You might notice the template is no longer symmetrical. My OCDness sometimes has to bow to reality. All is not perfectly symmetrical in the real world. Sigh. But I’ve been reworking templates  and making them asymmetrical for a while now with no bad side effects, like high blood pressure or something.

In case you're looking for templates, my favorite template designer is Tracy Larsen. The templates in her Simply White Collection leave a lot of white space for journaling and/or embellishments. If you're a physical scrapper, you can make collages and print them as one photo. (In other words, that four-photo collage above could be printed as a 4"x6" photo.)

Thanks for visiting my blog, and thanks in advance for any comments you leave. Enjoy your life and record it!

(Some photos are blurred for privacy.)